The editors sent me on a hardship assignment this week. I went paddling on the James River in central Virginia.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. I had to visit a particularly beautiful section called Seven Islands, in rural Fluvanna County, much of it protected by private conservation easements and a nearby state wildlife management area.
The water rippled around rocks and under the branches of towering sycamores. Smallmouth bass scattered when my canoe approached — this was likely a favorite fishing ground of the Monacan people for thousands of years — and a red fox flushed from the tall grass. An American goldfinch called, and a spicebush swallowtail butterfly alighted on its eponymous plant, now bursting with fragrant, red berries. Pawpaws drooped under the weight of their ripening fruit.
“You’re floating down the river and it’s forest in every direction,” said Vic Sorrell, a retired school principal who, with his friends, bought 390 acres here over the years. “This area is as far away from people as you can get in Fluvanna County, and we considered ourselves safe.”
After a pause, he added, bitterly: “Nowhere is safe.”
This slice of God’s country could soon be destroyed because of data centers — a story often told in Virginia, home to the greatest data-center concentration in the world. But here’s the twist: Fluvanna County doesn’t even have a data center, nor does it have plans for one. Neither does Buckingham County, across the river. And yet residents in both counties are set to have their land, and their scenic vistas, taken from them against their will by eminent domain to make way for monstrous new power lines: 12 story-tall towers carrying the highest voltage lines that exist in the United States to bring electricity to data centers in Northern Virginia, some 100 miles away. The likeliest path for that line goes right through Seven Islands.
Not 10 miles downriver from here, in Cumberland County, which also has no active or planned data centers, Dominion Energy has proposed to build the largest gas-fueled power plant in the state, with 300-foot smokestacks and a water intake averaging 800,000 gallons a day — also to provide electricity for far-away data centers. And, in the ultimate insult, residents here and across the commonwealth could well end up paying for this construction in the form of higher utility rates. Ordinary Virginians would be forced to subsidize the multitrillion-dollar AI industry even more than they do with their taxes today.
The rampant destruction of the state’s natural beauty, and the obvious unfairness to its residents, have set off a bipartisan clamor in the state for a moratorium on new data-center projects. The movement against data centers has caught fire nationally. But Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, insists on saying the matter is “a local choice.”
The proposed decimation of Seven Islands — and 115 miles of countryside in the path of the Valley Link transmission line — shows that her position makes no sense. What happens in Loudoun County very much affects the residents of Fluvanna. It’s difficult to comprehend just how much destruction the data-center explosion is set to unleash on the state, both in areas (such as Loudoun) that welcomed the plants and in areas (such as Fluvanna) that didn’t.
Utilities in the state have requests from data centers for about 95 gigawatts of additional power. Essentially, this means a near quintupling of power demand in the state from the current peak demand of about 25 gigawatts. Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council in Warrenton, Virginia, told me that to carry that much electricity, Virginia would need to construct between 20 and 30 new high-voltage power lines crisscrossing the state over the next 15 years or so. That’s the environmental equivalent of building 20 to 30 new interstate highways in the state.
Want to power the data centers with solar instead? The required solar farms would take up as much as 5 million acres, Miller said — about 20% of the entire land mass of Virginia. Either option would harm Virginians far away from data centers. “Why,” Miller asks, “should average Virginians be putting up with these impacts when it’s not their demand, when it’s not their lifestyle, when it’s not their choices, that are driving the impacts on their communities?”
Sorrel said he and his buddies at Seven Islands are all “staunch conservatives,” which I had surmised easily enough from the framed mugshot of President Donald Trump on a side table and the MAGA baseball cap on a lampshade at the old house they use as a hunting lodge. Photos of their kills cover the walls and a sign on the refrigerator defines “vegetarian” as “an old Indian word for bad hunter.”
Yet these right-wingers are pleading for government intervention to stop the madness — both to block the proposed Valley Link power line and to declare a moratorium on new data centers in Virginia until more controls can be put in place. “We’re not opposed to data-center development, but it has to make sense,” said Jim Dudley, who is a Seven Islands partner of Sorrel.
As you enter their property, a sign demands “BLOCK VALLEY LINK. Its [sic] coming HERE taking your LAND and your HEALTH.” Similar messages on yard signs pop up in several spots on the James Madison Highway, which roughly parallels the proposed power line.
