Monthly Archives: January 2026

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Solar can save Virginia farms — if government gets out of the way

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Photo courtesy of the American Solar Grazing Association

It’s not easy to be a farmer in Virginia. Pests, weather, uncertain markets and access to capital are a perennial problem. This year farmers have also had to contend with disruptions from President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs, and an immigration crackdown that has deprived many farms of their experienced labor force. 

 And then there’s climate change and the outward creep of suburban sprawl. No wonder studies show the number of farms in Virginia continuing to shrink, and the age of farmers still in business trending steadily upward. We are losing our family farms.

 That’s why I’m baffled by the resistance to solar in many parts of rural Virginia. 

Farmers who lease part of their land for solar earn a guaranteed, stable income for 25 or 30 years, keep the property in the family, and never have to watch as a subdivision paves over the fields where they played as children. The income from a solar project will be there when a late frost means the loss of that year’s fruit crop or a scorching summer reduces the corn harvest by half.

Indeed, these days the choice is not between farming and solar; farming and solar are increasingly compatible “crops.” Sheep grazing has gotten the most attention in Virginia for its perfect synergy with solar: the sheep thrive in the shade of the solar panels and do the work of vegetation management, which otherwise would require herbicides and machinery. Elsewhere, farmers are raising cattle, poultry, grapevines and shade-loving crops under solar, in a practice collectively known as agrivoltaics.

 The combination of solar and agriculture is spreading rapidly across the country, endorsed by organizations like the American Farmland Trust. Solar sheep grazing is so popular that it has its own trade association, the American Solar Grazing Association. Here in Virginia, at least two sheep grazing companies contract with large solar developers for vegetation management. One, Gray’s Lambscaping, has over 800 sheep at solar projects, and expects to scale up to 5500 sheep by 2028. 

 Meanwhile, the conservation group Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), which typically opposes large solar projects, is demonstrating the feasibility of growing vegetables under solar panels at a community farm in Loudoun County. 

 If solar integrates so well into the agricultural economy, what is the reasoning behind the county ordinances that ban solar or limit it to only a few projects? And why, when a county doesn’t prohibit solar outright, do local leaders so frequently reject permits for projects that meet all their conditions?  

 I’ve received emails from solar haters who regurgitate misinformation about the harms of solar panels, I’ve listened to legislators wax eloquent on the subject of “protecting rural values,” and I’ve sighed in frustration at a few fellow members of the environmental community who, when it comes to it, care less about addressing climate change than about keeping viewsheds pretty. 

 Often the opposition to solar is couched in terms of defending local control of land use decisions. But too many localities use this authority, not to make sure projects are developed responsibly, but to make sure they aren’t developed at all. And to that end, they prevent landowners from using their land in the way the owners have decided they need to. The rejections don’t mean the land returns to being farmed; more likely it means the land will be sold and, quite likely, developed for housing or even – gah! – data centers. If localities cared about saving farmland, they would approve more solar.

 In the last year, the percentage of utility solar projects that receive permits from localities ticked up slightly. One possibility is that the hostility to solar is easing. That would be welcome, but I suspect the more likely reason is that solar companies aren’t pursuing projects where they expect rejection. That’s a loss all around: the localities lose out on tax revenue, their landowners lose out on income, and everyone loses out on low-cost electricity.

 The hostility to solar makes little sense to me. Conservatives who care about property rights typically favor landowners over the government, so why is solar different? To be fair, some conservatives actively support solar, such as the groups Conservatives for Clean Energy and Energy Right.

 On the other side of the political spectrum, liberals and everyone else who cares about climate change should want solar everywhere – and most do, but not all. As for solar and farming, those of any political persuasion who care about farmland preservation should favor solar over subdivisions. And anyone who cares about the farmers themselves should be spreading the gospel of solar. Agrivoltaics is just the icing on the cake that can make everyone feel they didn’t have to compromise.

The legislative response

 Legislators have struggled with this problem for several years now. Many are desperate for new clean energy projects to serve the fast-rising demand for electricity, but they’ve been unable to bring themselves to take authority away from recalcitrant localities. It’s a hard needle to thread.

 Last year members of the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation (CEUR) crafted a multi-part bill designed to give localities all the information they need to make rational decisions about solar permitting, while giving landowners and project developers a right to appeal adverse decisions to the State Corporation Commission (SCC). 

 That bill failed in committee, and this year only a part of it made it into a bill. House Bill 918, from Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, sets up a university consortium to provide expertise and guidance, including on solar siting and permitting. 

 Meanwhile, a bill proposed last year by members of the solar industry came closer to passage than the CEUR bill did. The industry bill proposed a suite of rigorous best practices for solar, designed to reassure localities that solar facilities will be good neighbors. 

Among the best practices were farm-friendly provisions like using native pollinator plants, screening with native trees, and incorporating grazing animals or farm crops. Localities would not be allowed to ban solar outright, but would have to make decisions on the merits of each proposal. However, nothing in the bill would have required localities to approve these projects.

 The industry bill foundered last year, but this year it is back with the endorsement of CEUR. In its current form, HB 711 from Del. Charniele Herring, D-Alexandria, and Senate Bill 347 from Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, continues to preserve local decision-making, but localities that deny permits to solar projects must report their reasons to the SCC for inclusion in a public database. SB 347 has already been reported from committee and will be heard by the full Senate.

 Only one bill this year is directly aimed at helping farmers install solar. HB 1091 from Del. Amy Laufer, D-Albermarle, adds half a line to Virginia’s right-to-farm law giving farmers a right to install solar if they also use the same land for agricultural activities like grazing or crops.  The effect of Laufer’s bill is that any farmer who wants to combine solar and farming could do so without having to go get a local permit. (The right-to-farm law does not exempt farmers from other laws, so regulations governing erosion, wetland protection, etc. still apply.)

 A more modest bill, developed by PEC and carried by Del. Irene Shin, D-Fairfax, defines agrivoltaics and sets up an advisory panel to determine what qualifies, consider possible requirements and limitations, and make recommendations for next year. That’s encouraging, but unfortunately, the bill defines agrivoltaics specifically to exclude “solar energy generation that replaces the farmer’s primary income.”

Counterfactual definitions like this tend to cause problems. 

If a farmer has a crop failure, and the farm’s major source of income that year is solar, do they no longer qualify? It also suggests that sheep graziers in the business of using their animals for vegetation management at solar projects – i.e., agrivoltaics – could not use the industry-accepted word to describe what they do. Besides, really, don’t we want all solar projects to incorporate agriculture?

 A bill from Sen.David Marsden, D-Fairfax, would task the Department of Energy with setting up a committee of experts to develop solar siting criteria and then score the appropriateness of any proposed site for solar. There’s no indication in the bill that the criteria would include a farmer wanting to include solar among their products, but perhaps it could. However, it would not require localities to approve any projects. 

 It feels inevitable that the future of solar incorporates farming, and the future of farming may well mean incorporating solar. Whether Virginia’s leaders see this yet or not is another question, but they do have their opportunity this year.

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on January 28, 2026.

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As 2026 legislative session starts, data centers’ diesel generators are a top concern for Virginians

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Data center between housing community and a bike path
A data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Photo by Hugh Kenny, Piedmont Environmental Council.

Virginia’s ever-growing fleet of data centers will take the spotlight when the General Assembly reconvenes this week. Along with bills addressing issues like energy use and siting, legislators will need to address a problem that received little attention in previous years: the diesel generators that provide backup power in emergencies.

In Northern Virginia, where most data centers are concentrated, millions of people are exposed to air pollution from thousands of massive diesel generators. Air toxins permeate the surrounding area every time these generators are run for routine testing and maintenance, with greater levels of pollution when they all kick on at once in a grid emergency. As more data centers go up in suburban neighborhoods and close to schools, residents fear that their health, and that of their children, is being sacrificed to Big Tech’s AI ambitions. 

