Not Here. Not on Our Mountains. Stop the Data Center Land Grab in Wise & Lee County.
Not Here. Not on Our Mountains. Stop the Data Center Land Grab in Wise & Lee County.
The Issue
Not Here. Not on Our Mountains. Stop the Data Center Land Grab in Wise & Lee County.
Sign if you live in, love, or grew up in Southwest Virginia — and you refuse to let our home become the dumping ground for Big Tech's power-hungry warehouses.
WHO WE ARE & WHAT WE WANT
We are residents, families, and neighbors in Wise County, Lee County, and across Southwest Virginia. We are asking our county supervisors, the Industrial Development Authorities, and our representatives in Richmond to STOP approving new data center developments in our region until there is real, independent, local research proving they won't harm us — and until anyone can prove the "green" promises are actually true.
Right now, developers are planning a massive complex in Wise County: roughly 2 million square feet across nine buildings, built out over about ten years, with its own on-site natural gas power plant generating up to 600 megawatts of electricity. Lee County is next on the list. They are calling it progress. We are calling it what it is: an industrial power plant complex with our names nowhere on the benefits and everywhere on the bills.
PART 1: THE PLAIN-ENGLISH VERSION (for all of us)
Let's talk straight, the way you'd talk over a fence or at the kitchen table.
What is a data center? It's a giant, windowless warehouse full of computers that run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They never sleep. They run the internet, AI, and cloud storage for companies hundreds of miles away. To do that, they need two things in enormous amounts: electricity and water. And they make one thing we don't want: constant noise.
Here's what that means for your family:
1. Your power bill goes up — even though the data center isn't in your house. Virginia is already the biggest data center market in the world. The state's own watchdog — the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) — studied this in 2024 and confirmed that the huge demand for electricity from data centers will raise power bills for everyone, not just the data centers. Right on cue, Dominion Energy asked to raise the average resident's monthly bill. New power lines and new plants cost money, and guess who helps pay for it? You do. Every month. Forever.
2. They drink water like a small town. A single medium-sized data center can use as much water as three hospitals — or two full-size golf courses — every single day, just to keep its computers cool. In a region where clean water and wells matter, that's not a small ask. It's a competitor for the same water your family, your livestock, and your land depend on.
3. The noise never, ever stops. Data centers run cooling equipment around the clock. Neighbors near these facilities in other parts of Virginia describe a constant industrial "hum" or "drone" — like a giant air conditioner that never shuts off, day and night. One woman in Northern Virginia spent a fortune on special windows and still couldn't sleep. In Texas, residents living near one reported permanent hearing loss and vertigo and had to sue. The noise has been linked to high blood pressure, heart problems, sleep loss, and — for kids — trouble concentrating and learning in school.
4. We get the burden. They get the tax break. Virginia's data center tax break cost the state around $1 billion in a single year, and the lion's share went to just a handful of the biggest tech companies on earth. The state's own analysis found the tax break doesn't even pay for itself. They get the jobs in PR releases (often just a few dozen permanent jobs after construction ends), and we get the power lines, the gas plant, the noise, and the bills.
5. Nobody has truly studied what this does to US — right here. This is the part that should make everyone stop. The research that does exist (the 2024 state study, a 2026 university health study) is described by its own authors as early and "exploratory." There has been no thorough, independent study of what a cluster of gas-powered data centers will do to the air, water, health, and quality of life in rural Southwest Virginia specifically. They want to build first and find out later — using us as the experiment. We say: prove it's safe first, or don't build it.
"But they said it's GREEN!"
Don't fall for it. Here is the simple truth: there is no such thing as a truly green data center. Here's why, in plain words:
The Wise County project is literally planned to run on a natural gas plant. Gas is a fossil fuel. There is nothing green about building a brand-new gas power plant on a mountain.
"100% renewable" is usually an accounting trick. Tech companies buy paper "certificates" (called RECs) that let them claim their electricity is clean — while the actual electrons powering the building still come from gas and coal on the regular grid. Even a state Attorney General has called these claims misleading. It's like buying a "vegetarian" sticker for a hamburger.
Even real solar and wind aren't free. The concrete, steel, and computer hardware all create pollution to build. And when a data center buys up all the clean energy in a region, there's less left for everyone else — which can mean more fossil fuel burned to power your home.
