I grew up in the Lehigh Valley, and I still have a lot of family and old friends back there, so I keep half an eye on local news from home even now that I'm selling real estate here in Myrtle Beach. Lately, that local news has been dominated by one subject I never expected to see become a kitchen-table issue back home: data centers. Between proposed projects showing up next to schools in South Whitehall Township and data center electric bills becoming a real point of frustration for homeowners in Northern Virginia, it's turned into exactly the kind of local disruption that's pushing more than a few of my clients to finally make the move south. If you're living through this in eastern Pennsylvania or Virginia right now, I wanted to lay out what's actually happening back home and why it looks so different from where I am today.
What's Actually Happening Back in PA and Virginia Right Now
If you haven't been following it closely, the scale of what's being proposed across both states is genuinely striking. In my own home turf, the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission has now reviewed two major data center proposals in quick succession: a 2.6-million-square-foot project from Air Products in Upper Macungie Township, which local zoning officials ultimately rejected, and a roughly 5-million-square-foot facility near Parkland High School in South Whitehall Township that one planning commission member described as the size of "five Parkland High Schools." Residents who live near the Parkland site have raised concerns about round-the-clock cooling system noise, air quality from exhaust systems, and the fact that basic energy and water usage figures weren't even available for public review before the approval process moved forward. State Sen. Jarrett Coleman has been publicly urging Lehigh Valley and Upper Bucks residents to stay organized against further projects, calling the region a poor fit for this kind of development.
Virginia's experience is further along and considerably larger in scale, since Northern Virginia, particularly Loudoun County, is the single largest data center market in the entire country. That maturity is exactly why data center electric bills have become such a visible local issue there. Dominion Energy's own regulatory filings show data center operators have requested about 70,000 megawatts of future capacity, nearly triple the roughly 25,000 megawatts of actual peak demand the utility saw on its coldest day this winter. Homeowners across the state have been posting bills that doubled or came close to it compared with the same period a year earlier, and while Dominion attributes most of this winter's spike to genuinely cold weather and new 2026 rate structures rather than data centers directly, the sheer scale of requested data center capacity has understandably made residents skeptical of that explanation.
Why Data Center Electric Bills Have Become Ground Zero
The clearest, most measurable version of this story is happening at the grid level, and it explains why data center electric bills keep showing up in local headlines across both states. Pennsylvania and Virginia both sit inside PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator covering 13 states and Washington, D.C., and PJM's capacity auction prices, essentially what utilities pay to guarantee enough future power supply, have jumped sharply as data center demand has outpaced new generation coming online. Pennsylvania's residential electricity rates rose almost 14% in the past year alone and are up more than 50% since 2020, according to federal data cited by state lawmakers pushing for reform.
PPL Electric Utilities, which serves the Lehigh Valley directly, is projected to see data center demand equal to roughly two and a half times New York City's entire current electricity use within the next decade, according to one energy policy analyst's estimate. State Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler has introduced legislation aimed at lowering regulated utility profit margins specifically to offset this pressure, and an independent economic analysis commissioned by advocacy groups projects average Pennsylvania households could save more than $840 a year by 2030 if reforms along those lines pass. The data center industry disputes that its presence is driving the increases, arguing that large facilities pay for their own power and actually help spread the grid's fixed costs across more users. Both sides agree on one thing: the pressure on the regional grid is real and growing quickly.
It's Not Just the Bills, It's the Land
What doesn't always come through in the electricity rate coverage is how much these projects are also reshaping the physical landscape of communities that, frankly, weren't built with this kind of industrial development in mind. The Parkland-area site sits on land designated for farmland preservation under the Lehigh Valley's own regional land use plan. Residents near the proposed facility, including one who lives just 1,100 feet away, have specifically raised the prospect of constant mechanical noise as a quality-of-life concern they never anticipated when they bought their homes. Allentown City Council has been working through curative zoning amendments specifically in response to resident pressure, and two separate pieces of state legislation, one that would repeal a sales tax exemption for data center equipment and another that would impose an 18-month moratorium so municipalities can rewrite their zoning rules, are both working their way through Harrisburg right now.
I'm not sharing all this to pile on data centers themselves. Reasonable people can disagree about the jobs and tax revenue they bring versus the noise, water use, and electric grid strain they create, and plenty of communities will end up deciding the tradeoff is worth it. But if you're a homeowner near one of these proposed sites, or you're already dealing with data center electric bills that are harder to explain and a lot more expensive to pay, it's completely understandable to start wondering whether staying put is still the right call.
How This Compares to Coastal South Carolina
Here's the honest, genuinely important difference: South Carolina simply isn't part of PJM's grid. The state's electric cooperatives, including Horry Electric Cooperative here in the Myrtle Beach area, rely on Santee Cooper and Duke Energy Carolinas through long-term power purchase agreements rather than PJM's competitive capacity market. There's a contractual relationship between South Carolina's cooperative power supplier and PJM for planning and market intelligence purposes, but the state's own utilities have been explicit that the physical transmission systems are not integrated. That means the specific mechanism driving Pennsylvania and Virginia's data center electric bills higher, PJM's capacity auction prices, simply doesn't flow through to a Horry Electric or Santee Cooper bill the same way.
South Carolina also just isn't a major data center market in the first place. The state has only a dozen mapped data center facilities statewide, compared with hundreds in Virginia alone and more than 50 large complexes currently planned across Pennsylvania. That's not a promise that electricity costs here will never rise, utility rates move for plenty of reasons that have nothing to do with data centers, but it does mean you're not buying into the same specific, rapidly escalating grid pressure that's driving the headlines back home right now.
What I Hear From Clients Making This Move
I talk to a fair number of people from the Lehigh Valley and Northern Virginia who are genuinely tired, not of any one thing, but of the accumulation: the noise complaints, the zoning fights at township meetings that used to be sleepy and predictable, the sense that their town is changing in ways nobody who lives there actually voted for. A rising electric bill is one thing. A 5-million-square-foot facility going up across the road from your kids' high school is another kind of frustration entirely, and for a lot of people approaching retirement, it's the moment they stop putting off a move they'd been thinking about for years anyway.
I can't promise coastal South Carolina will never see its own version of this debate eventually. But today, it's a genuinely different kind of place to live, without the industrial-scale development pressure or the grid strain currently playing out across PJM territory.
Browsing what's currently available across Myrtle Beach is a good way to get a real feel for what's out here, especially if you're comparing it against what's changing back home. A bit more about my own Lehigh Valley background is there if you want the fuller story of how I ended up making this same move myself, and if you're starting to think seriously about it, reach out here and we can talk through what the timing might actually look like for you.
