On June 26, Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas sent an email to county employees asking them to make "slight adjustments" — turn off lights, unplug space heaters, conserve where they can. The reason: electricity rates just spiked nearly 25%, effective July 1, and the county is staring down an extra $5 million in power costs next fiscal year.
Henrico County has 37 operating data centers. It has 17 more on the way.
The math isn't complicated. Massive server farms consume massive amounts of electricity. That demand drives up rates for everyone on the same grid. And in Henrico County, Virginia, "everyone" includes the county government, local businesses, and every resident paying a power bill. The 25% increase isn't some projecting-out-to-2030 forecast. It hit July 1. As in yesterday.
Vithoulkas told employees that rates "will increase dramatically" and warned the trend would continue "in the years ahead" as more data centers come online, according to reporting from the Henrico Citizen. His pitch to staff was blunt: "each dollar we can save by conserving electricity is another dollar the county can reinvest into staff."
That's the county government asking its own workers to sit in slightly warmer offices and skip the space heater so the budget doesn't collapse — while 37 data centers hum along at full power in the same county.
Virginia is ground zero for this problem. The state hosts roughly 400 operational data centers, with Northern Virginia serving as the densest data center corridor in the country. The power demands of AI computing have turned what was already a heavy electrical load into something that's reshaping the grid across 13 states, from New Jersey to Kentucky, as reported by 100 Percent Fed Up.
One Henrico resident captured the frustration simply: "Data centers are needed, I won't deny that... I don't want a waste treatment plant in my backyard." It's the NIMBY argument, but with a twist — the thing in the backyard is already there, already running, and already on your electric bill.
The standard defense is economic development. Data centers bring jobs and tax revenue. And that's true, in the narrow accounting sense. But a typical data center employs a skeleton crew compared to its footprint. The tax revenue looks good on a spreadsheet until you subtract the $5 million the county just lost to higher electricity costs — and that's one year, for one county, before the 17 additional facilities even break ground.
Sixteen of the county's data center facilities sit in the eastern corridor alone. Residents there aren't getting cheaper power because they live next to the servers. They're getting a 25% rate hike and an email suggesting they unplug their $150-to-$300-a-year space heater.
Thirty-seven data centers running. Seventeen more planned. A $5 million budget hit. And the county's best idea is turning off the lights.
Somewhere in Henrico County, a server farm is using more electricity in an hour than that space heater uses in a year.