Henrico County, Virginia, spent years courting data centers with generous tax breaks, and 37 of them now operate within its borders, with another 17 under review. This summer, the county asked its own teachers, custodians and office staff to help pay for the rising electricity costs that growth has helped drive.
In a June 26 email obtained by 404 Media, County Manager John Vithoulkas asked county and school employees to turn off lights when they leave a room, unplug chargers and shut down their computers at the end of the day. The goal is to help offset a $5 million increase in the county’s power bill.
The rate Henrico pays for electricity across its government buildings and schools rose 24.9 percent on July 1, and Vithoulkas warned employees that the increases are unlikely to stop there. “We anticipate more rate increases for electricity in the years ahead,” he wrote.
The email also asked staff to close blinds against the summer heat, switch off lights in empty rooms and avoid portable space heaters, which cost the county between $150 and $300 each per year. The request went out just days before a punishing heat wave settled over the East Coast.
How Henrico got here
The county’s approach dates back several years. In April 2017, Henrico’s board of supervisors slashed the property tax on data center computer equipment by 88.6 percent, dropping the rate from $3.50 per $100 of assessed value to $0.40.
Vithoulkas, the same official who sent the June email, championed the cut, saying it would “position Henrico to attract more businesses in this high-growth sector.”
The strategy paid off, Amazon Web Services, Meta and other major operators moved in. Virginia now packs in more data centers than any other market in the world, ahead of even Beijing.
Why the bills are climbing
Regulators have been blunt about what is driving the higher costs. Data centers consume enormous amounts of power, and serving them forces the local utility, Dominion Energy, to keep expanding the grid. In November 2025, Virginia’s State Corporation Commission approved Dominion’s request to raise rates, granting the company an $822 million revenue increase for 2026 and another $345 million for 2027 to pay for the buildout needed to meet surging demand, most of it from data centers.
Regulators are now trying to push more of that expense back onto the data centers themselves. The commission created a new billing class for the largest power users, those drawing 25 megawatts or more, which is enough electricity to run thousands of homes.
The change comes too late to ease the current crunch, however. The new rules do not take effect until 2027, and Vithoulkas has already told employees to expect another double-digit rate increase that same year.
Not just Henrico
Other Virginia counties are grappling with the same tension. Loudoun County, which holds the densest concentration of data centers on the planet, voted in March 2024 to reject a request for a facility larger than existing rules allow. “At some point we have to say stop,” one supervisor said at the meeting. Even so, the county remains the global center of the industry.
For Henrico’s schools, the bottom line is straightforward. Every dollar saved on electricity is, as Vithoulkas put it, “another dollar the county can reinvest into staff and the services we provide.” For the administrators who once sold data centers as a fiscal windfall, the arithmetic has grown considerably more complicated.
It’s not just data centers causing power to go up. It’s the number of electric cars as well.
Someone needs to say it (Nuclear power) there I said it! Today’s Nuclear you can drop off whatever you need to your location and plug and play! IMO Nuclear power/Energy is the direction we need to be heading in.
It’s past time for the data centers to help provide their own power via solar, etc. Easy enough to put panels on their roof tops.
This goes beyond Henrico County Schools. They have asked this for ALL county employees and businesses. Including police and fire stations. They have 23 fire stations and about 20% do not have properly working HVAC.
The county also chose to give the rank to battalion chiefs and higher, in the fire department, captains and above in the police department and high ranking sheriff’s officers at 19.6% pay raise in December of 2024, as well as the others in those departments a 6% pay raise in July 2025. After decades of wonderful fiscal management, the county is an example of Democrat mismanagement
You single out Henrico County when actually this same increase is happening in almost every county in Virginia. It was part of a negotiated electricity contact with Dominion Energy handled by a statewide organization that has 170 members in Virginia (local governments and agencies). They’re all looking at 25% cost increases, not just Henrico.