Virginia homeowners appeal grid-route approval to the state Supreme Court
Fights over high-voltage transmission lines are increasing across the United States as utilities upgrade the grid, driven largely by demand from new data centers, though Dominion Energy said data centers are not the only source of growth. One of those fights is unfolding in Ashburn, Virginia, where Vicky Hu is challenging Dominion’s plan to build a 165-foot monopole tower on her property.
Hu learned in summer 2025 that a Dominion representative might run a transmission line through her backyard and plant a pole there. The representative told her, “Oh, we will minimize the damage, the impact. You will not even notice the pole is in your backyard,” Hu recalled. “What did you just say?” she asked him. Dominion’s plan calls for the roughly 165-foot monopole and would require removing hundreds of trees on Hu’s 1.3-acre property and in the woods behind it.
Hu, who works in real estate and construction, has lived for two decades on an Ashburn street that backs onto a wooded conservation easement where she thought nothing could be built. She later learned the term “Data Center Alley” and realized her home sat near the epicenter of the world’s largest data-center market. Loudoun County, just outside Washington, D.C., tracked 233 data-center buildings completed or in some stage of construction as of March.
Dominion has the power of eminent domain, the right to take private property for a public use if it pays fair compensation. The 500-kilovolt line planned across Hu’s backyard is what the utility calls a “backbone reliability project.”
Hu’s homeowners association donated property it owned at the back of the neighborhood to the local school system in an effort to prevent the route. Virginia utilities generally do not have standard eminent-domain authority over public entities such as county governments or school boards. But the state utility commission approved the path anyway.
Hu, the homeowners association, the school board and others have appealed to Virginia’s Supreme Court, and no hearing date has been set. Dominion is discussing possible crossings with school officials and is aiming for a compromise.
Utilities are undertaking what they expect to be a generational investment in the grid. The Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade group, expects transmission-system spending by a group of investor-owned utilities and transmission companies to reach $43.7 billion this year, up about 10% from last year’s estimate. As utilities upgrade the grid, fights over where to place high-voltage transmission lines are increasing across the United States.
Many utilities are trying to keep pace with growth in manufacturing, electric vehicles and population in addition to demand from data centers. Much of the nation’s power infrastructure was installed during the decades following World War II and is due for replacement, and new power generation is needed, too.
Dominion’s annual electricity-demand growth in Virginia and North Carolina has jumped to about 5.5% from around 1% to 2% before 2022, said Greg Mathe, Dominion’s director of electric-transmission engagement, permitting and land. Mathe said customer growth is primarily from data centers for cloud computing, but the region also is seeing electrification and manufacturing growth, including from pharmaceuticals.
The disputes are taking different forms in Texas and Georgia. In Texas, country singer Tanya Tucker is joining the fight over high-voltage lines. Her ranch in Burnet County, northwest of Austin, could be bisected by one of the lines proposed to crisscross the state. “You don’t rush in and turn someone’s life upside down,” Tucker told state lawmakers at a July hearing before singing a few lines of her 1978 hit “Texas (When I Die).”
In Georgia, Cynthia Van Epps spent more than a year wrangling with Southern’s Georgia Power over a planned transmission line through her backyard. The utility at one point considered a large easement that would require removing her pool and preparing an easement line within about 12 feet of the house. Van Epps and her husband hired an attorney and expected a court fight, but they instead reached a confidential settlement to sell the property to the utility for demolition.
Van Epps said she knows not everyone in a similar position can afford an attorney and wants eminent-domain laws overhauled. “Criminals who kill people are afforded a lawyer for free,” she said. “People whose property is being stolen from them, if they can’t afford an attorney, that’s too bad. They’re up against these major companies.”
Clay Rikard, Southern’s senior vice president of system planning, said the company has a more than 99% voluntary-agreement rate with landowners and rarely resorts to condemnation. Along the 35-mile line, Georgia Power plans to tear down 29 homes and has reached agreements with all of them. Southern, which also operates electric utilities in Alabama and Mississippi, is in the midst of its largest-ever transmission expansion.
Over about 10 years, Southern plans to add more than 500 miles of new lines, plus 1,100 miles of rebuilt or upgraded lines that can carry more electricity. The company also is using technology to maximize the use of existing lines. “The infrastructure we’re building benefits everyone,” Rikard said. “Data centers do represent a lot of the growth, but I think they’re also bringing tremendous benefits to our communities.” He said adding transmission allows utilities to retire old power plants, add new generation such as solar, bring in power from other areas and improve resilience.
Dominion’s Mathe said: “But when you have a strong grid, you’re bolstering everybody’s reliability.” Utilities generally avoid saying that a line is being built for a particular project or industry, Alexandra Klass, an energy law professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said. “Typically, they’re going to build a transmission line that is going to deal with congestion generally,” Klass said. “A new data center would be a reason for that. But frankly, we need to build a lot of new transmission.”