There is a principle in law that says someone intends the natural result of their actions. You cannot throw me out a window and say you didn’t mean for me to get hurt.
By the same principle, if you block new solar and wind generation, you can’t say you didn’t intend to throttle energy production.
President Trump has made it clear he wants to kill wind and solar, and his appointees have followed through. The Department of Interior is refusing leases and permits to wind and solar projects, even as it moves ahead on lease sales for oil and gas drilling.
Interior even issued a stop-work order on an offshore wind farm that is 80% complete. The project was on track to supply enough energy for 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut, until the Trump administration stepped in. A judge later lifted the order, but not before the company building the project saw its share price drop to a record low.
Reducing the amount of low-cost, clean electricity developers can add to the grid will have an enormous impact. Clean energy is so much less expensive and faster to build than fossils fuels that renewable energy and batteries made up over 90% of the energy capacity added in the U.S. last year.
It’s fortunate for consumers that Trump won’t be able to stop all wind and solar projects, because the small number of fossil fuel plants under development won’t fill the gap. It takes years to develop a new gas plant, and gas turbines face an order backlog of up to 7 years.
The shortfall in new generation is happening at a time when the use of electricity is surging, mainly due to demand from data centers. Other customers, including ordinary residents, now have to compete with data centers for increasingly expensive electricity. Rates are going up as a result, and grid operators warn we may soon face power shortages.
Trump’s only concession to the power crunch is to order a few fossil fuel plants to stay open that their owners had planned to close for economic reasons. Ordering an uneconomic plant to stay open means someone loses money. Trump hasn’t offered federal dollars to pay the difference. The utilities that own the plants will pass the cost on to consumers.
If throttling energy production and raising energy costs is the natural result of Trump’s actions, it’s reasonable to assume that’s his intent. So many experts have pointed out the damage his policy will do that the alternative explanation – that the president is deluded and foolishly thinks his actions will somehow result in more energy production and lower costs – doesn’t hold up.
But why would the president deliberately hamstring American energy production and raise electricity costs for consumers?
Because that’s the deal he made with oil and gas industry leaders at a closed-door fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago last year, in exchange for the more than $200 million the industry spent to get him elected. Actually, Trump asked for a billion dollars, and in return promised to dismantle environmental regulations, go after the wind industry and scrap President Biden’s policies promoting electric vehicles.
Promises made, promises kept, as Trump’s fans like to say. Trump’s appointees have gutted environmental protections and done their best to keep wind and solar off the grid. Most people know the “One Big Beautiful Bill” revoked tax incentives for homes and businesses to install solar; less widely reported is that it included $18 billion in tax incentives for the oil and gas industry and lowered the amounts the industry must pay to lease federal lands for drilling, among other rewards.
Less renewable energy and higher prices means more market share and higher profits for fossil fuels. The natural result is that the American consumer will have to pay through the nose for energy.
Too bad, folks, but that was the deal.
This article was originally published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on September 30, 2025.
Visitors to a net-zero energy home in Vienna, Virginia learn about solar as part of SunDay, a national celebration of solar energy, on September 21, 2025. Photo courtesy of Meredith Haines.
For solar energy, 2025 is the best of times and the worst of times. It’s the fastest growing energy source in the world and the largest source of new power capacity additions in the U.S. for the fifth year in a row. Even in the absence of tax subsidies, solar is the cheapest source of new electricity in Virginia, and indeed almost everywhere.
Yet the congressional Republican budget law’s early termination of tax incentives for solar, together with the Trump administration’s determined efforts to restore fossil fuel dominance, make these dark days for the solar industry. The EPA is relaxing pollution standards for power plants and refusing to enforce regulations, and the same law that cut clean energy credits provided tens of billions of dollars in tax subsidies for drilling and mining activities. (What, did you think they wanted to level the playing field?)
As a result, analysts project a sharp drop-off in solar installations in the coming years, posing a challenge to energy reliability and affordability. With data centers driving up the demand for electricity, the loss of tax credits for solar will mean higher costs for our utilities, and therefore higher utility bills for customers. Virginians who worry about high electricity bills should be very unhappy with the rollback of these incentives.
How the rollbacks could push solar forward (at least for now)
Ironically, though, the coming end of tax credits has goosed the U.S. solar market in the near term. The industry has never been busier, as companies scramble to get projects completed in time to qualify for the tax credits before they expire. With careful planning, solar developers will be able to stretch tax credit eligibility to cover projects for a few more years, softening the blow for consumers.
And in the long term, the solar industry feels confident that the technical and cost advantages of renewable energy will win out in America as they continue to do abroad. Politics and policy aside, utility-scale solar is the cheapest, cleanest and fastest-to-build electricity source available in most of the U.S. The technology continues to push efficiencies up and costs down, while protecting Americans from the pollution and fuel costs of coal and gas. With energy storage technologies following the same price trajectory as solar, it is hard to imagine the U.S. willingly turning its back on clean energy for long.
In Virginia, of course, utility solar still faces rural resistance. But having embraced data centers, Virginia will have to find the energy to power them, and price has a way of winning out.
While the solar industry overall will survive, the loss of federal tax credits is landing hard on the segment that serves homeowners and businesses. The economic case for distributed solar has never been a slam-dunk in Virginia, given the higher costs involved. Now the question is whether it can remain even a reasonable investment.
The Virginia solar industry has grown a lot in the past decade and now includes 199 companies employing close to 5,000 workers, almost double the number employed in coal mining. I haven’t seen numbers specific to distributed solar, but installing solar on rooftops is more labor-intensive than utility solar. More importantly, these jobs tend to be local to Virginia, and most don’t require a college degree.
Distributed solar is also important to our energy supply and resilience. Sunny rooftops could potentially supply as much as 20% of Virginia’s electricity, yet less than 3% of Virginia homes have solar now, leaving plenty of room for growth. Rooftop solar is also a vital component of community resilience; when batteries are added to solar, buildings can remain powered during storms and other events that take down the wider grid. And of course, solar and batteries can form the basis for virtual power plants that support the grid and reduce the need for utility investments.
A trifecta of solar success
Three policies have enabled the industry to succeed here, and all three have been subject to attack. The first, of course, is the federal tax credits, which allow owners of solar arrays to recover 30% of project costs through their tax returns. For residential customers, availability of this credit will now expire at the end of 2025.
The good news is that structuring residential solar installations as leases or power purchase agreements puts projects under a more favorable provision that gives commercial owners of solar panels until July of 2026 to begin construction. This won’t work for everybody, and residential power purchase agreements are currently legal in Virginia only for low-income customers, but it does offer some breathing room.
The second policy critical for rooftop solar is a Virginia program that lets owners of solar arrays earn money from the sale of solar renewable electricity certificates (SRECs) associated with the electricity they put onto the grid. The Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) requires Dominion Energy Virginia to buy SRECs to meet a small fraction of its renewable energy purchase obligation. Customers with solar who choose to sell their SRECs can offset some of their costs this way, making solar more affordable. (Since SRECs represent the “bragging rights” to solar – the legal right to claim you are powering your home or business with solar – not everyone wants to sell theirs.)
Customers and industry members say, however, that the Virginia SREC market is neither robust nor transparent. The price that Dominion pays for SRECs would have to be substantially higher to overcome the loss of federal tax credits. Some advocates have floated the idea of asking the tech companies to support the distributed solar market through voluntary SREC purchases, which could raise SREC values and help localities build more solar on schools and other public buildings.
A bipartisan-backed bill that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed this year would have increased the percentage of Dominion’s electricity that must come from distributed solar generation. This would have incentivized more rooftop solar and possibly resulted in higher SREC prices through the normal economics of supply and demand. But so far there is no plan to set a floor on SREC prices.
The third supportive policy for distributed solar is net metering, which ensures that customers of Dominion and Appalachian Power get credited at the retail rate for surplus electricity they supply to the grid. Customers pay the utility only for the net energy they purchase. While this doesn’t make rooftop solar cheaper, it does mean customers don’t actually lose money on their surplus generation, as they would without net metering.
Dominion and APCo have tried repeatedly to undermine net metering, so far without success.
The State Corporation Commission recently rejected a proposal from APCo to replace one-for-one credits with a payment system valuing distributed solar at the utility’s avoided cost for energy – about one-third of retail. The effect on customers would have been severe, making it impossible for most new buyers to recoup the cost of solar panels. In rejecting APCo’s proposal, the SCC cited expert analyses showing that the value of customer-sited solar to the grid and the public equals or exceeds the retail cost of energy.
Dominion has also filed a proposal to gut net metering in its territory. Its replacement program differs from APCo’s, yet it too results in a greatly reduced compensation rate. The SCC has not ruled on Dominion’s request yet, but it’s hard to see how Dominion could succeed where APCo failed.
Net metering is the rock that Virginia’s rooftop solar industry is built on, so the SCC’s decision preserving the program was critical to the industry’s very survival. Net metered solar will also remain an appealing hedge against rising electricity rates for many people. Still, there is no getting around the fact that losing the 30% tax credit is the kind of blow that can send an industry off a cliff.
What’s next
What can the industry, or policy-makers, do to counteract the loss of tax credits?
The most obvious step is for the General Assembly to once again pass legislation increasing the requirement for utility SREC purchases (and this time with the governor signing the bill). The bill has other good provisions, like making residential power purchase agreements legal beyond the low-income market, and these will also help the industry.
Virginia should also consider adopting a streamlined permitting protocol for onsite solar, as states like Florida have done. Some Virginia localities have already adopted automated permitting software, such as SolarAPP+, a free platform developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Permitting in some other localities, however, reportedly remains so arduous that it adds significantly to costs and delays in installing rooftop solar.
Speaking of permitting, Virginia could pass a law like Utah’s to allow so-called balcony solar, plug-in solar panels that don’t require professional installation. The kits still require national certification before they can hit the market, however.
Virginia could devote some emergency preparedness funds to onsite solar and storage at schools and senior centers to make local communities more resilient. These microgrids would save on energy costs for taxpayers and ensure people have a place to go that still has power when the larger grid is down.
Utilities could once again be tasked with funding solar on low-income housing, as they did in response to Republican-sponsored legislation passed in 2019. Localities could be allowed to require solar panels on parking lots in some new developments, as provided in a bill the governor vetoed this spring. Legislation to increase goals and funding for solar on closed landfills, coal mines and other brownfields would also bring more solar to places where everyone agrees it is welcome.
Finally, our Department of Energy has done a very good job supporting solar energy through both Democratic and Republican administrations. It could now be asked to convene meetings with the solar industry to plan a pathway to solar on more homes and businesses. They could start with a program of government-backed advertising and outreach to educate more consumers about the value of solar, its cost, and how to hire trustworthy installers. Customer acquisition is one of the biggest costs for solar companies, so reaching potential customers will reduce costs.
Meanwhile, what can the average resident do? Talk to your elected leaders and candidates and get them to put in pro-solar bills and support the legislation you want to see. If Virginians want more home-grown clean energy, we need to make it happen.
This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on September 25, 2025.It has been updated to correct the date by which construction must commence in order to qualify for federal tax credits.
What lights up your life? Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Running for office requires candidates to know about topics they might never have given much thought to. Most Virginia campaigns are won or lost on hot-button issues like taxes, education, reproductive rights, guns and gay marriage, so everyone who runs for office has a position on these questions. This holds true for candidates in this year’s high-stakes races for the state’s executive branch and all 100 House of Delegates seats.
Inevitably, though, there are topics the average candidate doesn’t completely grasp. Some are narrow and – thankfully – nonpartisan. Where do you stand on Sunday hunting? Should I-81 have more lanes? How do you feel about skill games? Will you vote to save the menhaden, whatever a menhaden is? (It’s a fish, and I encourage you to say yes.)
Other topics affect the lives of every Virginian, but they are, frankly, complicated. One of these is energy. Not only is it hard to get up to speed on energy issues, but technology is changing so rapidly that keeping abreast of developments would be a full-time job. Who would spend that kind of time on such a dreary topic?
Uh, that would be me.
So here we go: I’m going to cover five things political hopefuls need to know about energy in Virginia before you get to the General Assembly and start passing laws that affect your constituents’ wallets and futures. And for voters, these are things you should ask candidates about before they earn your vote.
First up:
If you are going to talk about energy, you have to talk about data centers
By now you surely know that Virginia has embraced the most energy-intensive industry to come along since the steam engine launched the Industrial Revolution. Northern Virginia hosts the world’s largest concentration of data centers, which already consume an estimated 25% of the state’s electricity, with massively more development planned. The reason isn’t vacation photos or Instagram cat videos; it’s the competition to develop artificial intelligence (AI).
After putting tax incentives in place to attract the industry 15 years ago, the General Assembly and the current governor have rejected all attempts to put guardrails on development or make data centers more energy efficient. The subsidies now cost taxpayers a billion dollars per year (and counting). Virginia asks for almost nothing in return.
Under the best of circumstances, the skyrocketing demand for electricity would put upward pressure on energy prices. But our situation is even worse: Virginia already imports about half our electricity from other states, and the regional grid that we’re part of faces its own energy crunch.
Grid manager PJM has been so slow to approve new generation that governors from member states, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, wrote a letter taking PJM to task and urging it to move faster. But the damage has been done. Supply is tight, electricity prices have risen, and prices will continue to rise unless and until supply catches up.
