This article appears in the June 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
In mid-April, a week before Virginia voters narrowly passed new congressional maps in response to Republican gerrymandering, groups of landowners and land preservationists in Northern Virginia quietly won a state appeals court battle against a deep-pocketed consortium of developers. They had sued the county over failing to follow state regulations about posting public notices involving a data center project.
Between the redistricting vote, Virginia’s legislative budget impasse over data center taxation, and state and federal lawmakers caterwauling from Washington to Richmond and back again, it’s not surprising that a suburban county court case didn’t really penetrate the dystopian news cycle.
But a screwup that derails what would have been the world’s largest data center is worth unpacking. Zoning applications and hearings are some of the most combative, tedious, yet vital happenings in cities and towns. They are also relentlessly ignored by most residents, who never read those public notices, much less know where to look for the clues about parcels of land being sold or new builds that affect their lives and property. Some real estate developers often count on this disinterest.
But something as simple as failing to adhere to regulations about posting a public notice can upend an entire project. That’s what happened in Prince William County, Virginia, a Washington suburb, when the Board of Supervisors, the county’s policymaking body, mishandled public announcements for what at the time would have been a huge campus, the equivalent of about 12 dozen Walmart superstores.
That was a surprising but welcome development for county residents, who have been incensed that more harms might be foisted on their communities. In just the past couple of years, support for data centers has plummeted in the state and beyond. Northern Virginia is the country’s largest data center market, and it’s become ground zero for an upsurge of defiance, especially against the next-generation infrastructure that supports artificial intelligence.
Half of all data centers expected to open in 2026 will be delayed or simply canceled.
In an era of poisonous politics, Democrats, Republicans, and independents have found common cause over the value of tax breaks worth billions to Big Tech companies worth trillions. What residents see in exchange are higher electricity and water rates, a paltry number of new permanent jobs, and a host of unsavory environmental impacts, from the desecration of green spaces, erasures of wildlife habitats, and air and noise pollution. The public outcry has had a serious impact: Across America, at least 25 different data center projects were canceled last year, and half of all data centers expected to open in 2026 will be delayed or simply canceled, according to reporting from Bloomberg.
In Prince William County, where former Vice President Kamala Harris won in a landslide in the 2024 presidential election, tenacious local residents have pressed their cases against some of the most powerful companies in the world. The Digital Gateway case may seem like finally getting Al Capone on tax evasion. But as tech companies branch out from Northern Virginia to more rural parts of the state, court local officials with first-responder gear, and gag them with nondisclosure agreements, they’ll double down to make sure that their next mega-million data center project doesn’t implode on a technicality. It still may not pan out, however. Shoehorning even more development into the national epicenter for data center hubs has energized Virginians weary of unrelenting economic chaos to team up to confront the tech intrusions that bruise communities.
A FEBRUARY 2026 CLEAN VIRGINIA REPORT warns that in the next 15 years, Virginia data centers’ energy needs are projected to double or triple, increasing the transmission pressures on PJM, the grid operator. Electricity bills could jump by hundreds of dollars.
In a sprint to a zero-emission future, the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act required Dominion Energy, the state’s investor-owned public utility, to transition to 100 percent renewable sources by 2045. Energy consumption had been sagging but then surged after the pandemic. Artificial intelligence has only accelerated those demands.
By the time consumers were dazzled by the wonders of ChatGPT, the rest of the tech sector had decided to make an enormous bet. At the heart of it was hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure spending to generate the necessary compute to train, build, and maintain new AI agents.
So far, state regulators have given Dominion an out on the renewable mandate by allowing the company to build new natural gas plants. But the VCEA is still on the books, almost daring them to reconcile the differences.
The Northern Virginia counties, chiefly Fairfax, Prince William, and Loudoun, which has the state’s highest concentration of data centers, made very good use of decades of tech tax revenues, even as they offered the companies subsidies to locate in their communities.
Those dollars gloss over the crisis brewing over an electric grid that wasn’t equipped to handle the demand for energy to power data centers, much less a hyperscale AI data center, the Tyrannosaurus rex of these warehouse-style facilities. Replacing power plants, transformers, distribution networks, substations, and more to meet the AI revolution, while serving the existing demands from consumers and businesses, is expensive, and those exploding costs are traditionally passed along to residential ratepayers.
The AI build-out has become one more troubling symbol of the affordability crises plaguing middle-income and poor Americans and now gnawing at the lower rungs of the upper middle classes. But never mind all that, say tech company executives speeding to build new facilities everywhere. The problem for them and the specialty real estate developers they work with is that residents have caught on. Virginians’ support for data centers has sunk like a very large stone in places that once knocked themselves out trying to site the facilities.
PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY IS ONE of the fastest-growing hubs in Northern Virginia’s data center universe. The county has 57 data center buildings completed, with 30 under construction, according to the county’s data center development and inventory summary. And the developers they welcomed in are not exactly reliable partners: The county has spent close to half a million dollars fighting firms that are protesting the size of their property tax bills.
In 2021, the county initiated work on a new data center project, Digital Gateway. The plan would deposit an incredible 37 data centers—up to 27 million square feet—on 2,000 acres in a rural area of homes, a state forest, and the Manassas National Battlefield Park, the site of the first engagements of the Civil War. Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Kimberly Irving, in her ruling on the project, marveled at its scope: “The sheer size of this development cannot be overstated.”
There were political glitches from the start. In 2021, a county supervisor sold his home to one of the developers, and after sparking a recall effort, he resigned. The following year came the revelation that Ann Wheeler, the chair of the county’s Board of Supervisors, had sold stock in Blackstone, the parent company of QTS Realty Trust, one of the two developers. (Compass Datacenters was the other.) Another recall attempt unfolded after that news, but that didn’t dissuade Wheeler from running for re-election. But her campaign failed miserably, even after she outspent her challenger by some $300,000.
“That was when people finally started to understand outside of Prince William, there is an electoral consequence to this kind of industrial harm, and it’s going to be seen at the ballot box,” says Elena Schlossberg, executive director of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, a grassroots civic group and a project opponent. Though the county planning commission had voted against the project, citing questions about its effects on electricity rates, battlefield grounds, and recreation areas, Wheeler, by then a lame duck, steered the project to approval anyway.
That set the stage for two 2024 court cases filed against the county and the project developers: one by the Oak Valley Homeowners Association and the other by the American Battlefield Trust, which protects historic war sites, and another group of residents. “We didn’t know that we’d be sacrificing Virginia to become the data center landfill of the world,” says Schlossberg. But while previous efforts to fight data centers focused on residents’ concerns about electricity costs, this time broader concerns about the overall state of the regional economy hard hit by the DOGE cuts have ratcheted up residents’ anger. “I’m going to meetings and I’m hearing people talk about their water bills,” she says.
A mundane oversight finally took down the project. A Board of Supervisors employee submitted information about the hearing to The Washington Post. To publish it, the newspaper needed the employee to confirm the information. But no one got back to the paper. Though the notices did eventually post, the statutory requirements weren’t met. Who exactly was to blame has been disputed, but Judge Irving ruled that the board should have responded to the Post’s email.
“The integrity of our public notice law is the reason that the Prince William Digital Gateway is swaying on the ropes right now and about to collapse,” state Sen. Danica Roem (D-Manassas) told the Prospect. At the end of April, Compass Datacenters dropped its appeal to the state Supreme Court, but news reports indicate that QTS plans to forge ahead.
The Board of Supervisors was ready to bow out of the Digital Gateway war as well. On April 14, the board voted unanimously to drop its expensive legal fight; local officials had already spent $1.7 million on the case.
For the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, it marked another victory after years of battling data centers. The group sprang to life in 2014 to contest a Dominion Energy proposal to build a new transmission line, in part to service an Amazon data center. Residents were mostly in the dark about the project until a local official chatting with workers digging up a sidewalk and laying fiber found out they were working on an Amazon data center project. The coalition didn’t stop the transmission line project, but their protests managed to get a segment of the line buried underground.
“For a use that relies so heavily on the public utility system and also includes infrastructure that will impact the community directly through the transmission line or through the diesel generator or the gas turbines … this is exactly why you need more disclosure—and that is why that lack of the community transparency is starting to bite the data center industry,” says Schlossberg.
The industry has hit upon a new strategy in response to public pushback. Last Christmas, an organization called Virginia Connects, a group created by the industry’s Data Center Coalition, ran ads across the state totaling around $700,000, praising data centers for “investing billions in clean energy,” “creating good-paying jobs,” and “building a better energy future.” The spots also stressed that data centers would pay for their own energy costs, something no less a figure than President Donald Trump has pushed for.
“They’re trying to come up with better narratives of what they promised to do,” Schlossberg says. “‘We’re going to use hydrogen fuel cells, SMRs, we won’t use more water.’ But it’s all smoke and mirrors. I say, look at what is happening in Northern Virginia: What is happening in Northern Virginia is what will happen to you.”
DATA CENTERS FIRST SPRANG UP in Northern Virginia in the 1990s to facilitate mass commercialization of the internet, whose origins lie deep in the mid-century federal defense, space, and energy agencies. Generative AI, the large language models that create video, audio, and text in response to prompts or commands, by contrast, has different requirements.
Unlike the financial tech or defense companies that needed transmission lines on large, flat sites near their Washington-area customers, AI data centers don’t need to be physically close to customers. So they are branching out to more remote areas of the state, near pristine forests or abandoned coal mines. These hyperscale facilities are supersized, covering millions of square feet.
The Roanoke Parks and Recreation Department calls Carvins Cove the city’s “outdoor hidden gem” for hiking, horseback riding, fishing, and more, on 12,000 acres in Botetourt and Roanoke Counties in Southwest Virginia. It’s the drinking water source for the 98,000 residents of the city of Roanoke, as well as surrounding counties and towns.
Now it’s also the water source for a new Google hyperscale data center. Google and the Botetourt County Board of Supervisors sealed a $14 million deal in June of 2025 when they formally announced “Project Raspberry,” a nearly one-million-square-foot facility spread across three buildings on a 312-acre campus. The industrial area would contain three substations, an office building and access roads, utilities, parking areas, and stormwater management facilities—all set for an area that was quickly zoned for data centers two years ago.
Google has worked to secure clean-energy resources in the state. The company entered into a power purchase agreement for the full capacity of the 75-megawatt Rocky Forge Wind project, which will power its data centers in Dominion’s service areas. But the wind farm won’t supply any energy to Project Raspberry; it will instead draw energy from Appalachian Power, which services Central and Southwestern Virginia.
The company has also declared that its cooling technology will deliver efficiencies. “In Botetourt County, the high quality of water means that we can circulate it multiple times through our cooling system, reducing the amount of water needed for operations,” Google said in a statement posted on the county website. Google has indicated that it will pay all water and electricity infrastructure and generation costs.
But affordability concerns and strains on the grid haven’t dropped out of sight. PJM, the regional grid operator for 13 states and the District of Columbia, will soon face reliability challenges, and has warned that the region may experience brownouts during periods of high demand.
Project Raspberry closes in on recreational areas, homes, an apiary, and a popular cherry blossom grove. Trees have already been cleared. If the shock of a hyperscale data center emerging in the middle of the neighborhood wasn’t enough, residents were surprised to learn that the data center will slurp up two million gallons of water per day, and potentially up to eight million gallons once all three data centers are up and running.
Virginia is a water-rich place, but as data centers proliferate that could change. At the end of April, the U.S. Drought Monitor posted a severe drought advisory for Botetourt County that indicated the likelihood of water shortages and water restrictions. A new state law signed this spring requires municipal waterworks and other large water providers to report the amount of water they provide each month to individual data centers as well as other water users.
The law requires reporting on both potable and reclaimed water uses, which is particularly relevant to data centers because much of the reclaimed water they use—which is typically wastewater or other non-potable water that has been treated so it can be repurposed for other uses—is evaporated in data centers’ cooling processes and does not get returned to waterways. (However, diminished stream flows can affect downstream water supplies.)
While this provision affects data centers only once they are up and running and will not shed light directly on potential water use by proposed projects, it puts tech companies on notice that the state intends to monitor potential risks to drinking water supplies.
“Peak demand is the real critical number to think about, the days of the year when they’re using the most water,” says Quentin Good, a policy analyst with Frontier Group, a research and policy organization. “Transparent reporting on energy and water use from data centers” is key and those numbers should include “daily and hourly use, so that we can actually plan for those peak demand times.” Asked about the data center’s projected water usage, Good suggests those daily numbers could vary.
