The Henry County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to act Tuesday on a measure that might be cheered at home but could set the county on a collision course with state government.
The supervisors will take up a measure to reduce the number of acres the county is willing to allocate to solar energy development — “solar farms” to some, “industrial solar” to others, depending on your point of view.
Three years ago, Henry County decided to cap the amount of land it would allow for solar development at 1% of the county’s land mass — about 2,445 acres.
“Since setting the cap, the Boards (both the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors) have generally been less willing to allow solar development based on public input and other considerations related to land use, community character, and evolving local priorities,” county administrator Dale Wagoner said by email.
That has produced a proposal to lower Henry County’s solar cap to 1,754 acres. That’s a very precise figure that the county chose carefully — that’s exactly how much land the county has already granted approval for solar development on. Not all those projects have actually happened, though. “Those projects are at varying stages of development, with most making little progress since their initial approval,” Wagoner said. “If current projects do not come to fruition, it would open up acreage for other developers.” So far, only 633.9 of those allotted 1,754 acres have been developed, according to Brandon Martin, the county’s public information officer.
That means there could, and probably will, be more solar facilities built in Henry County. However, the 1,754-acre cap does constitute a ban on development above that amount — so if all the approved projects were to come to fruition, then no more solar would be allowed in the county.
Here’s where we start to run up against a new state law, and the politics start to get cloudy.
The General Assembly in 2020 passed the Clean Economy Act, which mandates the state’s largest utilities adopt a carbon-free energy grid by 2050. (Disclosure: One of those utilities is Dominion Energy, which is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy. You can become a donor and have no say, too. Here’s how.) In theory, that can mean lots of different forms of energy, but in practice, it’s meant solar. Wind is slow to get permitted; Dominion’s offshore wind project off the coast of Virginia Beach is just now starting to spin 13 years after the company acquired the rights. Virginia’s first on-shore commercial wind farm (in Botetourt County) is scheduled to start producing power later this year, 11 years after it was first proposed. There are two proposals for small nuclear reactors (nuclear isn’t renewable, but it is carbon-free), but nuclear has historically been even slower to build, and no one in North America has actually built any of those small modular reactors yet. There are other exotic forms of energy out there — geothermal, fusion — but we haven’t seen those developed yet, either. Solar has its problems (the main one is that the sun doesn’t always shine), but it is quick and relatively inexpensive to build. That’s why we’ve seen it proliferate across much of the southern part of the state (and elsewhere, too).
Solar has also sparked opposition in many rural areas. Solar is fascinating politically because it doesn’t always follow neat ideological lines. Some conservatives back it as a matter of property rights and the free market; some liberals will occasionally voice concern about environmental trade-offs with land development. What often seems to motivate many rural opponents is that solar just looks ugly to them, turning a rural vista into what they see as an industrial hellscape.
In response, many rural localities have banned solar outright or adopted such stringent rules on solar development that solar facilities are effectively banned. Earlier this year, Canary Media reported that about two-thirds of Virginia localities fell into this category.
That, of course, makes it harder for Virginia to meet its goal of a carbon-free energy grid. The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia has put together a Solar Database to track solar projects across the state. Its data showed that in 2024, for the first time, localities turned down more megawatts of solar than they approved. We’ve seen that revert last year and so far this year to more megawatts being approved than denied, but there’s still concern among those who want to see an energy transition that Virginia is moving too slowly — and that local governments resistant to solar projects are to blame.
This year, the General Assembly passed, and the governor signed into law, a bill to “ban the bans.” That law says localities can no longer ban solar projects outright; they have to consider each one separately. They can still vote them down, if they wish, but they now have to tell the state why. (Pay attention to that last phrase.)
This has led many localities to start adopting new ordinances to come into compliance with the law. Pittsylvania County is now moving to repeal its cap of allowing no more than 2% of a single magisterial district to be developed for solar. Henry County, though, appears to be going the other way, by keeping its acreage cap — and lowering it. Joe Lerch, director of local government policy for the Virginia Association of Counties, says counties are still allowed to set caps, but even if they fill up their allotted solar acreage, they still need to accept solar applications. In that case, counties would need to tell the state they rejected the project because it was above their acreage cap. (Again, pay attention to that requirement.)
What might be popular in Henry County (limiting solar development) isn’t so popular in Richmond. One of the legislators who sponsored the new solar law worries that some local governments still aren’t very accepting of solar. (He’s right on that.)
“Legally, it might be possible,” state Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico County, says of Henry’s revised acreage cap. “The spirit of the law, that’s a different question. It seems like this ordinance is not [in the spirit of the law]. I think it behooves localities to comply with the spirit of the law.”
What we have here is a clear difference of opinion on solar development. Let’s cut to the chase. The legislators who passed the Clean Economy Act that mandated an energy transition were almost exclusively Democrats who represent metropolitan areas, but the localities that are seeing the solar development are almost all rural, Republican-voting localities, who aren’t nearly as keen on seeing their landscapes transformed. The General Assembly this session passed legislation to encourage more solar development in urban areas — including so-called home “balcony solar” and allowing localities to mandate “parking lot solar” with solar panels over parking lots — but the reality is the only place to find large tracts of land for utility-scale solar is in rural areas.
VanValkenburg says he hopes that by requiring localities to consider solar projects one by one, rather than allowing a blanket ban, counties that have previously rejected solar will eventually come to see the value in some projects. “My hope is this bill will change the conversation,” he said in an interview. “By having to consider projects one at a time, it should be a less ideological conversation and more an economic, property rights conversation.” He adds: “I didn’t think we’d see change July 1; it will take time to suss this out. The Henry County example is a discouraging one but we’ll see how it plays out. They’re sending a signal to the General Assembly.” Rural areas might well agree they’re sending a signal, but legislators might take that signal differently than what localities intend.
