Data Centers are the Hidden Costs to Your Power Bill, Water, and Community: 22 Minutes with Ashish Kapoor

Data centers are booming nationwide, powering AI and our digital lives — but at what cost to communities? In this Earth Week 2026 episode of 22 Minutes With…, Ashish Kapoor, Senior Energy & Climate Advisor at the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), reveals the environmental and economic impacts of the data center surge, especially in Virginia.

From massive energy demand, water strain, and diesel pollution to rising utility bills and land grabs, Kapoor breaks down the real footprint of these facilities and why ratepayers — not just tech giants — are footing the bill. Drawing on PEC’s successful fights against bad projects and their push for smarter solutions like agrivoltaics and distributed energy, he shares practical tools for communities: local listening, coalitions, and policy wins that protect land, air, and wallets.

This is your guide to understanding data center impacts, cutting through the hype, and fighting back with facts.

Ashish Kapoor is the Senior Energy & Climate Advisor at The Piedmont Environmental Council, where he works on clean energy policy issues at the local and state levels. He recently developed an innovative agrivoltaics project in Virginia that combines crop farming, solar energy production and battery backup. Ashish grew up in western Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He graduated from Pennsylvania State University’s Schreyer Honors College with a Bachelor’s in Economics and Political Science and subsequently received a J.D. from Rutgers School of Law in Newark, New Jersey. During and after law school, Ashish worked as a public policy attorney on a variety of issues, including environmental and social justice in the U.S. and abroad. Most recently, he worked as a national solar consultant at Sunrun, the nation’s largest residential solar company.

Introduction

Hi, I am Kathleen Rogers, President at EARTHDAY.ORG, and welcome to 22 minutes with. Today, we have a special guest Ashish Kapoor, Senior Energy & Climate Advisor, Piedmont Environmental Council, Virginia. Welcome, Ashish. 

Interview questions

Q: Tell us a bit about PEC and what you do.

AK:  I’m the senior energy and climate advisor at Piedmont Environmental Council. Piedmont Environmental Council has been around for over 50 years and really works in a few different spaces. So there’s a whole team of folks that work on preserving natural resources, historic resources and land. We donate to food pantries, use regenerative practices, and really sort of volunteer driven, with some full time staff there that really run the operations, but have a lot of folks out there learn about farming, and take those lessons back to the community. I work sort of at the cross-section of all of those issues, on the energy and climate side.

Q: PEC has a long track record of winning land‑use fights with communities, like stopping Disney’s development in an historic battle, and dozens of other really bad projects . What made those community campaigns successful?

AK: There is a Virginia conservation network that was born out of those processes, which is a coalition of hundreds of environmental groups in Virginia that work on everything from water quality to the Chesapeake Bay, to tree plantings, to energy equity, to the clean energy transition, and peaker plants and everything in between. So a really robust and diverse coalition was born out of that. And I think that’s the same energy that we’ve taken and the same lessons we’ve taken into the data center coalition.

We founded the Data Center Coalition a few years back. Similarly, just various stakeholders, individuals and groups. Let’s first of all, get informed on this data center issue that’s really reared its head over the last few years in Virginia. Get really sort of on the ground information, scientifically sourced information, work with universities, share that info, communicate it through town halls, community meetings, email alerts, videos and whatever medium.

So, to your question, it’s that local engagement, the fact that we all have agency at a time. I think when things feel so big and so overwhelming the temptation to doom scroll is understandable. But you know these things like data centers there’s no cloud. There’s steel and concrete on the ground and there’s infrastructure impacts.we see our roles as being amongst the groups that sort of coalesced coalitions to use in-house expertise to tell that story and then use that to create policy. 

Q: Data centers are coming to towns everywhere, not just Virginia. How big is this national boom, and what is driving it?

AK: AI is driving this demand. Generative AI is driving this demand. Crypto’s driving this demand. Whatever comes to fruition. We have to build the electric infrastructure, right? And we have to build, you know, billions of dollars of transmission, billions of dollars in gas plants. 

Q: I recently watched  your TEDx talk, 3 ways to find the radical middle, you describe the ‘radical middle’ and three tools for getting there: reverse empathy, courageous vulnerability, and local listening. What does that look like when a community is split over data centers, and how has it shaped your approach?