Virginians of all political leanings are getting fed up with data centers. State polling has found large majorities oppose data centers in their communities and object to the tax breaks data centers receive. National polling also reflects a recent turn against data centers.
On the left, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul secured a temporary data-center moratorium in July. On the right, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott did the same this month. But it’s still the Wild West in Virginia. The Trump administration, in its rush to green-light AI, has weakened federal permitting to the point of irrelevance.
Spanberger’s communications director, Libby Wiet, pointed me to recent Spanberger moves to require data centers to pay more of the transmission costs they incur. The governor has also taken steps to raise standards for water usage, noise, clean energy and pollution at the centers. And that is welcome progress. But, in my view, Spanberger has done far less than is needed to protect Virginians from the coming environmental tragedy.
The Valley Link project will cut through as many as nine counties, trashing views from Campbell County, near Lynchburg, to Culpeper. The Valley North Project (which, like the Valley Link project, is a joint venture between Dominion Energy, FirstEnergy and Transource) would cut through 260 miles of countryside — about 50 miles of it in Virginia — bringing a lot of coal-generated power from West Virginia to Virginia’s data centers.
Dominion, meanwhile, plans to double the size of a power line from Charlottesville to Gordonsville, in the viewshed of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and near a national scenic byway commemorating the Civil War.
Outside Sperryville, Virginia, where I live, FirstEnergy plans to expand a power line through the heart of Shenandoah National Park, crossing the mountains with taller poles and a wider scar. The National Parks Conservation Association warns that “this change threatens to diminish the park’s nationally significant resources in ways that could last for generations.” The Appalachian Trail Conservancy says it has “significant concern” about damage to the trail’s “scenic resources.”
Everybody expects FirstEnergy to run amok through the park. Kerry Sutten, a Sperryville resident and shop owner spearheading the opposition to the enlarged line, said that, under the Trump administration’s leadership of the National Park Service, the power company “can do whatever they want.”
Once the enlarged power line leaves the park and snakes through the property of Sutten and 35 other residents, it will plunge into the beginning of Sperryville’s historic district. The Piedmont Environmental Council asked FirstEnergy to bury the lines where they approach the historic district; the company “categorically refused to consider this option,” reports PEC’s Sarah Parmelee. PEC also fears that the new line could be the first step of a new, longer power line that would connect to the Valley Link project — a possibility FirstEnergy pointedly does not rule out.
Company spokesperson Lauren Siburkis told me that “any future project would need its own planning, reviews, approvals and public input process.” Decisions about the national park and about burying power lines have not been finalized, she said.
In theory, there is no reason why data centers have to destroy the countryside — and hike everybody’s utility bills. They could be built underground, as multiple-level structures. They could be located where geothermal energy could power and cool them, on site, with less water usage. Some power lines could be buried. But all of that costs more money — which the AI industry doesn’t want to pay, and which the federal and state governments aren’t willing to require the industry to pay.
After the Trump administration is gone, there may be a chance for sensible federal regulation of data centers. A national policy on data centers could also ask whether we really need the “compute capacity” for every man, woman and child in America to have 24/7 access to generative AI. But by then it may be too late for Virginia, unless Spanberger reverses herself on a data-center moratorium.
A Dominion Energy spokesperson, Craig Carper, told me the Valley Link consortium will present its route proposal to the state this fall, and the state will rule on that request roughly a year later.
There’s a chance Seven Islands will be spared, but “I’ve been told by multiple people, including my lawyer, that it’s going to happen. There’s no way we can stop it,” Sorrel told me. “The only thing we can do is prolong it. We can chain ourselves to a tree.”
Sorrel, understandably, is worried that he will lose everything. “What is the value of this land now?” he asks, in a grove of mature loblolly pines and white oaks. “What is that same acre worth now with a power line on top of it?”
I feel his pain — even though he probably wouldn’t be in this mess if not for Trump’s gutting of permits. I also think of the pain of the plants and animals of Seven Islands: the bears and wild turkeys that feast on its bitternut hickory and black walnuts; the dragonflies, butterflies and water fowl that prosper on its shady banks; the humans who come to ride the rapids and to fish the pools of the James from their canoes and kayaks, and to explore the old stonework of its 19th century canal.
We are losing all of this, forever. And for what?
Dana Milbank is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.
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