County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'

They often have an individual contract with the utility and participate in load regulation: when you need liquefy a few tons of steel, those heaters have a lot of thermal inertia. If A/C loads are high they'll turn the power down, if wind output is high, they'll turn it up, and so on.

Do data centers participate in the same sort of dynamic pricing and power adjustment? I understand that they're spinning up and powering down instances on demand, and that those demands are somewhat outside of their control, but are they able (and willing, and desirous of reducing their electric bills) to dynamically adjust compute in response to utility rates?

Henrico County currently has 37 data-centres with ~2 gigawatts capacity (expected to reach 3 gigawatts).

Apparently, 1 MW can power approximately 834 homes annually. So 2 gigawatts would be closer to powering > 1.6 million homes.

Surely, that kind of concentrated demand is going to affect electricity distribution costs for everyone, which is what we are seeing now.

Data Center Power Demands Are Contributing to Higher Energy Bills - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-center-power-demands... - February 26th, 2026 ("As data centers expand nationwide, utilities are receiving hundreds of gigawatts in interconnection requests, with implications for the power grid and consumers. Dozens of utilities received data center requests for at least 700 gigawatts (GW) of power connection development in 2025, which is more than the 477 GW in electricity that the United States consumed in all of 2023. Even though many of these projects will never be built, the requests are still leading to a ramp-up in energy infrastructure investments, including generation facilities, transmission lines, and transformers.")

No more PJM data centers unless they can be reliably served: market monitor - https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-data-center-interconnec... - November 26th, 2025 ("The PJM Interconnection’s market monitor urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to rule that large data centers can only come online if the grid operator can still meet reliability metrics.")

FERC Complaint: https://elibrary.ferc.gov/eLibrary/filelist?accession_number... ("20251125-5275_2025-11-25 IMM Complaint re Data Center Loads-AS FILED-1.pdf")

Brannon, Ike and Wolf, Samuel, The Impact of Data Centers on Energy Demand and Market Prices (November 11, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5017484 or https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5017484

> The number of data centers in the U.S. has increased sharply in the last decade and nearly all forecasts suggest that their growth will accelerate in the next decade, mainly driven by the rapid adoption of AI. Since data centers are extremely energy intensive, they have led to significant increases in energy consumption. After two decades of relatively static demand, demand for energy in the U.S. is accelerating rapidly, and demand growth is driven in large part by data centers.

> Data centers have had a particularly strong impact on Northern Virginia: More than half of all the nation's energy consumption attributed to data centers occurs in the state-mostly in Northern Virginia, where the needs of the federal government and national security agencies are important drivers of demand.

> Capacity market prices in the last auction nearly doubled across the PJM region and by more than 14 times in Virginia, signaling an urgent need to secure new transmission and generation to ensure reliability for consumers. Billions of dollars of new investment in generation and transmission capacity will be needed to restore a healthy reserve margin and to recover the portion of reserve capacity that has been consumed by data centers.

> We estimate that failing to make such investments in a timely manner would force regulators to acquiesce to rate increases of as much as 70 percent in the next decade in order to ensure that the grid functions properly and provides energy to all users. The consequences of such a failure could be the appearance of regular brownouts and blackouts in Northern Virginia and across the country.

(If you want to talk to someone at Brookings, FERC, UtilityDive, or another domain specific firm to confirm, let me know and I will connect you to them)

Without some sort of mitigation, the costs keep rising and it'll drive families away from these cities and/or counties to avoid the cost hikes. This is akin to what we're seeing in a lot of major cities with rent, people are living further and further away from where they work, paying taxes in other forms (time, public transport costs, gas costs for their car inc. wear & tear, etc).

Hardly seems fair or right.