September 18, 2026 — Rewiring America today celebrated new provisions in Governor Abigail Spanberger’s executive order that create a pathway for Virginia to direct data center investment toward local energy projects that lower household energy costs and strengthen the electric grid.

The executive order establishes a new Virginia Data Center Accountability Framework and directs the Office of the Chief Energy Officer to “identify and pursue strategies that direct data center investments into local energy projects that improve the affordability of energy for Virginia communities and strengthen Virginia’s grid.”

The order specifically directs the state to focus on projects that deliver meaningful household energy affordability benefits, expand access for low- and moderate-income families and historically disadvantaged communities, and strengthen local grid reliability in constrained areas.

The approach also has strong public support. A new statewide poll released today by Deploy Action found that 76 percent of Virginia voters support requiring data center developers to fund improvements that lower nearby residents’ electricity bills by 20 percent or more, including investments such as rooftop solar and home batteries.

“This order puts an important idea into Virginia policy: data center investment can help build energy capacity in the communities being asked to accommodate extraordinary new electricity demand,” said Ari Matusiak, CEO and founder of Rewiring America. “Homes can be part of that infrastructure. Investments in technologies that lower bills, reduce peak demand, and make the grid more flexible can create value for families and for the energy system at the same time.”

The order reinforces that approach throughout its Data Center Accountability Framework. It calls for data centers to support new clean generation, energy efficiency, and flexible demand and establishes a forthcoming VA-LEAD program that will evaluate data center developments in part on their clean-energy and resilience investments and local community benefits.

It also directs the state to develop a Data Center Planning and Community Engagement Toolkit within 120 days, including model approaches for voluntary and enforceable community-benefit agreements. Those agreements could provide another vehicle for communities to negotiate investments that address local energy and affordability needs.

The executive order builds on legislation Virginia enacted earlier this year establishing voluntary demand-flexibility programs for large energy users. Under that law, utilities must propose programs through which high-demand customers can support or purchase verified capacity reduction credits from other electricity customers. The law explicitly identifies weatherization, energy efficiency, conversions from electric resistance heating to heat pumps, demand response, customer-sited batteries, and virtual power plants as potential ways to produce those grid savings.

Together, the law and executive order create a policy pathway through which data center investment could support household energy resources that both reduce demand on the grid and lower families’ energy costs.

Rewiring America’s Homegrown Energy analysis found that household technologies such as heat pumps, rooftop solar, batteries, and other distributed energy resources could provide substantial new grid capacity. These investments can complement, rather than replace, the new generation, transmission, storage, and grid modernization Virginia will also need.

“Virginia now has the beginnings of a framework that connects two challenges that are too often treated separately: how to meet rapidly rising electricity demand and how to make energy more affordable for households,” Matusiak said. “The opportunity is to use the investment already flowing into the energy system to make homes part of the solution.”

Virginia’s action also adds to emerging policy activity elsewhere in the region. New Jersey recently enacted protections requiring large data centers to pay their fair share while creating a pathway for large energy users to support distributed energy resources. New York has directed regulators to consider requiring data centers to fund new clean energy resources, including customer-sited distributed energy resources and battery storage.

These actions taken across Virginia, New Jersey, and New York reflect a growing policy approach that links large-load growth with investments intended to protect ratepayers, strengthen the grid, and deliver benefits to communities.