Did Orange County Government “Inadvertently” Shove Valley Link Westward… Straight Into Orange?

By now you’ve probably absorbed Mike Regan’s tidy little bombshell about what the Orange County Government has been quietly cooking for more than a year. It’s a masterclass in how a county can stealth-recruit hyperscale data centers, apparently aiming for the densest concentration in Virginia, while treating the public like an inconvenient afterthought. Nearly 9,000 acres are being shopped around through secret talks, NDAs, guided site tours, and supervisory hand-holding. All of it bankrolled by your tax dollars, of course, with that charming disregard for whether the citizens might actually want any of it.

Multiple 2025–2026 reports (City Journal, BBC, and friends) note that Loudoun’s data centers cover about 3% of the county’s land, roughly 9,900–10,000 acres of dedicated parcels. The Orange sites unearthed in these FOIAs sit uncomfortably close to that figure. Let’s hope not every acre turns into server farms. But even half would still dump 4,500 acres of industrial concentration onto the eastern end of the county. And wouldn’t you know it, rabid data-center cheerleader and former Board chairman Mark Johnson has lately been posting about how wonderful these things would be for Orange. Conveniently, his district sits about as far from the heavily marketed parcels as geography allows. Distance, it seems, makes the heart grow fonder… of other people’s problems.

Which brings us to the original premise: county planning and aggressive marketing of these parcels to data-center operators appear to have herded the Valley Link transmission line straight through eastern Orange. Overlay the proposed routes on the FOIA parcels and the picture snaps into focus—the routing team is thoughtfully co-locating a 765 kV industrial line on or beside almost every single marketed site. Pure coincidence that nearly every parcel the county has been pitching somehow ends up with one or more routes threading through or next to it? Or might the county have been in cozy, ongoing conversation with Dominion about whose land gets sacrificed for the “greater good”?

Consider the modest 100-plus-acre parcel recently hawked by Avison Young as data-center ready. An alternate Valley Link route obligingly swings wide around that corner of the county just to punch through that exact property. Coincidence, surely.

Or the sprawling timber tracts that inconveniently abut the densely populated Lake of the Woods community. Should those get developed, residents can look forward to the full data-center lifestyle package; 24/7 noise, diesel fumes, the works, courtesy of their own government. While they endure it, supervisors will be thoughtfully deciding how to spend the tax revenue generated by that suffering. Remember: the county helpfully deleted the 1,000-foot residential setback (at the polite request of Amazon’s lawyers). Some might call that an open invitation to nestle right up against people’s homes.

Then there’s the juicy parcel sandwiched between the Walmart on Route 3 and the Somerset Ridge community, perhaps explaining why the Yeat substation sits so conveniently near Orange. One doubts those neighbors ever pictured a hyperscale data center as the new kid on the block.

Looking back at the six-month war over rural central Virginia, we recall the supervisors’ repeated insistence that they were every bit as shocked as the citizens by the transmission-line routing. Those FOIA revelations and a few choice remarks from the Valley Link presentation at Orange County High School on March 24, 2026, are making that claim harder to swallow. The representative helpfully explained how routes are chosen:

• “You have to look to see if there are co-location opportunities.” Might a thousand-plus-acre data-center campus count as one of those?

• “So you look at things like industrial areas, and if a county has a tech overlay district.” Our supervisors keep touting that shiny tech overlay as citizen protection. How, exactly, is anyone supposed to decide where to live in this county? A safer bet might be deep in Mark Johnson’s distant district.

If you live east of Route 522 and north of Route 20, welcome to the planned Orange County Data Center Alley. District 4: congratulations, you’re the designated sacrifice zone. The timing is exquisite—another three years to bulldoze in the industrial transmission line, neatly synchronized with a data-center build-out.

If ever a situation proved that fighting data centers and fighting transmission lines cannot be separated, this is it. When Valley Link files with the State Corporation Commission they will be including their load assumptions driving the need. We suspect it will be quite the reveal as to what drove this transmission line into certain areas of the nine counties. The original premise that it was purely for Northern Virginia may just fall apart as we find out what our local governments have been secretly planning.

Orange citizens: Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, August 11 at 5 p.m., public comment period included. Highly recommended you show up and offer your supervisors some polite, pointed feedback on these highly secretive county plans.

Peruse the complete map of the new Orange Data Center Alley by clicking here. Note this disclaimer: The map is derived from Orange County records obtained through FOIA, supplemented where necessary by publicly available parcel information. It is intended to illustrate parcels that County records indicate may have been evaluated, discussed, or marketed by Orange County for potential hyperscale data center development. Because many County records do not identify specific parcels IDs, some parcel locations represent our best interpretation of the available information. Accordingly, not every highlighted parcel should be interpreted as definitively associated with County recruitment activities, nor does this map imply that every landowner participated in, supported, or was aware of those activities. The map will be refined as additional records become available.

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