There is a word moving through the energy industry right now like a current through a line: hyperscale. It shows up in regulatory hearings, in utility planning documents, in conversations between cooperative executives trying to figure out what comes next. It describes data centers so large—so hungry for electricity—that they represent a category of demand the American grid was never designed to absorb. And it is no longer contained to Northern Virginia.

To understand what that means for communities like ours, Allegheny Mountain Radio sat down at WCHG with two people whose job it is to know: Bill Buchanan, CEO of BARC Electric Cooperative, and Jason Carter, Vice President of External and Member Relations at Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative. The conversation—available to listen to above—covers what a cooperative actually is, what a hyperscale data center actually demands, and what it could mean for the members who pay their bills and expect their lights to stay on.

Bill Buchanan has spent 35 years in the cooperative industry, and he put the distinction between a cooperative and a traditional utility plainly: “In a cooperative system, our consumers are member owners. They’re part of the governance. We’re a not-for-profit—versus an investor-owned utility, which is a stock-held company primarily accountable to its stockholders.” That distinction matters enormously when large new demands land on the system.

A cooperative is accountable to its members—the people who live in the territory, who own it collectively, and who govern it democratically. BARC serves Bath, Alleghany, Rockbridge, and Highland counties across more than 2,200 miles of line, much of it through mountainous terrain. Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative, represented here by Jason Carter, is interconnected with BARC in Highland County. Different in size and geography, but built on the same principle: the people on the other end of the line own the system.

Artificial intelligence has changed the data center conversation entirely. The facilities being built to support AI operate at a scale that puts them in a different category from anything that came before. When asked to explain, in plain terms, what hyperscale means for a cooperative that might have to serve it, Jason Carter said: “Some of these facilities will have an electric demand that is 95% more than even some of the largest commercial industrial loads that we serve now. What we see as a manufacturing center in Augusta County—that’s minuscule compared to some of these facilities.”

Minuscule. That is how an experienced cooperative executive describes a manufacturing plant—the kind of facility that anchors a county’s economy, employs hundreds, and that rural communities compete to attract—compared to a single hyperscale data center.

He followed with a second figure: “We see a potential data center load in the northern part of our territory that’s bigger than the entire rest of the Shenandoah Valley that we serve now—just among a handful of entities potentially.” A handful of facilities—not yet built, not yet certain, but real enough to be in planning conversations—could draw more electricity than the entire existing cooperative membership combined. That is what hyperscale means when it lands on a rural system.

For years, Virginia’s data center story was a Loudoun County story—something that could be watched from the Allegheny Highlands as if it were happening somewhere else. That distance is closing. The same forces that filled Northern Virginia are now pushing development outward, toward rural counties with water, land, and transmission access. The question is no longer whether this story reaches communities like ours, but what kind of preparation is already underway.

In Part Two, Bill and Jason explain what happens when this level of demand actually lands on a cooperative system—who pays, what protections are being built, and what the next five years honestly look like for cooperative members.

Listen & Read More: Listen to Part One above. Part Two—“Who Pays and What the Next Five Years Look Like for Cooperative Members”—continues the conversation. The full series is available at AlleghenyMountainRadio.org.