A joint venture of Dominion Energy, FirstEnergy, and Transource called Valley Link is advancing plans for nearly 400 miles of 765-kilovolt transmission lines across West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia to move power from the Ohio Valley into eastern PJM, primarily to serve Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley, but the project faces organized opposition from residents and county governments over environmental impacts, property devaluation, and cost allocation, prompting the developers to adjust routes in central Virginia to reduce the number of homes near the corridor.
The scale of the proposed buildout reflects a structural shift in the PJM footprint: data center demand in Loudoun, Prince William, and surrounding counties is growing faster than local generation and existing transmission can support, and the 765-kV design — capable of moving multiple gigawatts per circuit — is the grid’s highest-voltage tool for long-haul bulk transfer. Valley Link’s central Virginia segment alone spans 115 miles and carries an estimated $2 billion price tag, costs that would ultimately flow through PJM’s regional cost-allocation framework to ratepayers across the footprint, a point that has sharpened local resistance.
Siting high-voltage lines has always been a friction point, but the data center boom has compressed timelines and amplified stakes. Counties along the proposed corridors have passed formal resolutions opposing the routes, citing impacts to historic landscapes, agricultural land, and residential neighborhoods. Valley Link’s response — shifting alignments to keep more homes beyond a 500-foot buffer — mirrors mitigation strategies seen in Texas’s CREZ buildout and other major transmission programs, yet such adjustments rarely resolve the underlying conflict: the beneficiaries of the power are concentrated in one region, while the visual and land-use burdens fall on another.
The permitting schedule underscores how slowly physical grid infrastructure moves relative to digital demand. Valley Link plans to file its Virginia State Corporation Commission application for the central Virginia segment this fall, but the multi-state portions targeting West Virginia and Maryland are not expected to reach regulatory dockets until 2027. In PJM’s capacity market and reliability planning, that gap matters: load forecasts already assume significant data center growth through the early 2030s, and each year of permitting delay tightens reserve margins and increases reliance on existing generation or emergency procedures.
Read the full report at Energy Central.