With friends like this, who needs enemies?
Both candidates for governor might be wondering that right now. If not, they should.
I noted last week that five school systems in bright blue Northern Virginia — Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax County, Loudoun County and Prince William County — had handed the Republican ticket an easy issue by deciding not to comply with Trump administration guidelines on transgender policies.
I’m not weighing in on who’s right or wrong, legally or morally, simply sizing up the political ramifications. Those that benefit Republicans: The most recent Roanoke College campaign poll found Republican voters less enthusiastic about voting this year than Democrats are. Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor, has struggled over the summer to find the right issues to run on; now some Democratic localities have given her one.
Earle-Sears has also been underfunded. Now, thanks to Democratic supporters — specifically the woman in Arlington who was photographed holding up a sign that proclaimed “Hey Winsome, if trans can’t share your bathroom, then Blacks can’t share my water fountain” — she’s a little less so. Late last week, Robert Johnson, co-founder of Black Entertainment Television, sent Earle-Sears a check for $500,000 and specifically cited that sign as a reason. In a statement to Politico, which broke the news, Johnson said he was “so appalled by that racist diatribe … that I choose to show the voters of Virginia how Black Brothers stand up to defend and support their Black Sisters.”
Meanwhile, President Trump isn’t doing any favors for Republicans in Virginia. Last week, he moved to revoke collective bargaining rights from more federal workers. Again, you can choose your own policy position on this, but in political terms, this will only rile up federal workers in Northern Virginia — to the benefit of Democrats. While Northern Virginia is rich in Democratic voters, it’s also a media market that both parties often have a hard time penetrating because Northern Virginia is so Washington-focused. The last thing Republicans want is to stir up Northern Virginia voters who will swarm to the polls to vote Democratic, but Trump has been doing a good job of doing just that.
The most significant thing the Trump administration did last week — insofar as it relates to Virginia — was to cancel $59.3 million in funding for projects in Hampton Roads that had some connection to Dominion Energy’s offshore wind project now under construction off the coast of Virginia Beach. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.)
Trump’s antipathy toward wind energy is well-known, and we’ll get to that soon, but it’s important to note that these canceled projects are not the wind project itself but port-related facilities that have larger uses beyond wind energy.
Most of the money — $39.3 million — was intended for Fairview Landing at the former Lambert’s Point docks in Norfolk. When construction began in 2023, Virginia Business described the site as a “logistics center supporting Hampton Roads‘ offshore wind, defense and transportation industries.” The wind-related part of the site would be 7.5 acres out of a total of 111 acres.
The remaining $20 million was slated for improvements at the Portsmouth Marine Terminal, which would be used as a staging area for moving equipment to the wind project. Update: This money has already been spent so the Trump administraton terminating that funding is purely for show; it has no practical effect.
In a joint statement, Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Rep. Bobby Scott of Newport News — all Democrats — called the cancellation of Fairwinds misguided: “The withdrawal of federal funding for the Fairwinds Landing facility is further evidence of this Administration’s across-the-board, reckless approach to governing. If the Administration took the time to learn about the project, it would realize that it is about investing in maritime supply chains and port infrastructure to support not only clean energy but also shipbuilding and ship repair. Stopping this project makes no sense, hurts our economy, and is completely counterproductive to the Administration’s so-called efforts to ‘restore America’s maritime dominance.’”
The Trump administration sees it differently: “Wasteful, wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go towards revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement. “Thanks to President Trump, we are prioritizing real infrastructure improvements over fantasy wind projects that cost much and offer little.”
It’s not my desire to litigate whether wind energy is or is not something we should invest in. However, some context is in order. First of all, Dominion’s offshore wind farm is not a “fantasy wind project.” It’s quite real and is set to go into service at the end of 2026. It may be too far along for the Trump administration to block, although with Trump, nothing is a given. Trump told a cabinet meeting that he would allow no further wind projects “unless there’s a legal situation where somebody committed to it a long time ago.” That would seem to exempt the Dominion project. As the conservative commentator and former government affairs consultant Steve Haner noted on the Bacon’s Rebellion site, “The 176-turbine. 2.6-gigawatt Dominion project is the largest offshore facility proposed so far in the United States and is one of the few (if not the only one) with the active support of a Republican governor and his administration. It is also the only one owned by a monopoly utility and financed by that utility’s ratepayers, who could bear the full $6-8 billion stranded cost of its cancellation.”
If that project were to somehow get canceled, Dominion customers would get stuck with paying for a project that’s not producing any power — and not all those customers are specifically Dominion ones. My home in Botetourt County is served by the Craig-Botetourt Electric Cooperative, which gets part of its power from Dominion. Whenever there’s a storm and the line near Eagle Rock that brings in Dominion power goes down, my lights go off. Part of my power bill is based on whatever Craig-Botetourt has to pay for Dominion power.
