Read more about the bills mentioned in this story — or any other legislation in the 2025 General Assembly session — at https://lis.virginia.gov/.
The fate of a solar-energy bill that generated a heated debate among more than a dozen Virginia senators on Monday remains up in the air after a late-afternoon reversal of a vote that had killed it earlier in the day.
Supporters say SB 1190, by Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, would provide much-needed technical assistance and advice to localities that receive proposals for large, utility-scale solar projects. Opponents argue it would encroach upon local government authority over how land is used.
Initially, the bill failed, 20-19. All 19 Republicans in the Senate plus Sen. Russet Perry, D-Loudoun County, voted against it. Sen. Lashrecse Aird, D-Petersburg, did not vote.
Later Monday, Perry moved to reconsider the bill, which General Assembly rules allow the prevailing side of a vote to do. She then moved to pass the bill by for the day. That means it will be up for consideration Tuesday, the last day before crossover, when the House of Delegates sends its passed bills to the Senate and vice-versa.
Perry offered no explanation for the reconsideration as she made her motions.
“A few folks reached out to Senator Perry to ask her to take it by for the day so they could continue to have conversations with members about possible amendments,” Perry’s chief of staff, Jessie Williams Reynolds, said in an email later Monday. “She did it as a courtesy. That’s all there is to it.”
Monday’s debate on the Senate floor marked the latest episode in an ongoing state-versus-local tension over who in Virginia should have the authority to approve or reject new solar projects.
“I’ve never brought a bill that caused so much consternation for this body, and I’ve never heard some of these speeches, and I thank you all for your candor and your remarks,” Deeds told his fellow senators after they debated and just before they initially voted to kill the bill.
Deeds’ bill would create a committee of state agency representatives to offer opinions to local governments on utility-scale solar proposals.
It would create an entity called the Virginia Clean Energy Technical Assistance Center, composed of experts from Virginia’s public universities, to conduct research and analysis related to solar siting and permitting.
It would require each of Virginia’s 21 planning district commissions — voluntary associations of local governments — to develop regional energy plans, with each local government then required to set targets for energy production and efficiency based on those plans.
“This bill in no way supersedes local government decision-making on local land use,” Deeds said. “Rather, it ensures that public bodies have the framework and capacity to make informed decisions on critical infrastructure projects to ensure a clean, affordable and reliable electricity grid.”
The bill that Deeds presented Monday differed from its original incarnation. That version — which had been recommended by the state’s Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, a body that studies the commonwealth’s energy policy and energy-related legislation — would have given the state more sway over local governments’ consideration of solar proposals.
The original bill would have created a new state board to review large solar projects. If a locality rejected a solar proposal that the board had recommended, the developer could appeal the locality’s decision to the circuit court, and the burden would have been on the locality to justify its rejection.
Furthermore, each locality would have been required to adopt local solar ordinances that fit within the parameters of a statewide model ordinance created by that board.
And the bill would have required each regional energy plan to demonstrate “a meaningful contribution to the Commonwealth’s energy goals.”
On Monday, Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg, expressed concern that despite the changes, passing Deeds’ legislation would be a step toward returning to the stricter mandates of the earlier version. Obenshain and Deeds both sit on the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, but Obenshain opposed the commission’s recommendation of the original bill.
“I really have every expectation that if this passes and becomes law, we’re just going to see a doubling down of efforts by solar developers to impose an ever-increasing burden on localities across rural Virginia, and I can tell you that that approach is roundly opposed by localities around Virginia,” Obenshain said.
Proponents of solar tout its clean electricity generation and the revenue that solar projects can bring to landowners and localities, but opponents have expressed concerns about such projects’ impact on rural viewsheds, property values and the environment.
Supporters of Deeds’ bill said Monday that it would help localities plan future energy needs as Virginia faces rapidly rising electricity demand, largely due to the growth of data centers. Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in the world, although Virginia has data centers elsewhere, such as in Mecklenburg County.
“There are localities that are approving data centers but not approving how we’re going to power them. That’s a problem,” said Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County.
Opponents said Deeds’ bill would usurp local authority. For example, Sen. Richard Stuart, R-Westmoreland County, pointed to the language requiring localities to include energy-production targets in their comprehensive plans, which are long-term planning documents for local governments.
“Is that not a mandate?” Stuart asked.
“It’s a mandate to put something in a comprehensive plan. … Comprehensive plans aren’t binding on what localities decide,” Surovell replied.
Senate Minority Leader Ryan McDougle, R-Hanover County, cited language in the bill that said “land availability and cost” would be among the factors that determine where solar projects go. That, he said, would mean rural areas — where land is cheaper and more widely available — would bear a disproportionate burden of future solar development.
“When you look at this, the impact on rural Virginia is incredible,” McDougle said. “Just incredible.”
Surovell countered that the bill also requires consideration of other factors, including impact on agricultural and forest land, and said that nothing in the bill would mandate that new solar projects go in rural areas.
“All this bill does is planning,” Surovell said. “Planning, planning, planning.”
Sen. Barbara Favola, D-Arlington, expressed similar sentiments, noting that Virginia set clean energy goals for itself. The Virginia Clean Economy Act, passed in 2020, requires Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power, the state’s two largest electric utilities, to achieve carbon-free energy portfolios by 2045 and 2050, respectively; it includes deadlines for adding new solar, wind and energy storage.
“This bill merely articulates a planning process to help get us to more renewable energy sources,” Favola said.
[Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]
At least a couple of legislators characterized the bill as residents of Northern Virginia dictating what residents of Southside and Southwest Virginia should do with their land.
“I do believe many of my friends that live in Northern Virginia want to be able to drive around the Beltway in their electric vehicle,” said Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, “and when they go home and they plug it in at night, they want to close their eyes and know that the electric genie is only putting solar-powered energy that they got from Southside and Southwest Virginia into their car. And then they feel good. They don’t feel dirty that maybe it was coal.”
Deeds said that the regional energy plans were specifically intended to “make sure that Northern Virginia has some skin in the game.”
Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico County, said he hoped that Deeds’ bill would help advance a “depoliticized” conversation about the quality of solar proposals and their appropriateness for an area rather than an “us-versus-them” conflict.
“This is a ‘we’ thing,” VanValkenburg said. “We all need energy.”
This year’s legislation could be seen as a sequel to bills that Deeds and Del. Rip Sullivan Jr., D-Fairfax County, carried last year that would have allowed, under certain circumstances, a solar developer to ask state regulators to override a local government if that local government rejected a proposal for a utility-scale solar project.
This year, Sullivan carried a similar bill to the one that Deeds presented on Monday.
When he presented his HB 2126 last week to a House of Delegates subcommittee, Sullivan said that his goal was to “move Virginia forward to our clean energy goals more quickly while respecting and preserving local control over land use decisions.”
Last year’s attempt, Sullivan said, was “admittedly a very heavyhanded approach.”
This year’s bill, he said, was “not perfect, and not everyone likes this bill” but it was “really a rather elegant solution to what is a very complex problem.”
The subcommittee voted 4-1 to table the bill, effectively killing it for this year.