A Decade of Approvals, One Power Bill

I.  TWO CLOCKS

Governing and campaigning run on different clocks, and the gap between them is where accountability goes to die. A statute enacted in 2020 can take six years to surface as a line item on a utility bill. A rezoning approved in 2019 does not require new transmission capacity until 2027. A rate case decided in November appears the following January. An election is settled in a single evening, on the strength of what voters can feel in the preceding few weeks.

That asymmetry is not a quirk of the system. It is an exploitable feature of it, and it has been exploited. The reliable pattern is to make expensive commitments on the long clock and stand for judgment on the short one, trusting that the two will never be laid side by side. This article lays them side by side.

II.  THE VIRGINIA LEDGER

Virginia is the cleanest case in the country, because there is no ambiguity about who holds the levers.

In 2020, a Democratic General Assembly and a Democratic governor enacted the Virginia Clean Economy Act and the Clean Energy and Community Flood Preparedness Act, the latter placing the Commonwealth into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — a cap-and-trade program whose compliance costs utilities are permitted to recover directly from ratepayers. Virginia entered in 2021. Governor Youngkin withdrew the Commonwealth in 2023, calling the rider what it functionally is: a tax on electricity that never appears on a tax form.

In November 2025, Democrats won the governorship, every statewide office, and a 64-seat majority in the House of Delegates, campaigning substantially on affordability. Loudoun County's entire delegation to Richmond is now Democratic, for the first time in decades. Unified control took effect in January 2026. Within six months, they put the charge back.

Virginia rejoined RGGI on July 1, 2026. Dominion Energy petitioned the State Corporation Commission to restore Rider RGGI. The projected charge for a residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt-hours per month is roughly $13 per month — arriving in the rate year running from March 2027 through February 2028. Authorized in 2020. Mandated by a majority elected in 2025 on a promise of lower costs. Effective July 2026. Billed to households in March 2027, four months after voters next weigh in.

The majority understood precisely what it was doing. The same budget carries an amendment directing 45 percent of RGGI revenue to be refunded to residential and small business customers before the remainder is disbursed to program funds. A rebate is not built for a policy that costs nothing. It is built for a policy whose sponsors know the charge is coming and would prefer to hand a portion of it back with their name attached.

This lands on top of increases already in force. In November 2025 the State Corporation Commission approved Dominion's first base rate increase in decades: about $11.24 more per month for the typical residential customer in 2026, and a further $2.36 in 2027.

III.  THE GRID BILL COMES TO NORTHERN VIRGINIA

Nowhere is the lag more concrete than on a Loudoun County power bill, and nowhere is the chain of decisions easier to trace.

Loudoun County holds the largest concentration of data centers on earth. Roughly 199 are built and another 117 sit in the pipeline; the county's own economic development office notes there has not been a single day without data center construction in more than fourteen years. Across the Tenth District the count exceeds 300 facilities, with about 200 more planned. Over the past decade the Board of Supervisors approved 38 rezonings explicitly for data centers and another 36 that permitted them. For most of that period the approvals were by-right — granted at staff level, without a public hearing, because the Board had zoned them that way and left them zoned that way.

The Board did not end by-right data center approvals until March 2025, and only then under sustained public pressure. That Board is chaired by Phyllis Randall and holds a seven-to-two Democratic majority. Every year of delay in tightening those standards is a year of additional load locked onto a grid that residential customers share.

The load does not stay theoretical. It moves through the regional capacity market and onto household bills. The most recent PJM capacity auction cleared 22 percent higher, hitting the federally approved price cap, and would have cleared higher still without it. PJM attributed the increase directly to data center expansion and told the public to expect year-over-year bill increases of 1.5 to 5 percent as a result. Dominion's own long-range planning forecasts residential monthly power bills rising roughly 50 percent by 2039. The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission — the legislature's nonpartisan research arm — projects that generation and transmission costs for a typical Dominion residential customer could climb $14 to $37 per month in real terms by 2040, independent of inflation.

Translate that into a household. The typical Virginia residential electric bill now runs roughly $150 to $165 a month, and a Northern Virginia single-family home running central air through July and August routinely sees $300 to $500. Total monthly utility spend for a family home in the region commonly falls between $380 and $550. Onto that base, the majority has now layered a $13 RGGI rider, an $11.24 base rate increase, a further $2.36 next year, and a capacity market being repriced by demand its own zoning decisions invited. None of these charges were imposed on Virginia from outside. Each was authorized, approved, or restored by officials Virginians elected, in Richmond and in Leesburg.

The transmission lines are the same story in physical form. Leesburg, Lovettsville, Fauquier, and Rappahannock are all facing proposals for new lines cut through settled communities to serve load that local boards approved. The infrastructure follows the zoning. The zoning followed the votes. The bill follows everything else, arriving last and arriving to people who cast none of those votes.

IV.  THE TWO BILLION DOLLAR TEST

The most revealing episode of the 2026 session was not a fight between the parties. It was a fight inside the majority, and it settled what the affordability promise was actually worth.

During budget negotiations, Senate Finance Chair Louise Lucas moved to end the sales tax exemption on data center equipment — an exemption that spared the industry close to $2 billion in a single fiscal year. She defended it in one word: affordability. Governor Spanberger and the House of Delegates opposed her, citing commitments made to companies that had invested under the incentive. The exemption survived.

Presented with an immediate, unambiguous, roughly $2 billion choice between an industrial tax preference and the cost of running a household, a majority elected on affordability chose the tax preference. It was not prevented from doing otherwise by anyone. It had the votes and it made a choice.