There are two political aspects to the Trump administration’s “war on wind.”
The most immediate is in Hampton Roads, whose economy is driven by the port. Roanoke College’s quarterly consumer sentiment poll that came out last week found Virginians in a pessimistic mood about the economy. The poll recorded the third-lowest score in the 14-year history of the poll; it also found that 54.4% feel business conditions are worse than they were a year ago. Nor are they optimistic about things changing: 42.5% say they expect things to be the same a year from now, while 30.5% think things will get better and 27.5% think things will get worse.
If these actions cause people in the state’s second-biggest metro to feel even worse about the economy, that’s not good for the party in power — which right now happens to be Republicans. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate for governor, may not have a better plan for how to deal with the economy — or even a very specific one, good or bad — but that’s not how voters think. If they’re unhappy with how things are going, they vote for the other party. Just ask Kamala Harris.
The more long-term consequence here is to complicate the job of whoever wins the governor’s race.
Democrats are intent on pushing ahead with converting Virginia’s electric grid to carbon-free sources. As long as Dominion’s offshore project goes forward, the wind portion of that will remain intact — for practical purposes, when Democrats talk about carbon-free sources, they all mean solar and some mean nuclear, as well. However, implicit in the “clean economy” is not just the clean part, but the economy part — the idea that transitioning to new energy sources will create new jobs, some of which may not immediately look like energy jobs — such as port jobs. The Trump administration’s actions put a crimp in that.
Virginia Republicans, meanwhile, have long pushed an “all of the above” approach to energy. Trump, though, doesn’t believe in an “all of the above” approach. He is trying to stamp out as much renewable energy as he can and drive consumers toward fossil fuels.
The practical difficulty there has nothing to do with carbon emissions but availability. Power demands — driven in part by data centers — are rising. Trump has championed artificial intelligence, which consumes even more power. We need more energy, and we need it now. We can debate all we want which forms of energy we should emphasize, but the reality is some are quicker to build than others. Solar is the quickest of all. Critics may find it intermittent and unreliable and ugly — as well as too reliant on Chinese solar panels. It can, though, be put into service quickly. Wind takes longer, but the Dominion project is about a year away from service — so it’s almost there.
Natural gas might be more reliable than wind or solar, but keep in mind it took about a decade — and ultimately an act of Congress — to build the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The backlog for the key parts of a natural gas plant now runs about five years. Nobody really knows how long it will take to put small nuclear reactors — the so-called small modular reactors — into service because no one in North America has ever built one. Someday they may well be the answer to our energy, but this is not someday; this is today. If we started out today to build “all of the above” energy sources, we’d have solar farms generating power (however intermittently) while gas plants and nuclear reactors are still in the paperwork stage. That doesn’t necessarily make solar “better,” but it is demonstrably quicker to build. That’s one of the reasons why 92.3% of the new energy that will be added to the grid this year will come from renewables, with 51.9% of that from solar, 29.3% from battery storage and 12.1% from wind, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The remaining 7.3% will come from natural gas.
Trump is pursuing policies that will require more energy — and even if he weren’t, the marketplace is doing that anyway, so his pro-energy usage policies may not matter. However, he is also pursuing policies that reduce the amount of energy available in the short term. The General Assembly’s research arm has warned that Virginia’s energy demands will triple by 2040 if data centers continue to be built without restraint. There probably will be some restrictions on their growth, but we’re not going to see them stop, so we’re going to see energy demands rise; it’s just a matter of how much. The bottom line is that we need more energy, but at least two of the energy projects that the Trump administration has targeted (wind farms off the coasts of New Jersey and Maryland) would have fed into the PJM grid that also serves Virginia. They may have been off the coasts of other states, but since Virginia imports more electricity than any other state, we had an indirect stake in the energy they would have produced.
Wind energy may not be someone’s favorite form of energy, but it is a form of energy at a time when we need more of it. Just as some on the left may need to reconcile themselves to forms of energy they’re not keen on (such as nuclear), some on the right may need to do the same with renewables.
The first day of any introductory economics class begins with an explanation of supply and demand — and what happens when demand goes up and supply doesn’t. Our next governor, whoever she is, will have to deal with those basic economics. Trump is complicating her job, even if it winds up being a fellow Republican.
Where do the candidates for governor stand on energy issues?
Here’s what Abigail Spanberger and Winsome Earle-Sears had to say about energy in separate interviews with Cardinal News. You can also see how they answered questions about energy (and other issues) in our Voter Guide. We’ve built election pages for all 133 cities and counties in Virginia; you can look there to see who’s on the ballot in your community.
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