Henrico County, Virginia is asking its own employees to cut power use. The same regulatory proceeding that let Dominion recover transmission and generation costs tied to data center growth also approved a 25 percent rate hike for county and school facilities—passing the…
Henrico County, Virginia has told thousands of school and county employees to turn off the lights, shut down laptops at the end of the day, close the blinds, and skip the space heater, according to a conservation memo from county manager John Vithoulkas obtained by 404 Media. The email landed days before a punishing East Coast heat wave settled in, and eight days before a 25 percent electric rate hike for county and school facilities took effect on July 1, 2026. The same county is home to 37 operational data centers, with 17 more planned or under construction, per reporting by 404 Media and the Washington Examiner.
The 25 percent jump is the local edge of a broader, regulated increase. On July 1, electric rates rose by about 24.9 percent across localities in Dominion Energy Virginia's service territory, the Virginia Association of Counties told its members. The full rate schedule, filed by the utility, is in a revised Dominion Energy Virginia tariff PDF effective the same day. For Henrico's government and school facilities, the Henrico Citizen reports the increase adds roughly $5 million to next fiscal year's energy costs.
The rate increase is not a vendor surprise. It is the bill for a regulatory proceeding most ratepayers will never read. In November 2025, the Virginia State Corporation Commission issued an order in Dominion Energy Virginia's biennial review case, the formal process that decides what the utility can recover in base rates every two years, approving the hike. Dominion's case centered on transmission and generation investment tied, in part, to data-center load. Base rates are socialized: every customer on the same class pays a share, including the school buildings, the county office, and the small business on the same feeder line as a hyperscale campus. The data centers are in the rate base too, but the recovery flows through bills the data-center operators are not the only ones paying.
That is the part the Vithoulkas memo makes visible. The conservation email is addressed to the people inside the same buildings that just took a 25 percent rate hike, in a county where data-center construction is still accelerating. The conservation ask, reported by 404 Media and the Washington Examiner, tells employees to be deliberate about lighting, laptop power, blinds, and personal heaters. It is a routine facilities memo in form. It is unusual only because it landed the same week a heat wave settled in across the Mid-Atlantic and the same week a 25 percent rate hike took effect for the buildings those employees work in.
Henrico's Board of Supervisors held a special meeting on June 23, four days before the conservation memo and eight days before the rate hike took effect. The published agenda does not name the rate case as an action item, but the timing is hard to read as coincidence. The memo reads as a facilities manager's response to a budget line that just got 25 percent larger, in a building stock whose peak cooling load is about to climb.
The mechanism behind the increase is the point worth watching. When a regulated utility files a biennial review or a general rate case, the commission decides how much of the utility's transmission, generation, and other capital investment flows into the base rate that every customer in the class pays. If the investment is justified by load growth from large new customers such as data centers, the commission can still decide that some of that cost is recoverable, but the bill lands on the same residential, small commercial, school, and government customers who share the territory. The cross-subsidy is not new, but the size of the new load is.
The next question for Henrico ratepayers is whether Dominion Energy Virginia's data-center-driven transmission and generation build-out will keep showing up in base rates the same way in the next biennial review, and whether the SCC will adjust the allocation between customer classes. The next question for the Board of Supervisors is whether the next conservation memo will still go to the schools and the county offices, or whether the data-center operators will start receiving the same instructions. The conservation ask, the rate hike, and the heat wave are all the same story: the cost and the comfort trade-off of a new electric load is being routed, by a regulator, to the customers on the wrong side of the meter.