Take a Minute to Call or Write Your State Delegate Today
The Virginia Data Center Reform movement is in high gear and we need your help with calls and emails to your legislators now! Your willingness to contact your legislators and members representing the whole Commonwealth on committees that are considering data center legislation makes a big difference.
Many of the data center reform bills introduced this General Assembly session have been killed, but two critical pieces of legislation still have a good chance of passing early next week if we can garner enough support in the House of Delegates.
SB619 and SB339 passed the Senate, and we expect the House will start voting on these bills as early as this Tuesday, Feb. 24. We believe these bills are “keystone” pieces of legislation that would finally bring state-level oversight to the data center industry. Unfortunately, the House rejected their companion bills a couple of weeks ago. So that means this is their second chance.
- SB619 would provide state oversight to evaluate and plan for the far-reaching regional impacts of data center development affecting neighboring jurisdictions and state policies.
- SB339 would establish ratepayer protections that ensure average residents and businesses aren’t shouldering industry risks and subsidizing the operation of the wealthiest companies in the world.
Final Push: Urge Your Delegate to Support SB619 and SB339
1. Call Your Delegate’s Office
Making a short phone call or leaving a voicemail with your delegate’s office will be more impactful than sending an email. Your message doesn’t need to be long. It can be as simple as “Hi my name is _____ and I live in _____. I’m concerned about the impacts of data centers and want to urge Delegate ______ to support SB619 and SB339. Thank you.” You can also talk about your own experience with data centers or use the talking points in this email if you’d like to expand on that.
> Find the phone number for your delegate’s Richmond office at pecva.org/electedofficials.
2. Send a Letter
If you are unable to make a phone call, we’ve made it easy to send an email through advocacy webpage, which auto-populates with your delegate based on your address information.
Once you customize the letter with your personal experiences about how data centers have impacted you (optional, but extremely impactful), with one click, it is sent directly to your delegate.
*This is a new campaign, so even if you have already sent in a letter to your senator or delegate, please use our new form letter.
It only takes a few minutes to send a letter, but it will make a monumental difference in helping legislators understand how important this issue is to you, their constituents!
The State Must Step Up
As data centers continue to contract with Dominion and other utilities for huge amounts of new electric demand without any review of impacts to the electric grid, electricity prices rise for all Virginians.
Virginia is home to over 500 data centers, with five times that amount already in the pipeline. The energy contracts Dominion Energy has with data center customers have now topped 70GW’s, three times to peak usage of the entire grid. Currently, there is no planfor assessing or fairly managing the costs and cumulative impacts of bringing this much load online. This leaves regular Virginians’ vulnerable to a less reliable grid, sky rocketing energy bills, and degraded air quality from increased use of gas and fossil fuels.
SB619, sponsored by Senator Srinivasan, R. Creigh Deeds, L. Louise Lucas, and Russet Perry, and SB339 sponsored by Senator Russet Perry, address the root of this crisis by requiring meaningful state-level oversight when data centers seek to interconnect to the grid and review of cost allocation to ensure other customers are not unfairly subsidizing new transmission and power generation.
There are other good bills that have crossed over too that help address various aspects of data center reform that you may want to support too, including tightening of the tax exemption for data centers which now exceeds $1.6 billion and transparency and additional transparency around water use. But right now, we’ve decided to focus on SB619 and SB339.
The Details: What Would SB619 and SB339 Do?
> SB619 would introduce a framework for critically needed state oversight rather than leaving these interconnections completely in the hands of the utilities.
The bill requires any new “high-load facility”—specifically those demanding more than 90 megawatts of electricity—to obtain a Certificate of Operation from the State Corporation Commission (SCC) after January 1, 2027. This bill would capture most interconnections of hyperscale data centers.
If passed, SB619 would introduce a framework for the SCC to consider these factors before approving their certificate of operation:
- Ratepayer Impacts: Any likely generation, transmission, or distribution needs attributable to the operation of the high-load facility, the SCC must find that the approval would not raise the rates of other customers.
- Grid Reliability: If there is sufficient energy and infrastructure to support the load without jeopardizing reliability of the grid.
- Environmental Impact: Alignment with the state’s clean energy goals or if impacts on public health and the environment are adequately minimized. For the first time, the SCC would be responsible for assessing the aggregate and cumulative impact of the increases in electrical demand, including the need for new generation, transmission and substations.
> SB339 directs the SCC to use its existing authority to examine and adjust the allocation of transmission costs for electric utilities to protect non-data center customers from rate increases driven by data center growth.
Dominion Energy’s Integrated Resource Plan projects an increase in high voltage transmission crossing thousands of miles of Virginia to cost more than $28 billion dollars to meet demand forecast for 2040!
The legislation encourages the SCC to use strong measures, including the direct cost allocation of transmission costs to specific data center customers (something that could be implemented as a part of the certificate of operation review if SB619 were to pass as well!), to eliminate or minimize unreasonable subsidies or rate increases. SB339 directs the SCC to complete this review by January 1, 2027.
It also requires review of current allocation of generation and distribution costs among different customer classification to ensure other rate payers are not subsidizing high load customers. Specifically, Phase II Utilities (Dominion) must provide to the SCC three proposals for cost allocation, with one of those using the Probability of Dispatch methodology in a relevant proceeding (the next rate case or a separate proceeding), prior to January 1, 2028. This is important because the probability of dispatch methodology more accurately aligns the costs of infrastructure with the actual, consistent, 24/7 high-demand usage of data centers.
Traditional ratemaking often spreads the costs of new transmission lines and power plants across all customers based on “peak hour” usage, which historically was driven by residential HVAC use during extreme weather in winter and summer. However, data centers, currently consuming 25-40% of all power in Virginia and projected to increase by 300 percent, operate at high capacity constantly, driving the need for massive new infrastructure. Relying on seasonal or monthly peak demand to allocate costs ignores the fact that most of the investment in generation, transmission and substations is only necessary to meet the overwhelming demand from data centers, which means they may not pay their fair share under old models.
We believe that passing SB619 and SB339 are the most important steps Virginia can take this year to protect ratepayers, public health, and the environment. Please use our advocacy page to send a letter and call to your state legislators today.
Now is the time to end the hands off approach that Virginia has had to managing data center development and exponential increase in energy demand. The costs and impacts are piling up. We can no longer afford to just “nibble around the edges” while our electric bills skyrocket and our communities are industrialized.
We are in this situation because localities have approved data center campuses without any state review of the implications to the larger grid, ratepayers, and the environmental and energy policies of the state. If SB619 and SB339 pass, it would create genuine reform providing the SCC a means of assessing these issues and ensuring the data center industry really pays its fair share. Please use our advocacy page to send a letter and call to your state legislators today.
Now is the time to end the hands off approach that Virginia has had to managing data center development and exponential increase in energy demand. The costs and impacts are piling up. We can no longer afford to just “nibble around the edges” while our electric bills skyrocket and our communities are industrialized.
Please join us in demanding a comprehensive solution to this crisis. Thank you for your continued engagement and support.
Sincerely,
Julie Bolthouse, AICP
Director of Land Use
[email protected]