The math doesn't even work. The state found that to actually power Virginia's data center growth with renewables, we'd have to build solar at twice the fastest rate we've ever managed — and we'd need more wind power than every offshore wind site Virginia has ever secured. It physically can't be done with clean energy. So when they say "green," they mean gas with a green sticker on it.
Green is the bait. Gas, noise, water loss, and higher bills are the catch.
PART 2: THE TECHNICAL VERSION (for the engineers, IT folks, electricians, and anyone who wants the receipts)
If you work in tech, power, or trades, you already smell the marketing. Here's the technical case, point by point.
1. Load growth and ratepayer cost-shifting. The 2024 JLARC study (and the supporting E3 grid-impact and rate-impact modeling) found that data center load growth drives large new generation and transmission buildout that wouldn't otherwise occur. While current rate design allocates costs to the customer classes incurring them, the fixed costs of that new infrastructure get socialized across the system, raising costs for residential and small-commercial ratepayers. Dominion's own IRP showed metered data center demand roughly doubling 2017–2020 and again 2020–2024, with forecast peak data center demand approaching 9 GW — a ~25% increase above current total system load. This is a textbook cost-causation-vs-cost-recovery mismatch, and ratepayers are on the losing end.
2. On-site dispatchable generation = a merchant gas plant in disguise. The proposed Wise development (the "Maverick Project" / Wise Innovation Hub, ~600 MW, phased) is explicitly architected around on-site natural gas-fired generation because, in the developer's own words, "reliable, dispatchable power is the gating factor." Translation: the grid can't serve this load, so they're co-locating a gas plant. That means NOx, CO, VOCs, particulate matter, and CO₂ emissions permitted under DEQ air standards — sited in a rural airshed that has never modeled this cumulative load. The Sterling, VA gas-turbine data center is the cautionary precedent: eight turbines running continuously, residents reporting health effects, operator citing "compliance" with permit maximums that are not designed for 24/7 baseload turbine operation near homes.
3. PUE is not WUE, and neither is being disclosed. Operators tout Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) but stay quiet on Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE). Evaporative and adiabatic cooling consume potable or surface water at scale — order-of-magnitude comparisons put a mid-size facility in the range of multiple hospitals' daily draw. In a karst/Appalachian hydrology context with well-dependent households, there is no published basin-level water-balance study for the proposed siting. Closed-loop and air-cooled designs exist, but they trade water for power (higher PUE), and nobody has committed to them on the record.
4. The "100% renewable" claim fails additionality. The green branding rests on unbundled RECs and financial PPAs, not on physically delivered, time-matched clean energy. Unbundled RECs are widely regarded as low-quality precisely because they decouple the certificate from the actual delivered electron and routinely fail to demonstrate additionality (the project would have existed anyway). A Montana AG-led coalition has formally characterized Big Tech's "100% renewable" framing as misleading, noting it pressures utilities to retire dispatchable baseload while the data center still draws from a fossil-heavy grid. Hourly/24-7 carbon-free energy matching (the actual rigorous standard) is not being promised here.
5. Embodied carbon and Scope 3 are conveniently omitted. Even a genuinely renewable-fed facility carries non-trivial embodied carbon: concrete and steel in the build, the manufacturing footprint of servers/GPUs on a 3–5 year refresh cycle, electrical and backup infrastructure, and high-GWP refrigerants/cooling fluids. Diesel backup generator fleets add a localized air-quality risk during grid events. "Carbon neutral" claims that lean on offsets and waste-heat credits do not zero out the physical Scope 1 + embodied + Scope 3 footprint. There is no credible "net zero" here — there is accounting.
6. The renewable supply math is physically infeasible at this scale. Per the state's modeling, meeting projected Virginia data center load with clean energy would require ~2x the 2024 record solar build rate annually, plus more wind than the entire offshore wind portfolio secured to date. That capacity does not and will not exist on the relevant timeline. Therefore the marginal generation serving this load is, by elimination, new natural gas. "Green data center" is, in this deployment, a category error.
7. The research gap is the real story. Existing peer-reviewed work on data center community health impacts (e.g., the 2026 Frontiers in Climate assessment) explicitly self-describes as exploratory and calls for stricter monitoring, emissions transparency, and public input before siting. The JLARC report flagged energy, water, noise (measured at 40–59 dBA, against EPA's 55 dBA day-night / 45 dBA indoor guidance), and air-quality concerns but did not perform a site-specific cumulative impact assessment for rural SWVA. There is no independent, peer-reviewed, site-specific study of cumulative air, water, noise, and grid impacts for a gas-powered data center cluster in Wise/Lee County. Building first and studying later inverts the precautionary principle.
