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When Bill Stanley rises to speak in the state Senate, listeners might not always agree with what the Franklin County Republican has to say, but they can always count on a good show.
Such was the case earlier this month when the General Assembly took up a bill that, depending on your point of view, would have merely helped advise rural localities on how to deal with solar projects or been the first step toward the state overriding rural localities that are increasingly blocking solar proposals.
State Sen. Barbara Favola, D-Arlington County, had spoken in favor of the bill. Then it was Stanley’s turn. When someone in the General Assembly is about to stick a rhetorical knife into an opposing legislator, they typically don’t glower. They smile. Stanley was smiling — and smiling broadly.
He turned to Favola and asked: “Can you tell me how many significant, large-scale solar farms there are in Arlington and Alexandria?”
They say a lawyer in court should never ask a question without already knowing the answer, and Stanley is a lawyer, a very celebrated one. He, and everyone else in the state Senate, also already knew the answer to how many solar farms are in Arlington and Alexandria: none.
“I can’t say we have solar farms,” Favola replied, “but I can say we were the first jurisdiction in the commonwealth to require that we have green buildings. … So we’re trying to do our part. We just have a different composition.”
Stanley pounced, as all knew he would. “So that means zero solar farms!”
His point: Favola was backing a bill that wouldn’t really impact her district but would impact his.
Favola’s response: “I will just say maybe one day we can put solar farms on our many rooftops that we have in Arlington.”
From there Stanley went on to give a spirited (and by now familiar) defense of rural Virginia. “The problem we have from our area is that you constantly dictate to our area what we should be doing in our area for you,” Stanley thundered.
Broadly speaking, he’s right: The state’s growing electricity demands are coming primarily from Northern Virginia — a recent state report projects that data centers could triple the state’s energy needs by 2040 — and the impetus behind this particular bill (sponsored by Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville) was that rural governments are often blocking new energy projects, largely because rural residents have come to see solar panels as an unsightly blight that turns their rural landscape into an unwanted industrial one.
(You can watch those exchanges here; the debate on SB 1190 begins at the 1:43:05 mark.)
The General Assembly did not resolve this conflict. This particular bill was unexpectedly killed when two Democrats — Russet Perry of Loudoun County and Lashresce Aird of Petersburg — opposed it. However, let’s rewind to something that Favola said in response to Stanley’s interrogation — that “maybe one day” solar panels could be placed on Arlington rooftops so that her county could do its share toward energy generation. That speaks to two questions I often hear from readers whenever we write about solar energy and how not everyone in rural Virginia is enamored with it. The most common question is: Why can’t all those data centers simply put solar panels on their flat roofs? The answer: Because that’s where all the cooling and ventilation equipment goes. The second most common question: Why don’t we have more rooftop solar? Wouldn’t that save us from having to build a lot of these solar projects?
The answers there are more complicated. For now, I’m going to skip over the financial incentives or disincentives behind rooftop solar — that’s a topic all its own — and instead focus on how much we have, how that compares to elsewhere, and what’s technically possible.
Some baseline information: Virginia gets about 7% of its power from solar, and that overwhelmingly comes from utility-scale solar projects such as the ones that are causing such consternation in some communities.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 11.5% of the state’s solar energy comes from something other than utility-scale solar — that would cover both rooftop solar but also other small-scale solar installations that might be somewhere other than a rooftop, a backyard, for instance. The technical term is “distributed” solar so, as much as I hate jargon, I’ll use that from here on out since the more common term of “rooftop” solar isn’t quite accurate.
Fun with math: Virginia’s output of distributed solar has more than tripled from 2020 to 2023, the last year for which figures are available — from 214,000 megawatt-hours to 708,000 megawatt-hours. However, because utility-scale solar has grown faster, the share of distributed solar in Virginia has actually declined, from 13.5% in 2020 to 11.5% in 2023. Either way, it works out that less than 1% of the state’s power comes from distributed solar.
If we want more distributed solar, we’re going to need it on a lot more rooftops and backyards. The city of Falls Church advises on its website that homes in Northern Virginia can usually accommodate enough solar panels to generate 550 to 1,200 kilowatt-hours of power each month, or 6,600 to 14,400 kilowatt-hours per year — or 14.4 megawatt-hours, which helps us make comparisons. By contrast, the 1,245-acre County Line Solar Project that’s expected to start construction this year in Charlotte County is expected to generate 347,200 megawatt-hours per year. That means we’d need 24,111 homes in Northern Virginia with rooftop solar to match the County Line Solar Project output.