The pattern recurs. The 2026 budget deadlocked for months inside the Democratic majority, requiring a special reconvening to resolve. The governor vetoed 31 bills passed by her own party's legislature, an extraordinary figure under unified control. On congressional redistricting, the position moved from no plans to a signed map. Voters were told a governing philosophy in 2025 and have watched a different one operate since January. By spring, the governor's approval stood at 47 percent — the weakest reading for a Virginia governor at that point in a term in recent memory.

V.  THE NATIONAL ARITHMETIC: A LEVEL, NOT A RATE

The same delay operates nationally, and the same distinction gets collapsed. Inflation is a rate of change. The price level is a cumulative total. When the rate falls, the level does not — it merely climbs more slowly.

Consumer prices are up roughly 23 percent since January 2021, averaging about 4.3 percent per year. The rate has since cooled to 3.4 percent for the twelve months ending July 2026, and that number is routinely presented as recovery. It is not recovery. It is a slower rate of increase applied to a permanently higher base. A family that surrendered a fifth of its purchasing power over five years does not get it back because the second derivative improved. Nothing went back down.

Estimates of how much any single package contributed to that level range from a few tenths of a percentage point to two or three points, and the argument over the coefficient has been allowed to obscure the decision that preceded it. The scale was itself a choice. The American fiscal response to the pandemic exceeded 25 percent of GDP, against roughly 16 percent in Canada and 11.5 percent in the Eurozone. The United States then led both in consumer price growth. Countries that chose smaller responses experienced smaller increases in the cost of living.

One package deserves particular scrutiny. The American Rescue Plan of March 2021 passed on party lines through reconciliation, a full year into the pandemic, at a point when the recovery was already underway — a distinction the San Francisco Fed itself drew in describing the plan's later timing and unusual size. Larry Summers, a Democratic Treasury Secretary, warned publicly in February 2021, before passage, that stimulus at a scale closer to wartime than to recession risked inflationary pressure the country had not seen in a generation. He was told he was wrong by people who now describe the result as something that happened to the country rather than something that was done to it.

The compounding continues in the debt. Net interest on the public debt reached $857 billion in the first nine months of fiscal year 2026, up 13 percent year over year. The Congressional Budget Office projects deficits averaging 7.2 percent of GDP over the next three decades and federal debt held by the public rising from 100 percent of GDP to 175 percent by 2056. Interest is the purest form of the delayed bill: the price of decisions already made, charged to people who had no part in making them.

VI.  A LAGGING INDICATOR

None of the consequences in the Tenth District were hidden. In April 2025, Representative Suhas Subramanyam testified before the House Oversight Committee that the early benefits of data center development — property tax relief, school funding — had given way to evident long-term costs: rising energy prices, transmission lines through populated areas, strain on local infrastructure, pressure on green space and water. He cited JLARC's findings and utility filings. The record was public, and it had been public for years.

Public opinion moved later, and moved hard. In August 2025, Virginians were roughly evenly split on having a data center near their home — 43 percent in favor, 42 percent opposed. By mid-2026 that had collapsed to 15 percent in favor against 75 percent opposed. Political positioning followed the polling, not the evidence. By July 2026 the Congressman was telling a national audience that these facilities were ruining communities and doubling utility bills.

Through the years in which the warnings sat in the record, the Board of Supervisors kept approving applications and the General Assembly kept the incentive structure intact. The alarm was sounded only after the electorate sounded it first. Arriving at the right answer after the voters do is not leadership. It is a lagging indicator.

VII.  WHAT THE LONG VIEW ASKS

Costs in a modern economy are set by decisions with long fuses — a 2020 statute, a 2021 party-line package, a decade of by-right rezonings in Loudoun, a 2025 rate case, a $2 billion exemption defended in a 2026 budget conference. Each was made by identifiable people at an identifiable time. Each was defended, at the time, with reasons. And each arrives years later in a form most households experience as weather rather than as policy.

Weather is nobody's fault. That is precisely why the delay is so useful to those who benefit from it. A charge that lands in March 2027 cannot be voted on in November 2026, and officials who authorized it in 2020, restored it in 2026, and will bill it in 2027 are counting on exactly that sequence holding.

So the discipline this asks of a Virginia voter is chronological. Not who is in office now, but who decided what, when they decided it, what they said it would cost, and when the bill comes due. Answering that question requires a memory longer than a campaign cycle — which is precisely what a campaign cycle is built to prevent.

Virginians will be paying the 2020 and 2026 decisions in 2027 and for years after. The only question genuinely open in November is whether they will be paying them knowingly.

SOURCES

—  U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index, July 2026 release (August 12, 2026).

—  Barnichon, Oliveira & Shapiro, “Is the American Rescue Plan Taking Us Back to the ’60s?”, FRBSF Economic Letter 2021-27.

—  Council of Economic Advisers, comparative pandemic fiscal response and inflation data.

—  Congressional Budget Office, Monthly Budget Review: June 2026; The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036.

—  Virginia State Corporation Commission, Dominion Energy biennial review order (November 25, 2025).

—  Institute for Energy Research, “Virginia’s Residential Electric Rates Will Increase Under RGGI” (June 2026).

—  American Action Forum, “Virginia’s New Data Center Electricity Rate Class” (2026); PJM Interconnection capacity auction results.

—  Dominion Energy, 2025 Integrated Resource Plan.

—  Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, report on data center development in Virginia (2024).

—  Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, Data Center Standards and Locations (CPAM-2024-0001, ZOAM-2024-0001); Piedmont Environmental Council, “Data Centers in Loudoun: A Primer” (2026).

—  Virginia Mercury and Loudoun Now, coverage of the 2026 General Assembly session, RGGI reentry, and budget negotiations.

—  Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (April 1, 2025); NewsNation interview (July 2026).

—  Statewide polling on data center siting, August 2025 and 2026; statewide gubernatorial approval polling, spring 2026.