On the morning of Jan. 27, as Arctic air moved in after a snow and ice storm, the temperatures across the western part of Virginia fell to the single digits.
Lynchburg and Roanoke saw the mercury (if anyone still uses mercury thermometers) drop to 7 degrees. Abingdon shivered at 5 degrees, Wytheville at just 1. Blacksburg saw a big fat 0 degrees. And in Burkes Garden, a beautiful place tucked away in a valley in Tazewell County, the temperature sank to a bone-chilling, teeth-chattering, cliche-inducing -1 degrees.
In all these places, unless people had a wood stove burning, they stayed warm thanks to fossil fuels.
All those communities are served by Appalachian Power, which is primarily a coal-burning utility. Across the wider 13-state PJM grid, of which Virginia is a part, coal is a smaller, but still significant, source of electricity generation. On that particularly cold morning, natural gas accounted for 41.7% of the generation across the grid, while coal at about 20.6%. Solar was nonexistent, wind just 3.3%.
We stayed warm, but at the price of pumping out carbon emissions into the atmosphere, which help us stay warm in ways we may not want. The colder it gets, the more fossil fuels we need to burn, so every cold wave can be measured both in degrees, but also in metric tons of carbon — roughly 80,650 metric tons on a typical day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, although Jan. 26 was by no means typical.
Meanwhile, about 1,600 miles to our northwest, on the edge of the Canadian prairie, the community of Wasagaming, Manitoba, was feeling the full force of the polar vortex. The temperature there that morning was -43.6 on our Fahrenheit scale, making it one of the coldest places in North America that wasn’t above the Arctic Circle.
Wasagaming stood out only by degree (or the lack thereof). Other parts of Manitoba were in the -30s Fahrenheit. Somehow, though, as long as the people stayed indoors and didn’t decide that it was a good day to play hockey, they stayed toasty warm without sending a single molecule of carbon into the atmosphere.
How did they manage that? Because Manitoba, which has more water than some American states have land, generates 96% of its power through hydroelectricity, the remaining 4% through wind energy, thanks to the incessant prairie wind. (Go listen to Neil Young’s album “Prairie Wind” for more information and the song lyric “out on the prairie where the wind blows long and hard.”) Manitoba burns no coal, splits no atoms. It just lets water and the wind do their thing.
Last week, Mark Christie, the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and now head of the Center for Energy Law and Policy at the College of William & Mary, called attention to the energy mix that was keeping Virginians from freezing in the dark: natural gas, nuclear and coal. Wind was a negligible factor, 4.5% at best; solar nonexistent at night. “We can’t do it without the generation mix you see on the dashboard now,” he said.
Winter storms (and nighttime, generally) are awkward events for those who want to see more renewables. The amount of power we need during a winter storm, when people are cranking up their thermostats, is massive and the amount of power that solar farms produce, even after they’ve spread so much they’re causing an uproar in many rural communities, is relatively small. At best, about 7% or so in the afternoon, according to PJM. We can build more solar if we want — there are those in the General Assembly who would like to see that — but even if we covered up every acre in Southside with solar panels, they still wouldn’t produce power at night.
That’s where battery storage comes in; it’s the natural companion to solar energy — batteries can take in power by day, then use it by night. Batteries have their own challenges, though. They don’t last very long (a few hours usually). Technology will surely improve and lengthen their duration, but they also face some of the same opposition that solar does: People don’t want to see them. Mecklenburg County has banned more utility-scale solar projects. Last week, one of Mecklenburg’s towns, Clarksville, voted down a storage site, too. Maybe someday we will have utility-scale batteries that last for days and weeks and our arguments now will seem quaint. For now, though, the question is how do we transition to a carbon-free grid when battery storage is still in its infancy?
For some, this is practically a theological question, on both sides of the aisle. Believing in the virtue of renewables does not make the sun shine at night, but disputing that renewables can never do the job runs counter to our whole history of technological advancements.
Instead, I set out to explore this question: How do the coldest places in the world power their grids?
That’s what led me to Wasagaming, Manitoba, which looks like a lovely place on the edge of Clear Lake but not one I’d care to visit in the winter.
Here’s the short version of what I found: A surprising number of cold-weather places (be they Canadian provinces or Scandinavian countries) don’t burn any (or many) fossil fuels, at all. However, they also have natural attributes that we can’t replicate here.
Canada, which is often called the Great White North for a reason, is a carbon powerhouse but uses very few of those carbon molecules to generate its electricity. Canada is mostly water-powered: 55.4% of its electricity comes from hydroelectricity. That’s why Canadians often refer to their electricity bill as “the hydro bill.”
The national figures mask regional ones. Manitoba, as we saw, gets 96% of its power from hydroelectricity. Quebec gets 95%. Newfoundland and Labrador get 97%. British Columbia seems a piker at 89%. All that is very green power (or blue, if you prefer), but there’s no way we can replicate that. Think of how big Smith Mountain Lake is. Then add in Claytor Lake, the Bath County Pumped Storage Station and other scattered hydroelectric sites across the state. Even with all that, hydroelectric power only accounts for about 1.25% of the energy on Virginia’s grid, according to the EIA. A proposal to build a hydroelectric site on the New River in Grayson County in the 1970s failed because of intense local opposition. In 2024, Dominion Energy scrapped its exploration of a possible pumped storage site in Tazewell County because the projected costs had risen to $2 billion. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.) We are simply not going to build hydroelectric dams at a scale to change that percentage very much.
