Abigail Spanberger Warns VA Residents About The State’s Energy Crisis

By: Olivia Armstead

Virginia’s governor-elect, Abigail Spanberger, has warned residents about the energy crisis that the state is heading towards. 

Spanberger’s campaign partly focused on ensuring that prioritizing affordable energy was a top concern, and now the incoming state leader is standing by her word. 

“There’s some bad energy policies in some of our neighboring states that have driven up prices, particularly in southwest Virginia,” Spanberger stated on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” per CBS News. “We have to be clear-eyed about the fact that we will have an energy crisis headed into the future. 

According to CBS News, the state of Virginia has the world’s largest concentration of data centers. These centers are the housing for technical infrastructures that allow AI to operate, and with the fast-paced evolution of AI, the demand for the centers is increasing. However, the use of the centers comes at a cost due to the use of an abundant amount of energy. 

CBS News also cites that energy costs for consumers have gone up, with energy bill costs increasing by nearly 7% over the last year. Spanberger is now putting a plan in place to lower energy costs by requiring more energy production and ensuring that the data centers pay their “fair share” for it. 

This new policy change introduced by Spanberger has young science enthusiasts and aspiring policy changemakers exploring the problems Virginia has now in regards to energy legislation, new innovative ways to resolve this energy crisis, and analyzing how important it is for residents of Virginia to understand. 

“[Virginia needs] more investment in affordable, reliable energy and better access to distributed resources like battery storage, EV chargers, and solar — especially in areas with poor infrastructure, limited funding, and a lack of education,” said Emmanuel Baskerville, an electrical engineering student at Hampton University. “The public generally doesn’t understand how complex the electrical grid is or how deeply it affects everyday life. People don’t always see how data centers, new developments, rates, and power demand all connect.”

“[Energy policy in Virginia] has been reactive. Under the previous Governor Glenn Youngkin, there were a lot of veto votes for clean energy legislation. Then, also, there’s a huge criticism of the Virginia Clean Economy Act because he opposed key provisions regarding it,” added Nick Jones, a political science major at Hampton University. “Misinformation is very prevalent right now, so I think [messaging] needs to be simplified because even I do not have a great understanding of it and had to [take some time] looking it up.”