When the grid can't arrive until 2030, a county let a project build its own power. Here's the real concern.
Fauquier approved an on-site power plant for a technology park because utility service won't be available for years. It is a workable answer for one site and a warning about the region's grid.
Last month Fauquier County's board approved on-site gas-fueled generation for a large technology park in Remington. The reason was simple: under the utility's revised schedule, grid power would not reach the site until at least 2030, and without it the project, and the tax revenue a supervisor estimated at about $100 million, would sit idle for years.1
For that project, the decision makes sense. A facility that brings its own power doesn't add to the strain everyone else feels. But step back and the picture is troubling. We have reached the point where a major employer in Northern Virginia has to build its own power plant because the grid can't serve it this decade.
How we got here
Demand for electricity in this region has grown faster than the lines and substations that deliver it. The regional grid operator has approved $11.8 billion in new transmission to catch up.2 Nearly every one of those lines will be contested somewhere, and some have been delayed or rerouted after neighborhood opposition, including a line in Prince William this summer.3 Each delay pushes an energization date further out, for the data center that prompted it and for the subdivision, the hospital and the school down the same line.
The region pays for the gap in two ways. Capacity prices in the regional market have risen sharply as demand outruns supply, which is one more reason the large users driving that demand should fund the capacity and connections that serve them.4 And employers who can't get power either build their own, as in Remington, or go elsewhere, taking the tax base with them.
What a sensible region would do
Start from the fact: Virginia needs more power, and it needs the wires to deliver it. Treat the grid as what it is, shared infrastructure that every home and business depends on, which has to be approved and built ahead of the demand rather than after it. Review each line and substation on its merits, with real attention to routing and screening, and then let the good ones proceed. Expect the large users whose demand drives the need to pay for the connections that serve them, as the best projects already do, so the cost of new capacity lands on the growth that requires it. And stop treating the word "substation" as a reason to say no before looking.
Reliable power is not a data center issue. It is the condition for every home, school and employer the region approves, and the Remington decision shows what happens when it isn't there.