The hum was already there when the room filled, a low vibration bleeding through the walls of the Prince William County hearing chamber. It didn’t sound like a crowd. It sounded like the substation across Route 234—one of the many nodes in the electrical lattice that keeps Northern Virginia’s data-center empire alive. People fanned themselves with folded agendas. The air was still, thick, electrically charged. And the hum kept going.
A woman in a green raincoat stepped to the microphone. She lived near Pageland Lane, where developers wanted to convert 2,100 acres of farmland into what the Washington Post called “one of the largest data-center developments on Earth.” She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to.
“My bill went up again,” she said. “I used less electricity than last year. But I paid more. And no one will tell us exactly why.”
That line hung over the room. Later, she’d learn that she wasn’t imagining it. Dominion’s 2024 and 2025 rate filings attributed a meaningful share of their grid upgrades—including transmission-line expansions and new substations—to data-center growth. But here’s the twist the public rarely hears: that doesn’t mean data centers inherently raise everyone’s rates. Under the right conditions—when they soak up spare capacity and pay their full freight—large loads can actually push rates down by spreading fixed costs across more kilowatt-hours.
The tension comes from the word “spare.”
Northern Virginia ran out of that years ago.
The hum deepened as the next speaker approached—a retired Army officer in a Prince William baseball cap. He pointed at the map of the Digital Gateway corridor and said, almost quietly at first, that the region was being asked to “overbuild the grid for companies that don’t live here.” The council members shifted. Several residents nodded.
Then he added the line that sharpened the room: