Virginia Commercial Electricity Sales · 12-Month Total (GWh)

## What this measures

Electricity sold to commercial customers in Virginia, in gigawatt-hours (million kilowatt-hours), summed over the 12 months to each month. Monthly from January 2001; 12-month totals from December 2001.

## Why it matters

Utilities bill most data centers as commercial customers, so commercial electricity sales are where data center load shows up first in public data. Northern Virginia (Loudoun and Prince William counties) is the largest data center market in the world. Read against the national total (energy.retail_sales.commercial_12m_gwh.us), it shows how much of the growth is local.

## How to read it

Higher means more electricity sold. A 12-month total removes the seasons: read its growth over a year or more. Over the ten years from 2015 to 2025, Virginia’s commercial sales rose 73.0% and the U.S. total 9.8% (calendar-year totals).

## What it does not say

Commercial is a proxy, not a data center count: the sector also holds offices, stores, hospitals, schools and government buildings, and some large data centers buy power as industrial customers or directly on the wholesale market. Weather moves it too: hot summers and cold winters raise it. EIA revises recent months when utilities file the annual EIA-861.

## How it's built

EIA's API (electricity/retail-sales, sector COM, state VA), monthly sales in million kilowatt-hours, which Palanor stores as GWh (the same unit). The 12-month total adds the latest 12 consecutive months; a month is published only when all 12 are reported. Each run reads the full history so EIA's revisions carry through.

## Source

U.S. Energy Information Administration, electricity retail sales by state and sector, Forms EIA-861M and EIA-861 (eia.gov). Public domain. Refreshed weekly.