County with 37 data centers tells schools to 'conserve electricity' as rates jump 25%

A 25% jump, and an email asking teachers to save power

404 Media's report centers on one email. The county manager of Henrico County, Virginia told thousands of employees that starting July 1, the rate the county pays for electricity in all its government and school facilities would rise dramatically, by 25%, adding roughly $5 million to next year's costs, and asked staff to conserve. The framing writes its own headline: this is a county that hosts 37 data centers, with plans for 17 more, including a proposal to convert hundreds of acres of Civil War battlefields into more of them. Meta built its facility there back in 2017.

The implied story (hyperscalers guzzle the grid, families and schools pay) is the one most readers arrived with. The thread's most credentialed voices spent their time complicating it.

The thread: blame the mandate, not the racks

The hardest pushback came with a citation. Virginia passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act in 2020, ordering utility Dominion to reach 100% renewable energy by 2045, which front-loads spending on projects that haven't come online yet.

"Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently did an analysis on electricity prices… most of the rate increase in Virginia was attributable to the VCEA, and that load growth had a mitigating effect on price increases." — a commenter linking the LBNL report

If that holds, the data centers' demand growth was pushing prices down at the margin, not up: the opposite of the headline's insinuation. A second reader went at the reporting itself, pointing out that Henrico's buildout largely happened in 2017, making it a strange culprit for a 2026 rate change. A third caught a quieter sleight of hand:

"the county government sent this message to all government facilities, but I suppose that doesn't make for quite as sexy a headline and a public school is technically a government facility." — a reader who read the article's own text

The real grievance: who should pay for the upgrades

Strip away the argument over causation and a sharper policy question remains, which several voices converged on: even if data centers aren't the whole reason, why are their infrastructure costs socialized onto residential ratepayers at all?

"It's kinda crazy that data centers aren't on some sort of ringfenced scheme. This whole just throw it on the grid and residential consumers pick up the increased infra costs is insane." — a longtime commenter with 25k+ karma

That is the design flaw underneath the outrage. One reader who sells bandwidth infrastructure sketched the fix in a sentence: if you want to draw a lot of power, fine, but pay cash up front for the upgrades instead of passing them to other ratepayers. Whether Virginia's rise came from the racks or the renewable mandate, the mechanism people actually resent is the same: a big new industrial load lands on a shared grid, and the bill for reinforcing it arrives in everyone's mailbox, including the schools that just got told to switch off the lights.