John McGuire's journey from SEAL Team to Congress

So you bring up energy, and I want to talk about data centers.

Somehow Virginia has become the leading state in the country on the number of data centers that we have.

That kind of astounded me.

I had to like... go way down the rabbit hole and chat GPT when I was reading that the other day.

What is your position on sort of that explosive growth in our state? Is it is it good for us? Is it an energy drain on us? Are we going to see the prices in our energy spike because we keep inviting all these data centers in and what? How do you feel about what's happened there?

Well, you're absolutely right.

We have more data centers in Virginia than any other state.

In fact, I believe the number is 34% of the world's data centers are in Virginia.

Yeah.

So somehow, someway, we become the data center place.

But let's go back to energy for a second.

Have you noticed that your electric bill is going up?

Yeah.

All over my district, I'm getting phone calls.

If you remember, Governor Glenn Youngkin took us out of REGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

And when he did that, everyone's heating and cooling prices went way down.

Their bills went way down.

As soon as Governor Abigail Spanberger got elected, and remember, she ran on affordability, she put us back in REGI.

And people's electric bills have almost doubled all across Virginia, like overnight.

It's like a carbon tax on energy.

It just makes everybody pay for these windmills and these solar panels.

Which, by the way, the Secretary of Interior said today in the United States, 70% of our energy is fossil fuels, 30% is nuclear.

And then he paused and he says, how much room does that leave you for wind and solar? Not a lot, but we're paying for it.

But data centers, if a county, city, or town does not want a data center, I don't think they should have it.

It should be up to the county, city, or town if they want it.