PJM has decided to fast-track new high-cost, gas-fired generating plants ahead of the cheaper renewable energy projects that make up 95% of the queue. It’s a much-criticized move and seems more likely to increase costs. Once built, fossil gas plants burn a fuel that has doubled in price just over the past year, threatening a repeat of the post-pandemic price surge that Virginia ratepayers are still paying for. And there is no relief in sight, with utilities now having to compete with a doubling of U.S. natural gas exports.
Short of unleashing all the renewable energy stuck in the queue, there is no easy way to protect Virginia residents from higher electricity costs. Dominion Energy, Appalachian Power, and at least one of the electric cooperatives have proposed special rate classes for large-load customers, but that would shield residents from only some of the costs of serving the data centers.
Utility bills are going up. Dominion Energy is seeking hefty rate increases that would push up residential bills by an average of more than $10 per month in base rates plus almost $11 per month in fuel costs, primarily due to those higher natural gas prices. Coal-heavy APCo has seen even steeper rate increases in the past few years.
Virginia needs new legislation ensuring data centers bear the full expense and risks of serving Big Tech, and they should be required to source their own clean energy. Localities, meanwhile, must be required to evaluate the costs to all Virginians before they issue permits to data centers, including considerations like where the energy will come from, water impacts, and the siting of transmission lines.
You can’t get from here to there without solar
Virginia wasn’t producing all of its own energy even before the data center rush, and PJM’s problems are now pushing us into a crisis. Our near-term options are limited; new data centers are breaking ground at a breathtaking rate, and only solar can be installed on the timeline needed to prevent an energy shortfall. Even if we were willing to pay for high-priced gas or nuclear plants, developers face a backlog of as long as seven years for gas turbines, and advanced nuclear is still not commercially viable.
Fortunately, solar is not just the fastest energy source to deploy, it’s also the cheapest and cleanest. Though President Donald Trump blames rising electricity prices on renewable energy, that’s false, just one of many myths the fossil fuel industry has propagated against solar. Nor is solar unreliable, another myth. When solar is paired with battery storage, it can match the rise and fall of demand perfectly.
It’s true, however, that while the great majority of Virginians support solar energy, many rural residents oppose it on aesthetic grounds. Of course, they would also oppose nuclear reactors and gas fracking in their neighborhoods. Legislators should be sensitive to their concerns – but having chosen to welcome data centers, Virginia leaders can’t just shrug off the need for energy.
We also have to recognize that many farmers need to lease their land for solar in order to keep the land in their family and generate stable income. This should be as important a consideration to lawmakers as the objections of people who aren’t paying the taxes on the farm. Preventing landowners from making profitable use of their land is more likely to lead to the land being sold for development than to it remaining agricultural.
The good news is that solar panels are compatible with agricultural uses including livestock grazing, beekeeping, vineyards and some crops. Dominion Energy uses sheep instead of lawnmowers at several of its solar facilities in Virginia and plans to expand the practice. The combination is a beautiful synergy: sheep and native grasses improve the soil, and in 30 years when the solar panels are removed, the land has not been lost to development.
While there is no getting around the need for utility-scale solar projects, rooftop solar also has an important role to play. In addition to harnessing private dollars to increase electricity generation, distributed solar saves money for customers and makes communities more resilient in the face of extreme weather.
This year the governor vetoed a bill to expand the role of distributed solar in Virginia. The legislation had garnered strong bipartisan support, so it will likely pass again next year. However, lawmakers will need to go further to encourage customer investments in solar now that federal tax credits will be eliminated for residential consumers at the end of this year.
Batteries: For all your reliability needs
The fastest-growing energy sector today is battery storage. Batteries allow utilities to meet peaks in demand without having to build gas combustion turbines that typically run less than 10% of the time. Batteries also pair perfectly with intermittent energy sources like wind and solar, storing their excess generation and then delivering electricity when these resources aren’t available.
Battery prices have tumbled to new lows, while the technology continues to improve. Most lithium-ion batteries provide 4 hours of storage, enough to meet evening peak demand with midday solar. When renewable energy becomes a larger part of Virginia’s energy supply (it’s less than 10% now) we will need longer term storage, such as the iron-air batteries that are part of a Dominion pilot program. This year the governor vetoed a bill that would have increased the amount of storage our utilities must invest in. Given the increasing importance of batteries to the grid, the legislation will likely be reintroduced next year.
Batteries installed at homes and businesses can also play a vital role in supporting the grid. Alone or combined with distributed solar, smart meters and electric vehicle charging, customer devices can be aggregated into a virtual power plant (VPP) to make more electricity available to the grid at peak demand times. Dominion will be developing a VPP pilot program under the terms of legislation passed this year.
Advanced nuclear is still in Maybeland
The enormous expense of building large nuclear plants using conventional light-water technology has made development almost nonexistent in this century. Proponents believe new technology will succeed with scaled-down plants that can, in theory, be standardized and modularized to lower costs. Many political and tech leaders hope these small modular reactors (SMRs) will prove a carbon-free solution to the data center energy problem.
It’s hard not to think they’re kidding themselves, or maybe us. Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power plan to develop one SMR each, with Dominion shooting to have one in service in 2035. Not only is this too late to meet today’s energy crunch, but a single SMR would add less energy to the supply side than new data centers add to the demand side each year. Virginia still needs near-term solutions, which means solar and batteries.
Industry enthusiasts believe the 2035 timeline can be shortened, while critics say SMRs may never reach commercial viability. SMRs have to be able to compete on cost with much cheaper renewable energy, including wind, solar and emerging geothermal technologies, and cost parity is a long way off. The economic case for nuclear reactors also requires that they generate power all the time, including when the demand isn’t there, so SMRs need batteries almost as much as renewable energy does.
Finally, radioactive waste remains a challenging issue, as much (or more) for SMRs as for legacy nuclear plants. The U.S. has never resolved the problem of permanent storage, so nuclear waste is simply kept onsite at generating stations. The risk of accidents or sabotage makes it unlikely that communities will accept SMRs in their midst, especially if the idea is for SMRs to proliferate on the premises of privately-owned data centers near residential areas statewide.
A nuclear technology with less of a waste problem is fusion energy. A fusion start-up plans to build its first power plant in Virginia in the “early 2030s,” if the demonstration plant it is building in Massachusetts proves successful. While fusion would be an energy game-changer, there are so many uncertainties around timeline and cost that only an inveterate gambler would bet on it helping us out of our predicament.
Pretending climate change isn’t real won’t make it go away
We don’t have to talk about climate change to make the case for transitioning to carbon-free renewable energy, but global warming hovers in the background of any energy debate like an unwanted guest. If you need a primer or are even slightly tempted to say you “don’t know” whether human activity is responsible because you’re not a scientist, read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s summary for policymakers. The continued habitability of the planet is too important for ignorance to be an acceptable dodge – and of course you, as a respectable candidate, would never stoop to such a thing.