While the entry point for this column is Henry County, it should be noted that Henry County already has more solar than most Virginia counties. The Solar Database measures by megawatts that have been approved. It’s possible that some of those megawatts haven’t been built yet. In any case, Brunswick County has approved the most (2,082 megawatts over 11 projects), followed by Charlotte County (1,648 megawatts over 11 projects) and Pittsylvania County (1,099 megawatts over 24 projects). For comparison purposes, the Tenaska gas plant in Nelson County is rated at 1,011 megawatts; its proposed expansion would take it up to 2,550 megawatts. Henry County is tied for 14th in the state out of 133 localities for the number of megawatts it’s approved: 303 megawatts over 13 projects. Henry County also has one of the higher approval rates for solar projects in the state: 76%, according to the Solar Database. At what point can a county say, “No, we’ve done enough. It’s somebody else’s turn”?
The difficulty is that for all the solar we’ve approved, solar still accounts for just 11.96% of the power that Virginia is producing, according to the site Choose Energy, which has compiled federal records. More than half of the power Virginia produces in-state still comes from carbon-based sources — 50.73% from natural gas, 0.73% from coal. That’s a lot of power that needs to be replaced if we’re going to truly go carbon-free (and that doesn’t count what Virginia imports from other states, which brings in more carbon-based power). Even just looking at our in-state production, to replace carbon-based energy basically means building 4.5 times as much solar (and related storage, a subject we’ll shortly get to). And that computation assumes — incorrectly, of course — that we won’t see demand for electricity increase. We know it will, not just because of data centers, either, but because we’re electrifying so many other things in our lives — but data centers are a prime culprit. In reality, we will need to build a lot more solar than that (plus wind and other things) to replace gas. However, we’re already running up against political limits in rural Virginia to how much land communities are willing to see go to solar energy production.
Some see rural Virginia being turned into a “sacrifice zone” for energy development and resent that they often see as having to produce energy for Northern Virginia (no matter that Northern Virginia supplies the tax revenue that subsidizes their schools). On the other hand, there are those property rights issues: “Private property rights have long been one of Virginia’s most tried and true values,” says Jack Wilson of the conservative, pro-renewables group Energy Right that emphasize those property rights. “While acreage caps may seem like a simple planning tool, they can have unintended consequences for private property owners. Setting an arbitrary threshold effectively tells landowners that, regardless of whether their property is well-suited for solar or whether a project meets every local standard, they can no longer pursue that use once the threshold is reached.”
The most notable county with no utility-scale solar is Bedford County, which has none, even though it’s the fourth-largest county by physical size in the state. Another notable county without solar is Northumberland County, which has rejected every solar project to come before it (five). Fauquier County has rejected six of eight projects; Essex County has rejected three of four. Those are imprecise measures because some projects may get withdrawn before a formal vote when it’s clear they won’t get approved. That was the case recently in Botetourt County, which saw two solar proposals inspire a countywide campaign that proclaimed: “No industrial solar: Keep Botetourt green.” The larger of the two proposals was withdrawn, the smaller one voted down. It seemed clear that Botetourt supervisors were in no mood to accept solar anywhere in the county. The irony of the “Keep Botetourt green” slogan is that both projects are in growth sectors of the county; the land in question may be green now, but it’s unlikely to stay that way. The choice might be a solar project now or a housing development later.
Solar power’s cousin is battery storage, which helps overcome solar’s main problem: It can’t produce energy at night. Battery storage stores up solar power during the day, then releases it onto the grid at night. Some counties are also moving to restrict where it can go. Culpeper County recently voted to ban battery storage on agricultural land and instead limit it to parcels zoned industrial. That vote came over the opposition of some farmers who said they needed the extra income that leasing land to a battery storage company would bring; that’s an argument we see some farmers make in favor of solar, too. “You got to let people make a living,” farmer Joe Gray told the supervisors. “This is the land of opportunity.”
On the other side, Supervisor Paul Bates warned that opening the door to battery storage could bring a repeat of what’s happened with solar: “Any type of supplemental income is great to try to preserve the family farm, but what’s happened as soon as we cracked that door, was no stopping it,” he said. Culpeper now has about 1,000 acres approved for solar. “This was land zoned for farming,” he said. “Once we destroy our land, we’re done.”
This is a microcosm of the debate over energy sites, be they for solar or battery storage, across rural Virginia. VanValkenburg warns that if counties continue to reject solar projects, the state might move to take away their power over solar siting. “I think local governments should comply with the spirit of the law if they don’t want to give us reasons to engage more on this issue,” he said. “If local governments are not going to greenlight energy projects, we’ll have to take a heavier hand.”
That’s the kind of talk that makes local governments shudder. “I can’t speak for every locality, but I think it’s fair to say that local governments generally place a high value on maintaining local land use authority because it is one of our most fundamental responsibilities,” said Martin, the Henry County spokesman. “Comprehensive plans, zoning ordinances, and capital investments are all built around a community’s vision for its future. If we lose the ability to make meaningful land use decisions, it becomes much more difficult to plan for economic development, preserve land for future housing, protect agricultural and forest resources, and make long-term infrastructure investments.”
Lerch, with the Virginia Association of Counties, agrees that these fears are a real concern: “We are very concerned regarding proposed legislation preempting local authority on the siting of solar facilities, battery storage, and other alternative energy sources.”
That could be what’s coming, though.
Remember the part about how localities will now have to explain to the state why they rejected energy projects? Those could be the trigger for that “heavier hand” VanValkenburg warned about.
“A lot of people are going to have eyeballs on all these reports,” VanValkenburg said. “If the General Assembly thinks these reporting mechanisms show that local governments continue to play games, I think there will be an appetite.”
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