Eight dollars and fifty-one cents
That’s how much more a typical Dominion customer in Virginia will pay each month under the utility’s first base-rate hike since 1992. Ask why, and the honest answer runs through a fleet of data centers that did not exist five years ago. We are not here to stop them. We are here to ask the one question the boom keeps dodging: who pays?
When a single campus needs as much power as a small city, someone has to build the generation and string the transmission to feed it. If the data center pays that full cost, wonderful — that’s a customer. If the cost gets spread across every household’s bill while the company signs a quiet discounted industrial rate, that’s not a market. That’s a subsidy nobody voted for, running from the people with the least to the firms with the most.
The abundance builders say more supply fixes everything, and it helps — but new plants cost money, and the fight is always over who’s on the hook. AEP Ohio paused new hookups because the grid couldn’t take them; that pause should mean bring your own power,
not raise the neighbors’ rates.
When a town ends up fighting a six-million-square-foot project over its water and its grid, the lopsidedness is the whole story.
Make them pay their full freight and we’ll cheer the buildout. Socialize the cost and we’ll fight every permit.
Where we concede ground: Some grid upgrades genuinely help everyone, and not every shared cost is a hidden subsidy.
What would change our mind: Transparent accounting showing data centers already pay the full marginal cost of the power and wires they require.
Read the full synthesis: Should AI data centers get their own power plants?