Virginia codified its own action plan in 2020 with two major laws. One provides for the commonwealth to participate in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multistate compact that uses auctions of carbon emission allowances to incentivize a shift away from fossil fuels and raise money for energy efficiency and climate adaptation. After taking office in 2022, Youngkin removed Virginia from RGGI – illegally, as a court ruled. Virginia remains outside RGGI while the appeals process continues.
The second law is the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which creates a pathway for Dominion and APCo to transition to carbon-free electricity by 2050. The VCEA includes provisions requiring Dominion and APCo to invest in renewable energy, storage and energy efficiency and make renewable energy an increasing portion of their electricity supply.
The VCEA contains special provisions for offshore wind, which I haven’t addressed here because Trump is determined not to allow projects to move forward while he is in office. This is a shame, as there is bipartisan support in Virginia for this industry and the huge economic development opportunities that come with it. Still, Virginia’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project is 60% complete and will start delivering power next year. Eventually, hopefully, it will be remembered as the first of many.
The VCEA also prohibited new investments in fossil fuel plants except under certain conditions. Dominion is currently seeking permission from the State Corporation Commission to build a $1.5 billion, fossil gas-fired peaker plant, citing data center demand and a need for reliability. Local residents, environmental organizations and ratepayer advocates oppose the plant and filed expert testimony showing that solar, storage and other less expensive technologies would better serve consumers.
In what passes for a bombshell in the energy space, Dominion was forced to admit last month that it had not obtained an independent review of the bid process before selecting its own gas plant over resources offered by third-party bidders.
“No regrets” solutions are progressive and conservative
As you’ve probably figured out by now, there is no perfect power source available today. And yet we would need new generation even if we stopped data center construction cold in its tracks – which isn’t in the plans. Solar is the cheapest, cleanest, and fastest source of generation, allowing us to preserve land – and keep options open – for the future. If the data center boom goes bust, having surplus clean energy on the grid will let us eliminate dirty sources faster, while saving money.
Who would run against that?
First published in the Virginia Mercury on September 15, 2025.
Rooftop solar panels are helping generate electricity after Hurricane Maria destroyed much of the island electrical infrastructure. (Photo by Aaron Sutch/Solar United Neighbors)
Back in 2017, a hurricane destroyed Puerto Rico’s power grid. The island struggled to rebuild it, with limited success, and continues to experience a severe electricity shortage and frequent power outages. Customers and nonprofits have stepped into the void, installing solar panels on rooftops all over the island and backing them up with batteries. Today, 175,000 households have solar — about 1 in 7 – and at least 160,000 of those also have battery backup. Thousands of new installations go in every month.
The solar and batteries don’t just secure electricity for the customers who install them. Through programs like one managed by the solar company Sunrun, Puerto Rico’s grid can draw on the batteries to provide power in times of emergency, reducing the frequency and duration of power outages for everyone.
Last month, as hurricane season got underway again, Puerto Rico’s grid operator announced it had reached a “major energy milestone.” In a statement posted on X, LUMA Energy said it “successfully dispatched approximately 70,000 batteries, contributing around 48 MW of energy to the grid.” That’s about as much as a gas peaker plant, with no need for fuel.
Puerto Rico’s experience shows how residents and businesses no longer need to be passive energy consumers. With a well-designed program they can play an active role in keeping the lights on in their communities, and get paid for it.
This customer participation creates what is called a “virtual power plant” (VPP), sometimes also called a community power plant. The VPP may use battery aggregation, as in Puerto Rico, or demand reduction measures like temporary adjustments to smart thermostats or shifting electric vehicle charging to off-peak times. The more these measures are combined, the bigger the benefit to the grid, and the less a utility needs to invest in new generation to meet peaks in demand.
VPPs offer such promise that this year Virginia’s General Assembly directed Dominion Energy to develop a pilot program for its customers, to be overseen by the State Corporation Commission.
HB2346, from Del. Phil Hernandez, D-Norfolk, calls for a program of up to 450 MW to “optimize demand” with distributed energy resources, mainly batteries but also smart thermostats, electric vehicle charging and non-battery storage (e.g., electric hot water heaters). The proposal, due to be filed with the SCC by December 1, must include incentives for at least 15 MW of residential batteries. The legislation calls for stakeholder participation in the development of the VPP, with opportunities for public input.
Dominion is also tasked with expanding the electric school bus program it began in 2019, which allows the utility to make use of school bus batteries at times of the day when the buses are not needed to transport children. As of March of 2024, Dominion had 135 electric buses in the program, spread across 25 school districts in Virginia.
The impact of VPPs can be significant. This summer, California’s grid operator conducted an experiment to determine how much customer batteries could contribute to the needs of the grid. More than 100,000 residential batteries across California delivered an average of 535 MW of power from 7 to 9 p.m. on July 29, an output equivalent to that of a coal plant.
Many other states are also using VPPs. Some are limited to solar-powered battery aggregation, like Xcel’s Colorado program and a new Texas program, while others involve demand response programs using smart appliances – anything that can be turned off and on remotely for short periods. In Michigan, DTE pays electric vehicle owners to charge at off-peak times, while Arizona Public Service’s VPP pays customers for the ability to access their smart thermostats to reduce peak demand.
Vermont’s Green Mountain Power runs two popular battery programs, one for people who own their own batteries and the other that leases batteries to customers. Both allow the utility to draw on the batteries when the power grid requires more capacity.
While Virginia has not had a VPP program before, appliance-based demand response will be familiar to residents who opted into Dominion Energy’s “Smart Cooling Rewards” program. Participants allowed the utility to remotely turn their air conditioners on and off for a few minutes at a time on hot days in exchange for an annual $40 payment. This helped the utility shave peak demand without affecting residents’ comfort.
Dominion ended the cooling rewards program in 2022 and now offers a “Peak Time Rebate” program that rewards customers for reducing energy use during certain times of high energy demand. This program, however, requires residents to take affirmative measures themselves, like adjusting thermostats and delaying laundry. A well-designed VPP program, by contrast, takes the burden off the individual.
Josephus Allmond, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center who helped to craft the Virginia VPP legislation, told me in an email that he expects school buses and smart thermostats will make up most of Dominion’s program initially, but he’d like to see the residential battery component grow significantly from the initial 15 MW. Even 100,000 aggregated residential batteries would be a minor share of Dominion’s 2.8 million residential accounts, he pointed out.
I emailed Nathan Frost, Dominion’s general manager for new business and customer solutions, to ask for more information about the VPP program. Frost replied only that Dominion is “actively developing our VPP framework and will be engaging stakeholders soon.”
Stakeholders, including customers themselves, are likely to have a lot to say. Clean energy advocates have long urged that VPPs, distributed generation sources and microgrids can contribute to a more efficient, secure and resilient grid, at less cost to everyone.
No doubt recentering the grid around customers is too tall an order for a monopoly utility with a profit model based on centralized generation. But from what we’ve seen in Puerto Rico, California and elsewhere, harnessing even some of the power of customer-owned resources is a worthwhile project whose time has finally come.
This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on September 2, 2025.
Update: on September 15, Dominion sent this note:
Dominion Energy Virginia is preparing to file a virtual power plant (“VPP”) pilot proposal by December 1, 2025, pursuant to House Bill 2346 and Senate Bill 1100. As part of this effort, Dominion Energy Virginia is seeking stakeholder input. Please visit our website at https://www.dominionenergy.com/vpp. The website contains an overview of the legislation, a timeline, an informational webinar about VPPs and the Company’s plan, and additional information. We encourage all interested stakeholders to review the materials posted on the website and provide feedback through the link on the website by October 6, 2025.
Sharon Fisher (second from left) and other members of Southwest Virginia Nuclear Watch. Courtesy of Fisher.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin wants to bring a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) to Southwest Virginia in the course of the next decade. The administration has put together a small amount of funding to search for a larger amount of funding to pay for a study. One of the study questions is what they would use the reactor for – research, possibly, and to provide electricity for the University of Virginia at Wise, or perhaps a data center that the region has yet to attract.
If this all sounds a little sketchy, that’s because SMRs remain a little sketchy. Nuclear companies haven’t yet demonstrated they can attain the holy grail of safe, 24/7 carbon-free power at a competitive cost.
It’s not for lack of trying. At last count, the Nuclear Energy Agency was tracking some 98 different design technologies around the world for SMRs ranging in size from 1 MW microreactors to utility-scale reactors of more than 300 MW. Only a handful of these have reached the construction phase, and none are operational in the U.S.
This meager track record hardly reflects the enthusiasm surrounding the industry. It’s not just politicians and profit-seekers; many climate advocates believe the industry must succeed if the world is to have any hope of transitioning our energy supply away from fossil fuels. And polling shows that 56% of the public supports building more nuclear plants. That’s way less than the levels of support for wind and solar but more than support for fracking and coal mining. Still, concerns remain about safety and the proliferation of nuclear waste, a problem neither the industry nor the government yet has a strategy to deal with.
And then there’s the cost. SMRs haven’t shown an ability to compete in the energy marketplace, even against other carbon-free alternatives. As renewable energy and storage technologies continue to drop in price, the economic case for new nuclear remains an open question.
Nonetheless, both of Virginia’s publicly-owned utilities are exploring SMRs, having secured legislation last year that will allow them to charge customers for millions of dollars in early development costs. Appalachian Power is targeting a site near Lynchburg (not Southwest Virginia), while Dominion Energy says it is evaluating the feasibility of an SMR next to its existing conventional reactors at North Anna.
Dominion’s 2024 integrated resource plan shows an SMR could be part of its power mix as early as 2035; APCo has no timeline. For either utility, actually building an SMR will require making the economic case to the State Corporation Commission.
The slow timeline and cloudy cost picture have not dampened enthusiasm for nuclear among Virginia’s elected leaders. The data center boom is exacerbating a shortage of energy and causing utility bills to skyrocket. Keeping the party going means making messy tradeoffs between polluting fuels with volatile prices and low-cost but land-hungry solar. No wonder Youngkin and other leaders hope nuclear will magically allow them to sidestep the hard decisions and party on.
But wishful thinking doesn’t put megawatts on the grid. A recent article surveying the state of the nuclear industry makes it clear that these are early times in the nuclear renaissance, if such it is. The industry won’t be able to scale unless and until production-line manufacturing becomes a reality, and that will be years from now.
Fortunately for the nuclear industry, it has always been a darling of U.S. policymakers, and that remains true. Nuclear subsidies survived the axe in this year’s Republican budget law, while tax credits for wind and solar were revoked.
Indeed, President Donald J. Trump is doing his best to further the industry’s prospects, albeit in a ham-handed fashion that almost seems calculated to erode public trust.
Last month a representative of his Department of Government Efficiency reportedly told the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, charged with ensuring the safety of the industry, that it was expected to provide “rubber stamp” approval to nuclear plant applications after they were tested by the Department of Energy or Defense. A few days later, Trump dismissed all but one of the members of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which provides oversight of spent fuel storage.
These alarming moves may not do much to dampen the enthusiasm of the Youngkin administration and other boosters. The administration even hopes to lure nuclear manufacturing to Virginia – but it would be in Lynchburg, not Southwest Virginia.
That calls into question Youngkin’s claims of economic benefits for an SMR in Wise County. If the SMR would be just a one-off for “research” purposes and needs a rich company or state-supported customer to buy the electricity, is it really an investment in the region, or a solution in search of a problem?
Many local residents are skeptical of the administration’s plans, trusting neither the governor nor the nuclear industry. Sharon Fisher, one of the leaders of the Southwest Virginia Nuclear Watch grassroots movement, told me in an email that her group “has extensively researched the nuclear industry with its enormous costs and contaminations.”
She pointed me to a 2023 study of health trends in a Tennessee county where a company called Nuclear Fuel Services generates highly enriched uranium fuels for naval reactors. Over the years, unintended releases of enriched uranium, plutonium and other substances have caused an accumulation of radioactivity in the local air, water, and food. The study documented rising cancer and mortality rates in the county, including a rate of premature deaths that is 61% above the U.S. average.
Rees Shearer, an activist with the Appalachian Peace Education Center, told me in a phone call that SMRs are “the next wave of exploitation” of Southwest Virginia’s resources.
“First they came for the timber, then they came for the coal, now they are coming with radioactivity,” Shearer said.
He explained, “Coal left a terrible legacy of abandoned mines, polluted creeks, and leaking methane. But this pales compared to the potential legacy of high-level nuclear waste stored on site. With SMRs, the amount of this waste can be 100 times more per megawatt than conventional nuclear. This is waste that will last millions of years. This isn’t a fair trade.”
An SMR would also come with the risk of terrorism, either from hacking or a drone attack. “It makes a place that was never a target into a target,” he noted.
Both Fisher and Shearer challenged the notion that SMRs would provide jobs for Wise County residents, even in the construction phase. Modular facilities would be manufactured offsite and assembled by an expert crew from out of the area. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has even approved remote operation of nuclear reactors from an offsite facility, they pointed out.
Well-paying jobs are certainly a priority for the area. Unemployment rates for Southwest Virginia counties have risen only slightly from their Biden-era lows, but poverty rates in some counties remain stubbornly high.
But Fisher says the key to a healthy economy lies in diversification.
“Wise County was once a major producer of apples. We have vineyards and breweries, and fields for growing grains. Tourism is growing. [We should be] investing in local entrepreneurs and farmers, getting equitable tax revenues from the thousands of large absentee landholdings, which should be used for housing and development.”
