Thirteen Cooperatives: Virginia's Distribution Cooperatives and the Arrival of Load Larger Than the System
Thirteen electric distribution cooperatives serve Virginia — the figure most often cited is eleven. Data-center load is arriving on several of them. This reference walks identity and jurisdiction, wholesale supply (nine of thirteen through Old Dominion Electric Cooperative), the seven-case affiliate sequence in which one cooperative was twice refused authority to serve hyperscale load through an unregulated affiliate, and the four large-load rate schedule cases side by side against the investor-owned regime that preceded them.
Thirteen electric distribution cooperatives serve Virginia. They are member-owned, they are governed by boards their members elect, they buy most of their power through a wholesale cooperative they collectively own, and they are regulated by the State Corporation Commission on terms that differ from the investor-owned utilities in ways the public record rarely sets out in one place. Data center load is arriving on several of them. This reference sets out what is established about each one, and what is not.
It is organised for consultation rather than argument. Section 2 fixes identity and jurisdiction, including the count itself: there are thirteen, and the figure most often cited is eleven. Section 3 traces wholesale supply, nine of the thirteen through Old Dominion Electric Cooperative and four outside it. Section 4 covers affiliates and the seven-case sequence in which one cooperative sought, and was twice refused, authority to serve hyperscale load through an unregulated affiliate. Section 5 sets out exposure to arriving load from the federal utility survey and the cooperatives' own filings. Section 6 reads the four large-load rate schedule cases side by side against the investor-owned regime that preceded them. Section 7 reports docket behaviour and the search defects that make any docket count a floor. Sections 8 and 9 cover finances and governance.
Section 2.4a addresses the statutory change that reframes the affiliate question. Va. Code § 56-234 D, enacted by 2025 Acts of Assembly chapters 499 and 598 and effective July 1, 2025, provides that a cooperative may meet its duty to furnish reasonably adequate service through unregulated sales by an affiliate to a customer contracting for demand reasonably expected to exceed 90 megawatts. That is close to the authority the Commission said in October 2024 it could not find. The document does not resolve whether subsection D is read together with the narrower authorising provisions, which reach members served at or by dedicated or excess facilities rather than any customer, and it says so rather than choosing.
The evidence register is the point of the document. Section 1 carries one row per source with its path, its hash, what was read, what was not read, and whether the source may be quoted. No source enters the prose before its row exists, and a bound recorded in the register travels with every claim keyed to that row. Where a source is a paraphrase of a document not held, section 1.6 says so and the prose does not quote it. Section 10 states six limits the document knows it has and fifteen items left open, each with the reason it was left.
The full evidence base is deposited with the document , as an archive whose internal paths are the register's paths: 39 State Corporation Commission filings and orders with their text extractions, 17 captures of statute, constitution, Acts of Assembly, case law and agency pages, and the Dominion biennial order the cooperative regimes are compared against. A reader can check any claim without repeating the retrieval.