THE ASK
We are not against Southwest Virginia having a future. We are against being lied to, used, and stuck with the bill. So we demand:
A moratorium on new data center approvals in Wise and Lee County until an independent, site-specific cumulative impact study (air, water, noise, grid, health) is completed and made public.
No on-site fossil-fuel power plants disguised as tech infrastructure.
Full disclosure of water usage (WUE), real-time noise data, and the actual energy source — not REC paperwork.
A binding guarantee that local residents will not absorb the electricity-rate increases this load creates.
A real public vote for the people who will live next to it — not a backroom deal between developers and the IDA.
Citizen opposition has already held up $64 billion in data center projects nationwide. It crosses every political line. It works.
Sign this petition. Share it with every neighbor in Wise, Lee, Scott, Dickenson, and across the coalfields. Our mountains are not for sale.
Sources
Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC), Data Centers in Virginia, December 2024 — jlarc.virginia.gov
E3 (Energy + Environmental Economics), JLARC grid- and rate-impact modeling, 2024
Cardinal News, "Data center complex with gas power plant planned for Wise County," Feb. 2026
Data Center Dynamics, "Red Post Energy to develop natural gas power solution... Wise County," 2026
Virginia Mercury, "Will special rate classes protect Va. residents...," April 2025
Governing, "Virginia's Data Center Tax Breaks Cost the State $1 Billion," 2025
U.S. News, "This 'Health Earthquake' Is Hitting Virginia Residents...," April 2026
NBC Washington, "Amid 'constant' data center noise, Sterling residents worry about health," April 2026
Frontiers in Climate, "Health implications of the rapid rise of data centers in Virginia: an exploratory assessment," Jan. 2026
EESI, "Communities Are Raising Noise Pollution Concerns About Data Centers," 2026
Data Center Dynamics, "We must move on from RECs," 2026; Montana AG coalition letter on "100% renewable" claims, 2025
This petition states the case for restricting data center expansion. Developers and economic-development officials dispute several points — notably arguing the tax exemption keeps Virginia competitive, that current rate design protects ratepayers, and that backup generators rarely run. Read their case too, then decide.
83
The Issue
Not Here. Not on Our Mountains. Stop the Data Center Land Grab in Wise & Lee County.
Sign if you live in, love, or grew up in Southwest Virginia — and you refuse to let our home become the dumping ground for Big Tech's power-hungry warehouses.
WHO WE ARE & WHAT WE WANT
We are residents, families, and neighbors in Wise County, Lee County, and across Southwest Virginia. We are asking our county supervisors, the Industrial Development Authorities, and our representatives in Richmond to STOP approving new data center developments in our region until there is real, independent, local research proving they won't harm us — and until anyone can prove the "green" promises are actually true.
Right now, developers are planning a massive complex in Wise County: roughly 2 million square feet across nine buildings, built out over about ten years, with its own on-site natural gas power plant generating up to 600 megawatts of electricity. Lee County is next on the list. They are calling it progress. We are calling it what it is: an industrial power plant complex with our names nowhere on the benefits and everywhere on the bills.
PART 1: THE PLAIN-ENGLISH VERSION (for all of us)
Let's talk straight, the way you'd talk over a fence or at the kitchen table.
What is a data center? It's a giant, windowless warehouse full of computers that run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They never sleep. They run the internet, AI, and cloud storage for companies hundreds of miles away. To do that, they need two things in enormous amounts: electricity and water. And they make one thing we don't want: constant noise.
Here's what that means for your family:
1. Your power bill goes up — even though the data center isn't in your house. Virginia is already the biggest data center market in the world. The state's own watchdog — the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) — studied this in 2024 and confirmed that the huge demand for electricity from data centers will raise power bills for everyone, not just the data centers. Right on cue, Dominion Energy asked to raise the average resident's monthly bill. New power lines and new plants cost money, and guess who helps pay for it? You do. Every month. Forever.
2. They drink water like a small town. A single medium-sized data center can use as much water as three hospitals — or two full-size golf courses — every single day, just to keep its computers cool. In a region where clean water and wells matter, that's not a small ask. It's a competitor for the same water your family, your livestock, and your land depend on.
