Built for Someone Else: Generation, Load, and the Exception in Virginia
Virginia's generation-siting statute reaches two of the four routes now serving data centers, applies its full test to one, and does not reach the other two at all. Built on 108 primary documents, each hashed. Evidence snapshot 24 August 2026.
Virginia has a statute governing the construction of electric generating facilities. Four kinds of generation now serve the Commonwealth’s data centers. The statute reaches two of them, applies its full test to one, and does not reach the other two at all.
This volume documents the four routes and the scrutiny each attracts. A utility-owned plant built under the Virginia Clean Economy Act’s reliability exception drew 1,923 written comments, 83 witnesses, four days of hearing and 338 docket filings; six months after it was approved the same utility announced a second plant at three times the size, which has no docket at all. A merchant plant of comparable size is reviewed under a two-prong test, the public convenience and necessity finding elided because the statute conditions that prong on the applicant being a rate-regulated utility. A 132-megawatt gas plant behind a data center’s meter required no certificate at all and has been running since April 2024. And roughly eight thousand permitted diesel and gas generators never reach the State Corporation Commission under any docket number.
The volume also documents what the demand actually is, and the one case in which a utility acted on a forecast of this class and the load did not appear.
Built on 108 primary documents, each deposited and hashed. Every claim carries an evidence grade. Evidence snapshot 24 August 2026.
Corrected 10 September 2026. The files now deposited add a subsection on Dominion’s 3,000-megawatt Cumberland Energy Center, announced 7 May 2026 and omitted from the volume as first published, and rewrite the thesis statement and the first of the conclusion’s three findings to match. The volume had treated the reliability exception as the smallest of the four routes it maps, on a record of one certificated plant of 944 megawatts; a second utility plant at three times the size, advanced on the strength of the first approval, reverses that weighting. The four-route framework and every primary-source finding are unchanged. No application for the Cumberland plant had been filed with the State Corporation Commission as of 10 September 2026, and the new subsection shows the docket search that establishes it.
What changed from the live version: one clause added to the CERC sentence in paragraph 2, and one new closing paragraph. Paragraphs 1, 3 and 4 are untouched.