Mike Jacobs

I'm Mike Jacobs.

I work at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

And transmission topics are what I do here.

I get a window seat so I can look for the transmission lines on the airplane.

And now they lead to wind farms.

Dan, when I saw this and when I've showed it to my colleagues who work in the renewable field and they see you don't have to pay for it if you're a data center, just gets your hackles up.

It really was sort of a this isn't right kind of moment for me.

In the future, we're going to have our economies run on non-fossil fuel, and we're going to think it was so foolish to dig up ancient carbon and burn it.

I was digging around these local plans, and I started to notice these references about building for data centers.

Page 36, a new delivery point to serve a data center customer in South Hill.

Page 48, a request at the White Oak substation to serve a data center customer.

Page 50, serve a data center complex and data center customer.

Well, Mike Jacobs sure doesn't think so.

This is not fair.

You know, this isn't right.

All the consumers of Virginia are subsidizing the business plans of these data center companies, which I would say is morally wrong and bad policy.

But they're asking for the right thing.

So we got a nice little fight unfolding over this very problem.