Saturday, 18 July 2026

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has asked the State Corporation Commission to place the cost of data-center-driven transmission projects on the facilities themselves, according to Inside Climate News, in a case argued through a filing by her chief energy officer.

Her administration is pushing a "but for" test, one that would make data centers cover the transmission lines and substations their projects require, Inside Climate News reported.

The disputed charge, Rider T-1, sits at $11.79 a month for a typical residential customer. Dominion has acknowledged that shifting to a dedicated data center rate class would cut that residential increase to $0.94.

Dominion currently earns a return on equity of 11.4 percent on transmission and 9.8 percent on its base rates, according to Inside Climate News.

During a case on its 2024 long-term planning document, Dominion testified it had estimated an additional $7.59 billion in transmission line investment coming online through 2031. Data centers accounted for 68 percent of that need, either on their own or shared with other customers, leaving 32 percent unrelated to them.

Officials in Bessemer, Alabama handed over a non-disclosure agreement tied to a proposed 4.5 million-square-foot hyperscale data center after environmental groups threatened legal action over the city's refusal to release public records, Inside Climate News reported.

The agreement covers a project named Project Marvel and blocks the city from disclosing information in six categories, according to the outlet. Those categories span the identity of the project's developers, its site plans, and any related reports or studies, plus anything else that would reasonably count as non-public.

Inside Climate News reported that the document took effect in February 2025 and was later amended in February 2026.

One clause obliges city staff to destroy every copy of material the developer treats as confidential, either when the agreement lapses or whenever the developer asks, according to the outlet.

A copy handed to the nonprofit Alabama Rivers Alliance and lawyers at the Southern Environmental Law Center carried the signatures of Bessemer Mayor Kenneth Gulley, city attorney Aaron Killings and chief of staff Christopher Warren, Inside Climate News reported.

The groups threatened to sue after the city declined to share public documents about the planned construction on the rural southwest edge of a community of 25,000 residents, according to the outlet.

Built to capacity, the campus could draw up to 1,200 megawatts of electricity, which Inside Climate News described as more than 90 times the annual energy use of Bessemer residents. The outlet compared the site's footprint to 18 Walmart Supercenters.

The Columbiana case set an earlier precedent in the state. In January, Inside Climate News published a non-disclosure agreement that officials in Columbiana, Alabama signed with data center developer DigiPowerX.

Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN will supply computing power to Canadian large language model developer Cohere, according to Semafor Net Zero. HUMAIN will dedicate at least 50 megawatts of compute to Cohere's new models starting in late 2027, Semafor reported.

The agreement was announced during Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's visit to Saudi Arabia the prior week, according to Semafor.

The deal marks Cohere's first major deployment outside North America, Semafor reported. HUMAIN and Cohere will also work together on Arabic-language AI models.