Valley Link 'Bought the Farm'
Valley Link just bought the farm. Literally. And it did not bother to wait for Culpeper county to say yes.
On September 9, Valley Link closed on the entire Culpeper County tract eyed for its proposed Yeat substation, paying $4.5 million with no contingency tying the sale to a rezoning or conditional use permit. That is not how a careful buyer usually handles land that is still zoned agricultural and still needs local permission before it can become an electrical substation. The ordinary path would have been a contract that dies if the Board of Supervisors refuses the use. Valley Link skipped the parachute.
Culpeper’s Board of Supervisors has already told them, in writing, not to expect a soft landing. On April 7 the board voted 6–1 to oppose both the Joshua Falls–to–Yeat 765-kilovolt line and the Yeat substation planned near Richardsville. The resolution cites damage to farms and forest, lost property value, and a rural landscape being asked to host infrastructure whose main beneficiaries sit in Northern Virginia’s data-center belt. Staff were directed to intervene at the State Corporation Commission. Later comprehensive-plan work has been aimed at the same problem: make new high-voltage lines harder, not easier, to justify inside the county.
Public reporting from earlier in the year already had Valley Link in the process of buying roughly 448 acres off the Eleys Ford Road area, with something on the order of 85 to 127 acres actually needed for the substation and its immediate development. The parcel had been timberland, owned by a Pardee Resources subsidiary, sitting in an A-1 district where a utility facility needs a conditional use permit. Local government, not the SCC, is the body that normally decides whether that substation gets built. The SCC picks the route of the line. Culpeper picks whether the endpoint is allowed to exist.
So why write a $4.5 million check with no zoning escape hatch after the board has already passed a resolution saying no?
A few possibilities, none of them especially flattering.
One is simple confidence that “no” is temporary. Resolutions are not zoning denials. A future board, a narrower application, a promise of buffers and tax revenue, or a sufficiently exhausting process can still produce a permit. Buying the land now removes the seller, freezes the site, and lets the company tell regulators the endpoint is no longer theoretical. Sunk costs have a way of becoming arguments.
Another is leverage. When company representatives were asked in May what happens if the SCC approves the line and the county still refuses the substation, the answer was that Valley Link would look at whether the SCC, rather than the county, could assert authority over the substation itself. Owning the dirt makes that argument cleaner. You are no longer a hopeful contract purchaser. You are the landowner asking a state body to override a local zoning refusal. Whether that theory survives contact with Virginia law is a separate question. Previous attempts at something similar were smacked down by the Virginia Supreme Court. The purchase suggests someone is willing to fund the experiment.
A third is that $4.5 million is pocket change next to a project Valley Link prices around a billion dollars, with towers in the 135-to-175-foot range and a cleared corridor on the order of 200 feet wide running across roughly 115 miles and as many as nine counties. Ratepayers across PJM’s footprint are the ones expected to carry the transmission bill. Against that spreadsheet, an uncontingent land buy in Culpeper is a rounding error, and a useful one: it signals to PJM, to the SCC, and to every landowner along the route that the company is not treating local opposition as a reason to slow down.
There is also the less subtle reading. The board said it would not approve the rezoning. Valley Link bought the property anyway, in full, with no dependency on that approval. That is either a bet that the board will fold, a bet that someone above the board will step in, or a bet that owning the site is worth more as a bargaining chip than the risk of sitting on timberland you cannot use. None of those bets required asking Culpeper’s permission first.
Residents near Richardsville have already organized. Neighboring counties have passed their own opposition resolutions. The line, if built, would be among the highest-voltage transmission in the country, built largely to move power toward data-center load that Culpeper does not host. The company can call the site well buffered. The board has already called the project a bad trade for the county.
Valley Link now owns the land. It still does not own the zoning. The $4.5 million purchase without a rezoning contingency reads less like prudence and more like a decision exposing the hubris of a for-profit private company with deep-pocketed investors.
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