Hollywood has done what generations of English teachers could not: Get people interested in the classics. Take director Christopher Nolan, add in a star-studded cast that starts with Matt Damon, and next thing you know translations of Homer’s ancient Greek text “The Odyssey” are topping best-seller lists again. The movie version isn’t doing so badly, either, grossing $264.1 million on its opening weekend.
I would be practically derelict in my duties if I did not try to find some way to tie “The Odyssey” to what’s happening here in Virginia.
This would be easier if we were covering upstate New York: We could simply trace the route from Troy to Ithaca — the New York cities, that is, not the ones that Odysseus spent 10 years trying to traverse. We’re not in New York, though; we’re in Virginia. Fortunately, we have a Troy, too — a small community in Fluvanna County. Alas, no one has bothered to name a community here Ithaca. However, there is an estate in Henry County that is known as Ithaca, although some know it simply as the R.L. Stone House, after its original owner, one of the founders of Bassett Furniture. For our purposes, this will do — we will take a metaphorical trip from our Troy to our Ithaca and see what challenges we find along the way.
Odysseus had to deal with drugged-out lotus eaters, an ill-tempered cyclops, sirens who tempted him to sail to his doom and many other dangers. To my knowledge, we won’t encounter any of those things here in Virginia, but we will encounter challenges of other sorts. Spoiler alert: They mostly deal with energy and data centers, which some may think are just as difficult to deal with as the creatures Odysseus had to work his way past.
So, let’s begin. Of course, if we really had an Odysseus here in Virginia, he’d likely go by the nickname Odie. You remember good ol’ Odie. Whatever happened to him anyway? Always kept a good hound dog around.
Fluvanna County: How do we replace natural gas?
Our Odie wants to take the quickest way home, so from Troy he ought to get on Interstate 64 at Zion Crossroads, go west to Charlottesville, then south on U.S. 29. Odie, though, is not just in a hurry; he’s a proud man, and his hubris often gets the better of him, both in the original telling and ours. Odie thinks he can outsmart everyone else, so he’s going to try to take a shortcut, and we all know how shortcuts work out.
This one through Fluvanna County will take him near Scottsville — and the Tenaska natural gas plant that’s on the Fluvanna side of the James River at Scottsville. That plant has been in the news lately because Tenaska wants to build a second natural gas plant there, and to say that’s been controversial is like saying the sirens can keep a tune. It’s stirred up exactly the kind of opposition you’d expect to such a thing: complaints about carbon emissions. Despite that opposition, the Fluvanna County Board of Supervisors has voted 4-1 to approve the project, which now awaits regulatory approval.
This is more than just some local controversy. It’s part of a statewide, even nationwide, debate over energy. The Virginia Clean Economy Act mandates the state transition to a carbon-free electric grid by 2050, which would seem to rule out natural gas. However, the act makes an exception if natural gas is required for “reliability,” which is why we now see multiple gas plants proposed across Virginia — Chesterfield County, Cumberland County, maybe some I’m missing.
Here’s where aspiration runs into reality: At any given moment, more than 40% of the power on our electric grid comes from natural gas. That’s a lot of power to replace with something else.
Some inconvenient numbers: The Solar Database produced by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia shows that Fluvanna County has approved 13 megawatts of solar power. The proposed natural gas plant would generate 1,540 megawatts. Fluvanna would have to approve 118.4 times as much solar to get to the level of that natural gas plant. Now, obviously we wouldn’t expect one county to do that all by itself. However, that one gas plant would churn out nearly as many megawatts from one location as we’ll encounter from solar on our entire Troy-to-Ithaca trip. That might be an odd metric, but here’s a more conventional one. The existing natural gas plant in Fluvanna is measured at 1,011 megawatts. Add that and the proposed one, and Fluvanna’s natural gas operations would be pumping out 2,550 megawatts. That would be more megawatts in a single location than Virginia approved in solar across all of Virginia last year (2,233 megawatts).
Of course, that’s also a lot more carbon emissions versus none for solar, but the point is Virginia would have to double its solar approvals just to equal that one natural gas plant — and then some, because solar facilities only generate power when the sun is shining while natural gas can run around the clock. That’s why solar projects are considered inefficient; they take up a lot of land for the amount of power they produce.