AK: That is really kind of based on my own life experience and also my experience working at PEC and those issues, you know, local listening, reverse empathy, courageous vulnerability. They inform all issues, including data centers. Whether folks agree with us or not, hearing what people fear losing and what they’re concerned about when it comes to data centers, it may be that transmission line in their backyard, it may be their electric bill going up, iIt may be the fact that they bought their forever home, and 500ft away from their property there’s a giant data center that’s being built, and there’s nothing they can do about it. There’s so many ways in which we can kind of understand the community and where folks are coming from, and that’s really important in storytelling. And so far, it’s also important to hear from folks that are pro-data center and pro-growth because there are benefits. Of course, that comes from data centers financially, for the tax base, keeping property taxes low. 

I live in Loudoun County, Data Center capital of the world. And I’m raising my family here and we love it. But, you see  a good thing gone bad in a lot of ways. And you see it all over the place so that’s not enough. How do you create coalitions? How do you work with people that you may not traditionally have worked with? This is really not a partisan issue. There’s so many different tentacles to this issue that this is really an opportunity to bring a lot of folks together and to really sort of raise up what their concerns and anxieties are of day to day life and also sort of the greater existential, climate impacts and energy impacts for all of this. So all of that is informed by my work here. Those are the pillars that you said that inform what we do, and helping folks kind of put all those pieces together so they can also be better communicators of the issue and kind of come across as these are complicated things to talk about.

Q: Take us inside one of your counties. Residents are feeling the impacts: land grabs, noise, water strain, power bills. What are they actually living with day to day?

AK: You know, for many folks that may be going through those bucolic views as you’re going through some of these farmland that they’ve had yet for generations. And now there’s a giant transmission line going through there and all else that that transmission line brings, that transmission line impact might feel different for someone living in the suburbs. It’s going through their backyard. It may feel less sort of existential or less an insult to their background, but it’s still a giant eyesore. So there’s different ways in which we can definitely kind of tell the story. But I think, you know, the great thing about being locally grounded and having this footprint that really runs the gamut and politically class wise, is that that’s where this sort of concept of the radical model that I was exploring in that talk kind of comes into play, where we craft solutions in a way that should resonate with everyone.

Q: As data center energy demand surges, how can distributed generation and storage help meet that need, and what does that mean for local communities and infrastructure?

AK: So for the grid to be built to where it’s at now, it took 100 some years and it’s really built in that sort of centralized way. We have a coal plant, a gas plant, which produces energy. You have substation, giant transmission lines, those big erector sets take that energy, as you said, seven, eight, nine, 10% energy loss on those wires, and you step that down. It goes into those distribution lines into people’s homes. That’s been the way that we’ve made and transported energy for a long time. Distributed generation is the idea that you generate energy close to where you use it. 

We have a couple percent of our energies from a kind of smaller scale solar in Virginia. What will it take to make that greater? There’s a couple small batteries attached to your solar on your home, that will allow you to run your whole home off the grid if the if the power goes out. Any medical needs, whatever it is, you can run it in that way. If you took 20,000 batteries like that and combined them, and utility paid you this concept known as virtual power plants, you can pull from your battery, your battery, your about 20,000 batteries, a little bit of energy and you give the grid what it needs at that main time, that peak load, which is really what we’ve built our grid for. That time in the summer, or that time in the winter where AC’s are on, data centers are on, usually you don’t get up that high, but the grid is built with that extra cushion. So that’s why we’re having to build new gas plants, because, those peak load moments in particular, those peaker plants just operate 30% of the time. So you can use this distributed way of doing it and virtual power plants, and pull from everybody, give everybody some money for being a part of the solution. Store power when it’s cheap and available. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing, store it. And then when that grid needs it at night or during that peak load time, then you discharge it. So you’re able to kind of create more of a balanced grid. 

We need energy. Everybody’s kind of dying for an extra electron. At the same time, the utility’s proposing that we undercut rooftop solar on high while they make money off of transmission lines and centralized generation. Who pays for it? We do. You know, it’s all subsidized by the ratepayers. So that ties into the data center issue to where all these, all this new energy, all this new transmission, who’s paying for it for the richest companies in the world? We are. 

Q:Tech companies promise jobs, tax revenue, and even help with energy costs. How much of that holds up when you look at the real numbers?