3. The noise never, ever stops. Data centers run cooling equipment around the clock. Neighbors near these facilities in other parts of Virginia describe a constant industrial "hum" or "drone" — like a giant air conditioner that never shuts off, day and night. One woman in Northern Virginia spent a fortune on special windows and still couldn't sleep. In Texas, residents living near one reported permanent hearing loss and vertigo and had to sue. The noise has been linked to high blood pressure, heart problems, sleep loss, and — for kids — trouble concentrating and learning in school.
4. We get the burden. They get the tax break. Virginia's data center tax break cost the state around $1 billion in a single year, and the lion's share went to just a handful of the biggest tech companies on earth. The state's own analysis found the tax break doesn't even pay for itself. They get the jobs in PR releases (often just a few dozen permanent jobs after construction ends), and we get the power lines, the gas plant, the noise, and the bills.
5. Nobody has truly studied what this does to US — right here. This is the part that should make everyone stop. The research that does exist (the 2024 state study, a 2026 university health study) is described by its own authors as early and "exploratory." There has been no thorough, independent study of what a cluster of gas-powered data centers will do to the air, water, health, and quality of life in rural Southwest Virginia specifically. They want to build first and find out later — using us as the experiment. We say: prove it's safe first, or don't build it.
"But they said it's GREEN!"
Don't fall for it. Here is the simple truth: there is no such thing as a truly green data center. Here's why, in plain words:
The Wise County project is literally planned to run on a natural gas plant. Gas is a fossil fuel. There is nothing green about building a brand-new gas power plant on a mountain.
"100% renewable" is usually an accounting trick. Tech companies buy paper "certificates" (called RECs) that let them claim their electricity is clean — while the actual electrons powering the building still come from gas and coal on the regular grid. Even a state Attorney General has called these claims misleading. It's like buying a "vegetarian" sticker for a hamburger.
Even real solar and wind aren't free. The concrete, steel, and computer hardware all create pollution to build. And when a data center buys up all the clean energy in a region, there's less left for everyone else — which can mean more fossil fuel burned to power your home.
The math doesn't even work. The state found that to actually power Virginia's data center growth with renewables, we'd have to build solar at twice the fastest rate we've ever managed — and we'd need more wind power than every offshore wind site Virginia has ever secured. It physically can't be done with clean energy. So when they say "green," they mean gas with a green sticker on it.
Green is the bait. Gas, noise, water loss, and higher bills are the catch.
PART 2: THE TECHNICAL VERSION (for the engineers, IT folks, electricians, and anyone who wants the receipts)
If you work in tech, power, or trades, you already smell the marketing. Here's the technical case, point by point.
1. Load growth and ratepayer cost-shifting. The 2024 JLARC study (and the supporting E3 grid-impact and rate-impact modeling) found that data center load growth drives large new generation and transmission buildout that wouldn't otherwise occur. While current rate design allocates costs to the customer classes incurring them, the fixed costs of that new infrastructure get socialized across the system, raising costs for residential and small-commercial ratepayers. Dominion's own IRP showed metered data center demand roughly doubling 2017–2020 and again 2020–2024, with forecast peak data center demand approaching 9 GW — a ~25% increase above current total system load. This is a textbook cost-causation-vs-cost-recovery mismatch, and ratepayers are on the losing end.
2. On-site dispatchable generation = a merchant gas plant in disguise. The proposed Wise development (the "Maverick Project" / Wise Innovation Hub, ~600 MW, phased) is explicitly architected around on-site natural gas-fired generation because, in the developer's own words, "reliable, dispatchable power is the gating factor." Translation: the grid can't serve this load, so they're co-locating a gas plant. That means NOx, CO, VOCs, particulate matter, and CO₂ emissions permitted under DEQ air standards — sited in a rural airshed that has never modeled this cumulative load. The Sterling, VA gas-turbine data center is the cautionary precedent: eight turbines running continuously, residents reporting health effects, operator citing "compliance" with permit maximums that are not designed for 24/7 baseload turbine operation near homes.
3. PUE is not WUE, and neither is being disclosed. Operators tout Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) but stay quiet on Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE). Evaporative and adiabatic cooling consume potable or surface water at scale — order-of-magnitude comparisons put a mid-size facility in the range of multiple hospitals' daily draw. In a karst/Appalachian hydrology context with well-dependent households, there is no published basin-level water-balance study for the proposed siting. Closed-loop and air-cooled designs exist, but they trade water for power (higher PUE), and nobody has committed to them on the record.
