Governor Abigail Spanberger told a Politico interviewer this week that being “upset” about data centers is “not how you make good policy” — her answer to the Northern Virginians pushing hardest on the power bills, the grid strain, and the sprawl the boom leaves behind.
She said it while arguing against a pause on the data-center boom — the pause Northern Virginia has been begging Richmond for.
Here is the full quote: “It is much easier to just say, you know, we’re upset about something, so let’s just turn away from it. But that’s not how you make good policy.”
Read that again. The people paying the power bills are the ones being told to calm down.
This is not an abstraction in Fairfax County. Northern Virginia hosts the densest concentration of data centers in the country, and the grid built to feed them runs through your neighborhood.
In November, state regulators approved a Dominion rate increase that adds about $11 a month to a typical residential bill in 2026.
Regulators did create a new rate class to push more of the grid cost onto the data centers themselves. The catch: it doesn’t reach residential bills until January 2027.
Winter bills already spiked hard enough to put data-center power use under scrutiny. Spanberger’s answer to the households footing it: don’t be so upset.
Translation: the buildout continues, the bill climbs, and your frustration is a messaging problem for her party — not a reason to slow down.
Some Democrats, including Congressman Frank Pallone, wanted an immediate moratorium and a long-term plan figured out later. Spanberger said no.
NEW: Spanberger warns of 'walking away from the table' on data centers. Watch my @politico Energy Podcast interview w/Virginia's governor, who dinged calls by some Democrats for a federal moratorium that she said would harm the economy & national security https://t.co/0meXymG5II
— Joshua Siegel (@SiegelScribe) July 6, 2026
She favors more data centers for the jobs and tax revenue, a new tax on their power use, and stronger standards written down the road.
That is a defensible position to hold. It is not a defensible thing to say to a room of people whose rates went up to power somebody else’s server farm.
In Fairfax and across the region, the applications keep coming and the transmission lines keep multiplying — each one waved through over the objections of the residents the Governor just told to settle down. The boom is not slowing. Neither is the meter.
Every substation and power line Dominion strings across Northern Virginia to feed another data hall is a cost, and a skyline, your neighborhood absorbs.
She opposed the pause. She backed the growth. She called the anger bad policy.
Spanberger can’t run again. But every legislator who waved the boom through is on the ballot in November 2027 — and the bill lands every month in between.