Monthly Archives: April 2018

How Virginia localities will get to 100% renewable

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Supporters of clean energy gathered in Richmond on April 25 to launch the 100% Virginia Campaign. Photo courtesy of the Sierra Club.

Last week a coalition led by the Sierra Club launched a “100% Virginia” campaign designed in part to encourage more localities to follow the lead of Blacksburg and Floyd in committing to a 100% renewable energy future. For many people this energy transition now feels inevitable, at least in the long run. In the short run, though, it still feels very difficult.

Consider the obstacles we face in Virginia. Most localities have to deal with Dominion Energy Virginia (Dominion) or Appalachian Power (APCo), which have monopolies in their service territories. With few exceptions, customers can’t just sign up with another supplier who will offer a cleaner energy mix. And most local governments themselves buy electricity collectively from Dominion under a contract that gives them an attractive price but constrains their ability to generate power for themselves.

Our utilities themselves show no interest in abandoning fossil fuels. Dominion Energy Virginia’s parent company, Dominion Energy, is heavily invested in natural gas transmission, storage and export. The parent company needs the electric utility it owns to keep burning fracked gas for electricity so it can fill pipelines like its $6 billion Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Dominion has sunk billions of dollars of its customers’ money into new gas generating plants, which it won’t want to close early. And Dominion’s 2017 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) showed the company expected to see its CO2 emissions actually increase over the next 25 years.

For its part, APCo is a subsidiary of Ohio-based American Electric Power (AEP). AEP has reduced its use of coal in recent years and plans major investments in renewable energy, but it won’t reach its planned 80% reduction in CO2 emissions until 2050. Meanwhile it is increasing its use of fracked gas.

Both Dominion Energy Virginia and APCo make money by building new infrastructure, so they need customers to use more energy, not less. They oppose mandatory efficiency savings as well as customer-owned and third-party owned solar, both of which would reduce their own sales. One result is Virginia’s abysmal showing on energy efficiency rankings.

Virginia lacks a mandatory renewable portfolio standard (RPS), relying on a weak and voluntary standard. As a result, Dominion Energy Virginia’s energy mix is currently less than 4% renewable energy, none of it from wind or solar. (Dominion does generate a tiny amount of solar energy but sells the renewable energy certificates, so legally it no longer qualifies as energy from solar. This will be an ongoing problem as Dominion builds more solar.) APCo has more wind in its energy mix than Dominion does, but also more coal.

Customers who want to generate their own renewable energy face a long list of policy barriers, and Virginia lacks incentives like tax credits, rebates, or a REC market that would spur private investment. Under pressure from Dominion, APCo and the rural electric cooperatives, the General Assembly routinely defeats proposals that would boost investment in rooftop solar. A recent report gave Virginia an F on solar policy, ranking us among the “10 States Blocking Distributed Solar.”

If the General Assembly is unhelpful, Virginia’s State Corporation Commission (SCC) is actively hostile to renewable energy and energy efficiency. The SCC cares about low rates and not much else.

It’s also hard for local governments to fill the policy gap. Virginia is a Dillon Rule state, meaning local governments have only the power granted to them by state government. A city or county can’t adopt a building code requiring homes to be more energy efficient than called for in the statewide code, or require new buildings to have solar panels or green roofs.

With all these obstacles, the prospects for meaningful change once looked grim. But two trends have converged to change the outlook. First, the economics of electric generation have now shifted decisively in favor of renewable energy and away from fossil fuels (though a lot of people don’t know it yet). And second, customer demand for renewable energy has surged across the political spectrum, with major corporations driving much of the action.

As a result, even in Virginia a number of trends favor renewable energy:

Dominion’s 2017 IRP dropped plans for new baseload gas plants before at least 2025, a sharp change from 2016. That IRP for the first time identified solar as the least cost resource in Virginia, though it proposed a build-out of only 240 MW per year. Dominion’s 2018 IRP, due out May 1, will almost surely call for more than that, in keeping with 2018 legislation, SB 966, putting more than 5,000 MW of wind and solar by 2028 in the public interest.

SB 966 also called for a billion dollars in new spending on energy efficiency programs, and limited the SCC’s ability to reject proposed efficiency programs. Meanwhile, localities are putting in place Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) lending programs that will allow businesses and non-profits to access low-cost financing for both energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Corporate demand has created new solar options, including some from Dominion but also some that don’t involve our utilities. For example, the 500 MW solar farm that will serve Microsoft and others appears to be structured to bypass Dominion entirely. The deal uses what is known as a wholesale power purchase agreement, an option increasingly popular with corporations, institutions, local governments, and other large purchasers of energy. The Northern Virginia Regional Commission is currently working with local governments in its area to do something similar.