The Scandinavian countries are similar. Finland, Norway and Sweden burn almost no fossil fuels. Their geography also affords them a lot of hydroelectric power — that’s where almost 89% of Norway’s power comes from.
Many of these cold-weather places that burn little or no fossil fuels also tend to rely on two other forms of energy that are carbon-free: wind and nuclear.
While the wind doesn’t always blow, when it does, it blows both day and night so isn’t as intermittent as solar. Where there is steady wind, it seems quite reliable. Internationally, Denmark gets 58.2% of its power from wind, just 8.2% from fossil fuels. In many Canadian provinces and the more northern Scandinavian countries, wind is a secondary power source that supplements hydroelectric power. Here at home, many Midwestern states rely heavily on wind and in some it’s the main source of power: South Dakota gets 52.38% of its electricity from wind, Iowa 42.19%, and we never hear about the lights going out in Des Moines.
Wind, like hydroelectricity, is also a function of geography. Virginia doesn’t have the wind potential that those Midwestern states do, but we could do more than we presently have, which is essentially none. We don’t have any on-shore wind farms (the first commercial one is set to open later this year in Botetourt County), and, of course, there’s the big off-shore wind project off the coast of Virginia Beach that Dominion is developing (amid some current pushback from the Trump administration, which approved the project in the president’s first term). Wind, though, has proven more controversial than solar because the turbines can be seen farther away. Proposals for wind projects in Highland and Tazewell counties have failed amid intense local opposition. The Botetourt project may be the rare spot where the project is so far back in the mountains that the turbines can’t be seen by many people; it’s also been approved by an all-Republican board of supervisors that sees tax revenue being generated off land that otherwise isn’t going to produce much. I don’t know what the technical limits are for wind power in Virginia, but the political limits seem pretty constricted.
We can’t duplicate these cold-weather countries’ levels of hydroelectric power or wind power, but we could follow their embrace of nuclear power — if we wanted. Finland and Sweden have invested heavily in nuclear power; that’s Finland’s main source of power at 39.8%; in Sweden, it ranks second to hydro power at 29.3%. In Canada, its most populous province, Ontario, is nuclear powered — 55% of the electricity comes from nuclear plants, only 8% from fossil fuels. In New Brunswick, 40% of the power comes from nuclear. On this side of the border, one of our cold-weather states is the most nuclear-powered state in the country: New Hampshire’s electricity is 57.78% nuclear. It’s one of three states where a majority of the power comes from atoms; Illinois and South Carolina are the others. (Virginia gets 23.73% of its power from nuclear, which ranks us 13th.)
While hydroelectricity and, to a lesser extent, wind are a result of cartography, nuclear is a result of choice. To be sure, nuclear is controversial (one of my favorite shows is the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl”) and horrendously expensive. For our purposes today, I’m skipping the important aspect of cost just to focus on the technicalities. Nuclear advocates insist that mass production of small reactors will lower the cost. Christie, the former FERC chair, says he hopes for the day when “we pop them out like microwaves,” but right now we don’t have any.
Where does all this lead? I am not an energy zealot on either side. Neither am I an engineer, and a lot of energy questions really seem like engineering questions. I do claim some expertise in reading the political tea leaves. Here’s how I read the politics:
Both left and right agree that we need more energy, they just disagree on what kinds.
Every form of energy is potentially controversial, because few people want an energy plant near them.
While more solar energy would be desirable, and is certainly the quickest to build, much of rural Virginia is pretty fed up with being a “sacrifice zone” for solar. Those feelings may be irrational and contradictory to the conservative politics of most rural voters (landowners who lease to solar developers have property rights, and property rights are generally supported by conservatives), but many feelings are irrational. Nonetheless, that frustration is quite real and a legislature dominated by suburban and urban legislators either ignores that or doesn’t comprehend the depth of those feelings. As with wind, I don’t know what the technical limitations for solar are in Virginia, but the political limits are being bumped into every time there’s another solar project proposed in some rural county. I’m not saying that’s good or bad; I’m just saying that’s how it is. Unless there is some dramatic change, it’s hard for me to see us using solar to produce most of our power, even on a nice, sunny day — just for political reasons.
The Achilles heel of the push to decarbonize the grid is cold nights like we’ve just had. Many people don’t care what their power is made from; they just want to be sure the heat and lights come on. While clean energy, and the promise that it will be cheaper, sound great, if people can’t trust it to get through those cold winter nights, then those natural gas pipelines snaking across the countryside might look a lot better to them.
That means some on the decarbonization side may need to become more comfortable with natural gas (which they don’t want because it’s still a fossil fuel). Or, if we’re truly serious about decarbonization, and not freezing on winter nights, we need faster deployment of nuclear power (which may not be technically possible and also risks objection from host communities) or we need a faster evolution of the duration of battery storage (which also may not be technically possible). It’s notable that Gov. Abigail Spanberger at various times has spoken approvingly about all three — natural gas, nuclear and battery storage. Is that our new “all-of-the-above” energy strategy?
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