Reality check: The State Corporation Commission says we now have 56,789 distributed solar installations in Virginia. If they’re all about the size of a house in Northern Virginia (and they may not be), then that’s like having 2.5 big solar projects. So somewhere in rural Virginia, there’s some land that’s not a solar project thanks to that distributed solar. Here’s the catch, though: Virginia currently has 498 utility-scale solar projects, according to the Virginia Solar Database, and more are being proposed. They come in all sizes, of course, but the point is distributed solar doesn’t come anywhere close to equaling utility-scale solar.
Meanwhile, keep in mind we haven’t factored in yet two big unknown variables confronting Virginia: The Clean Economy Act mandates a carbon-free electric grid by 2050, so that means we’re going to need a lot more solar — and those projected electricity demands by data centers mean we will need more energy of some sort, so even more solar than originally envisioned under the Clean Economy Act.
My point, which is a mathematical one, not an ideological one: Distributed solar can certainly help reduce the need for utility-scale solar — but it can never replace it.
Still, we could do more than we’re doing. How much more?
A report last year by a pro-solar group, Environment America, declared that “the United States has so far tapped only 1/28th of its rooftop solar potential. Rooftop solar has the technical potential to meet about 45% of national electricity sales in 2022, but in 2022, the U.S. only generated about 1.5% of all the electricity it used from rooftop solar.” It concluded that Virginia was very much on the low side, tapping less than 1% of its potential. As far as what that potential is: 44 million megawatt hours per year — or about 127 solar projects the size of County Line. I know some solar skeptics in Charlotte County who might think that anything that would keep solar projects out of their county would be a good deal.
If I’ve learned anything about writing about energy, it’s this: There’s always somebody with a different set of statistics and a different point of view. It’s not just that there are two opposing points of view, there are often three or four or five. Let’s not get hung up on the back-of-the-envelope math but focus on the main point, which I haven’t heard anybody dispute: Virginia could have more distributed solar, and that would be a good thing, even if it’s not going to come anywhere close to replacing utility-scale solar. Australia may be the country most reliant on distributed solar; 11.3% of that country’s total power comes from distributed solar. When I was in Melbourne in 2018, it seemed as if every new home had solar panels on its roof. Australia is also considered the sunniest country in the world so has a natural advantage over Virginia.
If nothing else, more distributed solar would help address Stanley’s point: Northern Virginia is expecting Southwest and Southside Virginia to do its dirty work by hosting solar projects. Stanley didn’t put it this way, but this is essentially what he was saying: Northern Virginia gets the jobs and tax revenue from data centers, and the good feelings that they’re increasingly powered by solar energy, but Southwest and Southside has to give up its rural character for industrial blight.
Things are more complicated than that, of course: Lots of people in Northern Virginia are getting fed up with data centers. Some of the tax revenue in Northern Virginia gets cycled through Richmond to subsidize rural schools. And one reason that some rural localities like solar projects is that they generate taxes in a way that vacant land does not. Still, the politics come down to this: Northern Virginia politicians want rural Virginia to host more solar, and many in rural Virginia don’t like that. Encouraging more distributed solar would be a way to show that everybody is doing their part.
Unfortunately, like many things, that’s easier said than done.
Virginia could require that new homes be built with solar panels. That would also drive up the cost of home ownership when that’s already out of reach for too many people.
Virginia could require that new commercial construction be built with solar panels. That’s not unprecedented — however, the precedents are in California, and promising to emulate California is a good way for elected officials in some parts of Virginia to find themselves ushered into early retirement. For the record, though, Culver City in 2008 became the first to require solar energy systems on new commercial developments. Now, cities as big as San Francisco and Santa Monica have followed suit.
Virginia could mandate that new schools be built with solar systems. In North Carolina, solar-powered schools have wound up generating revenue as they sell excess power back into the grid — summers are particularly good because students are out of school, cooling costs are less, and the sun shines a lot. However, again, there are upfront costs, and who’s going to pay those? That’s why many people don’t have solar panels on their houses: Who wants to write a check that big and then wait years to recover the cost?
There’s also this inconvenient detail: Solar projects only generate power about 20% to 25% of the time. The sun doesn’t always shine. Technology may fix this through battery storage, and energy technology is evolving rapidly. This hasn’t changed, though, and won’t: We all expect the lights to come on.
And that brings us back to the question that Stanley and Favola were tussling over: What should each part of Virginia be expected to do?
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Join us Thursday, Feb. 27, at Fitzpatrick Hall in Roanoke for the second annual Cardinal Way: Civility Rules luncheon with the top leaders of the Virginia General Assembly.
Hear from top Republican and Democratic House and Senate leaders as they discuss the issues on which they found consensus and those in which they remain far apart. They’ll also leave time to answer your questions.
Cardinal Way: Civility Rules is a project partially funded by a civil discourse grant from the American Press Institute. This event is also sponsored by Gentry Locke Consulting. Tickets are available here.