By Elizabeth McGowan for Energy News Network.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for Virginia News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Virginia’s participation in an East Coast greenhouse gas emissions pact is pivotal to curbing the climate impact of its thriving data center industry.

Globally, northern Virginia has become one of the largest data center hubs over the last decade-plus. Offering generous tax incentives has attracted tech giants eager to construct massive server farms with proximity to crucial digital infrastructure. An estimated 70% of the world’s internet traffic moves through the suburbs of Washington, D.C., daily.

That burgeoning has propelled a surge in electricity use. In 2020, the sector consumed close to 12,000 gigawatt-hours in Dominion Energy’s territory — roughly one-sixth of the investor-owned utility’s total retail sales that same year.

And yet, the state’s carbon emissions from power plants have fallen 12% annually during the last two years.

William Shobe, an environmental policy professor at the University of Virginia, is among those crediting the 11-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Known as RGGI, the initiative is a voluntary carbon cap-and-invest venture designed to tamp down heat-trapping gases emitted by the utility sector. Virginia’s downward emissions trend will halt without that cap in place, Shobe said.

Even as electricity-hungry data centers multiply across the state, RGGI’s binding carbon cap keeps emissions in check. Basically, the amount of fossil fuels a utility is allowed to burn shrinks each year as the cap is lowered. 

It’s a crucial dynamic to understand, Shobe said, as Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has vowed to extract Virginia from the market-based climate initiative.

“As a planetary citizen, I’m happy with that [cap],” said Shobe, who directs the Energy Transition Initiative at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. “If the state relaxes RGGI, then data centers have climate consequences that we need to worry about.”

He’s hopeful that legislators won’t follow Youngkin’s lead on RGGI during the session that opened last Wednesday. Republicans control the House of Delegates while Democrats have a majority in the Senate.

Shobe also argues that continuing to build data centers in Virginia can be a net positive for climate change — assuming data centers will be built somewhere and the state stays committed to the regional greenhouse gas program. That construction trend shows no signs of abating in Virginia for at least the next 10 years.

“As long as we are a member of RGGI, then we should encourage data centers here rather than Ohio, Indiana or someplace else without a cap on carbon dioxide emissions,” Shobe said. 

Shobe played a significant role in designing the mechanisms behind RGGI, which debuted in 2009. In a nutshell, each member state limits emissions from fossil fuel power plants, issues carbon dioxide allowances and sets up participation in auctions for those allowances.

In 2020, Virginia became the first Southern state to join RGGI, after ample back-and-forth bickering. Advocates have hailed the program for its climate benefits and the upward of $450 million the allowance auction has so far yielded for statewide flood resiliency projects, energy efficiency upgrades, and home repairs for low-income residents statewide.

Youngkin has been itching to extract Virginia from RGGI since he took office a year ago. In early December, the state’s Air Pollution Control Board voted 4-1 to accelerate that exit. 

Attorneys with environmental organizations maintain that the Youngkin administration lacks the authority to leave the compact. That decision, RGGI proponents say, is in the hands of the General Assembly. A legislative effort to derail RGGI failed last year.

The air board’s initial vote to leave RGGI will trigger a 60-day comment period this winter. Shobe and his colleagues are prepared to weigh in with insights that the board will review before voting again on the proposal.

Shobe published an electricity use forecast in April 2021 predicting that data centers will be the driving force behind a 38% increase in electricity sales between 2020 and 2035. That equals an average increase in electricity use of around 44,000 gigawatt-hours per year.

“Whether we think this is a good thing or not, data centers are growing very fast,” Shobe said. “Unfortunately, they use a lot of energy. How we provide that energy is what will make a difference.”

Shobe noted that residential electricity sales are close to flatlining due to slower population growth and improved energy efficiency. Likewise, commercial and industrial demand have fallen for several years.

For the most part, large technology companies have pledged to power their facilities with renewable energy. However, it’s unclear whether or how they are following through on those commitments.

Thus far, Virginia’s solar expansion is on pace with a legislative mandate to decarbonize the grid by 2050, Shobe said. But the state can’t afford a solar stumble if it’s going to feed the needs of voracious data centers.

Some in the environmental community doubt that server farms will be able to live up to their vows to harness 100% of their energy from clean sources. Rooftop solar can’t cover those needs because the average solar array on a data center would only offset about 2.2% of its annual electricity consumption, according to calculations by solar developers.

That means operators resort to power purchase agreements, which allow them to go solar even if the utility-scale arrays they invest in are located miles away or in other states and might not be generating when data centers are consuming power.

Some are leery of those pacts. But Shobe defends the agreements as “perfectly fine ways” to contain greenhouse gases.

“If a data center has a solar farm built somewhere else to cover emissions, why wouldn’t you want to credit them for that?” he said, adding that his university does just that with two off-campus arrays. “From the point of view of resolving global warming, it doesn’t matter where it is built.

“As long as it’s on the same planet, it has the same effect on emissions.”

Shobe suggested that in the big picture, a third-party monitoring organization — along the lines of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval — should be tasked with holding data centers accountable for clean energy pledges.

“Enforcement is a tricky problem,” he said. “What it boils down to is, are people holding true to their promises?”

Boosting in-state solar capacity is far preferable to importing electricity because that might be sourced from states without a carbon emissions cap, Shobe said. 

“The question is how fast we can add renewable energy,” especially over the next five or six years, he said. “We are going to have to be more aggressive and do it faster if we are going to be a center for data center construction.”

In the meantime, the air board’s vote and the start of Virginia’s new, two-month legislative session has ushered in fresh fears that the state’s progress could be stymied. Shobe said he and other RGGI champions will meet with lawmakers to tout the climate value of sticking with the cap-and-invest program.

Withdrawing from RGGI would halt the flow of auction allowances. Instead, in mid-December, Youngkin proposed replacing that with $200 million in taxpayer dollars dedicated to a Resilient Virginia Revolving Fund.

That shift away from the RGGI model signals a lack of commitment to tackling climate change, Shobe said, because it removes not only environmental certainty but also the incentive for utilities to pivot from high- to low-emitting generation.

In Virginia, he emphasized, the original reason for joining RGGI was about having a cost-effective tool for reducing emissions. Producing revenue was an afterthought. 

“If what the governor is hoping is that we will give up on achieving carbon dioxide reductions, that’s another matter,” Shobe said. “If we’re serious about reducing carbon emissions, we need to be thinking ahead and asking ourselves what our energy portfolio is going to look like.”

Elizabeth McGowan wrote this article for Energy News Network.


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The Trump administration's long-term plan for artificial intelligence could have far-reaching environmental impacts across the country.

His strategy calls for the removal of land use rules considered prohibitive to the construction of AI data centers. Last year, then Gov. Eric Holcomb announced Microsoft would invest $1 billion to establish a new AI data center in Laporte to generate cloud computing infrastructure.

Ben Murray, senior researcher for the advocacy group Food and Water Watch, said fossil fuel plants are already being reopened to help meet high energy demands.

"We just need to be aware that anything that prolongs our reliance on fossil fuel is going to increase the problems that we're seeing from the climate crisis," Murray explained.

Murray argued high-tech progress should not come at the expense of increased household energy prices. Residents' support is low due to concerns about increased traffic and noise near the centers. The Trump administration said environmental and permitting regulations will only slow America's dominance in the AI field.

A report last year found emissions from data centers owned by Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft were more than seven times higher than officially reported. Computer servers using AI require far more energy than those without. A ChatGPT query, for example, can use up to 10 times more electricity than a standard Google search.

"These companies can seem as if they're decreasing their emissions and meeting net-zero goals but in reality, the emissions are amping up faster than ever for these companies," Murray pointed out.

Murray noted the push for more data centers is already leading Big Tech companies to backtrack on their climate goals. It is possible to power AI services with renewable energy sources, he added, but doing so requires political will.

As of June 2025, a 1,200-acre corn and soybean field just outside of New Carlisle has turned into eight Amazon-led AI energy centers. The tech giant plans to construct a total of 30 at the site.


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After one year, Washington's first comprehensive bee survey has documented 15 species that have never been collected in the state before.

The project is cataloguing native bees, which includes nearly all species in the state, but excludes honeybees.

Karla Salp is a communications consultant with the Washington State Department of Agriculture's Washington Bee Atlas program, which conducted the survey.

She said the data will serve as a baseline to track bee populations.

"The reason why this is happening in the first place is to answer the question, how are pollinators doing in Washington state?" said Salp. "And the answer is we don't know, because we've never actually looked at even what bees we have throughout the state."

Salp said the project also involves compiling a list of plants that each bee species pollinates so residents can make their yards more attractive to these beneficial insects.

As honeybee numbers continue to decline rapidly, Salp explained that native pollinators may become more important to Washington's agriculture.

"Knowing what native pollinators we have and how we can support them is really a sustainability issue" said Salp, "to make sure that whether we have honeybees here or not, there are options for pollination."

Volunteers collected over 17,000 bees on more than 600 different host plants.

Salp said the process of identifying them is slow because each one must be viewed under a microscope, and there is still considerable work to be done.

"We're expecting to find a lot more species" said Salp, "that are either rare or even new to the state. "

If people are interested in volunteering, an online application for the Bee Atlas program is available on the Washington State Department of Agriculture website.




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The Trump administration wants to overturn a conservation rule that had garnered more public comment than any in U.S. history up until that time.

Commonly known as the Roadless Rule, the U.S. Department of Agriculture regulation prohibits road construction, reconstruction, and timber harvesting on nearly 60 million acres of national forest land.

Sarah McMillan - the senior attorney and director of the Wildlands & Wildlife Program at the Western Environmental Law Center - said before it was adopted in 2001, 1.5 million people submitted comments, with the vast majority in support of the rule.

"This was a rule that was carefully, thoughtfully developed," said McMillan. "There was a long process of inventorying these roadless areas and identifying these remote, often mature and old-growth trees. This didn't happen overnight."

A rollback of the rule would allow more logging and drilling on federal lands, which McMillan said would worsen climate change, harm wildlife & vital ecosystems, jeopardize water quality, and negatively affect recreational opportunities.

The Bush administration attempted to repeal the Roadless Rule in 2005, but lost in the courts.

In announcing the proposed rollback, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins claimed more logging would improve forest management, which would in turn decrease forest fires.

But McMillan said that argument is disputed in a 2020 Wilderness Society study that found just the opposite.

"The truth is, un-roaded areas burn at a significantly lower rate than areas with roads," said McMillan. "So, fires start near roads."

McMillan said it doesn't make sense to allow private developers to log more trees when the planet is undergoing a biodiversity and climate crisis - especially because old-growth trees create a buffer against climate change.

Forests cover almost 30% of New Mexico's land area.




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