Locator: 51080LDCS.
Today's RBN Energy blog has a great note on LDC build-out in the northeast.
Link here for this particular update.
As an example:
After being in virtual limbo for the past couple of years, the Northeast gas market is reawakening. Pipeline projects to expand connectivity between Appalachia and demand centers are moving forward for the first time in years, including into the previously off-limits New York/New Jersey and New England market areas. [The current administration is, apparently, getting no credit. It gets tedious.]
Regional flow dynamics are poised to shift as expansions debottleneck production and pathways out of the Appalachia producing region, deepening seasonal patterns. At the same time, structural changes, such as coal retirements and new data centers, are driving additional gas demand, and we’re already seeing more gas-related projects in areas where data centers are planned or under construction. In today’s blog, we’re calling out the heavy hitters among the 14 Northeast states, the places where big data center clusters already exist and more are planned.
As we detailed in Sweet Virginia, the center of the data center universe is Virginia. The state was the pioneer for data centers and has been home to them since the 1990s — long before most people even knew what a data center was. Virginia has more than 550 data centers, with some estimates at well over 600. Northern Virginia already hosts the world’s largest concentration of data centers, anchored by Loudoun (orange-shaded county on top of Figure 1 below) and neighboring counties, and industry estimates suggest the state’s installed and committed capacity runs into the multi‑gigawatt range, far beyond any other state, with the potential to significantly alter the region’s supply/demand picture, a topic examined in our new report. There are many thousands of megawatts already online, mostly serving hyperscalers like Amazon, Digital Realty, Equinix, Google, Microsoft and QTS. Meta’s 500‑MW Henrico facility near Richmond gives a sense of the scale of individual sites.
Figure 1. Planned Virginia Data Centers. Source: Novi Labs
What keeps pushing Virginia to the top of every list, though, are the development plans. There are hundreds of additional projects planned that would add tens of gigawatts (GW) of capacity, including multiple campuses in the 1-to-3-GW range, such as Microsoft’s Gainesville project in Prince William County, Amazon’s North Creek Tech Campus in Louisa County, and Tract’s big build in Hanover County. As Loudoun County — a primary suburb of the nation’s capital — runs short on land and available power, new campuses are also spilling into nearby Prince William, Fauquier, Culpeper, Stafford and Frederick counties (orange-shaded counties near top of Figure 1 above).
Virginia remains the epicenter of PJM’s data-center-driven load growth. PJM, the regional grid operator for much of the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest, expects the Dominion Energy service territory in Virginia to see the biggest jump in peak electricity demand on its system through 2030, largely because of data centers. To handle that growth, PJM has signed off on major transmission upgrades, including several billion dollars of new lines and substations in Virginia aimed at maintaining reliability and pushing more power into Northern Virginia. On the natural gas side, TC Energy’s recently announced Appalachia Supply Project would add at least 800 MMcf/d — and potentially up to 2 Bcf/d — of capacity on the Columbia Gas Transmission (CGT) system, which serves Virginia and the broader Appalachian region.
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LDCs -- US -- Overview
The new meme: twenty-five proposed LCDs were cancelled this past year. That's accurate but it's a meaningless data point. It's actually good news for many of the hyperscalers. LCDs are tracked here. See story here. Currently 4,438, up from 4,258 LDCs in the US as of May 7, 2026.
Top states, change from previous update (May 26, 2026 -- link here), 4,258
- Virginia: 579 --> 601-->603-->633
- Texas: 411 --> 441-->461->477
- California: 289 --> 288-->287-->290
- Illinois: 232 --> 228-->228-->239
- Georgia: 214 --> 213-->213-->226
- Ohio: 201-->204-->204-->224
- Arizona: 163 -->157-->156-->156
- New York: 133 --> 132 --> 132-->133
- Indiana: 89 --> 122-->122-->123
- Iowa: 96 --> 101-->102-->104
- Missouri: 91-->91
June 30, 2026: 4,438 known LDCs in the US, by state --
April 16, 2025: approximately 4,100 --
