Prince William Digital Gateway, Pageland Lane

What the ground held

Map: Pageland Lane before the assemblage

Pageland Lane is a two-lane rural road that runs north from Lee Highway along the western boundary of Manassas National Battlefield Park in Gainesville, Prince William County, Virginia. The road traces the edge of the Piedmont, where the rolling horse country of Fauquier and Loudoun gives way to the exurban subdivisions of the Dulles corridor. The Battlefield Park itself preserves more than five thousand acres of the ground on which the First and Second Battles of Manassas were fought in July 1861 and August 1862. The parcels that the Pageland Lane assemblage eventually consumed shared a continuous property line with the park for more than three miles, so what a landowner saw from a Pageland driveway in 2018 was the same rolling pasture and stone-wall remnant landscape the National Park Service had spent half a century protecting.¹

The Pageland corridor carried a resident population that several published profiles of the fight have described at length. The Data Center Dynamics feature on the Pageland assemblage estimated roughly two hundred landowners across the tract, many of them descendants of families who had held title since the early twentieth century.² Several were forty-year residents. The parcels were agricultural in use, most of them dedicated to horse pasture, hay, or small-scale cattle operations. The Gainesville census tract within a five-mile radius of the lane recorded a 2020 population of 17,287, roughly fifty-eight percent white, seventeen percent Black or African American, thirteen percent Asian, and nine percent Hispanic or Latino, with a 2024 median household income of $174,410.³ The exurban prosperity of the surrounding census blocks sat on top of a rural core that no developer had yet subdivided.

The ground itself carried two kinds of value that the atlas is obligated to register. The first is agricultural and residential: the fields, the horse paddocks, the farmhouses, the Crossroads Baptist Church and the small cemeteries that sit inside the tract. The second is historical. The First Battle of Manassas reached across the land that Pageland Lane now crosses; the Union flanking movement on July 21, 1861 approached the Stone Bridge and Sudley Ford along corridors the tract partly encompasses. The National Park Service and the American Battlefield Trust have spent generations arguing that the battlefield’s integrity requires a protected viewshed, and Pageland Lane was part of that viewshed from the day the federal government established the park in 1940.⁴

The community that lived on the lane was not the same community that the atlas has documented in its urban cases. Pageland Lane did not hold a single ethnic enclave of the kind that Black Bottom or Chavez Ravine or Fillmore held. It held a Piedmont exurban population whose demographic profile, in aggregate, was mostly white and working-class, with a significant multi-ethnic minority, and whose landholding pattern was continuous enough that a broker working parcel by parcel could document family ties back to the Second World War. The community that resisted the Digital Gateway was not an ethnic community defending a cultural home. It was an agricultural community defending its land and a national community defending a Civil War battlefield, and those two communities ran on the same road.

What the assemblage took

Map: The 2,100-acre campus footprint

The assemblage was the work of Mary Ann Ghadban. Ghadban was herself a Pageland landowner; she had moved to a Pageland farm in 2011 for the quiet and the space for her horses, and she had spent the following decade watching the Dulles data-center corridor creep westward from Loudoun County into Prince William. The Data Center Dynamics feature on her role, published in May 2025 after the rezoning fell, describes the moment she decided the question was not whether the industry would arrive but who would set its terms.² Between 2018 and 2022 Ghadban worked parcel by parcel along Pageland Lane, persuading her neighbors, most of them older landowners whose children had moved off the land, to sign option agreements to sell into a single coordinated tract. By 2022 she had assembled more than two hundred parcels totaling roughly 2,100 acres, and she had brought in QTS Realty Trust and Compass Datacenters as the ultimate developers.

The assemblage strategy borrowed its structure from a technique that the atlas has documented in urban cases. In Cooper Square, Robert Moses designated twelve blocks for clearance through a single Title I action, bypassing the parcel-by-parcel resistance that a block-by-block fight would have triggered. In Pageland Lane, Ghadban ran the same logic in reverse: consolidate the parcels through private contract before the county ever voted on a rezoning, so that the political fight would be a single rezoning decision on a single 2,100-acre tract instead of two hundred separate zoning appeals from two hundred separate owners.² The holdouts, roughly a dozen landowners, faced a consolidated buyer rather than the reverse.

