Virginia governor bans data-center NDAs as the Senate blocks a power-cost bill

Virginia Governor Spanberger signed an executive order banning nondisclosure agreements around data centers on the same day the Senate declined to advance the Ratepayer Protection Act, 57-43, three votes short of the 60 it needed and a long way from the 417-3 margin the bill carried in the House. The order governs what the public may know about a project before it is built; the bill governs who pays for the power the project draws. In the space between them, the terms of the data center buildout moved into rooms operators are less practiced at working: the statute, the rate case and the county planning chamber.

The order does more than open the paperwork. It expedites noise rules for data centers, orders a review of how diesel backup generators affect the surrounding area, and creates a state AI task force, with each provision treating a data center as an industrial facility whose costs the host community absorbs and converting a negotiation that once happened privately between a developer and a board of supervisors into a published rule carrying the state's name. The nondisclosure agreement was the instrument that kept those talks off the record. Remove it and the first draft of every project becomes a public document.

The federal bill attacks the other half of the same ledger. The Ratepayer Protection Act would make large data centers pay their own incremental power costs — the generation and transmission built to serve them — instead of spreading that tab across the residential base, and it cleared the House 417-3 before failing in the Senate 57-43. Near-unanimity in one chamber met 43 votes in the other, and the 43 were enough.

The two instruments do different work: a disclosure requirement changes when the public learns about a project, while a cost-allocation rule changes what the project costs the utility's other customers. Virginia's order is the first kind, an executive action with the governor's office behind it; the Ratepayer Protection Act was the second, and its defeat pushes the pricing question down to the states, where the answer can differ by a few hundred miles.

That devolution has a cost of its own: a national rule would have made the same demand of every utility in the country; now the standard gets set jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and a developer building in three states may answer to three different tests that can shift between filings. The Senate's three-vote margin did not settle the argument; it chose a venue for it.

Virginia had already put a clock on this. Legislation passed in April requires Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power to submit proposed data center utilization metrics to the State Corporation Commission by Oct. 15, turning an argument about fairness into a document with a date on it, and the Utilize Coalition has proposed two metrics for the commission to consider ahead of those filings. What the commission adopts will shape how large-load contracts in the state are written from here, at the level of a tariff rather than a project. A tariff reaches the next customer in line without anyone having to reopen the argument; a project approval settles one site and leaves the next one to fight the same fight from scratch.

Two utilities filing means two proposals to reconcile, and the commission's choice will be read well beyond Virginia. What the two proposed metrics measure remains unstated in the coverage, and that gap is where the practical fight will live: a metric a developer can satisfy without changing how it operates is not a constraint, whereas one that tracks when a campus draws power would change how it gets built and when it runs.

A cost-allocation fight needs data — what a facility draws, when it draws it, and what it costs to serve. The NDA ban puts projects on the public record before they are approved; the utilization metrics put operations on the record afterward.

Buckinghamshire Council approved AWS's data center campus at Iver with conditions attached to construction traffic, drainage and water use, three commitments that sit on the record alongside the approval and have nothing to do with compute. All three bear on whether a community can tolerate a site through construction and operation. Consent at this level is seldom a yes or a no. It arrives as a list of obligations the developer has agreed to meet, each one enforceable, each one adding cost and time before the first rack is ordered, with traffic conditions shaping the build schedule, drainage conditions shaping the site plan, and water conditions shaping what the campus can be used for over its life.

Against that, consider what a transaction looks like when it does not have to run the same gauntlet. Amazon signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation covering 690MW at the Calvert Cliffs expansion, an arrangement that supports more than $3 billion of investment and includes about 190MW of new nuclear capacity due online by 2032. If that 190MW sits inside the 690MW the agreement covers, then about 500MW is coming from a plant already in service, from an operator expanding rather than starting. That is a different consent problem from a greenfield campus on land no one has approved, which is much of the appeal of the nuclear-plus-hyperscaler template.

The other end of the spectrum is Valar Atomics' Project Beehive, a filing in Utah for a data center campus built around 456 small modular reactors on more than 9,000 acres near Price, with a first reactor targeted for 2028 and no offtake customer named in the coverage; the campus puts the siting argument in front of county government as well as the utility regulator. Set beside the Calvert Cliffs deal, the filing reads as a bet that enough of the constraint sits in generation to justify starting from open land and seeking consent for the whole thing at once. Whether that is right depends on a question the coverage leaves open: who buys the power.

Set the two dates side by side: the new nuclear capacity under the Amazon agreement is due online in 2032, while Valar's first reactor is targeted for 2028. One is contracted to a single offtaker for 20 years; the other is a proposal in search of a buyer. That range, from a signed long-term agreement at an operating plant to a nine-thousand-acre filing without a counterparty, is where the power problem for data centers currently sits.

October 15 is the next hard test, when Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power file their proposed utilization metrics with the State Corporation Commission. It is the first place Virginia's disclosure mandate and its cost-allocation instinct meet on paper, and the first test of whether the two metrics the Utilize Coalition has put forward gain traction. Whether a state can write down what it expects a data center to disclose and absorb before it has to price the power is what those filings begin to answer.