Legislation passed in 2017 is also finally producing a solar option for Dominion customers that will likely be available by the end of this year. As proposed, it will offer electricity generated from solar facilities in Virginia at a cost comparable to that of Dominion’s wretched Green Power Program.

Offshore wind has not gotten much attention in Virginia recently, but Dominion’s partnership with the Danish company Orsted, the world’s leading offshore wind developer, puts Virginia’s 12-MW pilot project on track for completion in 2020, with the commercial lease area likely to see the full build-out of 2,000 MW occur during the 2020s.

Finally, the Northam Administration is finalizing new regulations designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by having Virginia utilities trade carbon allowances with those in states that are members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). It’s not clear yet how much this will incentivize utilities to build wind and solar.

Localities considering a commitment to 100% renewable energy should feel optimistic about these developments. As renewable energy costs continue to tumble, charting a path to 100% also means saving money for taxpayers.

The exact path to 100% may not be clear, but it will likely involve a combination of some or all these options:

  • Prioritizing energy efficiency in both public and private buildings;
  • Investing in large offsite solar (and wind) facilities, and encouraging corporate and institutional customers to participate in similar investments;
  • Putting solar on rooftops and parking lots of municipal buildings and schools, using third-party PPA financing to avoid upfront capital costs;
  • Offering C-PACE financing to businesses for energy efficiency and solar;
  • Sponsoring and promoting “solarize” bulk purchasing programs that make it easier and cheaper for residential and commercial customers to install solar;
  • Promoting utility-sponsored renewable energy purchase options for residents and businesses as they become available; and
  • If adequate utility options don’t emerge, using municipal aggregation to purchase renewable electricity from another supplier.

Localities also have to do a better job advocating for clean energy at the General Assembly and with the Governor, where they are currently underrepresented in the energy debate. They need to become squeaky wheels about things like the barriers to customer-owned solar, the paucity of renewable energy options and our substandard residential building code.

But most of all, localities have to begin taking advantage of the efficiency and solar options that already exist. Too many boards of supervisors and city councils waste time dithering and second-guessing and deferring to unmotivated staff and wondering if, gee, maybe it would be better to wait for someone else to go first.

Getting to 100% may not be easy, but it’s impossible if you never start.

The race to 100% renewable is on in Virginia: Floyd and Blacksburg lead in committing to energy transition (sort of)

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On October 24, 2017, deep in the heart of Virginia, the mostly Republican supervisors of Floyd County (population 15, 755) issued a resolution proclaiming the county’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by “replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy along with conservation and energy efficiency,” and “support[ing] the achievement of near zero greenhouse gas emissions through policies that shift the energy supply strategy of our County from fossil fuels to 100% clean renewable energy.” The vote in support was unanimous.

The vote made Floyd the first Virginia locality to join more than 70 cities, towns and counties across the U.S. that have committed to achieving 100% renewable electricity. At least five cities are already powered by renewable energy today, according to the Sierra Club. (And surprise! None of the five are in California.)

Floyd’s resolution does not set a date for accomplishing its goal, so some might call it more aspirational than committed. And even the residents of Floyd subsequently showed themselves more than a little conflicted. (I’ll get to that in a moment.)

But within three months, the Town of Blacksburg followed suit with its own resolution in favor of 100% renewable energy, and it upped the ante by setting a target date of 2050. The Blacksburg commitment is bolstered by the town’s previous work on a climate action plan and its own claim to fame as the location of Virginia’s first Solarize campaign.

As best I can tell, Floyd and Blacksburg are the only Virginia localities to take the pledge so far, but the idea is under consideration across the state. The Sierra Club launched its “Ready for 100” campaign in Virginia almost two years ago in an effort to persuade Arlington and Alexandria to set a target date of 2035 for both government and residents to be powered by 100% renewable electricity. Fairfax City and Charlottesville have also begun the conversation.

The 2035 target proposed for Arlington and Alexandria is both more and less ambitious than Blacksburg’s goal, since it covers only the electric sector. Moving to 100% renewable energy, as Blacksburg aims to do, also requires things like eliminating petroleum use in transportation and an end to heating by natural gas and fuel oil. These are harder in the near term but generally considered achievable by 2050, given the projections for electric vehicles, cost declines that make electricity from wind and solar competitive with fossil fuels, and a growing belief that combating climate change will soon push us towards a policy to “electrify everything.”