We’ve barely gotten started on our journey, and already we’ve encountered one of the central challenges with the energy transition we’re trying to pull off: How do we replace all this natural gas? We won’t find the answer in Fluvanna County, but we will find the question.
Nelson County: How do we plan for the future?
We move on to Nelson County, where the big news recently was the county’s purchase of 683 acres along U.S. 29 for economic development purposes. The county says there’s no specific project in mind; this is just planning for the future. Naturally, given the times, the land acquisition has stirred concern that a data center might be on the way, and polls show that Democrats and Republicans alike now despise the facilities, despite the tax revenues they produce. County officials say not to worry — that data centers aren’t allowed under Nelson County ordinances. Still, people worry.
Nelson County’s land purchase also highlights one of the challenges facing many localities: a misunderstanding of how slow-moving economic development often is.
North District Supervisor Cameron Lenahan voted for the purchase but said he wants to see a plan to develop the land in five years or get rid of it. “If this is to bring in jobs to Nelson County, good-paying jobs and not bottom-of-the-barrel jobs for economic development, I’d be on board, but this has got to be a five-year plan,” he said. That is completely unrealistic: Roanoke bought land for the Centre for Industry and Technology in 1982, and some tracts are still undeveloped. Botetourt County bought the land for the Greenfield Business Center in 1995, and the land sat vacant for almost two decades before it finally began to be developed. Danville and Pittsylvania County bought the land for the Southern Virginia Megasite in 2008, and it sat empty until Microporous started construction for a battery plant this year.
Had those localities not acted when they did, though, the land might have been developed for other purposes — and there would have been no large tracts ready when companies came calling. Both Democratic and Republican administrations in Virginia have pushed to make sure that large tracts are available for economic development prospects. That’s what Nelson County is doing, although one of its own supervisors seems not to understand that economic development is a long game — longer than Odysseus’ journey.
Our Odie might not live to see this investment for Nelson County pay off, but his children might.
Amherst County: Taxes going up but options to offset them are controversial
One of the most famous scenes in “The Odyssey” — both Homer’s version and the movie version — comes when Odysseus faces a choice of how to navigate around three dangers. First, there are the sirens who are trying to lure sailors to their doom. Then sailors must make a seemingly impossible navigational choice. On the one side, the ravenous six-headed monster Scylla. On the other, the ship-swallowing whirlpool Charybdis. Amherst County faces choices roughly similar in their unpopularity.
Assessments have gone up. The board of supervisors has cut the tax rate, but even so, taxes are still going up for many property owners. Enter one possible remedy, possibly two. Petitions are being circulated to put a referendum on the fall ballot to allow a Rosie’s Gaming Emporium (there’s a similar drive underway in Pulaski County). Amherst voters rejected a Rosie’s by a wide margin in 2021; will the new assessments cause them to reconsider?
Meanwhile, there are persistent rumors that a big revenue generator might want to locate in Amherst — and not everyone is happy about that. Such a revenue generator would be a data center. (Spoiler: This is going to be a recurring theme.) There are no specific proposals before the supervisors, but this week the planning commission approved an ordinance that would ban data centers by right and require them to seek specific approval from the supervisors.
Campbell County: An energy center faces energy decisions
From Amherst, Odie would cross the James River on U.S. 29 and skirt the eastern edge of Lynchburg. I’ll resist the temptation to dwell on Lynchburg’s political drama (no Republicans on the fall ballot for the city council, but instead two rival slates of Republicans running as independents, which would seem to give an advantage to the three Democrats). Instead, let’s talk about what Odie finds in Campbell County when he passes into that locality.
Campbell County is home to a major Appalachian Power substation at Joshua Falls. It factors into the state’s energy debate two ways. First, there’s the proposed Valley Link transmission line that would run from Joshua Falls to a proposed substation in Culpeper County and would be connected to the Dominion Energy grid. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.) The purpose of this proposed line would be to move power from the Midwest to Northern Virginia, where data centers are guzzling electrons in record numbers. Not surprisingly, this power line is quite controversial in the counties it would run through. Most of that opposition seems to be in places other than Campbell County, but that hardly matters. Campbell County helps illustrate how the power grid is connected — and how if we talk about putting more energy on the grid, that means we need more power lines. Campbell is one of the places where the theoretical becomes real.