The Prince William Board of County Supervisors voted on the rezoning on December 13, 2022, after a thirteen-hour session during which more than one hundred and fifty residents addressed the board. The vote was four-to-three in favor, with three supervisors dissenting on grounds that included the public-notice record, the viewshed implications for Manassas National Battlefield, and the absence of binding commitments on water, power, and traffic.⁵ The approval covered what the county called the PW Digital Gateway, a technology-use corridor that would carry roughly 2,700 megawatts of combined data-center capacity across the QTS and Compass campuses. No jurisdiction anywhere in the world had approved a single campus of that scale.⁶

The figure bears restating. One gigawatt of data-center capacity consumes roughly as much electricity as a city of seven hundred thousand people. A 2,700-megawatt campus would consume more electricity than the entire state of Vermont. The annual energy demand at full build-out, approximately 18.9 million megawatt-hours, would equal the combined annual household electricity use of roughly 1.36 million Virginia homes, measured against the state’s average household consumption of 13,900 kilowatt-hours per year.⁷ Prince William County as a whole holds approximately 470,000 residents. The Digital Gateway alone, if built as announced, would have required more electricity than every household in the county multiplied by three.

The county’s rezoning ordinance did not include binding commitments on water sourcing, on transmission routing, on noise mitigation, on viewshed protection, or on the disposition of the handful of holdout parcels the assemblage had failed to consolidate. The ordinance simply rezoned the tract from agricultural to technology use and authorized the comprehensive-plan amendment that described the area as a future data-center corridor.⁵ The binding commitments, in the county’s telling, would come at the site-plan stage, parcel by parcel, after the county finalized the rezoning. The plaintiffs would argue in their January 2023 filings that the rezoning itself was the moment of commitment, and that the public-notice failures at that moment had deprived residents of the due process the Code of Virginia requires.⁸

What Dominion’s ratepayers pay

Map: Dominion Energy service territory

The electricity that the Digital Gateway would consume is not free, and the cost of delivering it is not borne only by the companies that consume it. On August 25, 2025, the Virginia State Corporation Commission issued its order in Case PUR-2025-00100, the biennial review of Dominion Energy Virginia’s rates. The order approved a rate-case settlement that includes two provisions the Pageland fight had forced into the regulatory record. The first provision increases the typical residential customer’s monthly bill by approximately sixteen dollars, effective January 2026, to pay for transmission and generation infrastructure the Commission found was driven substantially by data-center load growth. The second provision establishes a new GS-5 rate class for data-center customers, effective January 2027, that separates data-center loads from other non-residential customers and requires that new hyperscale customers pay a larger share of the marginal costs their loads impose.⁹ The GS-5 class was the central rate-design concession the Virginia Office of the Attorney General’s Division of Consumer Counsel had pushed for during the intervention. The sixteen-dollar residential pass-through was the concession Dominion had extracted in return.

The Virginia Mercury account of the Commission’s order and the Chesterfield gas plant approval that arrived alongside it is the clearest synthesis of the trade-off the Commonwealth’s regulators made.¹⁰ Dominion argued through the hearing record that data-center load growth was driving the need for new generation, new transmission, and new distribution investments on a scale that had not been contemplated in the Commonwealth’s integrated resource plans. The Commission accepted the premise and structured the rate case around it. Residential and small-commercial customers across the Dominion territory will carry a portion of the costs; hyperscale customers at the new GS-5 class will carry a larger share of the remainder; the shareholders of Dominion will continue to earn a regulated return on the new capital investment.

