On May 5, 2026, the U.S. Energy Information Administration published an in-brief analysis in its series Today in Energy, under the headline "Commercial electricity sales have soared in Virginia, driven by data centers." It looks at what was sold to commercial customers in Virginia from 2019 to 2025, and at the peak loads in PJM's Dominion zone, which covers the state. Parts of the note follow, not the whole.
Sales to Commercial Customers
Commercial electricity sales in Virginia "increased by nearly 30.0 million megawatthours (MWh) between 2019 and 2025, much faster growth than in any other state except Texas, a much larger state," according to the agency's Annual Electric Power Industry Report. The growth, the note says, "is largely driven by a concentration of data centers, as well as electric vehicle adoption and building electrification." The sentence names data centers first, and two other causes with them.
Sales, in the note's terms, "refer to the delivery of energy from load serving entities (LSEs), which are mostly utilities, to final consumers." A data source line in the note names final data for 2019 through 2024 from the agency's Annual Electric Power Industry Report, and preliminary data for 2025 from its monthly report. The last year is preliminary.
The headline gives the growth to data centers. The text gives it to them "largely", beside two other causes, and puts no number on their share. A lender who sizes data center load from this note would be sizing more than data centers.
Peaks in the Dominion Zone
Peak load, the note says, is "a snapshot of maximum load in megawatts (MW)" and "denotes the instantaneous or single highest peak in a day, month, or season, even if it only lasts for 15 minutes." In the note's words, load serving entities "must have sufficient resources and reserves to be able to respond to hourly, daily, and seasonal spikes in customer demand."
In PJM's Dominion zone, summer peak load was 23,905 MW in 2025, 23% higher than in 2019. Winter peak load was 25,413 MW in the 2025–26 winter season, 45% higher than in the 2019–20 season.
The agency's Hourly Electric Grid Monitor shows that between 2019 and 2025, all but three of the top 50 peak hourly loads in the Dominion zone came in 2024, with 15, or in 2025, with 32. Under one of its charts, the note says that summer includes June, July and August and winter December, January and February, and that the monitor "only captures generating units that are managed by a balancing authority and generating units with operations visible to a balancing authority."
PJM's Forecast, and Strategies for Peak Demand
PJM announced its 2026 Long-Term Load Forecast Report earlier in the year, the note says. It "expects the Dominion zone, which covers Virginia, to experience the largest absolute increase in summer peak demand in the period 2026 through 2030, largely because of the growth in data center load." The zone, in the note's words, "currently serves the largest concentration of data centers in the world," a hotspot for data centers "largely because of its fiber optic connectivity, land availability, and power infrastructure."
PJM expects peak summer load to grow at an average of 5.4% a year over the next 10 years, by the note's account, a downward revision from the 6.3% it projected in its 2025 forecast. Both are forecasts.
Utilities and other market participants, the note says, are employing "several strategies to tackle the challenges of peak demand, such as demand response programs, energy storage solutions, updates at facilities with spare interconnection capacity, and investing in infrastructure updates to ensure reliability." Market participants, it says, are also working on "improving load forecasting capabilities from forecasting data center load, given the rapid deployment and evolving technologies."
How much of Virginia's growth in commercial sales was the data centers' own?
Sources
- U.S. Energy Information Administration. Commercial electricity sales have soared in Virginia, driven by data centers. 5 May 2026. energy agency