Del. David Bulova, D-Fairfax County, was in Las Vegas for a funeral last summer when he noticed the parking lot he was in suddenly got cooler.
The state legislator from Fairfax County looked up, and that’s when he got the glimmer of an idea that led to a bill that now sits on the governor’s desk, at least metaphorically, waiting for action.
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Across rural Virginia, but especially in Southside, rural localities are pushing back against solar projects on the grounds that they are an ugly industrial blight that ruins the landscape. Their resistance raises serious questions about whether Virginia can ever meet the goals of the Clean Economy Act, which mandates a carbon-free power grid by 2050. Right now, Virginia gets about 7.22% of its power from solar energy. If that much (or that little) solar prompts that much resistance, how are we ever going to ramp that percentage up many times higher?
That was the backdrop to a debate during the recent General Assembly session over a bill that proponents said would help rural localities manage solar development and opponents warned was the first step toward a state mandate.
State Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, asked state Sen. Barbara Favola, D-Arlington County: “Can you tell me how many significant, large-scale solar farms there are in Arlington and Alexandria?”
His point: Rural Virginia is being expected to sacrifice its land to produce energy for Northern Virginia.
Favola acknowledged that her district has no solar farms but held out hope that maybe someday the region could produce more solar energy through rooftop arrays.
I devoted a previous column to rooftop solar — how Virginia could produce a lot more of it but how even that is nowhere near what we need. Rooftops covered with solar panels simply don’t add up to the utility-scale power demands that solar farms produce, especially if the growth of data centers really does triple power demand by 2040 as one state report forecasts.
There is, though, another way, one that could indeed turn parts of Northern Virginia (and other developed areas) into utility-scale solar projects without giving up farmland or rural viewsheds. That way was what was over Bulova’s head that summer day in Las Vegas: solar panels over top of parking lots.
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There’s a reason cities are sometimes called “asphalt jungles.” They have a lot of parking lots. A group called the Parking Reform Network studied more than 100 cities across the country and found that about 22% of their land was devoted to parking. In Austin, Texas, the figure is 42%. In San Bernardino, California, the percentage topped out at 45%. Those figures, by the way, don’t count street parking; these are parking lots.
Three Virginia cities made it into that study: Norfolk came in at 24%, Richmond 25%, Virginia Beach 36%.
What if some of those parking lots were covered with solar canopies? This is not a new idea.
Back in 2012, Washington & Lee University in Lexington put a solar array over one of its parking lots, as well as a separate one on its law school building. At the time, this was heralded as the largest solar energy project in the state, which gives some sense of how quickly solar energy has expanded in Virginia. Some 13 years later, the parking lot canopy is still there. It’s difficult to break out the energy generation, but W&L reports that its on-campus arrays (the parking lot, Lewis Hall and the Outing Club Pavilion) generate about 6% of the university’s power. (The rest comes from an off-campus solar project, meaning that W&L is now 100% solar.)
Since then, the prospect of turning acre upon acre of urban parking lots into solar farms has sparkled like some solar El Dorado. In 2022, France started mandating solar panels on parking lots with 80 or more spaces (which some have pointed out are about the size of 50 American cars). The Washington Post reported that this had the potential to add enough energy to equal 10 new nuclear plants. We also have a lot more parking lots than France. Time magazine reported in 2022 that, theoretically, the United States could supply all its power needs, and then some, if it put solar panels over parking lots. That skips over a lot of technical details, such as transmission issues and the fact that solar panels only generate power about 20% to 25% of the time. Still, the point is, there’s a lot of untapped potential in parking lot solar.
Some are trying to tap that potential. The Washington Commanders football team has a solar canopy over 841 parking spaces in its Platinum A1 lot. This, along with other solar arrays, supplies all the power the stadium needs on non-game days — and 20% of its energy needs on game days.
You can find other parking lot solar projects from JFK Airport in New York to the Cincinnati Zoo to certain Walmart and Target stores in Arizona and California.
