Data centres stressing grids

A data center can be built in 18 months and still sit dark for years if the power connection is not ready, and that is pushing developers to treat electricity like waterfront access. The pinch point is no longer just land, tax breaks, or fiber routes; it is whether a utility can deliver hundreds of megawatts on time. (eia.gov) The strain is showing up in national power numbers. The United States Energy Information Administration said electricity demand grew about 1.7% a year from 2020 to 2025 after growing just 0.1% a year from 2005 to 2019, with data centers identified as a main driver. (eia.gov) These buildings use power like factories that never sleep. The Department of Energy said data centers used about 4.4% of all United States electricity in 2023 and could reach roughly 6.7% to 12% by 2028. (energy.gov) The biggest cluster is in Northern Virginia, where the market keeps stretching because the internet already lives there. A Virginia state report said Northern Virginia holds 13% of reported global operating data-center capacity, and CBRE said the region reached 4,039.6 megawatts of inventory in 2025 with a vacancy rate of just 0.5%. (virginia.gov) (cbre.com) Utilities are now getting requests that look less like office parks and more like entire cities. Dominion Energy told investors it had about 40 gigawatts of data-center power capacity in various stages of contracting as of December 2024, up from 21 gigawatts in July 2024. (datacenterdynamics.com) The bottleneck is not only generation. Grid hardware such as transformers and switchgear, which act like the valves and circuit breakers of the power system, has become scarce enough that manufacturers are adding factories and jobs just to keep projects moving. (hitachienergy.com) (gevernova.com) GE Vernova said in January 2025 that it would invest nearly $600 million in United States factories and facilities and create more than 1,500 jobs, and in July 2025 it said up to $100 million more would go into Pennsylvania with about 700 jobs across multiple factories. Those plants make the grid equipment that has become as strategic to data centers as concrete and steel. (gevernova.com 1) (gevernova.com 2) Hitachi Energy is doing the same. The company announced a $1 billion United States manufacturing plan in September 2025, including $457 million for a new Virginia transformer factory, after earlier adding $22.5 million in Southwest Virginia and more than $70 million in Pennsylvania for high-voltage switchgear and breakers. (hitachienergy.com 1) (hitachienergy.com 2) (hitachienergy.com 3) The queue behind all this is enormous. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said that, as of the end of 2024, about 10,300 projects were actively seeking interconnection to the United States grid, representing roughly 1,400 gigawatts of generation and 890 gigawatts of storage. (lbl.gov) That backlog changes real-estate math for everyone nearby. Cushman & Wakefield said traditional industrial space in Northern Virginia is being repurposed for data centers, shrinking conventional supply and pushing logistics users into a fight over the same substations, feeders, and developable parcels. (cushmanwakefield.com) So the winning site is increasingly the one with power already attached, not the one with the prettiest brochure. Cushman & Wakefield’s 2025 global market comparison put it bluntly: the best place to build a data center is wherever the required power can be secured. (abramswireless.com)