Data center developers and their local supporters don’t have any interest in engaging with community members. Ben Verschoor, an organizer with the Southwest Virginia Data Center Transparency Alliance, a group formed last fall to oppose the project, claims the board moved the Google sale forward with minimal public notices. There were no public hearings.
Subterfuge is a feature, not a bug. If local officials can come up with a “by right” development project, discuss it behind closed doors, and quickly approve it in a scheduled session at an inconvenient time, there’s no need to worry about NIMBYs, enviros, or working stiffs showing up to complain. (The Transparency Alliance discovered that the board had rezoned the land for data center usage after a person who regularly attends the meetings alerted them.)
Prince William County’s win is definitely on Botetourt County’s radar. Like the Prince William County officials, the Botetourt County Board of Supervisors was excited by the dollars but unmoved by democracy in action, and resorted to a grand plan of maximum obfuscation.
Prince William County has 57 data center buildings completed, with 30 under construction.
Last fall, seeking to confirm reported water usage, a hyperlocal news outlet, The Roanoke Rambler, took the water authority to court after submitting a state Freedom of Information Act request. They would eventually receive documents from the water company, which had signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) with Google, with the usage numbers redacted. The company had claimed that the information was “proprietary.” The Rambler then sued the water authority, and a Roanoke County circuit judge ordered disclosure of the numbers, ruling that the data is “not a right” or “information that is owned by Google.” The case is likely to boost other Virginia communities’ efforts to obtain water usage numbers from data center developers.
In 2024, Trump, AI’s top cheerleader, crushed Harris in Botetourt County. Yet residents have been alarmed by Project Raspberry, says Danny Goad, a realtor and an opponent who’s active in local GOP circles. “I don’t care if President Trump is pushing it; I don’t want it. I don’t care if Biden is pushing it,” he says. “It’s bad for our communities. They take our water; they take our power; they give us no jobs.”
Like most data center projects, Project Raspberry goes heavy on temporary jobs—it will bring in 1,500 construction jobs—and light on permanent local positions: about 150. For local officials, the jobs were incidental; what appealed was the $30 million in new annual revenues, $10 million per center. Google also agreed to $4 million in community benefits that included ambulances and fire trucks.
The most attractive aspect for the water authority was that the revenues would support development of a new water resource. But the projections around identifying a new source and when it would have to be available depend on who’s doing the talking: the board, the water authority, or Google. “It just feels like there’s a lot of shifting goalposts,” says Verschoor. “It’s difficult to get a straight answer.”
Google’s application set in motion a Section 404 Clean Water Act permit application that brought the Army Corps of Engineers into the mix to evaluate the project’s impacts on surrounding wetlands, streams, and endangered and threatened species. A public comment period ended in early April. The Transparency Alliance asked residents to request a public hearing in their letters to the Army Corps.
IT’S EASY TO FIND DATA CENTERS in the wild. About 45 minutes from downtown Washington, WMATA’s Silver Line glides along Interstate 66 in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, past leafy suburban neighborhoods of colonial homes that give way to a parade of low-rise, rectangular warehouses in shades of agreeable gray.
At the end of the line is Loudoun Station, a small development of apartment buildings, fast-casual eateries, Mexican, barbecue, and pizza restaurants, and other retail businesses topped off with a movie theater and a small park with a splash pad for kids. This being the serious ’burbs, midday on a weekday it’s ghost-town dead. Only a few people mill around: a middle-aged woman slowly walking a large dog, another pushing a baby in a stroller. A few workers plant flowers in large containers around the development.
More than a few apartments have a view that might satisfy hardcore tech nerds: The data center out this way is another standard-issue gray building, though this one had some bright-yellow squares running along the rooftop line. Young trees and an impressive black wrought iron fence topped with knife-like protrusions surround the facility, in case you didn’t get the off-limits message.
No matter how well landscaped they are to fit in, data centers have provoked outrage and acts of violence across the country—shots fired at the home of a data center–supporting Indianapolis city councilor and a firebomb hurled at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco residence, for example. Mostly, though, there are tried-and-true protests. In Virginia, a few demonstrators greeted Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) on a late-April visit to Botetourt County to sign unrelated legislation.
