When Transmission Lines Serve Everyone…  and When They Don’t

There is a difference between strengthening the electric grid and simply stretching it farther.

The proposed Valley Link transmission project has been marketed as a reliability improvement for Virginia’s electric system. But when one looks closely at the purpose and routing of the line, a different picture emerges. This is not primarily a project that strengthens the grid for the communities it crosses. It is a project designed to move enormous quantities of electricity north to feed the data-center corridor of Northern Virginia.

Rural Virginia has long played an important role in the state’s energy infrastructure. Power plants, pipelines, substations, and transmission corridors have often been located outside the urban crescent, and many of us recognize that a modern electric grid requires serious infrastructure. I am not opposed to high-voltage transmission lines when they actually strengthen the regional grid, improve resilience, or create real long-term capacity for the areas through which they pass.

At our February Board of Supervisors meeting, representatives for the Valley Link project presented a slide deck and a map of the proposed route. I asked a simple question: what percentage of the route would use existing right-of-way, and what percentage would be entirely new corridor?

The representative initially answered in broad terms and said a substantial portion would require new routing. When I pressed further, it became clear that the line will, for all practical purposes, be almost entirely greenfield.

A mostly greenfield transmission line means that, across the length of the corridor, land must be acquired one way or another — either through voluntary negotiation or through the adversarial machinery of eminent domain. It means farms, woods, family land, viewsheds, and rural quiet are not being affected as a side note to the project. They are the project, at least from the standpoint of the people who live along the route.

And for what?

• Not for a major new local substation.
  
• Not for lower electric bills in Appomattox County.
  
• Not for some transformative increase in local grid capacity that will open a new industrial future for our region.

No — this line appears to exist largely to move power north.

The proposed route is, in essence, a straight shot designed to help serve the ever-expanding demand of Northern Virginia’s data-center economy. That economy is real. It is large. It is lucrative. But it is also increasingly difficult to support politically and physically in the places where it actually exists. It is hard to permit new generation near the end users. It is hard to tell affluent, politically connected jurisdictions that if they want limitless server farms, they may also need power plants, new gas infrastructure, and the industrial footprint that comes with them.

So instead, the easier answer is to export the burden.

That, to me, is what this transmission line really represents: the political realism of Dominion and AEP. They have concluded that it is easier to strong-arm a scattering of rural counties in Virginia than it is to stand up in the urban crescent and tell the plain truth.

And the plain truth is this: Virginia does not have a transmission problem nearly so much as it has a political honesty problem.

If Northern Virginia intends to continue building out one of the largest concentrations of data centers on earth, then Virginia needs to have a grown-up conversation about generation at the point of need. That means saying out loud what many people in the power world already know perfectly well: the Commonwealth likely needs major new generation closer to the load. It means being willing to say that if Virginia is serious about long-term electric supply, then we should be discussing another reactor at North Anna, and substantial new natural gas generation along major fuel infrastructure corridors in places like Culpeper, Fauquier, and Prince William — closer to where the demand actually exists.

And it means the end users, trillion-dollar technology companies with effectively unlimited appetite for power, should be the ones paying the true cost of that buildout.

Instead, what we are drifting toward is a system in which the economic benefits remain concentrated in Northern Virginia, while the visual, land-use, and political burdens are pushed outward into the countryside. Rural counties become little more than utility corridors: places where things are taken, crossed, or imposed, but where the actual upside never really stops.

That is not a balanced energy policy. It is a subsidy of convenience.

Unlike many other kinds of demand, data centers are not especially mysterious. Their load is not seasonal in the way residential heating and cooling is seasonal. It is not diffuse. It is not unpredictable. It is concentrated, steady, and highly legible. In other words, it is exactly the kind of industrial demand for which generation should be planned deliberately and built close to the point of need.

Transmission will always matter. Interconnection will always matter. A healthy grid requires redundancy, transfer capability, and regional coordination. But that is not the same as pretending every new line is equally beneficial to every place it crosses.

Some transmission projects genuinely strengthen the grid for everyone. Others are, in substance, long extension cords for somebody else’s economy.

Valley Link, as currently presented, looks much more like the latter.

And that is why I object to it.

Not because I am opposed to high-voltage transmission. Not because I fail to understand that a modern electric grid is regional. And not because I think rural Virginia should never host infrastructure.

I object because this project asks rural Virginia to bear the burden for a development model whose benefits are being captured elsewhere. It asks counties like ours to accept a largely greenfield corridor, with all the land acquisition, conflict, and permanent landscape change that implies, so that the Commonwealth can avoid confronting a much more difficult but much more honest question:

If Northern Virginia wants the power, why should it not also host much more of the infrastructure required to produce it?

The people who live under these lines deserve a better answer than “reliability.”

They deserve the truth.