Ongoing research led by Dr. Damian Pitt at Virginia Commonwealth University, using data from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), shows pollution from data centers currently makes up a very small but growing percentage of the region’s most harmful air emissions, including CO, NOx and PM2.5. (In pollution, the automobile is still king.)  Already the appendix to the report, using 2023 data, shows significant impacts to neighborhoods around data centers in Loudoun and Prince William counties, exceeding emissions from other high-pollution facilities in the region. 

(Map courtesy Damian Pitt/Virginia Commonwealth University research team)

But as the research team noted, the total allowable emissions under DEQ permits is far greater, and this also keeps growing with construction of each new data center. 

And those are annual limits, which could be met with very high emissions on a limited number of days. It’s not hard to imagine the health crisis that might accompany a grid emergency causing all of the area’s generators to fire up at once on a hot summer day, perhaps when smoke from wildfires is already pushing air quality into the hazard zone. 

Yet the problem grows with every new data center that’s built, each one requiring backup power on site. In Virginia, diesel is the fuel of choice, most of it burned in so-called Tier II emergency generators with no pollution controls. 

In the past year, large operators have started installing Tier IV generators in addition to Tier II generators. The Tier IV have some pollution controls and are not restricted to emergency use. They are subject to the same annual emissions limits, but as long as they stay under the permitted level there is no limit on how much they can run. 

The new trend suggests that operators who install these non-emergency generators either think their Tier II generators may be used so much in the future that it will put the data center at risk of exceeding the permit’s annual air pollution limits – which would be bad – or they intend to use the Tier IV generators outside of emergency situations – which might be worse. 

Either way, it appears operators expect to burn a lot more diesel fuel in coming years. One Amazon permit I reviewed contemplates a single data center using up to ten million gallons of diesel fuel annually for 173 generators. All that diesel fuel is delivered by diesel trucks, which adds to the region’s pollution but isn’t limited by the permits.

Why so much? DEQ guidance from January 2025 indicates that data centers have two to three levels of redundancy in their generator capacity – that is, backups for the backups, so operators never have to fear losing power if some of the generators won’t start. As a result, there is more generator capacity than data center load. Together, Northern Virginia’s 4,000-plus diesel generators add up to over 11 gigawatts of energy capacity – exceeding Dominion Energy’s entire natural gas fleet, and enough to power millions of homes. 

But of course, they don’t power millions of homes. They are used only for data centers, and when all goes well, they aren’t used at all. These thousands of generators just sit around doing nothing.  

Apparently, this is the cheapest possible way to ensure data centers never lose power, but it’s hard to believe they can’t do better. If there is redundancy anyway, data centers ought to be using batteries or other storage as their first line of defense in an outage, reserving Tier IV for second-line backup and eliminating Tier II generators altogether. Typical lithium-ion batteries provide four hours of electricity, enough to cover most backup needs and still leaving room to help the grid meet peaks in demand. 

A (very) few operators are in fact doing this, but unless Virginia acts to require it, Big Tech has little incentive to prioritize clean backup power. The use of diesel generators offloads the true cost of backup power onto residents in the region, who pay in the form of worse health outcomes and a lower quality of life. Evidently that suits the tech companies just fine. 

While residents demand an end to the pollution, Virginia’s government has been going in exactly the opposite direction. This fall, DEQ amended a guidance document to allow Tier II generators to run more often. DEQ achieved this by changing the definition of “emergency” to include planned power outages, such as might occur when a utility schedules work on a substation that supplies electricity to a data center. 

DEQ cut some legally-questionable corners to get this change finalized two weeks before the end of Glenn Youngkin’s term as governor. When word got out, more than 500 people submitted comments online and by email, overwhelmingly opposed to easing generator restrictions. Only a small handful of commenters supported the change, mainly the data centers themselves and a couple of their chamber of commerce allies. 