There’s been a swift shift in public opinion. By the winter of 2024, Virginians had mostly come to terms with data centers. A Virginia Commonwealth University poll showed a plurality of respondents supporting them. There wasn’t much of a partisan divide, though independents seemed to be holding their noses. All was not well in Northern Virginia, though, where one-third of registered voters “strongly disagree” that there should be more data centers in the state. In Northwest Virginia, another one-quarter of respondents thought the same. Another eyebrow-raising data point indicated that nearly one-third of Gen Z and younger millennials aged 25-34 also “strongly disagree” that there should be more data centers.
Today, most residents don’t want to be near one, hear one, or pay higher electricity and water bills because of one. A March Washington Post-Schar School/George Mason University poll found that nearly 70 percent of Virginia’s registered voters agreed that the sales tax break should end. On overall quality-of-life issues, 59 percent believe that the facilities have had “negative impacts” on the local environment; another 57 percent said they had negative impacts on home energy and utility bills. But 56 percent thought data centers had a positive impact on job creation.
In Loudoun County, 40 percent believed life was worse with them; another 40 percent thought that there was no difference. Only 19 percent thought life had improved.
The atmosphere in Richmond reflects this massive political reorientation. Virginia lawmakers went into a late-April special session to hash out a two-year budget agreement precisely because of an unbridgeable divide over preserving or ending a sales and use tax exemption on computer equipment and software for data centers. The minimum eligible requirements include $150 million in new capital investment and 50 new jobs, which put the state on the tech-friendly business map.
Elected last November, Spanberger preached affordability on the campaign trail, but she wants to keep Virginia “open for business” and doesn’t support quashing the tax exemption. Delegate Don Scott (D-Portsmouth), the Speaker of the House of Delegates, backs her up with the proviso that, in order to receive the credit, the facilities won’t be able to use on-site power sources that generate carbon emissions, which appears to be a nod to the VCEA and community concerns with pollution from diesel generator emissions.
Another grassroots-pleasing piece of legislation signed into law this year allows jurisdictions handling rezoning applications and other special uses to require data centers and other high-energy users to provide site assessments evaluating noise, ground- and surface water, agriculture, historic sites, forests, and park impacts for projects 100 megawatts or greater. The data center’s electric utility also must submit information about substations and transmission voltage requirements.
For Virginia delegates in the lower chamber, data centers are bright spots, supporting direct and indirect jobs. Tech companies pay billions in property and state income taxes at a time when federal cutbacks have compromised state finances. “This is what’s helping keep the budget afloat and that’s what I think the House is worried about,” says David Toscano, a former Virginia House of Delegates Democratic minority leader.
Not everyone agrees about the jobs impact. A Food & Water Watch report in January found that the investment necessary to create one data center job in Virginia cost $13 million, 100 times more than it does to create a comparable job in another industry.
Anthony Elmo of Good Jobs First, a corporate and government accountability watchdog group, co-authored an April white paper on the hidden costs of the data center subsidy to public schools. He doesn’t buy the jobs pitch either. “If taxpayers are on the hook for subsidies, credits, incentives, abatements, all these different things for these projects, is the amount of money that they’re inserting into these projects worth it in terms of the outcomes of jobs?” Job creation is a mirage. Their promises resemble the ones made by professional sports teams that point to local jobs connected to their stadium deals, ones that are low-wage and seasonal and rarely much beyond that.
Data center construction yields temporary construction and maintenance jobs. Even local jobs can be an illusion for a community if skills aren’t there. Data center electricians require special certifications that residential electricians typically don’t have; the sector often relies on electricians who travel.
These jobs are critical for unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 26, which has seen its membership increase and supports preserving the tax exemption. Other unions like the Virginia Education Association want recovered tax revenues directed to public schools.
Elmo, who is based in Texas, has seen the aftershocks of data center development in Abilene and Amarillo. “What ends up happening is it throws the housing market out of whack,” he says, “because you have electricians having to come in from out of state and from other parts of Texas to work on these projects for 18 to 24 months. It ends up wrecking the local housing economy by driving up prices.”
Candidates have put data centers at the forefront of their campaigns, and woe to those who defy voters.
Spanberger and state lawmakers want to seal the deal before the state runs out of money at the end of June. They say they’ll get there. But keeping the tax break intact would come at a major political cost. “I can understand the logic of the House and the governor not wanting to rock the boat with tech companies and businesses,” says Verschoor, the Botetourt County organizer. “But realistically, everybody hates these [data centers] and they’re going to hate anybody who supports them.”