4. The "100% renewable" claim fails additionality. The green branding rests on unbundled RECs and financial PPAs, not on physically delivered, time-matched clean energy. Unbundled RECs are widely regarded as low-quality precisely because they decouple the certificate from the actual delivered electron and routinely fail to demonstrate additionality (the project would have existed anyway). A Montana AG-led coalition has formally characterized Big Tech's "100% renewable" framing as misleading, noting it pressures utilities to retire dispatchable baseload while the data center still draws from a fossil-heavy grid. Hourly/24-7 carbon-free energy matching (the actual rigorous standard) is not being promised here.
5. Embodied carbon and Scope 3 are conveniently omitted. Even a genuinely renewable-fed facility carries non-trivial embodied carbon: concrete and steel in the build, the manufacturing footprint of servers/GPUs on a 3–5 year refresh cycle, electrical and backup infrastructure, and high-GWP refrigerants/cooling fluids. Diesel backup generator fleets add a localized air-quality risk during grid events. "Carbon neutral" claims that lean on offsets and waste-heat credits do not zero out the physical Scope 1 + embodied + Scope 3 footprint. There is no credible "net zero" here — there is accounting.
6. The renewable supply math is physically infeasible at this scale. Per the state's modeling, meeting projected Virginia data center load with clean energy would require ~2x the 2024 record solar build rate annually, plus more wind than the entire offshore wind portfolio secured to date. That capacity does not and will not exist on the relevant timeline. Therefore the marginal generation serving this load is, by elimination, new natural gas. "Green data center" is, in this deployment, a category error.
7. The research gap is the real story. Existing peer-reviewed work on data center community health impacts (e.g., the 2026 Frontiers in Climate assessment) explicitly self-describes as exploratory and calls for stricter monitoring, emissions transparency, and public input before siting. The JLARC report flagged energy, water, noise (measured at 40–59 dBA, against EPA's 55 dBA day-night / 45 dBA indoor guidance), and air-quality concerns but did not perform a site-specific cumulative impact assessment for rural SWVA. There is no independent, peer-reviewed, site-specific study of cumulative air, water, noise, and grid impacts for a gas-powered data center cluster in Wise/Lee County. Building first and studying later inverts the precautionary principle.
THE ASK
We are not against Southwest Virginia having a future. We are against being lied to, used, and stuck with the bill. So we demand:
A moratorium on new data center approvals in Wise and Lee County until an independent, site-specific cumulative impact study (air, water, noise, grid, health) is completed and made public.
No on-site fossil-fuel power plants disguised as tech infrastructure.
Full disclosure of water usage (WUE), real-time noise data, and the actual energy source — not REC paperwork.
A binding guarantee that local residents will not absorb the electricity-rate increases this load creates.
A real public vote for the people who will live next to it — not a backroom deal between developers and the IDA.
Citizen opposition has already held up $64 billion in data center projects nationwide. It crosses every political line. It works.
Sign this petition. Share it with every neighbor in Wise, Lee, Scott, Dickenson, and across the coalfields. Our mountains are not for sale.
Sources
Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC), Data Centers in Virginia, December 2024 — jlarc.virginia.gov
E3 (Energy + Environmental Economics), JLARC grid- and rate-impact modeling, 2024
Cardinal News, "Data center complex with gas power plant planned for Wise County," Feb. 2026
Data Center Dynamics, "Red Post Energy to develop natural gas power solution... Wise County," 2026
Virginia Mercury, "Will special rate classes protect Va. residents...," April 2025
Governing, "Virginia's Data Center Tax Breaks Cost the State $1 Billion," 2025
U.S. News, "This 'Health Earthquake' Is Hitting Virginia Residents...," April 2026
NBC Washington, "Amid 'constant' data center noise, Sterling residents worry about health," April 2026
Frontiers in Climate, "Health implications of the rapid rise of data centers in Virginia: an exploratory assessment," Jan. 2026
EESI, "Communities Are Raising Noise Pollution Concerns About Data Centers," 2026
Data Center Dynamics, "We must move on from RECs," 2026; Montana AG coalition letter on "100% renewable" claims, 2025
This petition states the case for restricting data center expansion. Developers and economic-development officials dispute several points — notably arguing the tax exemption keeps Virginia competitive, that current rate design protects ratepayers, and that backup generators rarely run. Read their case too, then decide.
83
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Petition created on June 4, 2026