Now Bulova wants to bring that to Virginia.
His HB 2037 would give localities permission to require developers of non-residential lots of 100 or more spaces to install parking lot solar. Notice two seemingly contradictory words in close proximity there — permission to require. Local governments in Virginia only have the powers granted to them by the state; this is the famous (or some would say infamous) Dillon Rule. But the word that may get this bill in trouble is not permission but “require.”
Bulova’s bill passed the General Assembly — 64-32 in the House, where it picked up some Republican support, but just 21-18 in the Senate, where it did not.
The bill saw left-of-center environmental groups and the often right-of-center Farm Bureau on the same side, but it drew the opposition of real estate developers. “This is really expensive,” lobbyist Sarah Thomas told legislators as she represented the Virginia Association of Commercial Real Estate. She also warned that the power generated by parking lot solar is more expensive than regular, ground-mounted solar farms, simply because it costs more to mount solar panels on a structure than to stick them in the ground. Obviously I’m simplifying, but you get the idea.
That argument clearly wasn’t persuasive with enough legislators, although I suspect it might be more so with Gov. Glenn Youngkin when it comes time to act on this bill. This might seem the classic case of what Republicans often like to call “burdensome regulations.”
Parking lot solar also doesn’t generate as much power as a comparable amount of ground-mounted solar. In other words, an acre of parking lot solar doesn’t equal an acre of solar panels out in the countryside. “Utility-scale solar facilities that are built on raw land are situated to maximize the use of the land, such as being oriented towards the sun. That might not be possible with a carport, depending on the layout of the parking lot,” says Tim Eberly, a Dominion Energy spokesman for solar issues. “Another key detail is that carports might have shade from nearby trees or buildings. A third issue is that carports are restricted to fixed-tilt solar panels — not the tracker solar panels that move and follow the path of the sun. But let’s say that the parking lot didn’t have shade and was already ideally oriented with the path of the sun. In that case, then you could expect the output to be comparable, minus the difference from fixed-tilt versus tracker solar panels.”
(Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.)
Tony Smith, CEO of Secure Solar Futures in Staunton, the company that worked with Washington & Lee on its parking lot array, also cautions against expecting too much out of parking lot solar. “While this is certainly a move in the right direction for displacing some of the pressure on utility scale solar in rural areas, it’s no panacea, and more of a goodwill gesture,” he said via email. “For example, most solar developers would probably not refer to anything less than 3 MW as a solar farm, which in a practical sense would mean a parking canopy covering at least 3 X 7 = 21 acres, which would be a very large parking lot. Also, the cost of building a solar canopy structure makes it an uneconomic proposition to do at large scale to meet the energy demand (think of building a steel infrastructure to support the panels, and the rising cost of steel, especially in light of [President Donald] Trump’s tariffs).”
Bulova, though, hopes Youngkin will give his bill a chance. He sees this as a way to save at least some farm and forest land from development. “Agriculture and forestry is still Virginia’s largest industry, and we don’t want to do anything to disrupt that,” he told me during an interview. He also hopes this bill could go a ways toward mitigating the feeling that rural Virginia is expected to do all the heavy lifting on energy. “I’ve got a lot of constituents up in Northern Virginia who would like to be part of that solution.”
Yes, the parking lot solar requirement would run up the initial cost of development, but it also would make the property being developed more valuable in the long term, he said, because the property owner would be saving power costs.
There’s no doubt a lot of math involved to figure out the exact costs and the exact savings — and, of course, the exact power generation possible at each site. Ultimately, Bulova said, this is a question of whether we really do believe in an “all of the above” energy strategy. “We have seas and seas of large parking lots associated with office buildings, big box stores and strip malls that have potential to generate lots of energy,” he said. Whether it’s a mandate or something voluntary, why aren’t we making use of that space? I suspect the next time a controversial solar project is proposed somewhere in rural Virginia, some people might be wondering why the solar panels have to be there and not over top a parking lot in Northern Virginia.
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