Vicky Hu didn’t realize she lived at the heart of the internet until the summer of 2025 when a representative from her utility called and said it might run a transmission line through her backyard and plant a pole there.

“He said, ‘Oh, we will minimize the damage, the impact. You will not even notice the pole is in your backyard,’” Hu recalled.

The monopole tower would be about 165 feet tall. He told her it would require cutting down hundreds of trees on her 1.3-acre property and the woods behind it. “What did you just say?” she asked him.

Hu, who works in real estate and construction, has lived for two decades on a street in Ashburn, Va., that backs up to a wooded conservation easement where, she thought, nothing could be built.

It turns out her utility, Dominion Energy, has power of eminent domain, the right to take private property for a public use, provided it pays fair compensation.

Hu soon learned the term “Data Center Alley” and realized her home sits near the epicenter of the world’s largest data-center market. Virginia’s Loudoun County, just outside Washington, D.C., tracked 233 data-center buildings completed or in some stage of the construction process as of March.

Now, Hu is part of a battle over the need for electric-grid upgrades driven largely—though Dominion said not entirely—by rising electricity demand for new data centers. She isn’t alone.

Fights over the placement of high-voltage transmission lines are happening across the U.S. as utilities embark on what they expect to be a generational investment in the grid.

Spending on the transmission system by a group of investor-owned utilities and transmission companies is expected to rise to $43.7 billion this year, according to the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade group. That is up about 10% from last year’s estimate.

Beyond electricity-hungry data centers, many utilities are trying to keep up with growth in manufacturing, electric vehicles and population. Much of the nation’s power infrastructure was installed during the decades following World War II and is due for replacement. New power generation is needed, too. That has sparked debates about where to build the necessary infrastructure. In Texas, country singer Tanya Tucker is among those joining the fight.

The ranch where she lives in Burnet County northwest of Austin, Texas, could be bisected by one of the high-voltage power lines proposed to crisscross the state.

“You don’t rush in and turn someone’s life upside down,” Tucker told state lawmakers in a July hearing before singing a few lines of her 1978 hit “Texas (When I Die).”In Georgia, Cynthia Van Epps spent more than a year wrangling with Southern’s Georgia Power over the construction of a planned transmission line through her backyard.

She and her husband were told that the utility at one point was considering taking a large easement that would require tearing out their pool—and to prepare for an easement line within about 12 feet of the house.

They hired an attorney and expected a court fight but instead reached a confidential settlement to sell the property to the utility to be demolished. Van Epps said she is aware that not everyone facing a similar situation can afford an attorney—and she wants to see eminent domain laws overhauled.

“Criminals who kill people are afforded a lawyer for free,” Van Epps said. “People whose property is being stolen from them, if they can’t afford an attorney, that’s too bad. They’re up against these major companies.”Clay Rikard, senior vice president of system planning at Southern, said the company has a more than 99% voluntary-agreement rate with landowners and rarely resorts to condemnation. Along the 35-mile line, Georgia Power plans to tear down 29 homes and has reached agreements with all of them.

Southern, which also operates electric utilities in Alabama and Mississippi, is in the midst of its largest-ever transmission expansion. Over about 10 years, it plans to add more than 500 miles of new lines, plus 1,100 miles of rebuilt or upgraded lines that can carry more electricity. It is also using technology to maximize the use of existing lines.

“The infrastructure we’re building benefits everyone,” Rikard said. “Data centers do represent a lot of the growth, but I think they’re also bringing tremendous benefits to our communities.”Adding transmission lines allows for retiring of old power plants, adding new generation such as solar or bringing power in from other areas, which improves resilience, he added.

In Virginia and North Carolina, Dominion’s annual electricity demand growth has jumped to about 5.5% from around 1% to 2% before 2022, said Greg Mathe, director of electric-transmission engagement, permitting and land.

Customer growth is primarily from data centers for cloud computing, but the region is also seeing electrification and manufacturing growth, including from pharmaceuticals, he said. “But when you have a strong grid, you’re bolstering everybody’s reliability,” Mathe added.

The 500-kilovolt line planned to cross Hu’s backyard is what the utility considers a “backbone reliability project.”Her homeowners association donated property it owned at the back of the neighborhood to the local school system, hoping to scuttle the route. Generally, Virginia utilities don’t have standard eminent domain authority over certain public entities like county governments or school boards.

But Virginia’s utility commission approved the path anyway. The fight will move to the state’s Supreme Court following appeals by Hu, her homeowners association, the school board and others. A date for the hearing hasn’t been set. Meanwhile, Dominion is talking with school officials about possible crossings, aiming for a compromise.

Utilities generally avoid saying a line is being built for a particular project or industry, said Alexandra Klass, an energy law professor at the University of Michigan Law School.

“Typically, they’re going to build a transmission line that is going to deal with congestion generally,” Klass said. “A new data center would be a reason for that. But frankly, we need to build a lot of new transmission.”