The tax exemption went live in 2008, but only a few jurisdictions adopted it; in 2010, lawmakers implemented it statewide. They projected hits of $1.5 million each year. “One of the biggest problems,” Elmo says, “is that when these programs were started, it wasn’t fully understood that companies would double-, triple-, and quadruple-dip on this sales and use tax every time they needed to replace servers and chips.”
“States vastly undershot what they thought these programs would cost,” says Elmo. He estimated that in fiscal year 2024, K-12 schools lost out on $267 million, and the state nearly $1 billion. Prince William County schools lost out on $19 million. The estimate for fiscal year 2025 is nearly double: almost $2 billion.
The lead state Senate negotiator, Sen. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), the chair of the Finance and Appropriations Committee, declared early on that the state no longer needed to subsidize the richest tech companies in the world. (Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Oracle all do business in Virginia.) While most of the tax benefits were scheduled to expire in 2035, the Senate wanted them gone in 2027.
Lucas, a longtime force in Richmond, originally wanted nearly $2 billion in savings to go to education, transportation, and local and regional programs. At press time, her latest proposal was $1.6 billion. “Our dispute is now whether data centers will pay the same sales tax as every other business and I will not budge on that,” she has said.
The Data Center Coalition, the leading industry group, is also at the negotiating table. The sector’s lobbying arm represents the hyperscalers, who don’t always play nicely with the organization’s smaller companies. The undisputed heavyweight in Virginia politics, however, is Dominion, a major political donor that has contributed to Lucas’s and Scott’s campaigns, and to Spanberger’s 2026 inaugural fund.
“They definitely benefit in a major way from having a huge data center demand on the horizon that helps them do what they do best, which is to build very expensive capital infrastructure on which they earn a return,” says Brennan Gilmore, executive director of Clean Virginia, a clean-energy and government accountability group. Dominion has conveniently blamed data centers for rising electricity costs, Gilmore adds, and the utility wants to see the costs transferred to them.
WHETHER VIRGINIA GIVES IN to public pressure or not, other states are striking back. Washington state eliminated its sales tax break for data centers. The decision goes into effect on July 1 and will bring in $63 million over the next two years and $144 million for the 2027–2029 fiscal years. State lawmakers also applied the state sales tax to previously exempt digital services and technology. Texas, currently the second-largest data center hub and charging fast toward Virginia’s top slot, is exploring getting rid of its sales tax exemption or paring it back next year.
Meanwhile, grassroots opposition to data centers continues to surge. By the end of last year, analysts at Data Center Watch had found local opposition groups in 42 states. Small towns like Canton, North Carolina, were issuing moratoriums on construction. Port Washington, Wisconsin, overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure in April giving residents more say over data center development projects. And other rural Virginia communities, like Appomattox County, are in open protest.
Candidates have put data centers at the forefront of their campaigns, and woe to those who defy voters. Global headline writers proclaiming Maine as the first state to implement a data center moratorium didn’t reckon with Gov. Janet Mills’s (D-ME) veto pen. Mills wanted to save a data center project at a former paper mill site, and the legislature failed to overturn her veto. Destined to be unpopular, her decision pretty much confirmed that she had given up on her Democratic Senate primary fight against first-time candidate Graham Platner, a popular oysterman. She quit the race soon afterward.
In Festus, Missouri, voters tossed four city councilors out of office in April after the council approved a $6 billion hyperscale CRG data center. Turnout was mammoth, extraordinarily higher than last year’s contests. Data center opponents in the St. Louis suburb are now collecting signatures to recall the mayor and the councilors who were not on the 2026 ballot. Of those four, one has already resigned.
Richmond is on notice. “The legislature has to get it right,” says Schlossberg of Prince William County. “If Democrats don’t get it right, if [the governor] goes back on her word for affordability, if people see their land being seized for eminent domain—which is happening more and more throughout Virginia, in communities that are more densely populated, in communities that are farmland—it doesn’t matter where the gas turbines are being approved as on-site generation.”
“The impacts are growing,” she adds. “And Abigail Spanberger needs to get it right, or she’s going to be seen on the side of the wealthiest industry in the world destroying communities.”
This article appears in Jun 2026 issue.