Not everyone agrees that abandoning fossil fuels is the right goal, including some of the same people who said it was. Immediately after passing the 100% resolution, supervisors in Floyd County contracted a case of buyers’ remorse when the local Tea Party found out and raised a ruckus. (The local newspaper had been covering the topic for months, but evidently it didn’t make Fox News.)

Barely six weeks later, on December 12, the board issued a hastily-prepared second resolution. It began by repeating several findings of the first resolution, including recognizing the threat of climate change and the role of humans in causing it. So far, so good. Then it took a sharp detour to praise fossil fuels and to pledge to “protect the freedom and economic interests” of residents by working for “viable, cost-effective, clean and reliable energy resources of all available types,” which the drafters seemed to think included fossil fuels. Only one supervisor voted no. They did not, however, repeal the first resolution. That leaves Floyd with its first-in-the-commonwealth status on embracing 100% renewable energy, but sadly paralyzed on putting it into action.

It is worth reading this second Floyd resolution to understand the underlying concerns of the noisy minority who pushed it through. It reveals that a belief in coal as a cheap fuel remains common, though it has been years since coal lost its competitiveness. And the reference to fossil fuels as “clean” is surely an echo of the “clean coal” propaganda that never had any truth behind it, but seemed to offer a free lunch. The very silliness of the phrase works in its favor: since no one would make up something so absurd, people figure, it has to be true.

The second resolution also reflects a genuine concern about the potential of an over-active government to infringe on individual liberties. Billy Weitzenfeld, President of Sustain Floyd, told me some local people who were opposed to the pro-renewable energy resolution expressed a fear that it would lead to the government taking away peoples’ wood stoves and forcing everyone to put solar panels on their houses. Thus the freedom from utility control that rooftop solar offers to consumers was turned on its head and made to look like a threat to individual liberty.

Weitzenfeld feels the Tea Party concerns are misplaced, but he also thinks the conflict could have been avoided by better dialog in the process. It was unfortunate, he said, that fear took over, and—at least temporarily—brought a halt to what had been an exciting momentum on clean energy initiatives.

Weitzenfeld has not thrown in the towel, though. He and other advocates in Floyd are getting back to doing “the proactive stuff that can really make a difference”: putting solar on rooftops through a second Solarize program, encouraging energy audits, engaging the public, and building what he calls “the constituency of practitioners,” people whose own experience with renewable energy will make them the ones to push back against fear and misinformation the next time around.

Looking on the bright side, even the rebelling Tea Partiers recognized the climate threat, which is also a theme common to the other Virginia resolutions. In other conservative states, more prosaic considerations have driven the decision. And by that, of course, I mean money. The Republican mayor of Georgetown, Texas, said economics pushed them to become one of the first cities in America to run entirely on wind and solar energy, when they found they could save money doing it. Bentonville, Texas, may become the second city in that state to achieve the 100% goal, on economic grounds as well as due to concerns over air quality associated with coal and gas burning.

In 2008, tiny Rock Port, Missouri, became the first locality in the U.S to be powered entirely by wind energy, taking advantage of a cheap and abundant resource in a windy farm community. Greensburg, Kansas, also went all-wind in 2013, and uses this and other green initiatives as a major branding tool.

All of these are small communities that control their own electricity supply, which gives them options most Virginia localities lack. Blacksburg residents get their electricity from Appalachian Power; most others have to deal with Dominion Energy Virginia or one of the rural electric cooperatives. So even if they achieve consensus within their communities on a goal of 100% renewables, meeting the goal will require navigating a range of barriers.

We are not alone there. A fair number of the cities on the Ready for 100 list are also located in the Southeast, and suffer from the same outdated monopoly utility structure that we do. Virginia localities can look for guidance to Atlanta, Georgia (100% renewable energy by 2035), and Columbia, South Carolina (100% renewable electricity by 2036).

Next week Sierra Club will launch its “100% Virginia Campaign” to encourage residents across the state to advocate for clean energy in their communities, with the hope that more localities will take up resolutions for 100% renewable electricity by 2035.

More generally, Sierra Club organizer Alice Redhead says the goal is to “build a movement for clean energy across the state and set the conditions for Virginia to transition to 100% renewable energy statewide by 2050. We are pushing for localities around Virginia to commit to 100% clean energy, but we are also making sure that the campaign is flexible rather than one size fits all and allows for locally-tailored initiatives that are strategic for the conditions in different areas of the state. Local campaign teams that are a part of the 100% Virginia network will develop unique plans to advocate for clean energy progress specific to their area.”

In an upcoming blogpost I’ll take a harder look at the obstacles facing Virginia localities, as well as the opportunities that make getting to 100 a viable option.