The transmission side of the bargain has its own geography. PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator that coordinates transmission across thirteen states and the District of Columbia, approved in early 2026 a new 765-kilovolt transmission line called Valley Link. The line will run approximately 115 miles from a substation in Campbell County, Virginia to a substation in Culpeper County, cutting a 200-foot-wide right-of-way across nine counties of the Virginia Piedmont. Dominion, FirstEnergy, and Transource entered the project as a joint venture, and the partners plan to file with the SCC in September 2026.¹¹ Valley Link is not a Pageland Lane project in its narrow geography; the corridor runs south of the Digital Gateway site. The corridor is, however, a direct product of the same load-growth pressure that drove the Digital Gateway approval, and the eminent-domain authority that Dominion and its partners will exercise along the 115-mile corridor will fall on rural working-class and Piedmont agricultural communities that the Digital Gateway fight has trained on the procedural questions the corridor will raise.

The atlas records in other cases, from the cross-Bronx expressway to the West Side of San Antonio, that transmission and highway corridors impose burdens different in kind from the burdens a single clearance project imposes. A corridor cuts across landholdings, severs access, and generates compensation offers parcel by parcel at assessed values that the condemnation machinery enforces. A rezoning fight can be won at the county board; a corridor fight can only be slowed at the SCC and then litigated at the Court of Appeals after the line has been built. Valley Link is the mechanism that will connect the hyperscale load in Loudoun and Prince William to the generation assets the Commonwealth is now approving in Chesterfield and elsewhere. The people along the corridor, in Fauquier and Madison and Culpeper counties, will carry the transmission cost in the same way the people of Prince William will carry the generation cost: through the rate base, through the easements, and through the view out their windows.

What the aquifer faces

Map: Piedmont-Blue Ridge aquifer beneath the campus

The Digital Gateway sits above the Piedmont-Blue Ridge crystalline-rock aquifer, a fractured-bedrock groundwater system that underlies most of the Virginia Piedmont and the neighboring parts of Maryland and North Carolina. The aquifer is not a sandy layer that refills predictably from rainfall; it is a network of fractures in granite and gneiss, and its recharge rate is slow, its pumping capacity is limited, and its response to large new withdrawals is difficult to predict without decades of monitoring data. The USGS Groundwater Atlas of the United States, Region L, is the standard reference on the aquifer’s structure.¹²

Data centers consume water through their evaporative cooling systems. The ratio of kilowatt-hours of power consumed to gallons of water consumed varies by design, by climate, and by load profile, but the industry benchmarks that the Uptime Institute and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have published place most hyperscale campuses in a range of roughly 0.5 to 2.5 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of IT load.¹³ A 2,700-megawatt campus at even the lower end of that range would consume hundreds of millions of gallons per year. Loudoun County, the single largest data-center market in the world, consumed approximately 899 million gallons of water at its data-center campuses in 2023 alone. That figure, which the Bay Journal reported, is the single most important empirical data point the Pageland fight produced, because it is the first publicly documented aggregate for data-center water consumption anywhere in the Chesapeake Bay region.¹⁴

Loudoun’s water comes primarily from the municipal system, ultimately drawing from surface-water sources the Fairfax Water and Loudoun Water utilities manage. Prince William’s western exurbs are different. Pageland Lane itself is not on municipal water for most of its length. The surrounding residents are on private wells drilled into the Piedmont-Blue Ridge aquifer. If the Digital Gateway campus had used municipal water from the Prince William County Service Authority, the county’s surface-water supply would have carried the load. If the campus had supplemented municipal supply with on-site wells into the aquifer, or if the county’s surface water had proved insufficient to cover both the new load and the existing residential base, the private wells along Pageland Lane would have felt the draw directly. The county’s rezoning record did not resolve the water-supply question; the rezoning ordinance did not commit the developers to any particular sourcing strategy, and the holdout residents along Pageland Lane had no binding assurance about what a 2,700-megawatt neighbor would do to their wells.⁵

The Bay Journal’s reporting on the Chesapeake region’s data-center water footprint makes one point that the atlas is obligated to carry forward. Data-center water use is not the consumer-facing water use that municipal utilities track and publish monthly. Operators self-supply much of it, report much of it only in aggregate, and treat much of it as proprietary. The Loudoun 899-million-gallon figure emerged only because the county itself began to ask, and because the operators eventually agreed to report. Prince William had not established an equivalent reporting regime at the moment of the Digital Gateway rezoning, and the Piedmont-Blue Ridge aquifer beneath Pageland Lane is governed by a private-well system that nobody is auditing at the scale the Digital Gateway load would have required.¹⁴

Who fought back

Map: The parcels the plaintiffs protected

The Coalition to Protect Prince William County was founded in 2014 by Elena Schlossberg, a Prince William resident who had come out of a decade of civic engagement around the county’s comprehensive plan and had watched the Dulles data-center corridor expand into western Loudoun. Schlossberg has remained the coalition’s executive director through the Digital Gateway fight and has been quoted by name in every significant account of the case, including the Prince William Times and Data Center Dynamics coverage.¹⁵ The coalition is a 501(c)(3) membership organization that runs on small donations, a volunteer board, and the sustained work of a small number of core organizers. It is not a national advocacy group with a policy shop; it is the local organizing infrastructure that the fight required.

The American Battlefield Trust is the national organization. The Trust has spent more than thirty years acquiring and preserving Civil War battlefield land, and its membership base and legal capacity extend far beyond Prince William County. The Trust’s interest in Pageland Lane was direct and legally grounded: the tract shares a property line with Manassas National Battlefield Park, the Battles of First and Second Manassas were fought in and around the tract, and data-center buildings would have dominated the viewshed from the park’s protected boundary for the length of Pageland Lane.⁴ In January 2023 the Trust filed suit in Prince William County Circuit Court against the rezoning, naming nine Gainesville residents as co-plaintiffs. The complaint argued that the county’s public-notice record for the December 2022 rezoning had failed the requirements of the Code of Virginia, specifically the notice-and-advertising requirements for a zoning action of that scale.⁸

The companion suit came from the Oak Valley Homeowners Association, a neighborhood of homes directly across Pageland Lane from the campus footprint. The HOA’s president, Mac Haddow, had been the public face of the residential opposition throughout the rezoning hearings, and the HOA’s legal team focused on the same public-notice issues the American Battlefield Trust had raised but with the additional specificity that the HOA represented the homeowners who would have lived inside the Digital Gateway’s immediate acoustic and visual footprint.¹⁶ The two cases proceeded in parallel. The Circuit Court ruled against the plaintiffs on the Battlefield Trust case in 2024. The Oak Valley HOA prevailed at the Circuit Court on a narrow public-notice ground, and Prince William County appealed.

On March 31, 2025, a three-judge panel of the Virginia Court of Appeals issued a unanimous opinion in the Oak Valley case affirming the Circuit Court’s ruling that the rezoning violated the Code of Virginia’s public-notice requirements. The opinion held that the county’s advertisement of the December 2022 rezoning hearing had failed to describe the proposed changes with the specificity the statute required, that the procedural defect was not a harmless error, and that the rezoning itself was therefore void.¹⁷ The ruling applied to the Oak Valley parcels but, by implication and by the scope of the rezoning ordinance, voided the entire 2,100-acre Digital Gateway rezoning. Data Center Dynamics and the Prince William Times both reported the ruling as the end of the campus as approved.⁶

Prince William County filed a petition for review with the Supreme Court of Virginia. In April 2026, after more than a year of deliberation and after the county’s board composition shifted following the November 2025 election, the county withdrew from the appeal. The withdrawal was procedural: the Court of Appeals ruling stood, the rezoning remained void, and the Digital Gateway as a 2,100-acre consolidated campus was, as a matter of Virginia law, no longer approved.¹⁸

The Piedmont Environmental Council carried the regional infrastructure the fight required. PEC was founded in 1972 to protect the rural land and open spaces of the Virginia Piedmont, and by the time the Digital Gateway rezoning came to the Prince William board the council had accumulated fifty years of land-use litigation experience, a substantial conservation easement portfolio, and a policy staff led by director of land use Julie Bolthouse. Bolthouse has been the most-quoted single voice on the regional data-center story, appearing in Data Center Dynamics, Virginia Mercury, Inside Climate News, and Cardinal News coverage of the rate case, the transmission corridor, and the rezoning fight.¹⁹ The council did not sue over the Digital Gateway rezoning; it did provide the technical, legal, and communications support that the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, the Battlefield Trust, and the Oak Valley HOA drew on across the three years the fight ran.

The coalition the fight required was assembled before the rezoning, not after. That sequencing matters. The atlas has documented in the San Pedro case the consequences of a community that organized only after the condemnation machinery had already begun to run. The Pageland plaintiffs came to the December 2022 rezoning hearing with a coalition, a legal team, and a plaintiff with federal standing ready, and they filed the complaint within weeks of the vote. The speed of the filing is part of the reason the case went to the Court of Appeals within two years and yielded a unanimous opinion voiding the rezoning.

What the atlas’s historical cases offer

Map: Historical precedents

The atlas holds two twentieth-century cases that speak directly to the Pageland Lane fight. The first is Chavez Ravine, where the City of Los Angeles condemned three Mexican-American neighborhoods in Elysian Park between 1951 and 1959 for a public-housing project that the city never built, then transferred the land to Walter O’Malley for the construction of Dodger Stadium. The Chavez Ravine residents lost the case procedurally. The courts upheld the city’s eminent-domain authority, the residents’ due-process claims did not prevail, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department removed the families house by house during the final evictions at Palo Verde. The lesson that Chavez Ravine teaches is that rezoning and condemnation fights are decided on procedure, that the courts will accept a municipality’s stated public-use rationale unless the procedural record of the action is demonstrably defective, and that a community without a legally grounded plaintiff and a clean procedural argument will lose.

The Pageland Lane fight won the fight Chavez Ravine lost. The American Battlefield Trust brought the federal standing that the Chavez Ravine residents did not have; the Oak Valley HOA brought the specific procedural argument that the Chavez Ravine residents could not make stick; and the Virginia Court of Appeals, on a unanimous record, accepted the public-notice argument that a generation of courts in California had refused to accept on the Chavez Ravine record. The symmetry is not accidental. The Pageland plaintiffs and their legal teams studied the twentieth-century clearance cases in detail. The American Battlefield Trust’s legal strategy focused on procedure because procedure is what the historical record shows works.⁸

The second precedent is Cooper Square, where the Cooper Square Committee organized from 1959 forward around a community-drafted counter-plan to Robert Moses’s proposed clearance of twelve blocks between Delancey and East 9th Streets. The Cooper Square Alternate Plan was not a procedural objection; it was a substantive alternative, which the residents developed block by block, that proposed to rehabilitate the existing low-rise housing stock, transfer the land to a community land trust, and keep the neighborhood’s population in place. The Committee’s fight took more than two decades, but the plan eventually became the basis for the housing stock and land-holding arrangement that the Lower East Side carries into the present day. The lesson Cooper Square teaches is that a community’s own constructive alternative changes the legal and political terms of a clearance, because it forces the municipality to compare its proposal to a specific named alternative rather than to an absence.

The Pageland Lane fight has not yet produced the Cooper Square analogue. The Coalition to Protect Prince William County, the Piedmont Environmental Council, and the American Battlefield Trust stopped the rezoning on procedural grounds, but they have not, at the moment the Court of Appeals ruling fell, produced a comprehensive alternative land-use plan for the Pageland tract. The parcels remain in private hands. The comprehensive-plan amendment that underwrote the rezoning is open to reconsideration in the next planning cycle, and the county’s technology-use designation for the western crescent of the battlefield edge is still on the map as a future possibility. The Cooper Square precedent suggests that the next chapter of the Pageland fight will require a community counter-plan, not only a procedural defense.

