-- Commercial electricity sales in Virginia increased by nearly 30.0 million megawatt hours between 2019 and 2025, much faster growth than in any other state except Texas, the US Energy Information Administration said on Tuesday.
In its Annual Electric Power Industry Report, it said the growth in electricity sales in Virginia is largely driven by a concentration of data centers, as well as by electric vehicle adoption and building electrification.
Electricity sales refer to the delivery of energy from load-serving entities, which are mostly utilities, to final consumers. However, LSEs must have sufficient resources and reserves to respond to hourly, daily, and seasonal spikes in customer demand, amid steadily growing energy demand in their service territories and extreme weather events. Peak load, a snapshot of the maximum load in megawatts, denotes the instantaneous, single-highest peak in a day, month, or season, even if it lasts only 15 minutes, EIA said.
Earlier this year, PJM Interconnection said in its 2026 Long-Term Load Forecast that its Virginia-serving Dominion zone will see the largest absolute increase in summer peak demand from 2026 to 2030, driven largely by data center growth.
PJM's Dominion zone currently hosts the largest concentration of data centers in the world, largely because of its fiber-optic connectivity, land availability, and power infrastructure.
Summer peak load in PJM's Dominion zone was 23,905 MW in 2025, 23% higher than in 2019; similarly, winter peak load in PJM's Dominion zone was 25,413 MW in the 2025-26 winter season, 45% higher than in the 2019-20 winter season. PJM expects the peak summer load to grow at an average of 5.4% per year over the next 10 years, a downward revision from the 6.3% it projected in its 2025 forecast.
Between 2019 and 2025, our Hourly Electric Grid Monitor shows that all but three of the top 50 peak hourly loads in the Dominion zone were in 2024 (15) or 2025 (32). As electricity demand increases, so do peak and average hourly loads. Comparing average loads by ending hour to these peaks shows the changing demand levels throughout the day in the Dominion zone, according to our Hourly Electric Grid Monitor data.
Utilities and other market participants are employing several strategies to address the challenges of peak demand, including demand response programs, energy storage solutions, facility upgrades with spare interconnection capacity, and infrastructure investments to ensure reliability. Market participants are also working to improve load forecasting capabilities, particularly for data center load, given the rapid deployment and evolving technologies.