Energy jobs needn’t be off the table, but, said Shearer, “We think the better approach is to put solar on the abandoned mines. We have a ready workforce already trained to do this.” He pointed to an effort already underway that’s being spearheaded by the environmental group Appalachian Voices.
What the region shouldn’t do, concluded Fisher, is “rely on one industry again that puts our lives and land at tremendous risk.”
This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on August 4, 2025.
When Dominion Energy Virginia filed its latest integrated resource plan (IRP) last fall, critics (including me) complained that the company failed to lay out a cost-effective approach that would meet soaring energy demand from data centers while complying with Virginia’s decarbonization mandate. We hoped regulators at the State Corporation Commission would reject the IRP and demand better of our largest utility.
Instead, they chickened out.
The SCC’s final order, issued July 15, is short but not really to the point. The order finds Dominion’s IRP “legally sufficient,” while citing previous SCC orders for the proposition that “acceptance” doesn’t mean approval “of the magnitude or specifics of Dominion’s future spending plans.” It would be hard to imagine a less enthusiastic endorsement, and the lack of analysis leaves advocates wondering, where’s the meat?
It’s true that an IRP is “only” a planning document; it doesn’t commit a utility to carrying out the plan, and the SCC still has to approve any project the utility decides to move forward with. But the point of the exercise is to ensure utilities are on the right track; that their demand projections are on target and their plans for meeting demand are realistic, cost-effective and comply with all relevant laws. This needs discussion and analysis, not merely an up-or-down vote.
Admittedly, the SCC has a long history of approving lousy IRPs while directing Dominion to do a better job the next time. That was the case here, too, with the order directing Dominion to do a few things differently in its next IRP, due in the fall of 2026.
First, the SCC wants to see a 20-year timeline instead of the 15-year period that Dominion used this year, which is all the law requires. It’s an obvious ask, even apart from the fact the SCC cites that the regional grid operator PJM uses a 20-year planning window. A better reason is that we are just 20 years away from Dominion’s 2045 deadline for full decarbonization under the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), and anything the utility does now will have consequences extending out to that deadline.
The SCC also neglected to mention that using just a 15-year window, and omitting the 25-year planning period that Dominion included in previous IRPs, allowed the company to avoid showing the economic consequences to consumers of spending money for fossil fuel generation that either will shut down or may become economically obsolete by 2045, long before the plants are paid off. If Dominion thinks it can justify sinking customers’ money into assets it knows will become stranded, we all deserve to see the rationale.
The order also directs Dominion to include in its modeling at least one pathway that complies with the requirement of the VCEA that carbon-emitting facilities (including any new gas plants) be retired by 2045. This goes beyond obvious: the lack of a VCEA-compliant plan should have prompted the SCC to reject the IRP outright.
But of course, Dominion claims new gas plants are needed for reliability, which would make them legal under the VCEA in spite of their carbon emissions and questionable long-term viability. Reliability is a red herring, as I’ve argued, and other parties to the IRP case modeled how Dominion can meet demand without building new fossil fuels. Dominion should have been required to prove its case.
But here again, the SCC chose not to engage on the issue. Requiring Dominion to do better next time is as far as it is willing to go. This is unfortunate, but the silence can’t last: in March, Dominion filed for approval of the first of its planned new gas plants. The SCC will have to address need and reliability to make a decision in that case, and it would have been better for all concerned if it had grappled with these questions now.
The order falls short in other ways, as well. While the SCC expresses concern about forecasted rate increases, it doesn’t even mention the data centers that are driving the problem.
This is astonishing; even before Dominion filed its IRP last fall, the commission ordered the company to supplement the record with an analysis of data center impacts. When Dominion did so, it became clear that all of the load growth (and likely, much of the projected rate increases) results from this one industry. It’s beyond strange that the SCC does not even mention the supplement it ordered, or discuss whether Dominion’s duty to serve truly prevents it from protecting existing customers.
The order also accepts Dominion’s argument that it had to artificially limit the amount of low-cost solar it could include in its modeling, due to the increased difficulty of siting solar projects in Virginia. It’s true that many rural counties have been denying permits to solar projects, even as they approve data centers. But I’ve also heard a Dominion lobbyist tell legislators that permit denials have not been a problem for the company, an assertion that may have persuaded some legislators to vote against bills that would make solar siting easier. It appears Dominion tells legislators one thing and the SCC another.
The SCC’s order contains a few other requirements for the next IRP, mostly things that really should have been included in this one. The IRP should model Virginia’s return to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, reflecting a Virginia court’s ruling that Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s withdrawal was unlawful. The IRP should assume Dominion achieves the energy efficiency targets that the SCC itself established for the company. Dominion should include an analysis of impacts on base rates and should share its modeling with utility watchdog Clean Virginia, as well as run modeling based on SCC staff inputs. Long-duration storage, a maturing technology that can replace gas combustion turbines, should be included in the next modeling.
“Do better next time” is a well-worn directive from the SCC to Dominion, but it is deeply disappointing at a time when Virginia is facing an unprecedented surge in demand from data centers and accompanying increases in utility rates.
It’s disappointing in another way, too: this is the first major ruling from the SCC since two new judges were added to the three-member commission, and all three were appointed by a Democratically-controlled Senate. If there was ever a time for the SCC to get tough with Dominion on its climate obligations, this should have been it.
No doubt, the problem lies in Dominion’s influence over the entire process. The utility doles out exceedingly generous campaign donations to members of both parties, so the company retains influence no matter who is in power. Not only does this give Dominion sway over who is appointed to the SCC, but commissioners have to be mindful that getting reappointed at the end of their six-year terms depends on how satisfied these Dominion-backed senators are with their rulings.
As long as Dominion is allowed to shower senators with unlimited campaign cash, the SCC will never be free of the utility’s pernicious influence.
Meanwhile, though, Dominion’s poor performance, and the SCC’s unwillingness to call it out, demonstrate the necessity of the comprehensive IRP reform legislation that the governor vetoed this spring. The Commission on Electric Utility Regulation is already working on similar legislation for the next session.
Passing the IRP reform bill may not inject the SCC with greater courage, but it will ensure the commission, and the public, get a fuller look at the facts.
This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on July 21, 2025.
Maybe it’s the heat. Heat-addled brains might explain the thinking of many Virginia lawmakers that what we need to do right now is burn more fossil fuels.
Scientists have documented the way high temperatures affect the brain, impairing cognition and causing impulsivity and trouble concentrating. And this summer is already starting out hot, which is saying something given that 2024 was the hottest year on record, bumping 2023 off its baking pedestal. Scientists say this global fever is the natural result of burning fossil fuels and driving CO2 levels to their highest in millions of years.
Since burning more fossil fuels will drive more global warming, it’s exactly the reverse of what we should be doing. Yes, but, these state leaders respond, how else are we going to power ever more data centers?
Northern Virginia is the data center capital of the world, and data centers are notoriously power-hungry. Without them, Virginia electricity demand would be flat, and we could easily meet our electricity needs while gradually decarbonizing along the pathway laid out in the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA).
