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Every video that loads and every answer an AI chatbot types runs on electricity. That electricity traveled through a wire hung somewhere.
Somebody decides where that wire goes. In one Virginia county, residents spent two years in hearings and courtrooms learning who that somebody is.
Loudoun County in Northern Virginia is home to Data Center Alley. In July 2022, Dominion Energy warned data center developers that eastern Loudoun’s power lines could not support some new buildings for years.
In 2024, Dominion sought approval for Aspen-Golden, a roughly nine-mile high-voltage transmission project along Route 7 through Lansdowne, a community of homes, businesses, and data centers.
Dominion planned steel poles up to 195 feet tall, according to the Virginia Supreme Court’s February 19, 2026, opinion.
The community pushed to bury the lines. The Lansdowne Conservancy hired an engineering firm to design the underground route, which Loudoun County later updated.
The final plan buried three miles along Route 7 at an estimated $1.1 billion, $423 million more than Dominion’s overhead design, according to the court.
Public hearing participants overwhelmingly supported burying part of the line, but the Virginia State Corporation Commission approved the overhead route in February 2025.
The county and conservancy appealed, but the court upheld the decision. At least two steel poles will stand within a protected scenic view of Belmont Manor, a historic house near Route 7.
The Lansdowne dispute continues as power demand grows. Aspen-Golden is one segment of a three-part loop designed to deliver more power to Ashburn’s data center cluster.
The final segment, Golden-Mars, faced similar objections and was approved above ground in April 2026. As data centers expand, new transmission lines increasingly cross established communities.
Virginia’s Utility Commission Draws the Route for Big Lines
In Virginia, the state utility commission decides where large power lines go and how they are built.
A utility that wants a new line of 138 kilovolts or more must win a certificate of public convenience and necessity, a state permit confirming the line is needed and approving its route.
A kilovolt is a thousand volts, so these lines carry power at a scale far beyond anything wired into a house.
The law gives the commission two jobs. First, it must confirm the line is needed. Second, it must pick a route that keeps harm to scenery, historic sites, and the environment as small as is reasonably practical.
For Aspen-Golden, the need came from a computer model of the grid.
PJM Interconnection runs the regional power grid across 13 states and the District of Columbia.
Its models projected that 21 pieces of grid equipment would be loaded past 100 percent of their capacity by the summer of 2028 without the new lines.
Commission staff checked those models and confirmed the result.
The hearing examiner, the official who hears the evidence and recommends a decision, found that such overloads could damage equipment and cause power outages across the region.
The county holds a smaller role. Loudoun County’s website tells residents that the commission can use eminent domain, the government power to take private land for public use, to build new power infrastructure.
The same site states that the county has no authority to require lines to go underground.
Local Rules Give Way Once the State Approves a Line
Most people assume the county that approved all those data centers also controls the wires that feed them. That belief has good reasons behind it.
Counties write zoning codes and comprehensive plans, the long-range blueprints for how land in a place should be used.
Loudoun’s plan discouraged new overhead lines along major roads wherever burying them was possible, and the county told the commission that burying lines mattered most along gateway corridors such as Route 7.
For high-voltage lines, state law turns that plan into advice.
Virginia’s transmission line statute asks the commission to “give consideration” to a county’s plan.
The court explained that considering a factor means reflecting on it with care, with no duty to make findings about it.
A separate part of the same statute says that once the commission approves a line, the line is treated as meeting local zoning rules and the county plan.
The county plan is an argument the county brings to the state. The route itself belongs to the commission.
In Loudoun, the hearing examiner found that overhead lines along Route 7 fit the letter of the county plan, even though burying them would have matched its intent more closely.
Hard Rock and a 2028 Deadline Kept the Lines Overhead
Burying the line would have taken longer than the grid could wait.
The hearing examiner observed that a line of this scope had never been built underground in the United States.
Dominion’s engineers testified that 500-kilovolt lines are rarely buried and need specialized materials, crews, and equipment that may be hard to get.
The ground added its own delay. The route beside Route 7 runs over shallow diabase, a hard rock that slows digging, and existing underground utility lines would have had to be moved before any new cable went in.
Commission staff doubted an underground line could be finished before the overloads projected for the summer of 2028. Dominion set June 1, 2028, as its target to finish the project.
Cost mattered too. The $423 million gap came from the county’s engineer, while other witnesses said the true cost could be higher.
The burying plan also lacked a full environmental review and a clear route, which appeared to pass under planned homes, streams, wetlands, and a historic church and cemetery.
Addressing those gaps would have taken more time.
Time closed the door. A buried line finished after the overloads arrive fails the reason the line was proposed.
Neighbors See the Towers and Households Share the Bill
The first people to feel a route decision are the ones who live along it.
When the commission approved Golden-Mars in April 2026, it preferred a path near Rock Ridge High School and Rosa Lee Carter Elementary School, which needed the Loudoun County School Board’s permission to cross school land.
The school board withheld that permission.
On June 30, 2026, the commission ordered the backup route, which cuts through the Loudoun Valley Estates neighborhood, and described it as far worse than its first choice on nearly every objective test.
Loudoun Now reported on June 30, 2026, that the route crosses a neighborhood parcel holding the Broad Run stream and walking trails students use on their way to school.
The second group is everyone who pays a power bill.
JLARC reported in December 2024 that data centers were paying their share under existing rates, but new power plants and lines to meet demand could raise costs for all customers.
A typical Dominion household could see generation and transmission costs rise by $14 to $37 a month by 2040, in today’s dollars.
If you live near a growing cluster of data centers, the route hearings decide what you see from your window, and the rate hearings decide part of what you pay.
Four Public Records Show the Next Fight Coming
The first clue is a utility’s application for a line permit. In Virginia, those applications appear on the commission’s online docket, and each one lists the routes the utility studied.
A filing that names a data center cluster as the reason for a new line marks the start of a route fight, years before any pole goes up.
The second clue is a reliability deadline inside that application. Aspen-Golden carried a projected overload date of summer 2028, and that date shaped every later decision.
The closer the deadline sits to the filing date, the less room the regulator has for slower options such as burying the line.
The third clue is a county asking the regulator to weigh the cost of burying a line or to consider its comprehensive plan. Those requests appear in county board agendas and in the commission’s case files.
A county making that request has reached the edge of its own authority and is asking the state for help.
The fourth clue is a sudden change in who owns land along a proposed route. In June 2026, the Loudoun Valley Estates homeowner’s association gave land on the backup route to the school board, which accepted it on June 23.
School board and homeowners’ association agendas record moves like this, and they signal that residents are using the few tools a local community still holds.
The Wires Behind the Cloud Need Somewhere to Stand
The AI tools people use every day depend on buildings, and the buildings depend on high-voltage lines that someone has to route through real neighborhoods.
In Virginia, the people who live along those routes can testify, hire engineers, and appeal.
The state still holds the final word.
Loudoun County proposed a pilot program in July 2024 to spread the cost of burying the Aspen-Golden lines. Those lines will go up on poles.
The open question the case leaves behind is who, if anyone, will pay to bury the next high-voltage line through a neighborhood, and whether a state will ever decide the view is worth the price.
The part about the 2028 reliability deadline was the clearest piece for me. Once that date was treated as fixed, the underground option was almost finished before it started, even with strong local support. That feels like the bigger lesson here. The real fight starts long before the public hearing, when the need date, route options, and cost frame are first set. By the time neighbors show up, most of the room to change course is already gone.