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PHMSA receives more information from Crimson Pipeline Company

PHMSA now has additional information from Crimson Pipeline Company in this case, which it may use when considering what to do in the related matter.

What the map shows. This map covers Loudoun County, Virginia, home of “Data Center Alley,” the densest concentration of data centers on Earth.

The gray dots are the 252 data center buildings already standing. The colored shapes are 174 county filings for data centers that don’t exist yet: requests to rezone land, construction plans awaiting approval and plans approved in the past two years where bulldozers are likely at work. The larger circles are 75 giant AI campuses across the country, for scale.

The pattern. The money moves first. Then the power bill arrives.

The money. In July, builders across the U.S. were putting up data centers at a pace of $75 billion a year, the highest ever recorded and 57% more than a year earlier. June, once the numbers were finalized, came in at $71 billion. That’s not a stock market story. It’s concrete, steel and cooling towers being poured into the ground faster than the wires that feed them can be built.

The power. The electricity shows up next, and you can watch it on a government website. The Energy Information Administration, the federal agency that tracks the grid, publishes hourly demand for every region of the country. The region that includes Data Center Alley is Dominion Energy’s territory, which covers most of Virginia and a corner of North Carolina.

On Oct. 14, that one territory used 410 gigawatt-hours of electricity. That’s about what 13.9 million American homes use in a day, and Dominion has fewer than 3 million customers.

That day wasn’t unusual. Over the 30 days ending Oct. 14, the territory averaged 377 gigawatt-hours a day, 10.1% more than during the same 30 days a year earlier, matched weekday to weekday so a weekend doesn’t distort the comparison.

You might think August’s electricity numbers were just the heat. Look at the middle of the night and that explanation falls apart. In the quietest hour of each night, when most air conditioners have backed off and people are asleep, the grid should be at its calmest. Instead, demand was up 17% from a year earlier, almost the same rise as the daily average. Heat doesn’t run all night, every night. Data centers do.

The rest of the Mid-Atlantic grid grew, too, but at half that rate: 8% across PJM, the 13-state grid operator that Dominion belongs to. Dominion’s territory now carries about one-sixth of PJM’s total load.

What this means. At 377 gigawatt-hours a day, one utility territory is using about as much electricity in a year as all of Sweden. It is growing at a pace the grid was not designed for, and Dominion’s own filings with regulators put data centers at the front of that growth. The question is no longer whether data centers are big. It’s whether the grid can carry them and who pays when it can’t.

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Monthly Construction Spending, July 2026 release (Sept. 1, 2026), private “data center” category, seasonally adjusted annual rate; U.S. Energy Information Administration, Hourly Electric Grid Monitor, PJM subregion DOM, daily totals summed in local time; Loudoun County Land Applications (LOLA); OpenStreetMap contributors; Epoch AI, AI Data Centers.

Data refreshed — · Sources: Loudoun County land applications (LOLA); OpenStreetMap contributors, Open Database License (ODbL); Epoch AI, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)