Why the rest of Virginia is getting looked at now

If you farm in Southside, the Valley, or Southwest Virginia, you have spent twenty years watching this industry happen somewhere else in your state. That is changing, and the reason is worth understanding because it tells you what your ground is actually being judged on.

What ran out in the north

Not land. Power.

The corridor around Loudoun and Prince William built the densest concentration of these facilities anywhere, and the constraint that eventually bit was the ability to deliver electricity to them. Transmission projects there have become slow, expensive and politically contested, and the local argument about land use has hardened considerably.

When the cheapest place to build stops being available, the search widens. That is the whole of why letters are now reaching parts of Virginia that never used to receive them.

What that means about your property

You are being looked at for a specific reason, and it helps to know what it is.

The interest is in ground that can be electrically served without repeating the northern Virginia problem. That means proximity to existing high voltage transmission with actual headroom, or to a substation, or to a site where heavy industry or generation once sat and left infrastructure behind.

It does not mean rural Virginia generally. Two farms twenty miles apart can be entirely different propositions on this basis, and neither the acreage nor the soil rating tells you which one you have.

The corollary is worth saying plainly. If your ground is a long way from serious transmission, being in a part of the state that is receiving attention does not change that. Attention is not the same as capability, and a party who conflates the two is not doing you a favor.

The tax picture is being argued over

Virginia kept its equipment exemption in the 2026 budget and, for the first time, put a tax on the power these facilities draw: 1.1 cents per kilowatt hour, from 1 July 2026, with a sunset two years later. It applies to electricity a facility generates for itself as well as to what it buys. Whether that becomes permanent is exactly what the next two sessions are about.

You do not receive any of that money and you never did. It matters to you only in one respect. Changes to the terms change how many parties are looking, and which parts of the state they are looking at. It is the weather, not the ground.

The question that separates real from speculative

Ask what transmission they have identified near your property and what they have established about its available capacity.

A party that has done work answers with something specific about your area. A party that has not will talk about Virginia’s position in the industry, which is a fact about the state and tells you nothing about your farm.

Virginia landowners get more approaches than most, and the volume is a reason for care rather than excitement. Where the interest is real, there are always parties whose business is securing a position on somebody else’s land and finding a buyer later.

Where we sit

We buy and option for our own account. Nobody here is paid a percentage, your property is not shopped around, and most Virginia ground we look at does not work for this. You will hear that within about a week rather than being left to wonder.

Send the county, roughly the acreage, and what runs near you electrically. The review costs nothing and obliges you to nothing.