State law requires electric utilities to supply power to anyone when and where they want it.
But with Virginia already needing to import electricity from other states and proposed data centers seeking still more power — more than twice as much as Dominion Energy produces and imports on the hottest days of the summer — that’s becoming a challenge. It is on track to send power bills soaring as Dominion and the state’s electric cooperatives scramble to buy power from out of state and build the new power plants and transmission lines needed to keep up.
The state already hosts the world’s largest concentration of data centers, and developers have lined up with proposals to connect to Dominion’s system that would require as much power as 11.7 million homes.
The General Assembly’s Commission on Electric Utility Regulation says legislation to let utilities delay connecting big new users will help.
It’s recommending a bill that would allow utilities to delay connecting customers needing more than 90 megawatts — enough to power 22,500 homes — if a delay is needed to avoid overloading the grid in a way that risks blackouts or brownouts.
The commission is one of several panels the General Assembly designates to dig into complex issues and recommend legislation.
Dominion has negotiated with firms seeking large draws of power from its system over when they connect, to give the utility time to address transmission bottlenecks — limited capacity on its high-voltage lines, said David Essah, director of the division of public utility regulation at the State Corporation Commission.
But that’s been done on an informal basis, he said. It's also in those firms' interest, since they'd be at risk of outages, too.
“I guess it is sort of a gray area,” said commission member C. Meade Browder Jr., who as senior assistant attorney general is chief of the Office of Attorney General’s insurance and utilities regulatory section.
PJM Zones
The watchdog for regional grid operator PJM Interconnection is asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to order PJM not to connect more data centers until there is enough generating and transmission capacity to serve them. The 13-state regional grid stretches from New Jersey south to North Carolina and west to Illinois.
The watchdog raised worries that data center demands for power are already driving up the price of electricity and putting reliable supply of power at risk for the millions of people and businesses currently plugged into the regional grid that includes Virginia.
Grid's watchdog: Halt data centers until infrastructure catches up
The regional electric grid that covers Virginia should stop plugging in data centers until it has enough high-voltage lines and power plants to meet their demands for electricity, the grid’s watchdog says.
On Thursday, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Evergreen Collaborative, a nonprofit focused on measures to tackle climate change, called for the state to require data centers to secure their own, clean energy to ease pressure on electricity prices in Virginia.
The two groups also called for the state to force PJM to cut the years-long time it takes to win approval to plug new wind and solar facilities into the grid, and to act to cut utilities’ authorized profit margins.
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