Jason Woodby, a high school teacher, and his wife live about five miles from the site of a proposed 1,000-megawatt natural gas power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia. They became concerned after attending an open house meeting held by Dominion Energy, one of the largest utilities in the country, where it was revealed that the plant is estimated to produce high levels of pollutants such as nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide.
“We’re worried about the pollutants and the impact on the health of our community,” Woodby said.
The low-income neighborhoods around the site include homes, schools, churches and day-care centers.
The neighborhoods have been designated as environmental justice communities, largely due to their 70-year-long exposure to Dominion’s previous facility on the same site — a coal plant that was shut down in 2023. The proposed gas plant is likely to produce even more fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and greenhouse gas emissions than the coal plant produced, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center.
As a result, community members have loudly protested the plans for the Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center and, on Jan.13, filed a legal challenge with the Chesterfield County Circuit Court, claiming that Dominion failed to secure the necessary permits and approvals.
The giant utility has been “disregarding the concerns of the people who will be most negatively impacted,” said Rachel James, a resident of Chesterfield and a staff attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. She notes that air pollution levels in the neighborhood have declined since the retirement of the coal plant and the proposed gas plant will reverse those gains.
According to Dominion, the project will create over 540 jobs, produce more than $2.2 million in state and local tax revenue and contribute over $53 million in local economic activity during construction. A spokesperson for the utility told Virginia Public Media that the project will meet the EPA’s proposed stricter greenhouse gas emissions standards.
The push for the plant speaks to the massive surge in energy needs of data centers proliferating around the country. Northern Virginia is ground zero for this issue — with more than 300 such centers, which house IT infrastructure for data storage and management for tech giants like Amazon and Meta. The state has been called the data center capital of the world, and it’s estimated that close to 70% of the world’s internet traffic runs through Northern Virginia alone. Those centers consume more than 4,000 megawatts of power — more than twice as much as the world’s second-largest data center market in Beijing — and are expected to lead to a dramatic spike in the utility bills of Virginia residents.
“We’re seeing an explosive tidal wave of growth in data centers that is very quickly starting to undermine climate targets”
Jeremy Fisher, Sierra Club
The data centers also have the potential to slow the transition to a clean-energy future, with the sudden rush for more energy prompting utilities in states across the country to rethink the phase-out dates of their fossil-fuel-based power stations.
“Some states — such as Alabama and Mississippi — have delayed the retirement of old coal plants so that they can meet the demand,” said Jackson Morris of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“We’re seeing an explosive tidal wave of growth in data centers that is very quickly starting to undermine climate targets for states and threatens to undo some of the climate progress we’ve made in key areas like Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, Nevada, Iowa and elsewhere,” said Jeremy Fisher, a senior strategy and technical adviser with the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program.
In Virginia, the issue has prompted a flurry of debate — as well as several proposed bills in the legislative session that began Jan. 8. Several of the bills call for studying data center usage and costs, another would require data center operators to purchase more clean energy starting in 2030, and still another would require facilities to show that they have not negatively impacted electric bills, reliability, water supply or grid capacity. Some of the bills are currently being debated — one that recently passed the Virginia House of Delegates would increase transparency in the siting process for data centers.
Last year, several Democratic legislators signed an open letter opposing the Chesterfield plant, outlining their concern that the project “undermines the state’s transition to clean and renewable energy.”
Overall, the proposed plant enjoys wide support among a bipartisan group of lawmakers, as well as of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who says that natural gas will remain part of Virginia’s energy mix. Dominion — which has been called the most powerful political force in Richmond, the state’s capital — made more than $11 million in campaign contributions to state candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, in the 2023-2024 election cycle.
The power demands of the data centers is increasingly raising questions about the responsibility of their tech company owners, many of whom have adopted their own clean-energy goals.
“We can’t help but point out the hypocrisy that data center owners have climate commitments yet they are causing the biggest barrier to climate progress, full stop,” said Tim Cywinski, communications director for the Sierra Club’s Virginia chapter. “Unequivocally the climate crisis now is tied to the energy crisis. And the energy crisis is being driven almost exclusively because of data centers.”
Amid the increasing pressure to develop climate-friendly ways to power their data centers, tech companies have explored advanced nuclear energy, next-generation geothermal, clean hydrogen and long-duration energy storage, among other options.
“Many of these companies want to see the aggressive procurement of new additional zero-emissions resources to meet that load, not new fossil fuels or delaying the retirement of old fossil fuel plants,” said the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Morris. “Those are the conversations that are happening amongst stakeholders in these utility commission dockets, and in some cases it’s happening in the legislative context, where states are either setting up tax incentive bills to attract data center development and trying to build in safeguards that involve use of clean energy.”
In Virginia and central Washington state, Amazon is exploring the use of small modular nuclear reactors to supply some of the power it needs. And Microsoft partnered with Acadia Infrastructure Capital in December to develop renewable energy projects across the country.
Some states are developing new ways to cover the cost of energy required by these data centers. A recent agreement in Indiana between a utility and Google and Microsoft included provisions to supply upfront capital to cover the cost of their expected energy needs, noted Morris.
The expected increase in costs for Virginia residents from data center power usage concerns Woodby as much as the potential health impacts of the proposed plant and the urgency of tackling climate change. He said that Dominion has not adequately explained why such a facility is preferable to renewable energy sources, which also can be less expensive.
“We should be phasing out fossil fuels rather than ramping them up,” he said.
