Echoes of Appalachia

In 2024, according to research from the Energy Justice Lab at Indiana University, Dominion Energy disconnected electricity service from a staggering 339,000 households across Virginia for nonpayment. Appalachian Power, covering much of Southwest Virginia, severed power to another 43,000 customers. These are not just numbers; they represent families across urban centers and in the Appalachian foothills whose daily lives were abruptly disrupted.

The scale is startling. Virginia recorded the highest disconnection rate among the 23 states where data was available. The figures almost certainly conceal repeated disconnections for the same households, families who managed to scrape together enough money to restore service only to fall behind again as utility bills kept piling up. As bad as that picture looks, experts suggest the reality on the ground is worse and that worse still is coming.

Every lost connection uproots a household. When the lights go out, a home becomes more than just dark, it becomes precarious. Families are left without cooling in sweltering summers, without heating in brutal Appalachian winters, and without refrigeration for food or life-saving medications. Disconnections don’t just strip a modern household of convenience; they dismantle its stability.

The stakes go beyond discomfort. Children may struggle to do schoolwork without internet and light. Parents may have difficulty cooking or even safely storing groceries. Medical devices that depend on a steady supply of electricity suddenly become useless, placing already vulnerable people in jeopardy. There is also the stigma factor. Losing power carries shame, especially in smaller Appalachian communities where everyone tends to know each other’s business. That stigma, however, obscures the systemic reality: these are not isolated failures of personal responsibility but symptoms of widespread energy insecurity.

At its core, energy insecurity is about making difficult, often agonizing choices. Families with limited resources constantly juggle necessities. Should they pay for electricity or for gas to get to work? A power bill or a refill on a lifesaving prescription? Groceries for the week or the balance demanded by the utility? Studies reveal what anyone who has experienced poverty knows in their bones: these are not “optional” expenses. You cannot simply decide to live without food, medicine, transportation, or power. Yet many Appalachian households, already on the economic margins, face precisely these impossible trade-offs.

These decisions also come with harsh consequences. Late fees and reconnection charges, which are a source of steady income for utility companies, pile additional weight on struggling families, creating cycles of disconnection that are increasingly difficult to break.

Energy insecurity is not confined to households living paycheck to paycheck, it is expanding. Dominion Energy has already filed for a 15 percent increase in base electricity rates, citing inflation, fuel costs, and skyrocketing demand. That demand is being driven not by families or small businesses, but by the explosive growth of Virginia’s data center industry.

Virginia is now the global capital of data processing. Vast server farms owned by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta demand astronomical amounts of electricity. A large data center campus can consume as much power as tens of thousands of homes combined.

A 2024 study commissioned by Virginia’s General Assembly found that the state’s electricity consumption is likely to double within fifteen years, with the majority of this growth tied directly to data centers.

The infrastructure is not yet in place to generate or distribute this unprecedented power demand. And data center corporations, giants with nearly limitless lobbying resources, are maneuvering to ensure they do not foot the entire bill for building and upgrading the system. Instead, the cost will be shared across all customers, which means ordinary households across Virginia, from Richmond to rural Appalachia, will feel the pinch.

It is true that everyone’s electricity bill is going up. But those increases will not land equally. For a middle-income family earning Virginia’s median household income of about 90,000 dollars, energy costs represent roughly 2 percent of the household budget. For families at or below the poverty line, however, energy already eats up 22 percent of their income.

Almost a quarter of every poor family’s incoming dollars disappear just to keep the lights on. In Appalachian Virginia, where poverty rates are significantly higher than in the state’s urban centers, the impact is severe. Families struggling to remain in their homes will face ever fiercer pressure as utility costs spike.

As disconnections increase, economic inequality will grow worse, and the most vulnerable populations will face cascading harms: missed work from a lack of transportation, illness from lack of heat or cooling, interruptions of children’s education, and even eviction for households destabilized by repeated blackouts.

There is a bitter irony at work: the communities paying the steepest price for data centers are not the ones reaping the benefits. Corporations and municipal governments highlight the short-term tax base expansion and job creation that data centers can bring. But the number of permanent jobs they create is tiny compared to their resource footprint. And for Appalachian Virginia, an area not typically targeted for this wave of data infrastructure, residents mainly inherit the downstream costs.

Big Tech has made Virginia a hub because of its existing power grid connections and tax incentives. The costs of expansion, though, are being socialized on the backs of ratepayers. In effect, low-income Appalachian households are subsidizing Amazon’s cloud or Microsoft’s AI services through higher monthly utility bills and the devastating risk of disconnection when they cannot pay.

The looming crisis calls for both immediate relief and structural reforms. Virginia could adopt laws requiring utilities to offer more lenient repayment plans, cap late fees, or limit disconnections to protect vulnerable households. Programs like LIHEAP, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, help, but they are underfunded and often run out of money long before need is met. Expanding state-level assistance could prevent tens of thousands of unnecessary disconnections each year. Regulators could require data center companies to pay a larger share of the infrastructure upgrades their demand makes necessary, rather than spreading the bill equally among households. Appalachian homes, often older and less insulated, could benefit enormously from state- or utility-funded weatherization and efficiency programs that reduce long-term energy burdens. Transparency also matters, since data on utility disconnections are still absent in more than half the states. Expanding reporting requirements could create pressure for utilities and legislators alike to confront the scale of the problem.

Virginia’s ranking as the worst in the nation for utility disconnections should startle policymakers and residents alike. But for Appalachian households, the situation is not abstract, it is daily life. Families are already balancing precariously between feeding their children, paying rent, and keeping the lights on.

Now, with data centers driving electricity demand and utilities pursuing aggressive rate hikes, that balance is unraveling even more quickly. Unless Virginia reconsiders who pays for its digital future, Appalachia may be left quite literally in the dark, sacrificed to power the servers that fuel the fortunes of some of the world’s largest corporations.

The story of Appalachian Virginia’s rising energy insecurity is not simply about utility companies or high-tech industries. It is about fairness, survival, and the fundamental question of whether electricity, a necessity of modern life, will remain accessible to all, or become a privilege only the financially secure can count on.

-Tim Carmichael