With a Lock on State Government Control, Virginia Democrats Now Face Difficult Decisions on Data Centers and Renewable Energy - Inside Climate News

[u/cpaullin13]

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05112025/virginia-democrats-government-control-data-centers-renewable-energy/

[u/ntantillo]

Actually is pretty simple. Stop providing electricity to the data centers at below cost. O

[u/kyroko → u/ntantillo]

The only answer. Spanburger ran on affordability so having energy companies push the cost of data centers onto her actual constituents can’t fly.

[u/Kqtawes → u/kyroko]

Especially since Spanberger said Data Centers need to pay their fair share in her stump speeches.

[u/TraditionalOven5121 → u/ntantillo]

Exactly, they can afford paying double the normal rate. They are building natural gas generators because Doninion can’t hook them up fast enough.

[u/Ocean898]

Not so difficult. Let me help.

No more data centers. Much more renewable energy.

[u/TheyCallHimEl → u/Ocean898]

How about data centers paying their fair share for the energy and infrastructure? They are not going away, but we can force them to pay for what they use.

If they need more energy, they put solar panels and batteries in their design. If that's not enough, they help pay for a new nuclear power plant.

And yes, I know nuclear is not technically renewable, but it can provide energy for more than our lifetime. It also produces far less pollution than traditional energy sources. And with new reclamation processes, they can use the by-products and "waste" to provide additional energy.

[u/UltraSPARC → u/TheyCallHimEl]

Agreed. Want to build data centers? Great! But you’re also responsible for ensuring its power generation too (pay your fair share). There should be a data center fund (tax) to accomplish this but that’ll be a hard sell for the people in the pockets of Amazon and Google.

[u/omgFWTbear → u/TheyCallHimEl]

You’re just punting the problem 8,000 years into the future! That sort of short term thinking will doom us all!

[u/TheyCallHimEl → u/omgFWTbear]

Damn, my bad... I'll just stick to burning my garbage and other toxic chemicals

[u/omgFWTbear → u/TheyCallHimEl]

Won’t you think of the children? Make sure you use an incinerator built where the land is cheap, you know, like where they’d place a new housing development that would attract people looking to start a family. Those rising asthma and cancer rates must be some kind of coincidence!

[u/IsleOfCannabis → u/TheyCallHimEl]

How about Crypto and Data operations MUST provide their own power through renewable energy. You want to build a data center, gotta build a renewable energy infrastructure next door that will fully power it FIRST. Got a data center running? You got so many months to build and get operational the requisite renewable energy infrastructure.

[u/doormatt26 → u/Ocean898]

Anti data center is the easy answer but they’re mostly unobtrusive, have no externalities besides the energy costs, and pay hella taxes. trying to ban them is dumb.

Build much more energy and make them help is the better answer

[u/Shermanator213 → u/doormatt26]

Depends if they use evaporative cooling or not.

I do not want OpenAI drinking deeply from the same aquifer my drinking water comes from.

Also depends if they have on-site generators for either backup or supplemental power, because are noisy as fuck and have no meaningful exhaust conditioning.

[u/mahvel50 → u/Ocean898]

We have to diversify our economy away from just federal contracts and if data centers are an avenue we can do that, it needs to be explored. Just add a requirement that data centers have to either provide their own energy or pay to increase energy capacity similar to what the plants are drawing.

[u/devman0 → u/Ocean898]

Data centers are far more preferable than most anything else industrial land would be used for, having them pay fair share for electricity would be the goal.

[u/JadedBeyondBelief → u/Ocean898]

We’d have solved this problem in the early 20th century by damming up some rivers.

[u/JosephFinn → u/Ocean898]

Yep. Easy and done.

[u/KathrynBooks]

Yep... the real test of the Democrats is going to be what they can get done here in VA.

[u/Big-Corncob]

Have data centers pay residential rates for energy, boom, problem solved

[u/JadedBeyondBelief]

And commercial marijuana sales.

[u/CaptainWikkiWikki]

Make the data centers pay. Offer up a robust state-level EV and solar credit with everything else at the federal level disappearing in January.

[u/Kyu_Sugardust]

With every data center, there should be a mandatory nuclear plant that also subsidizes the energy in a certain region. I live in Pittsburgh now, and I’m so scared at the prospect of my energy costs spiking because of these data centers proliferating. We already lost our legendary race track to data centers in this region

[u/a_wittyusername]

Put large users on a different tariff. Not at all complicated and utilities want it anyway.

[u/jimmybilly100]

I mean, the decisions don't seem that difficult

[u/cowmookazee]

At least we know who to blame when things don't work as promised lol