Berkeley and Jefferson Counties lie at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, on limestone soils
that have been farmed since the eighteenth century. Together the two counties hold 1,369 farms working
on 122,507 acres, about a third of Berkeley County and nearly half of Jefferson.
More than 16,000 acres are under conservation easements and another 30,000+ acres are held as wildlife
management areas, nature preserves, parks, scenic corridors, and local land trusts. The network of protected
spaces reflects a community committed to balancing rapid regional growth with land conservation.
The limestone that makes this soil productive also makes the water beneath unusually exposed. Much of
the region is karst, or bedrock dissolved over millennia into fissures, conduits, and caves. Water moves
through karst quickly and along channels that are difficult to map. A contaminant entering the ground at
one point can emerge at a spring miles away in days, rather than filtering slowly through soil and rock.
Karst is also why this region is prone to sinkholes.
A karst aquifer is not an evenly satuarated layer that
draws down predictably. Rather, it is a network of channels, and pumping from one part of it can affect
wells and springs that ordinary modeling may not connect. Most households outside the municipal systems
draw from wells and springs.
The Eastern Panhandle region has been
recovering from a severe drought since 2024. The areas current drought status ranges from abnormally dry
to moderate drought.
THIS SECTION NEEDS SOME WORK -- THE IDEA IS "WHY SHOULD ANYONE CARE ABOUT HEAVY INDUSTRY IN THIS AREA? WHY DOES
FIGHT MATTER?"
The intent of this site to provide information about data center devepment proposals in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. We explore what has been disclosed and what information is shielded from public view, provide an estimation of potential costs and benefits to help communities understand how these projects will impact them, and share information about ways you can take action.
Currently, there are three proposed data centers in Berkeley and Jefferson Counties. All three of these sites were selected by the developer without local notice or input. As of September 2026, construction has yet to begin for any project.
Documented
Visit the Bedington Project page for more information (ADD LINK)
Documented
Visit the Kearneysville Project page for more information (ADD LINK)
Documented
The page for the Summit Point project is in progress.
Non-disclosure agreements and single purpose LLCs, often called shell companies, are a common practice in the data center development industry across the United States. West Virginia is no exception, with many project details yet to be disclosed. HB2014 certified data centers, like the Bedington Project, are also exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests, preventing the public from viewing project details submitted with the application for certification.
Not disclosed
Not disclosed
Not disclosed
Where a figure has not been disclosed, it can sometimes be estimated from figures that have been. Currently, only the proposed data center project in Bedington has disclosed IT load (600 MW). Since the projects in Kearneysville and Summit Point have not disclosed any information regarding IT load or energy, the following estimations account for 1 of 3 proposed data centers in the region.
Estimated
At full build-out, the facility's 600 MW of disclosed IT capacity implies 3.0 to 6.1 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity used each year, with a central estimate of 3.9 TWh. That is 1.2 to 2.5 times the electricity used by all of Berkeley County, which uses about 2.4 TWh a year across homes, businesses, and industry. On average, the facility would draw roughly 340 to 700 MW around the clock. No tenant or hardware has been disclosed, so how intensively the facility runs and how much power its cooling adds could push the actual figure higher or lower.
Definitions:
The disclosed critical IT capacity, 600 MW, is a power measurement that tells us the rate at which the installed server base will consume energy if operating at full capacity. The total energy the facility will consume depends on:
Because no tenant, hardware, or cooling design has been disclosed, our calculations use a range of three scenarios, based on values from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Smith et al., 2026):
The total energy is calculated as:
Operating at each rate for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (8,760 hours) yields:
Minimum:
Central:
Maximum:
Compared with Berkeley County's total annual electricity use of 2.43 TWh (FindEnergy, 2024), the Bedington Project would use 1.24 times (minimum), 1.61 times (central), or 2.50 times (maximum) as much electricity as the entire county.
Note: The 600 MW figure is critical IT capacity only and does not include whole-site power draw. The figures above add facility overhead through PUE, but the actual PUE, utilization, and cooling design will not be known until a tenant is named. A facility that runs at higher utilization or uses less efficient cooling would fall toward the upper end of this range.
Estimated
At national average rates, the facility's electricity use implies 3.9 to 7.9 billion gallons of water consumed each year, with a central estimate of 5.1 billion gallons, or about 14 million gallons a day. Most of that is consumed at the power plants that generate its electricity. The share consumed on site for cooling would be roughly 290 to 590 million gallons a year. No cooling design has been disclosed, so the actual figure could be higher or lower.
Definitions:
The water estimate starts from the facility's annual electricity use (see the electricity estimate above) and applies national average water intensities from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's 2023 estimates (Shehabi et al., 2024). In 2023, U.S. data centers used 176 TWh of electricity and consumed:
Dividing by electricity use gives the national water intensity:
The total water is calculated as:
Applying these intensities to the three electricity scenarios yields:
Minimum (50% utilization, PUE 1.145; 3.01 TWh):
Central (65% utilization, PUE 1.145; 3.91 TWh):
Maximum (80% utilization, PUE 1.45; 6.10 TWh):
To put the totals in context, we compare them with household water use. The average
U.S. household uses about 300 gallons of water per day at home and Berkeley County has
49,384 households.
The household equivalent is calculated as:
This yields:
For comparison, the home water use of all 49,384 county households is about 5.4 billion gallons a year (49,384 households x 300 gallons x 365 days = 5,407,548,000 gallons). This comparison describes the size of the facility's total water footprint. It does not mean the facility would draw that much from Berkeley County's water supply, since most of the total is consumed at power plants.
Note: These are national averages applied to one facility. Actual direct water use depends on the cooling design, which has not been disclosed. A facility using evaporative cooling could consume more than this estimate. One using closed-loop cooling with dry coolers could consume far less. Actual indirect water use depends on the mix of power plants supplying the site. The majority of the indirect water consumption is displaced outside Berkeley County.