Landowners have packed community meetings by the hundreds. Signs lining country roads across northern Maryland decry “eminent domain for corporate gain.” More than 10,000 people have joined a Facebook opposition group. A new documentary chronicles their struggle.

The electricity interests behind a proposed power line that would cut through 70 miles of mostly rural Maryland are finding that many residents don’t care much for the idea. The plan has united Democratic environmentalists and Republican property rights defenders in a grassroots response of outrage. Even Gov. Wes Moore has criticized the project’s developers.

The Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project has spurred debates over the state’s energy future since its announcement in June, forcing questions about how Maryland will wean itself off fossil fuels while managing ballooning electricity demand. It’s also left many Marylanders incensed about being asked to sacrifice to accommodate the enormous new strain on the power grid from data centers across state lines.

Backers of the controversial power line say spiking the plan isn’t an option. To accommodate economic growth while transitioning away from dirty energy sources like coal, operators and observers of the region’s power grid expect the mid-Atlantic is going to need more power lines. A lot of them.

One influential study by Princenton University researchers estimates that the U.S. needs to triple its transmission capacity if it wants to eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The operator of the regional grid, PJM Interconnection, plans to sink $5 billion in the next few years into upgrading its system, partly in response to new data center demand.

If the Piedmont Reliability Project doesn’t get built, PJM says, the region will suffer rolling brownouts and blackouts as soon as 2027.

The question is not whether we need to build new power lines, said Casey Baker, a transmission industry analyst with the policy group GridLab — it’s where to put them.

“Nobody’s going to be like, ‘Yes! Put it my backyard,’” he said.

A power grab in Virginia

For decades, demand on the mid-Atlantic power grid has been almost flat. That’s meant the people who manage the system, which spans from the Jersey Shore into Indiana, haven’t needed to worry about rationing electricity among the 65 million residents they serve.

But that stability is ending. PJM predicts system demand will climb 40% in the next 15 years. Among the drivers, a PJM spokesperson cited population growth and increasing reliance on electric cars, stoves and heat pumps.

A more urgent factor, also cited by PJM, are the data centers that now sprawl across Northern Virginia, sapping electricity like entire cities.

These computer warehouses — humming through tasks such as storing old emails and powering artificial intelligence — are a polarizing new presence on the grid, and the Piedmont Reliability power line would ferry electricity to their doorstep: a Frederick County substation less than 3 miles from the state line.

While backers say these power lines are needed to ensure reliable electricity, some are skeptical.

“How can you say that when there isn’t a Maryland connection?” asked Brandon Hill, a landowner who lives at the other end of the proposed line, in northern Baltimore County near Pennsylvania.

Hill bought a 60-acre farm next to his childhood home during the pandemic. A technophile who invests in artificial intelligence companies and builds computers for fun, Hill has become one of the most visible and outspoken critics of PJM’s plan. He’s been researching data centers for years, but ever since he learned that the Piedmont Reliability Project threatens to cut across his land, he’s grown skeptical of how officials try to accommodate them.

Moore, for instance, pushed legislation last year aimed at courting data centers to Maryland. Hill sees the governor as well-intentioned but misguided when it comes to the transmission line. Hill wants to meet with the governor to persuade him that developments like Piedmont Reliability undermine the state’s goals for climate, the environment and jobs.

Maryland People’s Counsel David Lapp, a state-appointed consumer watchdog, argues that grid operators shouldn’t accommodate new demand from data centers the same way they do a new housing development.

PJM says it’s bracing for another 7,500 megawatts of new data center demand in Northern Virginia and Maryland — a load Lapp notes is larger than Baltimore Gas and Electric built over a century.

And the costs of the $5 billion in infrastructure upgrades PJM plans to address this new power suck would fall on ratepayers. The grid operator say its upgrades address Marylanders’ needs — supporting, for example, a nascent electric vehicles market — but Lapp said it’s clear what Piedmont Reliability is really about.

“The more they can say it’s resulting from other things outside of data centers, the more rational that seems,” he said.

Still other experts caution against blaming data centers alone for the region’s infrastructure needs.

