Powerstack: Paperwork kills the biggest planned data center corridor

Hi there,

A story and cautionary tale out of my hometown in Data Center Alley today: how the world's largest planned data center corridor was killed by a missed email, and what it says about speed-to-power.

This is Sightline’s weekly newsletter on the moves and motives shaping the load growth era. Not a client yet?

Virginia’s Prince William County's Digital Gateway, briefly the world's largest planned data center corridor at 37 buildings on 1,760 acres, is dead, and not because of public opposition alone. The Virginia Court of Appeals voided the rezoning on 31 March because a county clerk missed an email confirmation with the Washington Post in November 2023. The county dropped its appeal on 14 April after spending $1.72m. As speed-to-power continues to rule, expect more procedural slips, and the signal is visible upstream of announcement.

If you ever think your job is just sending emails and it doesn’t matter, think again.

A Prince William County clerk didn't send one a couple years ago, and the world's largest planned data center corridor is kaput because of it.

That corridor was supposed to house 37 data centers and 14 substations, on the 1,760 acres immediately adjacent to the historic Manassas National Battlefield Park. Developers QTS (see our post last week!) and Compass had bought site control at up to $1m/acre.

Opposition was loud and organized. I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m from Western Fairfax County – just down the road from this site. For my family and friends back home, no one was a stranger to this project, and I didn’t know anyone who had a good opinion of it, primarily because of proximity to the battlefield park. The organized opposition started in 2021 and took the form of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County and the American Battlefield Trust. County planning staff also recommended denial. The county approved Digital Gateway anyway, in December 2023, on a 4-3 vote after a 27-hour (!!!) public hearing.

But in the end, it didn’t matter. The fatal error had already happened. According to Virginia law, significant rezoning efforts need to be advertised twice in local newspapers, with a clear link or pathway for the public to review the detailed proposal. The Prince William County clerk had placed an order with the Washington Post for a 28 November 2023 ad announcing the public rezoning hearing. But per the Post’s own rules, the paper needed confirmation by 3pm the next day before the ad would run. The confirmation email was never sent. The original ad never ran. 

I’m not certain they knew about this mistake at the time, but Oak Valley Homeowners Association and the American Battlefield Trust sued, and in August 2025, the Prince William Circuit Court ruled the rezoning void ab initio because of it. Last month, in March, a unanimous Virginia Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that actual notice (ie, people found out about the hearing, a lot of people showed up) is separate from public advertising (the requirement under the law). On 14 April, the Prince William Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to drop the appeal.

This seems more than just another case of local opposition. One that stands out is that speed-to-power produces shortcuts – expedited approvals, build first ask permission later, and so on. Here, the shortcuts that got Digital Gateway approved were also ultimately its undoing. Going forward, or if you weren’t already, watching procedure and zoning more closely provides a signal, way upstream of everything else, giving a strong signal to whether a project will get built or not.

In this new gold rush of data center construction, this likely isn’t the last time we’ll see procedural error be the thing that puts a stop to a project.

This is a big frickin’ deal.

For what it means to local residents. For the data center developers that will now put their attention into other projects (ahem, probably smaller, more distributed ones). For the implication that procedure will likely be the Achilles heel of projects.

But for me, the big question when I saw it was what does it mean for the load forecast – for PJM, for Dominion, for NOVEC. 37 data centers is a lot of data centers. 

Turns out, PJM has it mostly figured out. In January it revised-down its forecast through 2032, primarily because it’s now requiring near-term projections to have firm commitments, while longer-term projects get derated. Let’s call it PJM's "everybody chill" era.

Dominion is similarly insulated. It has a three-tier contract structure of progressively less-committed capacity – meaning a 47GW pipeline becomes a much smaller firm forecast. Digital Gateway was at most an early engineering letter and never made it into the firm number.

NOVEC, the local distribution co-op, is where this gets wild. Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative was the actual retail supplier for Digital Gateway, not Dominion. The co-op was started in 1939 to electrify the then-rural areas of NoVa, and was the perfect fit when the horse farms turned into Data Center Alley. Today, 65% of NOVEC's sales go to data centers – projected to rise to 95% by 2032. Unlike Dominion, NOVEC can't insulate. Its members absorb the risk directly.

But NOVEC, and co-ops more broadly, may actively want the load. Co-ops in falling-demand territories face challenges like legacy PPAs locked in at higher prices, or shrinking ratepayer bases – the result is per-member costs rising even as demand drops. A theme we’ve heard this year is that hyperscaler load can be the way out. It can absorb the legacy contracts, spread fixed costs, and bring developer-funded infrastructure and equipment upgrades that residential members otherwise pay for. That's a very different proposition than Dominion and other utilities face, where rate-basing Digital Gateway's capex would have spread across millions.

With Digital Gateway gone, NOVEC and its members lose those benefits.

If we continue to see a shift in data center siting to more rural areas it’ll probably accelerate the migration into co-op territory. And it seems like this could be a welcome addition by co-ops across the country, given the benefits to members, despite the risk.

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

220GW // PJM's newly reopened interconnection queue, the first cycle since it effectively closed in 2022 to work through its backlog. 800 generating projects entered, inlcuding 106GW of gas leads, followed by 67GW of storage, 18GW of nuclear, and 15GW of solar. PJM expects to complete reviews in 1-2 years using Google's AI-enabled tool, Tapestry. Still, clearing the queue doesn't mean getting built, with permitting and supply chain bottlenecks, but it’s particularly a massive step up in storage, suggesting that it could become a major source of capacity. 

