It’s probably not too early for Abigail Spanberger, fresh off last week’s 57%–43% election night win, to be thinking about data centers.

The Virginia governor-elect will inherit spiking electricity demands and gaps in the state’s power supply thanks in part to the state’s concentration of the cloud computing infrastructure, which is projected to continue to grow.

There are 663 data centers in Virginia, about a third of them in Loudoun County’s “Data Center Alley.” The county’s former lax building and zoning regulations, tax incentives and proximity to an extensive fiber optic network, plus relatively affordable power across Virginia, have spurred the building boom since the late ‘90s — and a local board of county supervisors projects the number in Loudoun alone will continue to increase.

“We’re going to start butting our heads up against [energy] constraints.”

“We’re going to start butting our heads up against constraints,” University of Virginia energy economist Bill Shobe told Technical.ly. “We have to figure out how to provide the electricity, how to stay compliant with our clean energy goals and how to keep consumers from having to pay for providing electricity to data centers.”

During Spanberger’s campaign as the Democratic candidate, running against Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, she backed alleviating energy costs for consumers and incentivizing renewable energy projects, but also said she’d consider extending tax breaks for data centers. Spanberger’s campaign did not respond to questions regarding plans for energy policy and data center regulation once she takes office in January.

However, because the Democratic party now has control of both houses in Virginia, Spanberger is in a strong position to get desired legislation passed, per Mark Christie, an energy law and policy expert from William & Mary.

He’s expecting potential rules will get a ton of attention from Dominion Energy — the primary utility in Virginia — and data center industry leaders.

“The interest groups involved,” Christie said, “have a lot of influence in the legislature and have very strong lobbying teams.”

Over the next five years, power consumption by gigawatt is expected to more than double in Loudoun County, in large part because of demand from data centers, which require large amounts of energy for uninterrupted server operation and to keep cooling systems running.