This fall, you’re going to hear a lot about the Virginia Clean Economy Act, the 2020 law that mandates a carbon-free electric grid by 2050, and which Democrats say lowers electric bills (because solar is cheaper than other fuels) and which Republicans say is raising them (because utilities have to build new facilities to generate that carbon-free power).
Here’s what you may not hear: the conversations behind the scenes about ways to rewrite that law.
Republicans, of course, would like to rewrite the whole thing, top to bottom. That’s not happening, not at least for the next two years, while Democrats have control of the state Senate. (Democrats currently control the House, too, but that’s up for election this fall, along with the governorship.)
The more interesting — and more challenging — conversations are happening on the Democratic side. Support for the Clean Economy Act has been an article of faith among Democrats, and there certainly seems to be no rethinking of the party’s embrace of renewable energy. However, other conversations are starting to take place on the left that deal with some touchy issues — among them, data centers, nuclear power and the status of the Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center in Wise County.
I’m certainly not privy to all these conversations, but it’s clear they’re taking place — to what extent, is hard to say. After the most recent meeting of the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, Radio IQ quoted two prominent Democratic members — House Speaker Don Scott of Portsmouth and Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell of Fairfax County — as saying it was time to reexamine the law.
They offered no details, and in a follow-up interview with me, Surovell said that’s because there are no details at the moment. However, he offered some thoughts that surfaced some of the things that might get talked about. I contacted all 10 of the legislators who sit on the commission. Some did not reply; one did, but only wanted to talk without attribution because that legislator didn’t want to mess up the tentative talks that are underway — talks that are complicated by the partisan nature of the upcoming elections.
“As we look at our energy infrastructure and future growth everyone involved needs to take a little humble pie and realize we can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good,” said Del. Michael Webert, R-Fauquier County. “There are a whole lot of competing interests and it’s complicated.”
What’s forced this reevaluation of the Clean Economy Act, especially on the Democratic side? The world has changed.
“The demand created by data centers changes everything,” says state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville.
The Clean Economy Act was passed at a time when power demand wasn’t growing very much. Now it is — and the General Assembly’s research agency has warned that state power demands could triple by 2040 if data centers continue to grow without restraint. Because of those energy-intensive data centers, Virginia now imports more electricity than any other state — and that imported power is more expensive than what we’ve been paying. PJM Interconnections, which operates the regional electric grid that Virginia belongs to, warns that we’re adding more demand but not adding enough supply. It recently warned that under “extreme scenarios,” the grid this summer might have to ask some electricity users to cut back. This is the first time it’s issued such a warning. On Sunday, with a heat wave bearing down, PJM issued a “Maximum Generation Alert and Load Management Alert.” The former is self-explanatory: Generate as much power as you can because we’re going to need it to keep the AC on. The “load management alert” is a program that activates “demand response,” where customers get paid to reduce power usage. While we’ve always had heat waves, this one seems to presage the energy issues we’re going to face in the coming years.
At one time, the issue in Virginia was converting the grid to carbon-free sources; now it’s both converting the grid to carbon-free sources and generating more power. The first of those has proven challenging enough; just look at the controversies in some rural localities over whether to allow large-scale solar projects. The second is controversial, too, because nobody really wants an energy plant near them, no matter what kind of energy it is. Solar, wind, natural gas and nuclear are all controversial in their own ways.
So just how is this supposed to work? Neither party has changed its basic worldview.
On the Republican side: “We will have to go back to an ‘all [of] the above’ approach to energy sources,” says House Minority Leader Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County. “Gas will be quicker for bigger energy supply than solar. With solar it takes a lot of land, and a lot of communities reject big solar. It really means we have to make changes to the Clean Economy Act because if we do not we will experience brownouts.”
On the Democratic side: “I am hopeful we can elect a governor who shares our goals of producing clean energy,” Deeds says, “but we absolutely cannot lose sight of the need for reliable and affordable electricity.”
It’s in those words “reliable and affordable” that there might be some room for consensus — but also still plenty of room for disagreement.
Surovell, who chairs the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, framed the problem this way: “We either need to generate more power in the commonwealth or reduce our demand. All that is extremely complicated.” He ran through a long list of the issues at play:
Can we build more transmission lines?
The problem sometimes isn’t a lack of power, it’s a lack of getting power to the right place — but building transmission lines is controversial. Maryland is currently objecting to new power lines that would carry electricity from Pennsylvania to Data Center Alley in Loudoun County.
Can we slow the growth of data centers? Should we?
This past session of the General Assembly saw multiple bills introduced that would have imposed more restrictions on data centers. Few passed, much to the dismay of the environmental community, which sees the voluminous energy demands of data centers as endangering the transition to clean energy.
Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council, disputes that we have a true energy emergency. “The whole thing is a contractual emergency,” he says. “It’s not a practical emergency.” In other words, the only reason we have a problem is because we’re allowing too many data centers.
“The bathtub is overflowing,” says Julie Bolthouse of the Piedmont Environmental Council. “The first thing we need to do, before we talk about painting the bathroom, is to turn off the water.” In this case, the growth of data centers.
Surovell, though, warns against that. “The environmental community needs to have a long conversation with themselves,” he says. “Their answer is to just shut down data center development. Data centers are part of national security.” Plus, he says, slowing down data centers in Virginia won’t solve the national problem, of which Virginia is a part. “They’re going to get built somewhere,” Surovell says. “If it’s in Wyoming, they will be powered by gas or coal and that will come blowing over our state.”
Can we make solar development more predictable without creating mandates?
Solar growth has boomed across Southside Virginia (which generates more than half the state’s solar power), but so has opposition from some residents who see solar projects as ugly, industrial blight. In the Clean Economy Act, Virginia has a state policy to promote renewables (the vast majority of which is from solar projects), but that policy depends on local governments to approve those projects and many are solar skeptics — not out of opposition to renewable energy but out of opposition to paving over their rural landscape, as solar projects are often seen as doing. The General Assembly has wrestled with this dilemma. The simplest thing to do (but also the most controversial) would be for the state to take over solar siting and simply impose projects on rural areas. Is there a way to avoid that but still have what Surovell calls “more predictability in zoning”? Last year, half the solar megawatts proposed in Virginia were rejected by local governments. More broadly, can we create more solar power (the quickest power to get up and running) without creating more pressure on rural areas that don’t want solar?
How can we encourage more solar when Washington is trying to discourage it?
The Clean Economy Act was passed before data centers boomed; it was also passed before the Trump administration and a Republican Congress tried to do away with most of the tax incentives that have helped support renewables in general and solar in particular. Here’s a case where Virginia’s existing law and the bill now moving through Congress are directly at odds. Virginia specifically wants more renewable energy; Washington does not. The problem isn’t simply a matter of which form of energy we might prefer politically; it’s what is most easily available. That’s where solar has the advantage; developers can get solar power on the grid far more quickly than they can any other form of energy. That’s another reason why we’ve seen rising demand for solar. If Washington pulls the plug on solar, how is Virginia going to meet its energy demands in the short-term when we’ve been counting on easy-to-build solar to supply that power? Shifting to other fuels may thrill solar skeptics, but the bottom line is that all the other energy sources take much longer to put into service. See my previous column for the details.
How much should we embrace nuclear power?
Virginia already gets about one-quarter of its power from nuclear energy — the Dominion Energy nuclear plants in Louisa County and Surry County. That means the question isn’t whether to have nuclear power, but whether to have more. Both Dominion and Appalachian Power have proposed adding small nuclear reactors, the so-called small modular reactors, or SMRs, to their energy fleet. Dominion’s would be at its existing North Anna plant in Louisa and possibly the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station, Appalachian’s at the Joshua Falls substation in Campbell County.
(Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.)
Republicans have long embraced nuclear power; Democrats are more divided, between those who think splitting atoms is dangerous and those who think nuclear power may be the only way to supply a lot of carbon-free baseload power. Nuclear power isn’t clean energy; it does produce nuclear waste, which is stored on site — but it’s also carbon-free. It’s reliable, but also expensive. The immediate challenge is a paperwork one: Right now nuclear power doesn’t count toward the state’s renewable energy goals. Should it?
Is Virginia City a liability or an asset?
Dominion’s Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center in Wise County burns a mix of biomass, coal and coal waste. Environmentalists have always hated the place — it burns coal, and they say it’s expensive and inefficient. In Southwest Virginia, though, the plant is almost sacrosanct — it’s a major employer in a part of the state where employers are hard to come by. That’s why Surovell surprised me by his comments on Virginia City. “The other party needs to stop grandstanding on Virginia City,” he said of Republicans. “We made a deal with Ben Chafin. We’re not going to touch Virginia City.” Chafin is the late state senator who represented that part of Southwest Virginia when the Clean Economy Act was passed. “They keep saying it’s on the chopping block,” Surovell says. “I’ve not heard that in the past five years.” (While the Clean Economy Act pushed for early retirement of coal plants, it granted Virginia City a reprieve until 2045.) Now for the most surprising part of all: “If anything, it’s underutilized and does a good job of cleaning up coal gob,” Surovell says. (“Gob” is the technical term for the coal waste that litters much of the southwestern corner of the state.) “The message from PJM is we don’t take anything offline,” Surovell says.
Environmentalists will blanch when they read Surovell’s comments, but Republican legislators in Southwest Virginia will welcome his acceptance of Virginia City — even more so the suggestion that Virginia City could play an even bigger role in energy production.
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