UCS: Data-Center Grid Hookups Put $4.3B on PJM Customers in 2024 — Virginia Alone Near $2B

WASHINGTON / RICHMOND — A Union of Concerned Scientists policy brief finds that in 2024 alone, utilities in seven PJM states passed more than $4.3 billion in local transmission upgrade costs tied to connecting data centers onto everyday customers — and Virginia alone accounts for about $1.988 billion of that total across 60 tracked projects.

Connection Costs Loophole Costs Customers Over $4 Billion to Connect Data Centers to Power Grid argues that federal and retail rate rules never anticipated individual customers big enough to force transmission-level service on the scale of modern 100–400 MW campuses. Historically, new data centers often drew under 10 MW. Today’s queue breaks the old assumption that transmission is a shared network cost with diffuse causation.

UCS tallies roughly $4.356 billion across 130 projects in Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia for 2024-era connection costs allocated to all customers of the same utilities. Ohio’s about $1.30 billion and Virginia’s nearly $2 billion dominate the table. The brief says consumers in those states have already absorbed on the order of $5 billion thus far when earlier years are included, with more coming under existing rules.

Mechanically, the loophole works like this: transmission-level taps for hyperscale loads are planned in utility local transmission plans, folded into FERC-supervised transmission rates, and then flowed through to retail bills in state rate cases. Cost causation for a single data-center campus disappears into the regional postage stamp. Residential and small-business customers in Dominion territory feel it as higher wires charges even when they never streamed a query off the new hall.

That is the bill-side twin of Loudoun’s land-use story. Democrat supervisors and Statewide Democrats spent years recruiting the loads; PJM and utilities planned the wires; UCS says the interconnection tab is socialized. The brief’s appendix is designed so reporters and intervenors can trace individual projects from data-center driver to regional transmission plan cost.

UCS calls for new rules that assign large-load interconnection costs to the customers who cause them, rather than burying campus taps inside generic transmission rates. Without that change, every new Northern Virginia or Ohio campus extends the same cost shift. Monitoring Analytics’ warnings about rising PJM supply costs sit beside the UCS wires finding: supply and transmission are both moving against households.

Virginia’s nearly $2 billion slice is not an abstraction for Loudoun, Prince William, and Culpeper landowners already fighting 500 kV corridors. It is the accounting entry that matches Aspen–Golden, Golden–Mars, and longer MARL-class projects when utilities recover local upgrades from everyone. Democrat growth policy created the campuses; existing FERC-state rate practice spreads the plug-in cost.

The brief notes PJM states are the hotbed where this distortion shows up first because that is where hyperscale clustering happened first. Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia appear in the same table because the regional grid moves power and cost across borders even when the building sits in Loudoun. Illinois and New Jersey show smaller but real shares of the same socialization pattern.

After two decades of flat load growth, UCS notes many utilities now forecast 30 to 80 percent sales increases in ten years. PJM is where that surge arrived first, and Monitoring Analytics has already documented rising bills for new electricity supply. The connection-cost loophole stacks a second bill on top: not only energy and capacity, but the steel that plugs campuses into the bulk system.

For SCC and FERC dockets, UCS supplies a simple question intervenors can ask under oath: which of these local transmission upgrades exist primarily to serve a data-center interconnection, and why is that cost in every ratepayer’s bill? The $4.3 billion 2024 figure is UCS’s answer for one year across seven states, with Virginia’s $1.988 billion proving the commonwealth is not a bit player.

Until regulators close the loophole, Virginia households will keep subsidizing the interconnection of an industry Democrat officeholders still celebrate for tax revenue — while Kimley-Horn-scale pipeline megawatts and Loudoun’s multi-gigawatt meter readings promise the socialized hookup bill only grows.

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,