Dominion's Data Centre Queue Reached 54.9GW as Construction Fell

Dominion Energy Virginia held about 54.9 gigawatts of contracted data centre capacity in September 2026, up roughly 6.3GW or 13 per cent on December 2025, according to the earnings slides the company published on 30 October 2026. The composition of that increase is more interesting than its size.

Dominion sorts the pipeline into three stages, and they commit the customer to very different things. An engineering letter of authorisation buys a detailed engineering plan, with the costs reimbursed to Dominion. A construction letter of authorisation authorises construction and, in the company's own words, means the customer must reimburse Dominion Energy for all spent costs should they walk away. An electric service agreement defines how the customer will take service and includes a revenue requirement whether the customer takes service or not.

Where the 6.3 gigawatts went

Between December 2025 and September 2026 the engineering stage grew from 27.4GW to 32.8GW and the electric service agreements from 10.2GW to 12.2GW. The construction stage fell, from 11.0GW to 9.8GW. Of the 6.3GW of net growth, 5.4GW landed in the least binding category.

A 1.2GW fall in construction authorisations alongside a 2.0GW rise in service agreements is consistent with projects graduating from one stage to the next, which would be the benign reading and is probably the right one. The slides do not say. Dominion published the stage totals and not the movements between them, so the arithmetic is as far as the disclosure goes, and whether any project left the queue altogether cannot be read off these numbers.

What the pipeline is already delivering

The demand is not hypothetical at the meter. Weather-normal regulated electric sales rose 3.4 per cent over the latest twelve months, led by commercial sales up 8.6 per cent. Dominion Energy Virginia booked $4,218m of revenue in the quarter against $3,311m a year earlier, and operating earnings of $862m against $679m. Group operating earnings were $1.28 a share, including five cents from renewable natural gas tax credits and five cents from better than normal weather, and the company said it expects to finish in the top half of its $3.45 to $3.69 full-year range.

Scale is the other half of the point. The firmest 12.2GW on its own is about three quarters of what the entire pipeline held in July 2023, when the total across all three stages was roughly 16.5GW. The queue has more than tripled in a little over three years, and the part of it that Dominion can bill regardless of whether a server ever switches on has roughly doubled.

The gap between a signed pipeline and a built one is where this gets decided, and it has already bitten elsewhere. As Parallax Nexus reported, Microsoft terminated its agreement at Nscale's data centre in Loughton, Essex, after the grid connection slipped into the 2030s, and NERC's package of new reliability standards for data centres and AI facilities cleared its final stakeholder ballot in October before heading to federal regulators.

The rules now being written around the queue

Dominion sits inside PJM, the grid operator whose territory covers northern Virginia. On 9 October 2026, in docket ER26-3515, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission accepted PJM's definition of a large load and its large load registry, effective 12 October, and rejected the rest of PJM's proposal, including the interim resource adequacy service and the bring your own new capacity rules, as documented by RMI. The accepted definition captures any end-use customer load with a cumulative peak of 50MW or more at a single electrical site, and counts affiliated facilities within a one-mile radius as one site. Dominion's 54.9GW is the sort of thing those rules now have to measure.

One more thing hangs over the figures. Management told the earnings call that evidentiary hearings on the proposed combination with NextEra Energy begin in late 2026 and early 2027. Whoever ends up owning the queue inherits the obligation to build for it.

The honest reading is that the headline 13 per cent is a weaker signal than it looks and the 54.9GW total is a stronger one. Growth concentrated in engineering letters is growth in optionality: developers paying to find out what a connection would cost, which is cheap next to building one. The line to watch next quarter is the electric service agreement total, because that is the one Dominion collects on whether the data centre ever draws power.