Electricity demand in Northern Virginia is surging to unprecedented levels. Dominion Energy Inc (NYSE: D) CEO Bob Blue said at the company’s first-quarter earnings call that Dominion has been receiving requests from data center developers to provide “several gigawatts” of electricity.
The increasing demand for electricity is primarily driven by the growth of artificial intelligence and its computational requirements. Data centers, which house the infrastructure necessary for AI operations, are at the forefront of this power consumption surge.
“Historically, a single data center typically had a demand of 30 megawatts or greater,” Blue explained. “However, we’re now receiving individual requests for demand of 60 megawatts to 90 megawatts or greater, and it hasn’t stopped there. We get regular requests to support larger data center campuses that include multiple buildings and require total capacity ranging from 300 megawatts to as many as several gigawatts.”
To put it in perspective, a gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes. The scale of power requested by these new data center campuses poses challenges for electric utilities striving to reduce their reliance on carbon-emitting power plants and achieve their climate goals.
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