Virginia's Data Centers Sit on 33 GW of Diesel Backup as Diesel Tops $6

Virginia now has an official count of the machines that keep its data centers running when the grid fails. A report delivered to the General Assembly's money committees on October 1, 2026 by the staff of the State Corporation Commission (SCC), compiled with the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), lists 10,290 permitted Tier 2 (or earlier) generator sets at data centers with a combined capacity of 26,718 MW, and 3,477 Tier 4 or Tier 4-equivalent sets with 6,414 MW.

In total, that is 13,767 generators and 33,132 MW of backup capacity, almost all of it fueled by diesel. The count arrives as diesel prices in the US have climbed to levels not seen since 2022, driven by the conflict that closed the Strait of Hormuz at the end of February. The same report, required by the 2026 budget bill, gives the first aggregated figure for contracted data center demand across Virginia's utilities. The war that began on February 28 created what the International Energy Agency (IEA) calls the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

Weekly retail data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, show the US average on-highway diesel price at $3.809 a gallon in the week of February 23, 2026. A common rule of thumb in the generator industry is that a diesel set burns roughly 0.07 gallons per kWh at full load. The generator fleet sits inside PJM Interconnection, where data center demand is the main driver of rising load forecasts and capacity prices.

The Virginia count shows that three-quarters of the backup capacity is Tier 2 or earlier: 26,718 MW out of 33,132 MW. Virginia's first aggregated numbers give a clearer picture of the scale of its data center industry: about 21.8 GW of contracted load and about 33.1 GW of backup generators.