Henrico County, Virginia, has told government and school employees to cut electricity use after officials said the county’s power rate will rise 25% on July 1, adding an estimated $5 million in costs next fiscal year.
County Manager John Vithoulkas sent the request on June 26 to thousands of county employees, according to a copy of the email obtained by 404 Media. Vithoulkas wrote that the higher rate applies to electricity used across Henrico County government and school facilities. He also said county officials expect additional electricity rate increases in future years.
The practical advice to staff was mundane: close blinds and turn off computers, among other conservation steps. The context is less mundane. Henrico, a county of more than 350,000 people just outside Richmond, has become one of Virginia’s data center clusters. The county currently hosts 37 data centers, according to 404 Media, and 17 more are planned.
Data centers are not office buildings with better badge readers. They are power-hungry industrial computing sites, packed with servers, cooling systems and backup infrastructure. Henrico’s rapid buildout has put it in the middle of a broader Virginia fight over who pays for the electricity grid that keeps the server farms humming.
404 Media reported that Henrico’s data center growth has been driven in part by its proximity to Washington, D.C., and the availability of large tracts of land. Meta built a data center in the county in 2017, according to company materials cited by 404 Media. Other facilities serve clients of different sizes, according to local reporting cited by 404 Media.
The county’s expansion has also drawn local resistance. WTVR has reported on plans for 17 additional data centers, including proposals involving hundreds of acres of Civil War battlefield land. Residents have pushed back against at least one expansion proposal, according to that reporting.
Vithoulkas’s email, as reported by 404 Media, did not say data centers caused the county’s rate increase. The available facts show the awkward collision: a local government in a major data center hub is asking schools and public employees to save electricity because its own power bill is about to get much more expensive.
For residents, the immediate issue is not a cloud-computing abstraction. It is public money. A 25% electricity rate increase for government and school facilities means Henrico expects to spend $5 million more in the next fiscal year just to keep public buildings powered.
The county’s advice to workers may trim some usage at the margins. Blinds reduce heat from sunlight, and shutting down computers cuts waste after hours. Those steps are standard facilities management, not a solution to the regional power demand created by adding dozens of server farms.
Henrico’s case shows the local version of a national infrastructure problem. Data centers are sold as economic development, and local governments often welcome the tax base. The costs arrive through substations, transmission lines, higher demand and, in this case, an email telling public employees to conserve electricity before the next bill lands.
This story draws on original reporting from 404 Media.