Today, data centers account for a fraction of the region’s overall power demand — about 4%. PJM expects that to quadruple in the next 15 years, but a green-energy future puts other pressures on the grid. More people will charge their cars and warm their homes with electric heat pumps.

Complicating things more, Maryland produces less and less of its own electricity. Since 2018, PJM says more than 6,000 megawatts of power generation have been taken offline in Maryland with new sources replacing barely a quarter of that.

All of that means the grid needs to be stronger.

Think of the grid like a spider web, said Baker, the industry analyst. If you connect one point to another, as Piedmont Reliability would, you fortify the web.

Baker said it’s hard to parse how important this particular line is for the grid’s reliability, but it’s also not as simple as saying the project is only going to help data centers. One day the line might carry electricity that winds up powering web servers in Northern Virginia. The next day it could help keep the lights on in Baltimore, which draws electricity from a power station near Piedmont Reliability’s northern end.

Opponents also shouldn’t assume that stopping new power lines will stop data centers, Baker warned. They might dislike the alternative just as much.

Take the multibillion dollar data center Meta wants to build in Louisiana, he said. Eager to get its complex online as soon as possible, the Silicon Valley giant plans to construct three giant natural gas plants next door. That means the turbines making Meta’s computers hum will pump climate-warming emissions into the atmosphere.

Environmentalism or NIMBYism?

The Piedmont Reliability Project is hardly the nation’s first — or biggest — transmission line to draw a visceral response. In Maine, a proposed 145-mile line aiming to bring in Canadian hydropower has been delayed for years.

Sharon Reishus, an energy consultant who formerly chaired the Maine Public Utilities Commission, supported that project in the face of environmentalist opposition – an easy decision, she said, since it promised to carry zero-carbon power into the U.S. grid.

The challenge for utility regulators is facilitating these developments in a sensitive way, she said. But in the end, Reishus added, most regulators approve these projects because their mission is to maintain a reliable power grid.

That’s a real challenge in a region experiencing as much growth as the mid-Atlantic, Reishus said: If you want economic growth, you need to build more power lines.

Leading the charge against the Maryland line is a coalition that includes the state’s most influential environmental groups. One analysis by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation found the Piedmont Reliability Project could disrupt hundreds of acres of forest cover, streams, protected land and other sensitive ecosystems.

Evan Isaacson, a senior attorney for the Chesapeake Legal Alliance, said he understands the broader needs for new transmission infrastructure to curb climate change, but he’s not convinced this particular line addresses that problem.

Isaacson sees data centers as leaching the state’s climate ambitions, and if Maryland facilitates more of them, residents will see new power lines all over the place.

“It’s hard to see where this ends,” he said.

That question rests in the hands of state utility regulators. PSEG Renewable Transmission, the New Jersey company tapped by PJM to build the power line, applied last month for a construction permit from the Public Service Commission, whose members are appointed by Moore.

Opponents of the line have argued that PSEG should build its new line along existing corridors or rely on upgrades that can enhance transmission line capacity. But the electricity interests behind the project say the potential for such upgrades would be limited on Maryland’s aging infrastructure, while building parallel to existing lines would impact homes and a school in the way.

Moore has taken a hard line on the controversial transmission project, saying he shares opponents’ “grave concerns” about the plan. Exactly what this project will do for Maryland residents, he said, “remains wholly unclear.”

But whether Moore will try to curb the development isn’t clear.

He met with officials from PJM and PSEG ahead of their regulatory application to discuss the firestorm. Neither side disclosed details, but Moore said in a statement that he came away from the meeting confident the developer and grid operator “understand they must be better partners with the state and the community.”

Hill and his wife Marie first learned about the Piedmont Reliability Project just four days after they were married on their farm this summer. The line could tear through a hillside where Hill recently planted an orchard of chestnut trees, the beginnings of a passion project he hopes will occupy the rest of his life.

But Hill said the issue isn’t personal. He thinks this power line would serve as little more than a highway for polluting Pennsylvania electricity sources to Virginia’s energy-hungry data centers.

“The whole idea of this line goes against all these things that all these people are talking about,” he said. “The environment, green energy goals and everything else.”