In mid-October, the Mecklenburg Board of Supervisors voted 6-2 to reject a 997-acre solar facility that had been proposed by Dominion Energy. The Mecklenburg Sun reported that the vote on the Finneywood Solar Project, as it was called, “effectively closes the book on large-scale solar developments in Mecklenburg County.”
That’s because earlier this year, the county passed an ordinance that effectively bans utility-scale solar projects. Finneywood, first proposed in 2022, was still moving through the approval process when that vote took place, so it still got to move forward — until the supervisors put the kibosh on it. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.)
That vote was seen as the signature example of rural counties in Virginia resisting the spread — critics would say onslaught — of solar farms. To the extent that the solar boom has been triggered by the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which requires that the state’s two biggest utilities (Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power), go carbon-free by 2050, this was seen as a case of a Republican-voting rural county resisting clean energy mandates imposed by a legislature dominated by Democrats from metro areas that consume lots of power but never have to worry about being asked to produce any.
The necessity of meeting the state’s carbon-free goals, and the growing refusal of some rural areas to approve those solar projects, has led to talk that maybe the state needs to take over some of the decision-making. Even a milder version, which could have simply set “regional goals,” sparked hot debate — and ultimately failed when two Democrats who have a substantial number of rural voters refused to go along.
The issue, though, remains very much alive: How is the state going to meet those goals if the rural areas that, by necessity, must host the largest-scale projects are reluctant to do so?
The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia put together the Virginia Solar Database to create a centralized place to keep track of all these projects. That database showed a clear trend: Project approvals were falling and project denials were rising. More important than the number of projects is the number of megawatts. In 2024, for the first time, local governments rejected more megawatts than they approved.
The number of rejected megawatts doubled from 611 in 2023 to 1,378 in 2024.
Meanwhile, the number of approved megawatts fell from 2,947 in 2022 to 1,746 in 2023 to 1,095 in 2024.
The most commonly cited way to understand power is to say that 1 megawatt of power can supply about 1,000 homes for an hour, although the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says that’s a myth that originated when homes were smaller and less air-conditioned. The Solar Energy Industries Association says that in Virginia, 1 megawatt of solar energy can power 112.39 homes. In California, which doesn’t have the winters we do, 1 megawatt can take care of 275.22 homes, the association says.
Using that industry measure, then 1,378 rejected megawatts translates into localities turning down enough power for 379,253 homes. The average household in Virginia is 2.53 people, so that works out to localities turning down power for 959,510 people — almost the size of Fairfax County, which is about 1.1 million.
Or put another way: Northern Virginia this year topped 4,900 megawatts worth of data centers, according to the real estate firm JLL. The Visual Capitalist says Loudoun County alone has 6,000 megawatts of data centers either in operation or in the works. Since that’s more than the amount JLL says we have, we can conclude that about 1,100 of those megawatts are for data centers that haven’t opened yet. The 1,378 megawatts of power that rural localities rejected would seem to be able to run all of those, plus a few more.
Now, statistics like these are funny things. These rejected megawatts didn’t necessarily disappear, poof. A company that got rejected may have come back with a different proposal that got approved. Or maybe it looked at another locality. And localities might well have had good reason to reject some projects for reasons other than skepticism about what some see as “voodoo energy” — a wonderful phrase I heard once at an energy conference that addressed rural skepticism. Maybe some of these projects weren’t in what the community felt was the right place. The list of reasons could go on. All we know is that if you add them all up, that’s how many megawatts got rejected, and in 2024, the amount denied was higher than ever and higher than what was approved.
Trends like that make the state’s clean energy goals look out of reach.
Now, as Paul Harvey liked to say, here’s the rest of the story.
In 2025, we’ve seen different trends. The Weldon Cooper Center recently updated its database through September.
What we see so far this year is that the number of megawatts approved far exceeds that number rejected — 2,022 approved, 711 rejected. The actual number of projects approved is down, but the projects getting approved involve more megawatts, which is what matters in the end.
Through the first nine months of the year, that’s already more megawatts approved than any other year on record except 2022. Of course, the amount rejected is also the second highest on record.
Still, the trend lines are different from what they once were, and state policymakers ought to know that before they start taking any new action.
We have a new administration — and some new legislators — about to take office in January. Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger and many House Democrats ran this year on a platform of increasing the amount of “distributed solar,” meaning what many of us call “rooftop solar.” In a column earlier this year, I looked at the potential for rooftop solar — and also its limitations. Expanding distributed solar can relieve some of the pressure on rural Virginia, but not all. Still, it’s a way for urban areas to say, “Hey, we’re doing our part,” and not just simply forcing rural areas to power the rest of the state whether they want to or not.
The Virginia Solar Database also includes some interactive maps. If you play around with them, as I have, we see two things:
a) The counties rejecting the most solar are also the counties approving the most solar, which suggests these are not blanket rejections, but a case of county officials taking a closer look and distinguishing between projects they like and projects they don’t. For instance, Sussex County has rejected the most solar by megawatts — three projects totaling 752 megawatts — but it has approved four projects totaling 607 megawatts. Greenville County rejected six projects totaling 498 megawatts but approved six others totaling 455 megawatts. Those are the No. 1 and 2 counties in the state for rejected megawatts, but also still rank among the 10 most solar-heavy counties. (The state solar capital is Brunswick County, which has approved 11 projects adding up to 2,082 megawatts.)
b) While solar is concentrated in Southside up to Spotsylvania County, there are now solar projects in most counties in the state. There are certainly some rural counties that aren’t producing solar energy that probably could — the sun shines everywhere — but the most notable absences here are metro areas. How hard will Spanberger and the new General Assembly press them to welcome solar? And, of course, how much solar can Virginia realistically produce? Whatever that figure is, no one has ever said it will be 100%, so how are we going to handle the rest of Virginia’s energy demands? Everyone agrees we need more power, but few people want an energy generation source next to them, no matter what it is. However, what we’re seeing is that most rural counties do have some power generation, whether people there like it or not.
Spanberger and many legislators want more local-state coordination on energy decisions. That can take many forms; we don’t know yet what they’ll be.
However this plays out though, we shouldn’t make next year’s policy decisions based on last year’s trends.
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