Concentrated Benefit, Dispersed Burden: Who Carries Virginia's Data Center Transmission, and What the Cost-Allocation Record Does Not Trace
Virginia's data centers consume roughly a quarter of the Commonwealth's electricity, and PJM attributes a ten-gigawatt increase in forecast Dominion-zone load by 2029 primarily to them.
Virginia's data centers consume roughly a quarter of the Commonwealth's electricity, and PJM attributes a ten-gigawatt increase in forecast Dominion-zone load by 2029 primarily to them. Serving that load requires transmission. This report establishes, from primary sources and original measurement, that the benefit of a data center is captured almost entirely by the locality hosting it, the cost of the wires is spread across an entire utility zone with no reference to geography, and the physical burden falls on a third set of places that appear in neither calculation.
Four findings are new.
One. PJM allocates the Joshua Falls–Yeat 765 kV project under a mandatory two-part formula for facilities at or above 500 kV: half by load-ratio share, half by distribution factor. Dominion's combined share is 44.96 percent as filed with the February 2025 recommendation and 45.29 percent on the 2026 load-ratio vector, which Schedule 12 restrikes annually. The tariff's precision is real and stops at the zone boundary; nothing below it references cause, and nothing anywhere references geography.
Two. Measured against published route geometry, 80.99 percent of the routed line runs through counties with no operating data center, and 45.98 percent through counties with no facility and no proposal in any status. Benchmarked against 2,000 randomly placed 116.47-mile corridors drawn entirely within Virginia, both figures sit below chance — the random median is 88.5 and 70.8 percent respectively, placing the observed corridor at the 36th and 17th percentiles. The corridor is therefore more concentrated in data center counties than a random line would be, and the finding is not that burden was steered away from beneficiaries. It is that the allocation instrument does not condition on geography at any step, and this is what the resulting geography looks like.
Three. The corridor counties are cooperative territory, which is unremarkable for rural Virginia and is stated here as context rather than as a finding. What is not context: none of the cooperatives serving the corridor — Rappahannock, Central Virginia Electric, Southside, Mecklenburg Electric — was a party to the proceeding that allocated the cost, and Appalachian Power, present in four counties along the route, sits in the AEP zone, which carries a load-ratio share and a zero distribution factor on this project.
Four. Louisa County adopted an overlay district in 2023 whose qualifying criterion is proximity to 115 kV transmission and in which data centers were permitted by right. All four of its districts lie within 452 metres of a single 230 kV circuit radiating from the North Anna Nuclear Station — against a county base rate of 7.2 percent of land area within that distance of any transmission line of 115 kV or more. No conditional use permit, no substantial-accord hearing, and no state transmission certificate attended the 420 MW campus subsequently built there. The county converted every Technology Overlay District principal use to conditional use permit by Ordinance 2024-11 on August 5, 2024, and removed roughly 2,000 acres; both campuses were grandfathered, so the conversion reached neither. Virginia's newest data center siting statute, § 15.2-2209.5, enacted in 2026, triggers only on a rezoning, special exception, or special use permit application — and therefore passes over by-right overlay land entirely.
The report concedes the strongest contrary finding in the field. Garimella (2026) finds no robust residential bill effect across 24 states and explains that null by cost dilution across large customer bases. That explanation is this report's mechanism, reached independently from the opposite direction.
The contribution is positioned deliberately. The zone-level allocation question is live before FERC in Maryland Office of People's Counsel v. PJM, Docket EL26-63. This report supplies the layer beneath it: sub-zonal geographic burden, measured.