AK: What are the benefits? I mean there’s, there’s billions of dollars of revenue, and billions of dollars of benefits, coming to the state of Virginia, coming to Loudoun County. That helps keep my property taxes low. So, that’s definitely a benefit. 

The employment comes at the beginning when you’re building and you’re employing electricians, you’re employing plumbers and all of that. But once the data center is up and running, you’re not really employing more than a handful of people there. And you can look at the parking lots if you want proof. But there’s not many people that actually have to go in there once it’s fully operational. But but money talks, right? And so that’s real. But what about the negative externalities? From just the financial perspective, we give a tremendous tax incentive to the data centers in Virginia. Close to last year, I think around $1.7 billion worth. That could have gone to fund schools or could have gone in other directions. We don’t ask for anything. We don’t ask for any sustainable practices or any renewable practices.

Q: The Wall Street Journal warns of a data center “gold rush” and even a glut of datacenters. How do you cut through that sales pitch with facts people can trust?

AK: It’s a challenge to kind of take what’s happening in your data center proposal in your community and tie that to everything else. How does this affect me? And we are living in a time where things do feel very nationalized and very overpowering. These companies have a lot of money.

One, it’s using every form possible, emails, town halls where people can come have a few hundred people, talk to folks, hear what they’re hearing on the ground, educate them, get educated by them. Conversation with legislators, local media, state media mapping. So it’s really kind of all hands on deck in terms of communicating the impacts, but also figuring out the impacts. When a transmission line gets proposed through your backyard, or your electric bill goes up 2 or 3 times, you do the math. If you’re paying an extra 300 bucks, a month over 12 months times ten, 15 years there. I mean, you’re talking tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars over time that your bill is going up. That’s something everybody feels.

Q: Communities are not powerless. What tools do they really have—zoning changes, public hearings, lawsuits, ballot measures—to shape or stop bad projects?

AK: Learn about the local process. There’s no better way in my experience than to learn about, how do you make a law, than to go in there, get involved in your general assembly and work with people that know how to write a law. That’s all it is, is people that work on stuff at the local level. They work with the legislator to write the law. Then they help advocate for it and lobby for it. And, you know, you might get something passed. And that’s really how all of that stuff happens. It’s folks on the ground that are crafting solutions. So that’s open for anybody. 

Q:Some states try to limit data centers while others chase them (Trump administration is trying to prevent states from doing that.). How can everyday people push for rules that protect their land and water in that landscape?

AK: There’s some national workgroups. There’s conversations with federal legislators. And we have Julie Bolthouse, she really leads us on the data center work from the land use perspective. And she’s really dug in with the rest of our land use team. And our president, Chris Miller, engages quite a bit at the national level. So everything from sort of Chesapeake Bay water impacts to electric infrastructure impacts to the need for more energy generation being built. We’re out there where we’re talking with folks and we’re sharing information and trying to empower communities. 

Q: Can you name one town or county that beat back a bad data center proposal, and what made it a “bad” proposal in the first place? What tipped the scales? (PEC/Fauquier’s Gigaland withdrawal, Prince William substation denial, etc.)

AK: In Fauquier County with the Giga Land proposal, which is a giant data center proposal, they eventually withdrew that application. It was a few hundred megawatts worth of energy and over 2 million square feet of development space. And they were able to push that back. I mean, this is something that’s become really an issue that transcends age and, and class and race and all those other things. So I think there’s there’s a lot of hope there

Q: Data centers bring a lot of hype, money and noise globally. What is your go‑to strategy to cut through it—town halls, social media, local papers, or door‑to‑door—and help communities tell their own story?AK: There’s no sort of coherent sort of strategy. It’s sort of a free for all, and every man and woman for his or herself. So with that you’re going to get all these negative externalities. So from an engagement perspective, one of the benefits of that, as I was saying a little bit earlier, is that a lot of folks are being impacted in different ways. You’re interested in this, or maybe it’s the climate part, maybe it’s the water part. Maybe your childhood home now has a data center in the backyard. You know, like that. Whatever it is, find out who the local organizations in your area are that are working on this, and maybe there’s nobody working on it. Get educated. Find a little bit of an entry way through an org or through whatever your interest point is.