The utility's final environmental assessment outlines a 75-mile clear-cut corridor that will transfer the physical ecology of rural Virginia directly into Northern Virginia server capacity.
GOOCHLAND, Va.—Dominion Energy filed its final environmental assessment with state regulators on Tuesday, confirming that a proposed 500-kilovolt transmission line through central Virginia will successfully transition the region's remaining physical landscape into cloud compute capacity for Northern Virginia data centers.
The filing, reviewed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, details a 75-mile corridor requiring a 150-foot clear-cut right-of-way that will bisect Goochland County to feed the rapidly expanding "Data Center Alley" in Loudoun County. According to the utility’s latest integrated resource plan, liquidating the rural canopy is a necessary step to meet the unprecedented power demands of artificial intelligence, allowing hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft to maintain uninterrupted deep learning training runs.
At a public hearing inside the Central High Cultural and Educational Complex, residents like Deborah Blackburn leaned on canes while waiting to testify against the project. Utility representatives stood by presentation boards explaining that while the physical farms would be bulldozed to accommodate the 160-foot steel monopiles, residents would soon be able to prompt large language models to generate photorealistic images of the pastures they previously inhabited.
We recognize the emotional toll of sacrificing generational family property, which is why we are partnering with Google to ensure the resulting server farms are fully optimized to generate deeply empathetic chatbot responses about rural displacement.
The transmission project highlights a growing contradiction in corporate net-zero pledges. A recent analysis in the IEA World Energy Outlook noted that global data center electricity consumption is projected to top 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026, forcing utilities to abandon decarbonization targets entirely. To push enough voltage through the new Goochland corridor, Dominion Energy has petitioned the EPA to keep three natural gas peaker plants burning indefinitely to ensure the cloud computing architecture never experiences a latency drop during peak wildfire season.
The Virginia State Corporation Commission is expected to vote on the routing proposal in late November. The cleared acreage will be formally reclassified as a Scope 3 downstream asset in Dominion’s next quarterly SEC climate disclosure, right as global delegates convene for the COP29 summit in Baku.