Virginia governors are required to produce an energy plan every four years. Gov. Abigail Spanberger recently released hers; you can find it here.
Two state legislators, one Democrat and one Republican, offer their contrasting thoughts.
Virginia energy plan shows path toward reliable, affordable future, by Del. Richard “Rip” Sullivan, D-Fairfax County.
Gov. Spanberger calls this an affordable energy plan, but rural Virginia will be asked to carry much of the physical burden of the buildout, while ratepayers face the financial consequences, by Del. Michael Webert, R-Fauquier County.
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Sullivan: Virginia energy plan shows path toward reliable, affordable future
There is a path forward. Several of them, in fact. These paths offer different scenarios to reach Virginia’s clean energy goals and deliver affordable, reliable and clean power to Virginia’s families and businesses.
Gov. Spanberger released the commonwealth’s 2026 Energy Plan last week. Every governor since Tim Kaine has done so. But Gov. Spanberger is the first to produce a plan using state-of-the-art power sector modeling and analysis — the same modeling Virginia’s electric utilities use.
The 2026 plan is innovative and thorough — keeping Virginia on the path to develop the energy grid of the future, which we began in 2020 with the passage of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA).
Naysayers and critics of the VCEA have insisted that we cannot meet its clean energy goals. That it is too hard. Too expensive. Too optimistic. That it simply cannot be done in this era of load growth. It turns out, though, that when we apply our technological prowess, muster our political will and affirmatively plan to meet our goals — rather than waste time handwringing over these challenges — we can still do what Virginia has always done: lead and succeed.
Virginia is at an inflection point. Data centers are driving surging energy demand, energy bills are rising and the devastating (and expensive) effects of climate change continue to impact Virginians in every corner of the commonwealth. The 2026 Energy Plan lays out practical strategies to meet this moment.
It wisely does not pick one of the plans. Rather, recognizing that there are trade-offs with every energy choice, that technology is advancing at a speed and direction we cannot predict, and that unforeseeable circumstances may well impact our options, it provides flexible choices to current and future leaders to carefully calibrate our path forward over the next 25 years.
Of the four paths that drive toward our clean energy goals, each helps prepare for potential challenges Virginia might face. One simply leaves current policies unchanged, another assumes solar is not deployed as fast as expected. Yet another anticipates demand flexibility from data centers, and a fourth envisions Virginia with a more substantial distributed energy portfolio. Each plan is unique, but all reveal scenarios that will move Virginia forward to a thriving clean energy economy.
Except one. The plan also describes in detail what would happen if we were to abandon our clean energy goals by repealing the VCEA and exiting RGGI. The bottom line:
Virginia would revert back to 20 years ago when air pollution peaked in Virginia. We would look the other way — and pay the costs — as the health impacts from fossil fuels (asthma, cancer, respiratory disease, etc.) grow exponentially and the costs — human and financial — of devastating floods and droughts accelerate. We would drive away and fail to attract businesses that have clean energy goals and want to locate in states where their businesses and employees can thrive.
Not to mention we would doom Virginians to continue to pay billions of dollars on their electric bills for the volatilely-priced gas that would fuel the many new power plants this backward-looking scenario would require.
Fuel costs make up 20% of Virginians’ energy bills. These costs Dominion passes through to ratepayers have more than doubled in the last five years, from $1.7 billion in 2020 to $4.4 billion in 2025. And now, twice — after extreme spikes in gas prices at the beginning of the war with Ukraine and during the two weeks of Winter Storm Elliott — Dominion has had to come to the General Assembly for permission to spread those billions of dollars in fossil fuel cost spikes over 10 years on customer bills. Had they not done so, bills would have increased dramatically by over $25 per month. So ratepayers are now paying not only for the fuel being used last year, but for fuel that was used many years ago.
Who can doubt that world events or natural disasters causing price shocks will continue — and probably become increasingly common? The resulting enormous fuel costs will land on Virginians’ electric bills.
Virginia must stick to its bold decision to develop the grid of the future. Why would we return to the past — an expensive and polluting grid that prioritized fossil fuel generation sources and made the commonwealth part of the climate problem? Instead, this energy plan has communities producing more clean energy serving their own homes and being paid for it, it has cleaner air and water helping to ensure a healthier environment for all Virginians, it helps create a more stable climate so industries dependent on the weather, like agriculture, have better opportunities to succeed, and much more.
Gov. Spanberger has set out a plan for Virginia to meet the growing energy demand, use cleaner, less expensive energy technology, and create the energy grid of tomorrow. I applaud the governor and look forward to working with her on this effort in the General Assembly.
Webert: Gov. Spanberger calls this an affordable energy plan, but rural Virginia will be asked to carry much of the physical burden of the buildout, while ratepayers face the financial consequences.
The governor’s own moderate-demand modeling, the “Current Policies” scenario, which includes the Virginia Clean Economy Act and RGGI, carries approximately $422 billion in power-system costs through 2050. The plan’s “No Policy” scenario, which removes those mandates, carries approximately $295 billion in modeled system costs, a $127 billion difference.
The cost shows up on the ground through an enormous solar buildout in our communities. Current policies estimate roughly 233,000 acres of solar land impact. Under the governor’s preferred approach, Virginia will be required to dedicate 277,000 acres to solar energy, including large industrial-scale solar plants, an area larger than Fairfax County.
That land is not coming out of downtown Richmond or Northern Virginia office parks. Large utility-scale projects require land, and the plan itself identifies farmland and forestland as the places that have historically absorbed much of that development. That means rural communities face many of the most visible consequences of this buildout.
The governor’s plan admits that Virginia’s historical pattern of utility-scale solar development has disproportionately fallen on forestland and farmland, two shared, vital natural resources. But her proposal offers no serious alternatives, and that means those acres have to come from somewhere, which means fewer farms and forests to supply data centers and office parks. Families in rural Virginia are being asked to watch productive farmland and forests bulldozed for energy infrastructure while the state simultaneously confronts unprecedented electricity demand from some of the largest energy users in the country.
The governor’s proposed $422 billion estimated cost does not include everything that customers will pay. Its modeling excludes utility return on equity and the full transmission costs necessary to connect new generation and serve new load.
The plan cites Dominion’s projection that 74% of its $54.8 billion capital plan for 2026–2030 will be recovered through riders and direct increases to electric bills each month, with a projection of an average residential bill increasing to more than $273 per month in just over a decade. The plan provides little incentive for the utility to save money.
While working families face higher electric bills, Gov. Spanberger supported keeping the sales tax exemption for data centers. In 2025 alone, data centers received a $2 billion sales tax benefit, while their energy demand continues to force billions of dollars of new generation and transmission lines. Spanberger chose to subsidize the data centers instead of collecting it for Virginia’s schools, roads and public safety.
Virginia will need more electricity, including nuclear, natural gas, renewables and new technologies. But an energy plan should not call itself affordable without confronting both sides of the ledger: what it costs families financially and what the buildout asks of the communities providing the land and infrastructure.
Rural Virginia should not become the sacrificial altar for an energy policy where costs are increasingly driven by enormous new demand elsewhere in the commonwealth.
Affordability, reliability and fairness should not be competing goals — they should be the standard.