Instead, Virginia taxpayers subsidize some of the richest corporations in America to the tune of almost a billion dollarsevery year to entice them to rip up land in Loudoun, Prince William and other Virginia counties instead of Atlanta or Dallas. In return, the tech companies keep construction workers busy, underwrite their host counties’ finances, make life miserable for nearby residents, raise everyone’s power bills, drain our rivers and aquifers and pollute our air with enough diesel generators to light up a major city.
Virginia legislators obviously consider this a fair deal, because that’s what they keep voting for. Whether their constituents agree is another question; the evidence says they don’t.
For anyone just getting up to speed on data center issues, the Virginia Sierra Club’s new report, “Unconstrained Demand: Virginia’s Data Center Expansion and Its Impacts” (to which I contributed), covers the current state of data center development in Virginia and the problems that come with it. Fun fact: More than half of all the nation’s energy consumption attributed to data centers occurs in Virginia.
That puts a special burden of leadership on our lawmakers. If we allow data centers to undermine our sustainability efforts here, we can only expect a race to the bottom in other states. As Virginia goes, so goes the nation.
And yet we haven’t heard much outcry from Virginia leaders against the plans of our largest utility to build new generating plants powered by fracked gas. Dominion Energy laid out its plans in its 2024 integrated resource plan as well as a proposal for a 944 megawatts of gas combustion turbines in Chesterfield now pending before the State Corporation Commission.
Dominion and its allies say more gas is needed for reliability, which could make it allowable under the VCEA. Indeed, “reliability” is a word that fossil fuel advocates frequently toss down like a trump card (in the unpresidential sense but with the same lack of thoughtful analysis). The claim is suspect. Fussing about reliability when your state ranks 24th in the nation for renewable energy is like worrying about the taxes you’ll owe if you win the lottery: we should be so lucky.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Republican legislators are explicit in wanting to see the VCEA repealed and more gas plants built. Democrats defend the VCEA’s goals, but worry about the challenges of implementation and the effect on electricity rates. They all cite data center demand as the reason they contemplate backsliding on clean energy.
I wish I could say that our rich and powerful tech companies were aggressively championing carbon-free energy for their data centers in Virginia, but they are not. I attended a meeting of the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation where legislators were hashing out the problems of too much demand and too little supply. Representatives from the Data Center Coalition stood in the back of the room, observing but refusing to engage. Out of sight, they successfully lobbied against any bills that would slow the data center boom, force them to absorb more of its costs, or require them to source their own clean energy.
Publicly, many tech companies tout their commitments to decarbonization. Amazon says it even met its goal to run its operations entirely on renewable energy. Yes, and I’m the Queen of Sheba. In fact, these companies are in a fierce competition to develop artificial intelligence as fast as possible. They’d like carbon-free power, but really, they’ll take whatever energy they can get wherever they can get it, and even among the industry’s best actors, climate now takes a back seat.
Yet the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos would not be significantly worse off if forced to meet their climate commitments. Virginia leaders know – or at any rate, they have been exposed to the information, which I realize is not the same thing – that building new fossil gas generating plants is not just bad for the planet but more expensive than pursuing carbon-free alternatives.
Oh, I know, Congress just yanked back the federal tax incentives that helped make wind and solar as cheap as it is, one of the myriad ill-considered elements of the big beautiful debt bomb Republicans adopted against everyone’s better judgment. (Apparently heat affects spines as well as brains.) With passage of that bill, developers will need to have begun construction on new facilities by this time next year in order to qualify for the existing tax credits.
There will be a mad rush to get construction underway immediately for facilities in the development pipeline. Thereafter, projects on the margin won’t get built. But others will, because even the loss of federal subsidies won’t destroy solar’s competitive edge against most new-build gas.
Even so, utilities and their customers will pay higher prices for unsubsidized new renewable energy – as well as for existing fossil fuel generation that will command higher prices in the coming supply crunch. The Clean Energy Buyers Association estimates that commercial electricity costs in Virginia will be about 10% higher after the phase-out of federal incentives.
A years-long backlog for orders of gas turbines will further squeeze energy supply and drive up prices for fossil power. On the plus side, the lack of available turbines will make fast-to-deploy solar not just the better option, but sometimes the only option.
I’ve never understood the conservative love affair with fossil fuels, when today’s clean technology is cleaner, cheaper and quicker to deploy. Trump would like to crush wind and solar altogether, which would eliminate 90% of the power capacity waiting to be connected to the grid and catapult the U.S into a serious energy crisis. In addition to much higher power prices, observers warn we would likely see a loss of data centers and other energy-intensive industries to parts of the world that are not on a mission to kill low-cost clean energy.
Well, that would be one way to rid Virginia of the data center scourge.
Fortunately, the worst attacks on solar in Trump’s budget bomb did not survive, but the bill should nonetheless serve as a wake-up call for Virginia leaders. With little time left to secure federal clean energy incentives, our utilities need to acquire all the solar and storage they can right now. With or without data centers, locking in as much fuel-free generation as possible while it’s available at a discount is a prudent move to avoid the coming shortages and escalating costs of energy.
As for the tech companies, lawmakers should embrace the simplest approach to this problem, which happens also to be the one that spares ordinary Virginians from bearing the costs of the data center buildout: shifting responsibility for sourcing electricity onto the companies themselves, and requiring that they live up to their climate claims by making the power they buy carbon-free.
It’s an approach other states can follow, holding Big Tech to the same responsibility no matter where they put their data centers. Certainly the tech titans can afford it; they just won big with massive tax cuts that our poorest residents will pay for.
No doubt they will complain. Everyone would like somebody else to pay for what benefits them. But Virginians can’t afford to subsidize Big Tech, and we don’t want to.
As for those legislators who think we should continue to do it anyway – well, all I can think is, it’s got to be the heat.
This article was originally published on July 8, 2025. On July 7, President Trump signed an executive order directing cabinet members to find more ways to hobble wind and solar energy, including directing the Secretary of the Treasury to interpret “beginning of construction” in a way that requires “a substantial portion” of a facility to have been built in order to qualify for tax incentives, counter to current regulation.
In Wise County earlier this month I met the candidate daring enough, or foolish enough, to run against the most powerful Republican member of Virginia’s House of Delegates.
When I walked into the community center in Norton, where I was to give a presentation at the invitation of the Clinch River Coalition, I found a volunteer wrangling wires to plug in the audio equipment. He was introduced to me as Josh Outsey, the man who had taken on the thankless job of Democratic challenger to Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott, in this fall’s election.
Before I could stop myself, I laughed. Terry Kilgore has been in the House for 31 years, and ran unopposed in the last three elections. A politically powerful member of a politically powerful family, Kilgore represents a district that’s over 92% White and voted 83.1% for Donald J. Trump. The 63-year-old lawyer was recently elected House Republican leader.
