Half the Grid Sits Idle
The American electric grid spends most of its life underutilized. Peak demand events, the hours that drive most infrastructure spending, occur during only 50 to 200 hours annually out of 8,760 total. For the remaining thousands of hours, poles, wires, and substations carry loads well below their rated capacity.
Nobody has been required to measure this. Virginia just changed that.
The bill. HB 434 passed the Virginia House of Delegates unanimously and cleared the state Senate. Governor Abigail Spanberger is expected to sign it into law. The bill directs Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power to petition the State Corporation Commission by November 1, 2026, to develop grid utilization metrics. The SCC must then analyze the potential for alternatives to traditional infrastructure investment, including energy storage, customer-owned capacity, distributed generation, and virtual power plants, with findings due by July 2027.
Charles Hua, founder of the PowerLines nonprofit, told Canary Media that “Virginia became the first state to introduce this sort of legislation.” Pier LaFarge, co-founder and CEO of Sparkfund, framed the stakes concretely: the grid “only is at peak 50 to 200 hours a year.” The remaining thousands of hours, the infrastructure is underutilized by design.
The incentive problem. Regulated utilities earn a guaranteed return on capital expenditure. Every dollar spent building a new substation or stringing new transmission line generates revenue for shareholders. Every dollar saved by optimizing an existing line does not. This is not a conspiracy; it is the arithmetic of rate-of-return regulation. The result is a system where nobody with a financial interest in the outcome has ever been required to quantify how much capacity already exists.
What the bill actually unlocks. HB 434 does not mandate that utilities deploy batteries or grid-enhancing technologies. It mandates that regulators give “special consideration” to non-wires alternatives after the utilization data is in. The bill defines those alternatives explicitly: energy storage resources, customer-owned or customer-financed capacity, utility-owned distributed generation, and virtual power plants. The SCC must then establish a timeline for utilities to optimize grid usage before approving new capital expenditure.
This matters most where grid stress is highest. Virginia hosts the densest concentration of data centers in the world, centered in Loudoun County. The state is simultaneously experiencing rapid load growth and acute interconnection pressure in PJM territory. Dominion Energy’s capital expenditure plans run into the billions. HB 434 does not block those plans. It requires someone to check whether existing infrastructure could absorb part of the load first.
The contrast. Two hundred miles north, Con Edison is pursuing the opposite approach. NY-BEST and NYSEIA filed a petition this week with the New York Public Service Commission demanding an immediate end to what they characterize as an effective freeze on distributed battery storage interconnection across constrained substations. Trade groups say Con Edison’s new storage rules make battery systems “not economical” in the utility’s service territory. Simultaneously, Con Edison has proposed nearly $6 billion in conventional infrastructure upgrades on overlapping networks.
The juxtaposition is instructive. Virginia is requiring its utilities to prove they need new infrastructure before building it. Con Edison is proposing $6 billion in new infrastructure while making it harder for distributed alternatives to compete. Both states face the same underlying pressure: data center load growth, aging distribution networks, and rising customer bills. They have arrived at opposite regulatory responses.
The national question. If grid utilization measurement becomes standard practice, the implications extend well beyond Virginia. Every state with a regulated utility faces the same structural incentive: utilities profit from building new infrastructure, not from optimizing what exists. HB 434 introduces a basic transparency requirement. Before approving billions in new capital expenditure, regulators will have data on how much of the existing grid is actually being used.
The bill’s scope is narrow. It requires measurement, not action. It does not cap utility spending or mandate specific technologies. It creates a procedural step: before regulators approve new infrastructure, they will know how much of the old infrastructure is being used. Whether other states adopt similar requirements will depend in part on what Virginia’s data reveals.
The timeline. Utilities must file their proposed metrics by November 2026. The SCC issues its order by July 2027. After that, utilization data becomes part of the regulatory record in Virginia’s infrastructure proceedings. For a bill that passed the House without a single dissenting vote, the mechanism is modest. The data it produces may not be.
The question HB 434 poses is straightforward: how much of the existing grid is actually being used? In 49 states, nobody with regulatory authority has been required to answer it. Virginia will have the data by mid-2027. What regulators and utilities do with it will determine whether grid utilization becomes a standard metric or remains a number nobody wanted to count.
Sources
Virginia Is Becoming the Nation’s Grid Utilization Test Bed (Latitude Media)
Virginia: Do More With Your Existing Power Grid (Canary Media)
Virginia House Unanimously Passes Legislation to Require Utility Measurement of Grid Utilization (pv magazine USA)
Industry Seeks Immediate Halt to Con Edison Storage Policy (RTO Insider)