Last week, after much debate and a contentious meeting where residents kept interrupting, the Patrick County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to approve the county’s first solar farm. “You sold us out!” someone shouted after the vote.
Barring complications, the developer will build a 211-acre site near Stuart that will generate 12 megawatts of energy. That’s roughly the amount of power it takes to generate a moderately sized data center.
Three days later, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that a Colorado company wants to develop 1,211 acres in Hanover County for a data center park with 46 buildings. There was no word on how many of those would be data centers, but obviously a lot would be. Nor was there information on what size they’d be, but medium-sized data centers use 5 to 20 megawatts of power and large ones are listed as 20 to 100 megawatts.
You can do your own math, though. Even 40 moderately sized data centers would require 40 solar farms the size of the one that caught such turmoil in Patrick County. If you think something here doesn’t add up, you’re right.
The passage of the Clean Economy Act in 2020, which mandates Virginia move to a non-carbonized electric grid, opened up a wave of solar energy development — mostly in the southern part of the state. It’s also provoked resistance in many counties, of which Patrick County is simply the most recent. Some counties have imposed caps on how much land they’ll allow for solar development or set up other rules that make solar development difficult.
The objections to solar vary from place to place — in Patrick County there were complaints about the company’s environmental record and the types of chemicals in its solar panels — but one objection is consistent. Many people in rural areas see solar farms — that term is coming to be regarded as propaganda — as industrial development, incompatible with a rural community. If people wanted to look out on an industrial site, they wouldn’t be living in Patrick County (or fill in the blank with whatever community is involved).
This is a problem; if Virginia’s going to trade fossil fuels for renewables, those renewable energy sources have to be somewhere. We can stick wind energy off-shore, although there are legal objections to Dominion Energy’s offshore wind site off the coast of Virginia Beach. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy. You can be a donor and likewise have no say.) However, solar’s got to go somewhere on land and it’s got to be somewhere with lots of land, which means it’s going to be somewhere in rural Virginia. As I noted in a previous column, rural Virginia did not bargain for this and now wonders why it’s responsible for being the state’s energy producer.
If we were just talking about replacing our current fossil fuel sources with solar energy, that would be hard enough — but we’re not. The demand for energy isn’t stable. It’s growing — and it’s growing primarily because of data centers.
The Washington Post recently published an alarming story: “Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power.” The Post wrote: “Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.”
That wasn’t even the scariest part. “In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently,” the Post wrote.
That wasn’t the scariest part, either. This was: “Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction.”
Read that again: several large nuclear power plants …
Of course, right now there are no large nuclear power plants planned in Virginia. There aren’t even any small ones planned. The governor’s made it clear he’d like to see one, but for all the chatter about SMRs, no utility has actually proposed building one. That may change someday but right now SMRs in Virginia remain theoretical; the data centers being built are quite real. And each one is driving up the power demand. Dominion says about 20% of its power now goes to data centers; the Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative says just over 50% of its power goes to data centers.
Frustration with data centers is growing in Northern Virginia. Some see too much land being gobbled up for these giant server warehouses. Others don’t think they’re paying enough taxes (a state report found that Virginia has given out $560 million in tax breaks for data centers). Still others don’t like the high-transmission lines that must service them. Localities in Southwest Virginia would love to have all those problems; they’ve cut their data center taxes to almost nothing as a way to lure the jobs and taxable real estate, generally to no avail. Moving data centers to Southwest Virginia might solve some zoning issues in Prince William County, but not the power supply problem — it would simply rearrange the demand from one utility to another.
Meanwhile, data centers, like many other things, are getting bigger. A recent report on data centers by the real estate management firm JLL described how, as land becomes scarce, some data center companies are simply building taller ones: “In Dallas-Fort Worth, DataBank is building a 40 MW three-story data center after securing additional power next to a current 13.5 MW data center. In Northern Virginia, Aligned Data Centers is developing a 72 MW four-story data center positioned as a build-to-suit project for a hyperscale customer.” That means it needs about six solar farms the size of the one approved so painfully and grudgingly in Patrick County.
Artificial intelligence is even more energy-hungry. One AI-related data center in New Jersey last year required 35 megawatts of power, JLL says. Or, as I like to say, nearly three Patrick County solar farms. And that’s just the beginning. In a previous report earlier this year, JLL said that AI’s energy requirements could require data centers of 300 to 500 megawatts. That’s said to be the equivalent of enough power for a city of 300,000 to 500,000 — or 23 to 38 solar farms the size of the one approved in Patrick County.
