Talking points come, talking points go, but Virginia’s energy crisis remains.
Two international events over the past few weeks have complicated some of the easy arguments being made on both sides of our energy debate — or, perhaps, ought to complicate them.
Let’s start with the agreed-upon facts.
- The General Assembly’s research arm produced an eye-popping report late last year that warned the state’s energy demands — driven largely by the growth of data centers — will triple by the year 2040.
- Virginia also now imports more energy than any other state — again, largely because of the growth of data centers.
- Virginia law — the Clean Economy Act — mandates that the state’s two biggest utilities (Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power) convert to a carbon-free electric grid by 2050. (Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy. You can become a donor, too!)
- The Clean Economy Act has spurred the rapid development of solar energy, almost entirely in rural Virginia, and about half that in Southside Virginia — and that solar development has been increasingly controversial. Many rural residents see solar projects not as solar “farms” but as ugly industrial blight that ruins the rural character of their communities.
- The Trump administration is pushing for more use of artificial intelligence, which sometimes uses up to 10 times as much power as more conventional internet uses.
- Given that Virginia has more data centers than anywhere else in the world, that likely means Virginia, in particular, is going to see even more demand for energy.
- However, the watchdog analyst for PJM, the power grid that covers Virginia and 12 other states and the District of Columbia, now warns there’s basically no more room on that grid unless we add more energy supply.
All this raises several questions: How can we generate more power to meet those demands when every form of energy is controversial and few people want an energy facility near them? The Clean Economy Act was passed at a time when energy growth was relatively slow; now it’s not. Given the new demands on the grid, can we realistically meet the targets in the Clean Economy Act? And, whether we do or not, if we add more renewables to the grid, how reliable is that power?
We will not answer those questions today — or even anytime soon. These are questions that are going to be with us for some time (and notice I haven’t even raised the question of what this power will cost). Instead, today I want to look at two energy-related developments in other countries that should factor into our discussions. One already has.
The risk of writing about energy is that some people, on both sides, have an almost theological belief that their solution is the only way to go. For some, it’s that renewables can power the entire grid. For others, it’s that renewables simply can’t power the entire grid. Recent events in Spain and Great Britain undercut arguments on both sides.
Solar power apparently didn’t cause the Spanish blackout
Around midday on April 28, the power blinked out in Spain, and then the whole grid in Spain, Portugal and part of France went down. It took about 3½ hours to get power up and running again. Spain relies a lot on solar power — at the time of the blackout, 59.8% of the country’s power was coming from the sun.
Some solar skeptics were quick to blame the blackout on Spain’s solar dependence: “It’s very sad to see what’s happened to Portugal and Spain and so many people there, but you know, when you hitch your wagon to the weather, it’s just a risky endeavor,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
However, the preliminary report into the causes of the blackout does not support that. While the report has yet to identify a precise cause, the initial findings appear to rule out solar power as the main cause and instead suggest that the blackout might have been caused by an outdated grid. An analysis of the preliminary report by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers — which I can guarantee knows more about this than I — faulted what it said were outdated Spanish rules for how to handle grid problems.
While the inquiry continues, this preliminary report takes away what had been an easy talking point: Renewables caused the Spanish blackout, because now it seems they didn’t. This could have been a potent Republican talking point in Virginia this election year, but now it can’t be. Virginia Democrats should say “gracias” to the authors of this report.
Before they get too cocky, though, they should remember this:
Even Britain’s left-of-center government says it needs natural gas to back up renewables
Britain has its own version of Virginia’s Clean Economy Act. The official platform of the Labor Party government of Keir Starmer, who was elected prime minister in 2024, calls for Britain to achieve 100% electricity generation from non-carbon sources by 2030 — 10 years before our goal.
If you’ve ever been to Britain, you know the sun doesn’t shine like it does here, but the wind sure does blow, the result of being downstream on the jetstream. Accordingly, Britain’s renewable energy strategy is heavy on wind energy and relatively light on solar. (Some of that wind energy comes from the wind turbines that President Donald Trump says ruin the view from his Scottish golf course.)
The country’s National Grid says Britain currently gets 32% of its power from natural gas, 29.4% from wind and 14.2% from nuclear, with the rest scattered among other sources. The goal is to ramp up that wind energy production even more in the coming years, with natural gas falling to just 5% by 2030 before getting phased out completely.
Except … late last year, the nation’s grid operator warned that the country will still have to keep natural gas around as a backup to renewables. This month, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband essentially agreed with that analysis and ordered the grid operator to keep gas plants online. The Telegraph, a British newspaper, reports that because the output of renewables varies (i.e., on some days, the wind doesn’t blow and battery storage can only hold so much power), this “has caused a mini-boom in construction of gas fired power plants.”
The reason why Britain’s energy issues matter to us here in Virginia is that all this seems very familiar. The details may vary — Virginia gets far more from solar than it does from wind — but the point is that some renewable skeptics simply don’t believe that renewables can be a reliable source of energy. “Intermittent energy,” they call it, and say that we need more “baseload” power — meaning power that can run anytime and not rely on battery storage to extend its lifespan. For practical purposes, that means either natural gas or nuclear (or both).
I am not an engineer, so I don’t feel qualified to weigh in on what’s possible and what’s not, but it may not matter, since these have also all become political questions, the engineering notwithstanding. Our next governor and the General Assembly will have to wrestle with the state’s growing energy demands — and the rules that govern how we produce that energy. When they do, they should also keep in mind that a reliance on solar energy isn’t what shut down Spain’s grid, but that even a left-of-center British government can’t yet find a way to do without fossil fuels entirely.
See where gubernatorial candidates Winsome Earle-Sears and Abigail Spanberger stand on energy issues in our Voter Guide. Want more politics? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter: