Who pays for new data center grid equipment? Virginia just set a deadline.
Virginia told Dominion to make data centers pay upfront for their own substations. The filing that says how is due in about a month, and Microsoft has already reserved the right to fight it.
The deadline was August 17. Most of the grid moved it to December.
The window to reply to what the grid operators filed closes September 16 — and in most of the country, there is not yet anything substantive to reply to.
Enverus says 40% of new data center capacity is going off-grid — but the gas demand attached to that same forecast describes a bridge carrying far less weight than the headline implies.
The interconnection queue isn't the bottleneck anymore
An interconnection agreement used to be the finish line. In 2026 it's barely the halfway mark — and the second half runs on a factory floor, not a queue.
FERC says it'll act by June. Watch for the number.
One Commission order decides who carries the cost of the grid the AI build-out needs — and the rest of the ecosystem is already positioning around the answer.
Nearly a third of new on-site data center battery capacity is now paired with a gas turbine. Storage isn't displacing fossil generation — it's optimizing it.