The obvious question is not simply how we’re going to produce all this power, but where. Actually, the where is easier to answer than the how: It’ll get produced in rural Virginia, or rural America generally, because that’s how power has always worked. We didn’t have coal-fired plants in the middle of major cities, at least not for a long time — we had them in out-of-the-way places like Halifax County or Wise County. Those may not have been out-of-the-way for the people in Halifax and Wise but they were out-of-the-way for the people in the state’s population centers and that’s what mattered. There’s talk of using small modular reactors to power data centers, but I bet you won’t see those small nuclear plants in Data Alley in Loudoun County. If we’re going to dig up land for solar farms, it’ll be in rural Virginia.
This conflict between those who want power and those who don’t want those power sources located in rural areas is not far away. In the most recent session of the General Assembly, we saw legislation introduced that, in the view of local governments, would have allowed the state to overrule their local zoning decisions on major energy facilities. That legislation will be back. And this isn’t unique to Virginia. Michigan passed a law in December to strip local governments of the power to block green energy projects. The Detroit News reports that California, Connecticut, Illinois, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island and South Dakota all have rules or laws of some kind that do something similar.
The Hill recently published an opinion piece by William Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, that was headlined: “America needs wind and solar energy; rural America needs to provide it.” Don’t get me wrong: I like wind and solar and would love to see them power as much of the grid as technologically possible, but I’ve also lived most of my life in rural areas, and I suspect Becker hasn’t. Rural America isn’t going to take it kindly to being told that it needs to sacrifice its rural character. Yes, we’re all complicit — any of us who have ever used a computer has indirectly used a data center somehow. We can’t pretend that this is somebody else’s problem, yet why does rural America alone have to bear the brunt of the solution? Why aren’t data centers required to put solar panels on their flat rooftops? Why aren’t urban brownfields being used for solar farms? The outputs there may be small but would still be symbolic — that we’re all in this together. Becker blames part of the rural opposition to solar power on “an intentional disinformation campaign by carpetbaggers linked to conservative groups.” He links to one such instance in Page County. I have no reason to disbelieve that’s happening in some places, but the opposition to solar I’ve seen is much more homegrown — and genuine.
Those who would like to see more solar energy and insist that it must be produced in rural Virginia risk misunderstanding rural communities, and not for the first time: The anger over solar is often quite real. You may think it’s silly, but if you don’t live in a rural community, you also may not fully appreciate all the feelings at play, or their intensity. To many people, this feels like yet another assault on communities that already often feel under siege — sometimes economically but often culturally. For someone in Washington to say that rural communities “need” to sign up for solar power is politically counterproductive, to say the least. Having someone in Richmond say that isn’t going to be welcome, either. I don’t have a better idea for how to broach this conversation, other than to suggest it must be done gingerly and with rural voices doing most of the talking — if some can be found to do that talking.
So far, the talk I’ve heard comes from the other direction. Last week the Bedford County Board of Supervisors talked of making a “preemptive strike” on any possible state regulation. Supervisor Bob Davis said it was “insanity” for Bedford to allow solar operators. “I’m going to suggest right now that we make it clear that Bedford County — we have a great economy made up of recreation, tourism and agriculture and putting solar panels here would do nothing but destroy the character of this county,” Davis said. “And I’ll tell you right now, before those sons of b— come in here and put solar panels in, I will fight to the death.”
Of course, passing regulations against solar also runs against a long-held conservative principle: property owners’ rights. Davis suggested he was fine curtailing those rights. “They have been able to convince some of our farmers you can continue to farm and you can use the land that you don’t want to be able to farm. I want to be able to say ‘no, you can’t use that land. So if you want to continue to farm you’re not going to be able to have the solar.”
That’s an unusual position to take in a conservative locality where “property rights” often trumps other concerns, but it also shows the depths of feeling about solar in some parts of the state, with some conservative supervisors willing to take what are really liberal actions — using the power of government to intervene in the free market — to achieve a desired end of blocking solar. Of course, such bans could also have unintended consequences; the farmer who can’t milk his back 40 for solar income might find it’s more profitable to sell the whole farm for a subdivision and a Walmart. Instead of looking at solar panels, you might be looking at a parking lot.
Nonetheless, the point is that even the level of solar development we have has stirred up anger in parts of rural Virginia. How much more will there be if our energy demands keep rising and rural Virginia is expected to supply all of it?
In this week’s newsletter:
I write a weekly political newsletter that goes out each Friday at 3 p.m. You can sign up for that or any of our other free newsletters. In this week’s issue:
- The Virginia Public Access Project calculates that Del. Terry Austin, R-Botetourt County, is the most successful legislator in this year’s General Assembly session.
- Why the legislators who didn’t get any bills passed were so unsuccessful.
- Lynchburg Republicans are voting Saturday on a unit chair; why that’s a key test of what kind of party they want to have.
- How Gov. Glenn Youngkin spent some free time during his Thursday visit to Roanoke. Hint: See the video above, in which he describes his Wednesday visit to Southwest Virginia.