DEQ didn’t respond to ordinary residents, but the letter it mailed to what seems to have been a select few commenters was unrepentant. DEQ did not even acknowledge the suggestions that it require batteries instead of allowing the increased use of the dirtiest diesel generators.

Pressure will now be on the General Assembly to tackle the issue. This session will likely see the reintroduction of legislation offered in 2024 and 2025 by Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, and Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, limiting or banning the use of diesel generators at data centers as part of larger bills addressing their energy use.

And this year a new Loudoun County Democrat, Del. John McAuliff, has introduced legislation requiring data centers to use storage as the first line of defense in emergencies, limiting Tier IV generators to emergency use when storage is exhausted, and removing the option of Tier II generators altogether. The bill also adds air monitoring and public notification requirements.

No doubt the data center lobby will resist these measures, as they have absolutely every initiative that would require them to shoulder the cost of their presence in Virginia. Their allies in the General Assembly will fret that requiring Amazon to prioritize cleaner alternatives to diesel generators might raise costs incrementally for a multinational company and its billionaire chief. 

That feels increasingly out of touch. In November a Virginia government report calculated that the data center industry received more than $2.7 billion in incentives over the past decade, thanks to Virginia taxpayers. 

It shouldn’t be any surprise that now the taxpayers would like a little consideration in return.

This article was originally published on January 14, 2026 in the Virginia Mercury.

Update: On December 29, 2025, DEQ quietly released a “revision” to its guidance memo on permit-writing procedures for diesel generators. For permits received after July 1, 2026, the revision adopts a “presumptive Best Available Control Technology” (BACT) for both emergency and non-emergency generators at data centers that will now be based on Tier IV generators or the equivalent. As I understand it, this means new data centers will be expected to have pollution controls on their emergency generators — a welcome improvement! — unless they are able to persuade DEQ otherwise.

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Is the SCC rethinking Dominion’s gas plant?

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Dominion Energy headquarters, Richmond, VA

When the State Corporation Commission approved Dominion Energy Virginia’s proposal to build a new, 944 MW gas peaker plant on November 25, it looked like the end of a long, drawn-out battle over the future of fossil fuels in Virginia.

The approval seemed to signal that for now, at least, the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) would not stand in the way of new gas-burning turbines in spite of their high greenhouse gas emissions. According to the SCC’s order, the surge in power demand from data centers had triggered a reliability exception to the VCEA’s ban on new fossil fuel construction.  

Then suddenly, on December 16, the SCC granted the Southern Environmental Law Center’s (SELC) motion to reconsider the decision the commission had rendered just weeks before,  suspending approval of Dominion’s plan. What the heck?

The SCC did not limit what it intends to reconsider, suggesting it will look anew at each of the four issues SELC raised. Since those issues cover pretty much everything about the gas plant’s approval, it’s impossible to guess what is going on. 

Certainly, there are many reasons to criticize the initial approval of the Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center (CERC), beyond its climate impacts. The majority-Black community where the plant would be located suffered for decades from exposure to toxic air pollution spewing from the huge coal plant on the site. Closure of the coal plant had brought a welcome respite. Residents fear they will once again serve as a sacrifice zone for decades to come, in spite of environmental justice protections written into the VCEA.

In addition, Dominion had gamed the planning process so thoroughly that this alone might have caused the SCC to reject the proposal. Dominion had gone ahead and put in an order for the gas turbine even before soliciting proposals from third parties to address reliability concerns, as the law requires. On top of that, the company told the SCC that an independent third party had reviewed the options, which was false. 

 Dominion, it turned out, never had any intention of awarding the project to anyone but itself or of considering alternatives that didn’t involve fossil gas. How could the SCC reward such malfeasance?

The VCEA prioritizes the security and reliability of the power supply even over its carbon-cutting and cost-saving goals, but there are conditions attached to approving new power plants, intended to make new fossil fuel generation something of a last resort. SELC and other environmental groups had made a strong case both that Dominion failed to meet those conditions, and that there were non-fossil fuel alternatives that could provide reliability at less cost.