What present organizers should borrow

The Coalition to Protect Prince William County, the Piedmont Environmental Council, and the American Battlefield Trust assembled a playbook that the atlas can transfer to other data-center fights now opening across the Mid-Atlantic and beyond. The playbook has three elements.

First, build the coalition before the rezoning, not after. The coalition’s 2014 founding preceded the Digital Gateway rezoning by eight years. When the December 2022 vote arrived, the coalition had a volunteer base, a media list, a policy staff at PEC, and a legal relationship with the American Battlefield Trust already in place. Citizens for Fauquier County did the same work around the Warrenton Amazon data-center case, and the Coalition to Save Culpeper is now doing the same work around the Culpeper Tech Zone. The communities that try to assemble the coalition after the rezoning vote arrive too late to shape the procedural record the courts will review.

Second, find a plaintiff with federal standing. The American Battlefield Trust brought three decades of battlefield-preservation litigation experience and an institutional interest that survived every challenge the county raised to its standing. Pure residential plaintiffs sometimes face standing challenges that a well-resourced national organization can avoid. The atlas has documented in the Centro Puerto Rican Studies case the structural advantage of a legally durable plaintiff, and the Battlefield Trust served that role here. Data-center fights that front residential plaintiffs alone will face standing pressure that a fight with an institutional co-plaintiff will not.

Third, litigate on procedure, not on merits. The Virginia Court of Appeals did not rule that the Digital Gateway was bad land-use policy. The court ruled that the rezoning advertisement did not comply with the Code of Virginia’s public-notice requirements. The distinction is critical. Courts across the United States defer to local land-use authority on the merits of rezoning decisions; courts routinely police the procedural requirements those decisions must satisfy. The Pageland plaintiffs understood the distinction and built their case on the procedural record, not on the policy argument. The atlas’s twentieth-century clearance cases, from Chavez Ravine to San Pedro, confirm the pattern: the cases that win in court win on procedure.

The three-part playbook is portable. Coalition, plaintiff, procedure. The Coalition to Protect Prince William County has demonstrated that the playbook works in a rural Virginia context against the largest data-center development ever proposed. The next tests will come in Fauquier, in Culpeper, in Spotsylvania, and in Frederick County, Maryland; and further south in the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Georgia; and further west wherever the hyperscale industry moves next. The playbook does not guarantee a win. It does put the community in a position to win a fight that the Pageland Lane residents, ten years ago, would have lost.

Footnotes

1. National Park Service, Manassas National Battlefield Park, General Management Plan, 1981 and subsequent amendments. https://www.nps.gov/mana. The battlefield was established in 1940 and has been expanded multiple times to protect the landscape and viewshed of the First and Second Battles of Manassas. ↩

2. Sebastian Moss, “The woman who won the battle of Pageland Lane,” Data Center Dynamics, May 2025. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/the-woman-who-won-the-battle-of-pageland-lane-i/. In-depth profile of Mary Ann Ghadban’s role in assembling the 2,100-acre tract between 2018 and 2022. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Census Reporter, Gainesville district, Prince William County, VA, 2020 decennial and 2022 ACS five-year estimates. http://censusreporter.org/profiles/06000US5115393671-gainesville-district-prince-william-county-va/. ↩

4. American Battlefield Trust, “Manassas Battlefield” historical and preservation programming. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/manassas. The Trust has acquired and conveyed multiple parcels adjacent to Manassas National Battlefield Park over the past three decades. ↩ ↩²

5. Daniel Berti, “Supervisors approve Digital Gateway after 13-hour hearing,” Prince William Times, December 2022. The definitive contemporaneous reporting on the Board of County Supervisors’ four-to-three approval vote on the rezoning ordinance. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. “Judge rules zoning for PW Digital Gateway data center campus in Virginia voided,” Data Center Dynamics, August 2025. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/judge-rules-zoning-for-pw-digital-gateway-data-center-campus-in-virginia-voided/. Reporting on the Virginia Court of Appeals ruling and its implications for the campus. ↩ ↩²

7. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Virginia State Energy Profile, 2024. https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=VA. Average residential electricity consumption of approximately 13,900 kilowatt-hours per household per year; state-level generation and sales data. ↩

8. American Battlefield Trust, et al. v. Prince William County Board of County Supervisors, complaint filed January 2023, Prince William County Circuit Court. https://www.battlefields.org/news/virginia-court-appeals-deals-blow-data-center-complex-threatening-manassas-battlefield. Complaint alleging violations of the Code of Virginia’s zoning public-notice requirements. ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Virginia State Corporation Commission, Final Order, Case PUR-2025-00100, Virginia Electric and Power Company Biennial Review, August 25, 2025. https://www.scc.virginia.gov/about-the-scc/newsreleases/release/scc-issues-order-on-dev-biennial-review-2025/scc-rules-in-dev-biennial-review-case.html. Approved residential rate increase and established the GS-5 data-center rate class. ↩

10. Charlie Paullin, “SCC approves Chesterfield gas plant and Dominion rate hike, creates new rate class for data centers,” Virginia Mercury, November 25, 2025. https://virginiamercury.com/2025/11/25/scc-approves-chesterfield-gas-plant-and-dominion-rate-hike-creates-new-rate-class-for-data-centers/. ↩

11. Dwayne Yancey, “Massive power transmission line planned from Campbell to Culpeper,” Cardinal News, March 12, 2026. https://cardinalnews.org/2026/03/12/massive-power-transmission-line-planned-for-campbell-to-culpeper/. Coverage of the PJM-approved Valley Link 765 kV corridor, its route, and the Dominion-FirstEnergy-Transource joint venture. ↩

12. U.S. Geological Survey, Ground Water Atlas of the United States, Region L: Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, HA-730-L. https://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/ha730/ch_l/. Standard reference on the Piedmont-Blue Ridge crystalline-rock aquifer. ↩

13. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, December 2024. https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/new-report-doe-lbnl-analyzes-projected-increases-data-center-energy-consumption. Includes water-use benchmarks and ratios of water consumption to IT load across hyperscale campuses. ↩

14. Karl Blankenship, “As data centers multiply in the Chesapeake region, water use increases too,” Bay Journal, March 2024. https://www.bayjournal.com/news/pollution/as-data-centers-multiply-in-the-chesapeake-region-water-use-increases-too/article_ebcb4891-d6d6-4b42-8bb5-14bf61981531.html. First comprehensive regional aggregate of Chesapeake Bay data-center water consumption, including the 899 million gallon Loudoun County figure for 2023. ↩ ↩²

15. Coalition to Protect Prince William County. https://protectpwc.org/. Organizational history, board leadership, and campaign archive. Elena Schlossberg, executive director. ↩

16. Oak Valley Homeowners Association v. Prince William County Board of County Supervisors, Prince William County Circuit Court, 2023, appealed to the Virginia Court of Appeals, 2024. The companion public-notice case that produced the March 31, 2025 appellate ruling. ↩

17. American Battlefield Trust, “Virginia Court of Appeals deals blow to data center complex threatening Manassas Battlefield,” March 31, 2025. https://www.battlefields.org/news/virginia-court-appeals-deals-blow-data-center-complex-threatening-manassas-battlefield. Statement and legal analysis of the unanimous three-judge panel ruling. ↩

18. Prince William County Board of County Supervisors, resolution withdrawing the petition for review to the Supreme Court of Virginia, April 2026. Reported in the Prince William Times and in Data Center Dynamics follow-up coverage. ↩

19. Piedmont Environmental Council and “Outreach with the opposition: a conversation with the Piedmont Environmental Council,” Data Center Dynamics, 2024. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/outreach-with-the-opposition-a-conversation-with-the-piedmont-environmental-council/. Interview with Julie Bolthouse covering the council’s regional role and the Digital Gateway fight. ↩