Loudoun’s Data Center Loop: Democratic Supervisors Greenlit the Boom. Ratepayers and Homeowners Face the Lines.

LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va. — Northern Virginia already hosts the densest cluster of data centers on the planet. Eastern Loudoun’s “Data Center Alley” is the epicenter. Now Dominion Energy’s application to build the last major piece of a local 500-kilovolt “Data Center Loop” is before the State Corporation Commission — and a Loudoun resident intervening in the case says the lines are not a shared public necessity so much as the bill coming due for years of political choices that put private server campuses ahead of neighborhoods, property rights, and the reliability of the wider grid.

The case is PUR-2025-00056: Virginia Electric and Power Company’s request for approval and certification of the 500 kV and 230 kV Golden-Mars lines, the Lockridge and Sojourner 230 kV loops, and related work. In a February 3, 2026 post-hearing brief, Theresa Ghiorzi of the Lovettsville area told the Commission that Golden-Mars is the third and final 500 kV link in the eastern Loudoun loop, after Aspen-Golden and Wishing Star-Mars. Dominion’s own application language, as she quotes it, shows the stakes: Attachment I.A.5 identifies 37 future delivery points — data center connection points — at various stages of the transmission planning process that the Golden-Mars build would enable, plus capacity benefits for another 33 future delivery points, including a hyperscale campus.

Those delivery points do not exist in a vacuum. They sit at the end of a local political pipeline that All Virginia News readers should recognize. Across Virginia, the majority of the votes that have placed data centers into zoning maps and “by right” pathways have come primarily from Democrats. Loudoun County’s Board of Supervisors — long dominated by Democrats — is the clearest local example. The filings in Ghiorzi’s packet do not invent that pattern; they document what those boards actually did when residents begged them to slow down.

Supervisor Mike Turner, on the board since 2019, has published Loudoun as the “Data Center Capital of the World.” Material circulated with the SCC filings credits his June 15, 2026 data center presentation and white paper with the familiar scoreboard: the highest concentration of data centers in the world; construction day after day for more than a decade and a half; on the order of 200 operating facilities in the county with more than 100 in the pipeline; tens of millions of square feet already built and tens of millions more queued. Turner’s own documents, as summarized in the packet, acknowledge that many pipeline projects are “by right” and do not require a fresh Board vote. Ghiorzi’s overview notes that Turner has consistently voted to rezone for data centers and to grandfather administrative applications — moves that more than doubled allowed by-right square footage and even added “data center” as a use on older industrial rezones from the 1970s through the early 1990s.

On March 18, 2025, that philosophy was on full display. During a Board meeting and public hearing on by-right data center development and grandfathering, supervisors debated whether to protect unfinished administrative applications and whether to let lots rezoned between roughly 1972 and 1993 add data centers without a special exception. Ghiorzi’s contemporaneous notes, filed as exhibits, record a 9–0 vote to allow those older rezones to add data center as a by-right use. Supervisor Matt Kershner defended developer property rights in blunt terms, calling a motion to deny grandfathering a “property rights snatch” and “anti-American.” Supervisor Phyllis Randall said she would not value a data center over a person’s home — while also noting, in later reporting cited in the testimony, that supervisors are told they cannot currently weigh power constraints in land-use decisions. Supervisor Kristen Umstattd Tekrony warned that administrative projects could expand by tens of thousands of square feet — on the order of a football field — without returning to the Board or the public. Supervisor Brinkman said residents were “begging us to slow it down.”

Ghiorzi’s point is that the rhetoric and the roll calls do not match. Democratic majorities on the Board kept feeding the industry that now demands 185-foot structures and 500 kV corridors through residential country. Dominion guidelines for land under transmission easements, she told the Commission, restrict or forbid homes, additions, decks, pools, wells, septic systems, fuel tanks, HVAC units, and more — while owners still pay taxes as if they retained full use. Virginia Code § 1-219.1, which she quotes at length, limits eminent domain when private financial gain or economic development is the primary purpose. Data centers, she argues, are private enterprises serving national and international customers; ordinary Loudoun ratepayers and homeowners should not be forced to underwrite their expansion plans.

York County, by contrast, wrote electricity use into its data center ordinance — capping growth at the load approved in the initial application and requiring periodic reporting. Loudoun has not used zoning that way. Instead, county economic policy and Democratic Board votes treated Data Center Alley as a permanent growth machine. Dominion’s own Integrated Resource Plan language, quoted in the packet, says the company serves the largest data center market in the world in about 30 square miles of Loudoun, with roughly 80 percent of Virginia’s industry there and a 2022 peak metered load near 2.8 gigawatts — about 1.5 times the capacity of the North Anna nuclear plant.

SCC staff comments captured in Ghiorzi’s brief underscore how open-ended the demand has become: load requests that seem “insatiable,” a “never-ending… avalanche of requests,” and delivery-point request counts in the dozens to more than a hundred in a single year. Building Golden-Mars as a reliability project while the industry queues more campuses, she argues, creates more reliability risk than it solves — especially when PJM’s Independent Market Monitor has told federal regulators that interconnecting large data center loads the grid cannot serve reliably means curtailments, including blackouts for data centers or for other customers.

That is the loop Virginians are being asked to close: Democratic local approvals created the load; utility transmission cases socialize the wires; and households from Lovettsville to Richmond pay in rates, easements, and risk. The Commission’s job in PUR-2025-00056 is not to rewrite Loudoun’s election history. It is to decide whether the Golden-Mars package is a genuine public necessity — or the next installment on a boom that Loudoun’s Democratic Board already voted into existence.

Email the Board of Supervisors at:
Phyllis J. Randall (Chair, At-Large) – Phyllis.Randall@loudoun.gov,
Michael R. Turner (Vice Chair, Ashburn District) – Mike.Turner@loudoun.gov,
Juli E. Briskman (Algonkian District) – Juli.Briskman@loudoun.gov,
Sylvia R. Glass (Broad Run District) – Sylvia.Glass@loudoun.gov,
Caleb Kershner (Catoctin District) – caleb.kershner@loudoun.gov,
Matthew F. Letourneau (Dulles District) – Matt.Letourneau@loudoun.gov,
Kristen C. Umstattd (Leesburg District) – Kristen.Umstattd@loudoun.gov,
Laura A. TeKrony (Little River District) – Laura.TeKrony@loudoun.gov,
Koran Saines (Sterling District) – Koran.Saines@loudoun.gov

Email the Loudoun County School Board:
April Chandler, april.chandler@lcps.org,
Anne Donohue, anne.donohue@lcps.org,
Deana Griffiths, deana.griffiths@lcps.org,
Ross Svenson, ross.stevenson@lcps.org,
Kari LaBell, kari.labell@lcps.org,
Jon Pepper, jonathon.pepper@lcps.org,
Lauren Shernoff, lauren.shernoff@lcps.org,
Sumera Rashid, sumera.rashid@lcps.org,
Amy Riccardi, amy.riccardi@lcps.org,