But if Dominion’s gaming of the process should have sparked outrage at the SCC, it also succeeded in putting the regulators in a difficult position. The mere suggestion of a future with rolling blackouts if a power company doesn’t get its way would cow any public utility commission, let alone one in a state facing an unprecedented surge in demand.  

That explains the SCC’s order approving a certificate of public convenience and necessity (CPCN) for the gas plant Dominion swears is its only viable option. What, then, explains the about face on December 16, less than 24 hours after receiving the motion to reconsider?  

Four possible errors

In its motion, the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), representing Appalachian Voices, the NAACP and Mothers Out Front, argued that the SCC erred on four points around environmental justice, the cost of the gas plant compared to alternatives, the burden of proof on reliability and the legal mechanism for cost recovery. 

If the SCC were to agree with any of the first three arguments, the result would require new analysis, and might even send Dominion back to the drawing board. Agreement on the fourth point, however, would only change how Dominion charges ratepayers for the cost of the project. It would require the company to put the cost into base rates instead of a new rider, making CERC potentially less profitable for the company.  

This last point looks like something of a legal slam-dunk. A provision in the VCEA allows rate recovery through a rider only when a utility has met its energy efficiency targets – something all parties agree Dominion has not done. 

SELC also alleged that the commission failed to ensure the development of CERC “does not have a disproportionate adverse impact on historically economically disadvantaged communities,” another statutory requirement. The SCC’s original order addressed the point but appears to have misread this section of the law. That fact alone would justify a reconsideration of the November 25 order, though it would not alter the core of the decision to approve a CPCN for the gas plant.   

SELC’s other three points put CERC in greater jeopardy, if the SCC agrees. 

The commission’s environmental justice analysis consisted mainly of a judgment that a gas plant would be less harmful to the surrounding Black and Hispanic community than the coal plant that was formerly on the site. This may or may not be true, but that’s not the standard. On the contrary, a minority community that has suffered decades of pollution shouldn’t be first in line for the next polluting project to come along. That “disproportionate” impact is precisely what the VCEA and the Environmental Justice Act prohibit.

If the SCC were to side with the local community on this point, it wouldn’t stop Dominion from building a gas plant, but it would require the company to find a new location.  

The two final arguments attack the decision that a large gas peaker plant is the right remedy for a looming energy crisis. SELC contends that Dominion didn’t prove the cost of the gas plant is reasonable, citing the company’s deeply flawed process for considering alternatives and its failure to include fuel cost data. SELC also complains the SCC didn’t require Dominion to prove that its claimed threat to reliability could only be satisfied with a fossil fuel plant, but had merely taken the company’s word for it. 

These are accurate complaints about Dominion’s flawed process and strained analysis, and compelling reasons to reject Dominion’s plan — but they were just as compelling on November 25, when the SCC issued its order granting the CPCN.  

Indeed, the SCC had to both close its eyes and grasp at straws to reach the conclusions it did. For example, a footnote in the SCC’s order cites a Dominion witness’ testimony for the proposition that a Sierra Club witness had agreed a gas plant would be needed eventually. The commissioners did not take the time to find and review the Sierra Club’s testimony, which would have shown the Dominion witness had mischaracterized the evidence. Indeed, the Sierra Club’s modeling showed an alternative portfolio of clean resources would provide more energy than CERC at less cost. 

But apparently, gaming the process, ignoring the law and mischaracterizing the evidence are all things Dominion is willing to do to get an expensive fossil fuel plant approved in the face of the rigorous conditions set by the VCEA. 

On December 29, the SCC set a date of January 23 for Dominion to reply to the issues raised by SELC in its motion for reconsideration; presumably the commission will then set a date for a new hearing on those issues. The timeline could push a final decision on CERC out beyond the end of this year’s legislative session, making the interplay of politics and policy all the more interesting.

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury.

Update: After all that, in February the SCC decided not to make any changes to its order. Environmental groups are taking the matter to court.