Eastern Panhandle United

They are coming for our farms! (DEFINITELY NOT THIS LOL)

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 is 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 in a 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 receives a little over 30 inches of precipitation a year, and the region is recovering from a severe drought that began in 2024. The area currently ranges from abnormally dry to moderate drought.

Eastern Panhandle Data Center Proposals Overview

Currently, there are two proposed data centers in Berkeley and Jefferson Counties. Both of these sites were selected by the developer without local notice or input. As of September 2026, construction has yet to begin for either project.

Documented

Project Blue Jay (Penzance)

  • Location: Berkeley County, WV on farmland in Bedington near Scrabble Road and Berkeley Station Road
  • Developer: Penzance (Virginia-based company)
  • Acreage: 565 acres
  • IT Load: 600 MW
  • Estimated Temporary Jobs: 1000+
  • Estimated Permanent Jobs: 125+ (90k-110k each)
  • Other disclosed: etc
Sources

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Documented

Project Carmel (QTS)

  • Location: Berkeley and Jeffereson County, WV on an old orchard in Kearneysville; adjacent to the Hospice of the Eastern Panhandle, XX miles from the VA medical center, and immediately neighboring several residiential communities and new home construction
  • Developer: QTS
  • Acreage: 90 acres in Berkeley County, 190 acres in Jeffereson County
  • IT Load: undisclosed
  • Tenant: QTS (this company builds and occupies their own data centers)
Sources

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What remains undisclosed

Blurb about transparency and HB2014 (then link to the HB2014 page in sources/dropdown)

Sources

Add relevent details like who can answer these questions, etc

class="source">Source: [document name, agency, date]

Not disclosed

Project Blue Jay (Penzance)

  • Cooling technology:
  • Server base:
  • Tenant:
  • Water, energy, mitigation etc -- anything on HB2014 application:
Sources

Add relevent details like who can answer these questions, etc

class="source">Source: [document name, agency, date]

Not disclosed

Project Carmel (QTS)

  • Cooling technology:
  • Server base:
  • Estimated Temporary Jobs: undisclosed
  • Estimated Permanent Jobs: undiclosed
  • Other disclosed:
  • I could be wrong, but I think there is a plan that the BC planning commission has seen, but is not public -- need to verify what is and is not known here (not under HB 2014):
Sources

Add relevent details like who can answer these questions, etc

class="source">Source: [document name, agency, date]

What can reasonably be estimated

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 project in Kearneysville has not disclosed any information regarding IT load or energy, the following estimations consider a single data center.

Estimated

Annual electricity demand at full build-out.

Estimated energy consumption of the Project Blue Jay data center
How this was calculated

Placeholder: Methodology

Estimated

Placeholder — water estimate.

Placeholder figure.

How this was calculated

Method goes here.

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