21GW // GE Vernova’s Q1 gas turbine agreements, pushing backlog and slot reservations past 100GW and lifting turbine pricing another 10–20% per kW versus Q4’25. Earlier this year, Jefferies said the natural gas equipment bottleneck may start easing as OEM capacity expands, with more supply coming by 2028–2030. There’s no real contradiction: demand is extremely strong today, exactly why manufacturers are expanding capacity for later years. In the near term, securing slots matters as much as land or financing. Developers without them may struggle to compete on project timing, even if everything else is ready.

+27% // X-Energy's first-day IPO pop, on a $1.02bn raise that’s the largest nuclear public offering on record. The S-1 tells a complex story: construction license expected Q1 2027, first concrete late that year, COD in the early 2030s, and a $390m net loss last year with a multi-year build still ahead. That timeline creates real pressure on X-Energy's $1.2bn DOE ARDP award, which has to be claimed by August 2029. The other surprise is Amazon. With ~66m shares out of ~280m total, it has likely made hundreds of millions on paper since the offering. Advanced nuclear is now as much a hyperscaler bet as a federal one.

60GWh // CATL and HyperStrong's three-year supply agreement for sodium-ion batteries. (CATL is the world's largest battery manufacturer and HyperStrong is China's largest battery integrator.) The approximately $5bn deal suggests that sodium-ion is now cheap enough to be a real hedge against lithium prices, which have jumped 2x since September. Whether or not this is followed by a wave of additional sodium-ion announcements, it’s clear that China will dominate sodium-ion manufacturing, too.

Explore more Signals on Sightline here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems filing to connect its ARC fusion plant to PJM. CFS submitted an application on April 28 to connect its 400MW Fall Line Fusion Power Station in Chesterfield County, Virginia to PJM, the first time a fusion developer has entered a major grid operator's interconnection queue. A lot has to go right — and fast — but CFS has hit its milestones so far, and getting into the queue now is the right move if the 2030s timeline is real. 

TerraPower's Kemmerer 1 breaking ground. The first utility-scale advanced nuclear plant in the US officially started construction on its 345MW sodium-cooled Natrium reactor in Wyoming last week, following NRC construction permit approval last month, the first commercial reactor permitted in nearly a decade and the first non-light water reactor in over 40 years. 

The American Energy Dominance Act to restore clean energy tax credits. Four GOP House members – Fitzpatrick (PA), Miller and Carey (OH), Lawler (NY) -- introduced a bill to reverse the accelerated expiration deadlines the OBBA put on the 45Y production and 48E investment tax credits. It’s highly unlikely to pass unless Democrats flip a chamber in 2026, but shows bipartisan appetite for clean energy tax credits.

Constellation's FERC waiver fight for the Crane nuclear restart. PJM's market monitor filed opposition to Constellation's request to transfer Capacity Interconnection Rights from its nearby gas units to Crane, the mechanism it needs to bid 760MW into PJM's June 30 capacity auction before transmission upgrades finish (December 2030 earliest). If FERC sides with the monitor, Crane sits out the auction entirely. If Constellation, with a signed Microsoft offtake and full political tailwinds, can't navigate the interconnection process cleanly, other nuclear restarts are in worse shape than advertised.

The latest research, features, and data drops on the Sightline Climate platform.

We rebuilt our Grid Technologies Sector Compass from the ground up. Deeper tech taxonomy (100+ sectors), cleaner company data, and updated context for the 2026 landscape. Built for utility strategists scoping vendor shortlists, grid corporates tracking competitor positioning and early-stage acquisition targets (SSTs especially), developers navigating interconnection options, and investors getting up to speed on the framework. Clients can check it out here.

And stay tuned for a new flagship report in mid-May: The Fastest MW - How data centers can find speed to power and hyperscalers can keep their clean energy commitments.

Where the market is meeting, and where to find us

📅 Boston Climate Week // Boston, MA, 3-10 May, 2026 // Boston's inaugural climate action week, featuring academic and research-driven climate solutions from New England's innovation ecosystem. Let us know if you'll be in town to join our team on site.

📅 DTECH Data Centers & AI // Scottsdale, AZ, 12-14 May, 2026 // A conference for utilities, data center operators, and technology providers tackling the engineering and operational challenges of rapid MW-to-GW-scale load growth, grid integration, and AI-driven infrastructure. Shout if you’ll be there.

📅 EEI 2026  // Las Vegas, NV, 2-4 June, 2026 // The flagship conference of Edison Electric Institute. Join utilities, regulators, and value chain players for discussions about the swiftly evolving US power sector. Join us on site, and we’ll be hosting a dinner for Sightline clients and friends on 2 June.

📅 SightLive London  // London, 23 June, 2026 // Held during LCAW, join us for our flagship London event. This year we’ll focus the discussion on the data center buildout (what else?!) and the pathways to the fastest MW. We’ll send out the official invite in a couple weeks, but mark your calendars!

Attending an event? Connect with our team.

Interested in diving deeper? Talk to our team and leverage the tactical intelligence that hundreds of energy and investment decision-makers like Southern Company, Tokyo Gas, Jefferies, Galvanize, B Capital and others use to stay ahead in the energy transition.