Campbell, meanwhile, is facing another energy decision: what zoning to have for a proposed nuclear plant. Appalachian has proposed to build a small nuclear reactor — an SMR, as the industry calls them, small modular reactors. The greater Lynchburg area knows more about nuclear energy than most because two big nuclear companies — BWX Technologies and Framatone — call the region home. Will that make Campbell a politically easy place to build a nuclear plant? We’ll see.
Bedford County: Solar farms not welcome
Odysseus runs into problems with the sun god when his hungry crew slaughters some of Helios’ sacred cattle. When our Odie enters Bedford County, he’ll enter a county that has its own beef with the sun, so to speak. Bedford County wants no industrial-scale solar.
“If you wanna have solar on your rooftop or on your business or on your own land that is for net metering, that’s okay. But the thousand-acre utility-scale solar arrays, we do have a problem with those,” county administrator Robert Hiss said last year.
Bedford is a county that is tempting state intervention, because the Clean Economy Act requires more solar — a lot more, as we saw above — and the General Assembly is concerned that rural localities aren’t doing their part. Many rural localities, though, either don’t want big solar projects or feel they’ve done their part already.
Bedford is the fifth-largest locality in Virginia by land mass, and the largest with no utility-scale solar facilities. Of the state’s 25 largest counties by physical size, only three don’t have any solar big enough to show up on the Solar Database: Bedford County, Washington County (14th in size) and Buchanan County (23rd). At some point, legislators from those power-hungry localities in Northern Virginia may start asking why Bedford isn’t doing its part, and saying “We think solar is ugly and we don’t want it” may not be a sufficient answer. The danger for rural localities is that the state takes over solar siting, in which case Bedford might be a prime candidate for solar facilities.
Franklin County: A ‘flash’ protest over the industry some don’t want in the industrial park
Franklin County hasn’t been keen on solar, either, although it has some. The big controversy there, though, is over the so-called “Project Flash,” a data center that might be headed for the county’s industrial park, the Summit View Business Park. In Northern Virginia, we’ve seen understandable protests against data centers that crowd up against housing developments. However, even the prospect of putting them in industrial parks — be it here in Franklin County or Botetourt County or Wythe County — is exciting opposition. Opponents would seemingly be happy if the land sat vacant and produced no tax revenue rather than see a data center there. At one time that would have been a surprise, but the latest polling shows conservative voters moving just as strongly against data centers as liberals have been.
Henry County: A county with solar farms now feels it has done enough and wants to limit solar development
At last our Odie crosses into his home county. He’ll find that since he’s been gone, Henry County has accepted solar farms — 13 approved projects for 303 megawatts, according to the Solar Database. In all, the county has approved 1,754 acres of solar, which is 1,754 acres more than Bedford has. Not all that is built, but Henry would like to make sure no more is. That could put Henry, much like Bedford, under the state’s magnifying glass. These energy questions quickly become uncomfortable: Rural areas ask why they should be the ones to sacrifice their land and viewsheds just so that Northern Virginia can have data centers. The issue is more complicated than that, but that’s how it’s often framed in rural Virginia. These rural counties didn’t ask Virginia — particularly Northern Virginia — to become a data center capital. Their legislators also didn’t vote for the Clean Economy Act that mandates non-carbon energy — yet these rural areas are now being expected to shoulder some of the load, and many aren’t happy about that.
Remember how Odie started off his odyssey by passing the natural gas plant in Fluvanna County that wants to expand? This is the flip side of that: counties that don’t want to do any more solar — even though state law requires utilities to develop more solar somewhere. Where is that going to be? The prospect of rooftop solar is a great thing, but can it match the numbers that are going to be required to replace natural gas? We have a state government whose policies are at cross-purposes with many of the local governments that also have a say in these decisions.
If Odie has any thoughts on how to solve that dilemma, they go unrecorded. He’s got a house full of unwanted guests waiting for him. In Homer’s version, and the movie — well, some of you already know how that ends. Let’s just say we hope that in our version, Odie calls 911 instead.
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