RICHMOND, Vir. — Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger recently joined POLITICO Energy to highlight Virginia’s new first-of-its-kind statewide energy consumption tax on data centers — and the steps the Commonwealth is taking to protect air quality and prevent ratepayers from shouldering the cost of new energy infrastructure investments by data centers and other high-load energy customers.
“In the budget that we passed, we created the first-of-its-kind consumption tax on data centers and their energy usage,” said Governor Abigail Spanberger. “We want data centers to pay their fair share — the way to get at that is by ensuring that they’re paying this consumption tax, based on their energy consumption. And we can couple that into the future with longer-term views of what are the standards we want to set in Virginia for water usage, for backup energy generation.”
Governor Spanberger also focused on the steps her Administration is taking together with the General Assembly to make energy more affordable and reliable.
“Energy rates are going up, electric bills are going up, and certainly we are seeing some of the real chaos coming out of Washington with trade and tariff policies being disruptive, and H.R. 1 — the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill — certainly driving up energy costs,” said Spanberger. “And of course, there’s the war in Iran. Since the beginning of that war, we’ve seen estimates that the average family has paid an additional $1,000 in just expenses, because things have gone up in cost.”
Spanberger continued, “I appointed and created the role of Chief Energy Officer as a cabinet-level position within my Administration that really works across our secretariats to find places where there are additional levers that we can pull on to lower costs for people. Our Chief Energy Officer is doing a lot of our work directly with PJM — really trying to push for some changes and modifications in PJM, both to drive additional energy generation and inclusion of newer energy generation in the PJM marketplace, but ultimately to the benefit of ratepayers across Virginia.”
Spanberger has signed a slate of legislation into law to make sure data centers pay their fair share for energy use and listen to local communities — including legislation to enforce stricter requirements on backup generators, give local leaders more tools to assess the impacts of data centers, and protect Virginia ratepayers from shouldering the cost of new energy infrastructure investments. The Governor has also joined a bipartisan group of Governors to push PJM Interconnection — the operator of the nation’s largest electric grid — to make sure data centers are paying for new capacity costs.
Click here to watch the full interview.
Tagged with data center, Power Brief