Somewhere in Henrico County, Virginia, a teacher is being asked to shut down a computer at night so the county can shave a few bucks off its electric bill. Meanwhile, 37 data centers hum along across roughly 2,700 acres of county land, each one drinking power at a scale that makes your home energy use look like a nightlight — a demand surge accelerated by projects like the Stargate Project. On June 26, County Manager John Vithoulkas emailed thousands of employees — including school staff — with the news: electricity rates jump 25% on July 1, adding about $5 million in annual costs. His fix? “Collectively make slight adjustments.”
The Math Nobody Did Out Loud
Data centers now drive the majority of wholesale electricity price increases in the region — and your bill reflects it.
A single hyperscale data center can consume over 100 megawatts — comparable to the usage of tens of thousands of homes. Virginia hosts the world’s largest concentration of these facilities, and PJM’s independent market monitor found data centers drove 63% of last year’s capacity price increases across the regional grid. That cost doesn’t stay abstract. It lands on every ratepayer in the territory — a pattern familiar to those who’ve followed tech scandals where costs are quietly shifted onto ordinary people.
Vithoulkas’s conservation email reads like a personal-finance app notification applied to a municipal budget crisis. Employees are advised to:
- Turn off lights
- Adjust blinds
- Skip the space heater — each one costs the county $150 to $300 per year in electricity
“Each dollar we can save by conserving electricity is another dollar the county can reinvest into staff and the services we provide our residents,” he wrote.
Reasonable advice, in isolation. But asking employees to unplug idle chargers while hosting facilities that consume megawatts by the hundred carries a certain dry comedic weight that no county manager memo can fully neutralize.
The Deal Henrico Made
Tax breaks attracted billions in investment and funded affordable housing — but the capacity costs weren’t part of the pitch.
Henrico slashed its data-center equipment tax rate to $0.40 per $100 of assessed value in 2017. The bet paid off on paper: White Oak Technology Park attracted $2.25 billion in assessed value, with $10.6 billion more in planned investment. The county even channeled revenue into a $60 million Affordable Housing Trust Fund, according to Time Magazine — a genuine, tangible community benefit worth acknowledging.
Capacity costs, however, followed close behind. When data centers spike peak grid demand, utilities must build more infrastructure — and those costs spread across all customers, residential and institutional alike. Energy analysts reviewing PJM data project that average household bills in Dominion’s territory could exceed $315 per month within 15 years — a reminder of how many things residents are already paying too much for without realizing it. Henrico residents already pay around $145 monthly, ranking the county among Virginia’s pricier areas for electricity.
Meta states that its global data-center electricity use is matched with 100% clean and renewable energy at the corporate level. Grid-level capacity pricing, though, doesn’t adjust for corporate accounting.
Henrico has begun tightening zoning, imposing noise limits, and restricting where new data centers can locate. Those are meaningful steps. Thirty-seven facilities are already running, however, and the conservation email has already landed. Residents in counties actively courting this industry may want to keep a close eye on their utility bills — the ask for “slight adjustments” tends to arrive right on schedule.