Joshua Outsey (pronounced OOT-see), 38, is a Black actor, singer and community organizer. As of June 5, Kilgore had raised $469,509, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Outsey had raised $200.
Outsey gives a respectable pitch for his candidacy, grounded in both experience and policy. If this were a contest for a seat in a more balanced district, I’d have no business being amused. But no one, least of all Outsey, is under any illusions that he can unseat Kilgore.
Still, I am filled with admiration. It is one thing to say that democracy works best when voters have choices, and quite another to agree to make yourself that choice against impossible odds.
I’ve seen up close what even a hopeless campaign can require. A couple or three decades ago, my friend Tom Horton ran for Congress against a well-funded Republican incumbent who was firmly entrenched in Virginia politics. Tom had no trouble securing the Democratic nomination – nobody else wanted it – but he didn’t have money for a staff, and he needed a policy director. I was at home with young children and glad for the mental stimulation, so I signed on.
Unburdened by any real prospect of success, I had a great time writing position papers based largely on my own opinions. Every once in a while, I would stop and ask myself, “I wonder what Tom thinks about this?” then shrug and plunge on. Very occasionally, Tom would balk at a position I proposed he take, and then we would talk it out.
But mostly, he didn’t have time for that. Poor Tom spent every day of the campaign on the phone trying to raise money. In the evenings he knocked on doors. If he was lucky, sometimes he was interviewed on the radio or got a quote in the paper. It was an uphill slog all the way, and none of it mattered. He lost by about the same wide margin that polls had shown him losing by at the outset of the campaign.
He had to be disappointed, but Tom told me he loved every minute of it and would run again in a heartbeat, if he didn’t have a family to support.
Maybe this is why I have a special place in my heart for underdogs. People like Tom who try, knowing they are likely to fail, and then indeed do fail, only to pick themselves up and say it was worth it anyway – they are heroes to me. Winners are dull by comparison.
Outsey is far from being the only sacrificial lamb this election. Democrats are fielding candidates in every House race this fall, including other long-shot seats like those held by Will Morefield, another coalfields delegate who won in 2023 with 85% of the vote, and Minority Leader Todd Gilbert, who won his Shenandoah Valley district by more than 77%.
Republicans are not similarly contesting every seat, but some are taking on Democratic incumbents even in deep blue districts, including a few who are making a repeat appearance on the ballot.
These include retired technology professional Kristin Hoffman, who is challenging McLean Democratic Del. Rip Sullivan for the second time, in spite of losing by 23 points in the last election. A few miles to the east, in another Fairfax County district that voted overwhelmingly for Harris over Trump last fall, retired federal worker Ed McGovern will face Del. Kathy Tran for a third time. He lost by 20 points in 2021 and 30 points in 2023.
I was unsuccessful in trying to reach these folks, so I don’t know their motivations. Regardless, I salute them.
Running against impossible odds can serve a purpose beyond dedication to the democratic process. Democrat Melody Cartwright told a Cardinal News reporter that she sees running for a second time against Del. Eric Phillips, R-Henry, after losing in 2023 by 40 points, as a way to support Abigail Spanberger’s gubernatorial campaign. She added candidly that forcing Republicans to spend money to defend Phillips’ seat would leave them less money to attack Democrats elsewhere.
Running for office with no expectation of winning can also be a tactic for raising awareness of a neglected cause, as many a Green Party candidate can attest. My colleague at the Mercury, Roger Chesley, recalls a candidate by the name of Gail Parker who ran for various local, state and federal offices seven times between 2006 and 2019. Calling herself “Gail for Rail,” she campaigned on the single issue of promoting light rail. A 2007 Washington Post headline snarkily called her a “One-Track Candidate.” Fair enough, but the record will reflect that Metro now extends out to Loudoun County.
Deep in the heart of every candidate, of course, is the hope that lightning may strike. The opponent might stumble badly enough, or voters suddenly realize that who they wanted all along was someone just like the scrappy upstart, leading to an upset victory.
It has happened. In a 2014 primary, libertarian college professor David Brat defeated Congressman Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader at the time, in an upset that shocked the political establishment and gave hope to long-shot candidates everywhere. Brat won the general election, too, and served two terms.
Brat’s win over Cantor, followed by his loss to a Democrat in 2018 – to Abigail Spanberger, as it happened – demonstrates a final point: the political winds can shift suddenly, and when it happens, the people who benefit are the ones who’ve got their sails ready.
Democrats have been able to field so many candidates this year because they sense such a shift coming as part of a backlash to the Trump presidency. Republicans say otherwise. Still, no matter which party wins control this fall, the outcome won’t help the longest of long-shot candidates.
But that’s okay. Just running is a win for democracy.
This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on June 30, 2025.
I’ve been thinking a lot about language lately, and the strange way words that used to mean good things are now attacked as bad, and vice-versa. Diversity, equity and inclusion are radioactive. Mentioning environmental justice or climate change will get your federal program canceled. Coal is clean, even beautiful, and pointing out the connection to global warming makes you an alarmist, because speaking up when your government steers you towards disaster is now a bad thing to do.
Recently I received an email excoriating “woke” energy policy, which seemed especially curious. I can see how awareness of historic racial injustice against Black people might nudge policy makers into greater support for renewable energy, given that pollution from fossil fuels tends to have a disparate impact on communities of color. But judging from the hostile tone of the email, I believe we may have different understandings of wokeness.
Sometimes, though, words mean different things to different people without anyone realizing they aren’t using the same definition. That may be the case when Virginia leaders talk about the reliability of the electricity supply. Everyone agrees reliability is critical – but they may not be talking about the same thing.
Virginia’s need for power is growing at a terrific pace. Data centers consume so much electricity that our utilities can’t keep up, causing them to increase imports from out of state. That’s okay for now; West Virginia is not a hostile foreign nation. Also, Virginia is a member of a larger grid, the 13-state (plus D.C.) PJM Interconnection, which manages thousands of generating facilities to ensure output matches demand across the region. But even across this wider area, demand is increasing faster than supply, pushing up prices and threatening a shortfall. Unless we tell data centers to go elsewhere, we need more generation, and fast.
Democrats and Republicans are divided over how to increase the power supply. Democrats remain committed to the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which requires Virginia’s electricity to decarbonize by 2050. Meeting the VCEA’s milestones requires investments in renewable energy and storage, both to address climate change and to save ratepayers from the high costs of coal and fracked gas.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin and members of his party counter that fossil fuels are tried-and-true, baseload sources of energy. They advocate abandoning the VCEA and building more gas plants, arguing that renewable energy just isn’t reliable.
Note that these Republicans are not alarmists, so they ignore climate change. If they were the proverbial frog in a pot of water on the stove, they would consider it a point of pride that they boiled to death without acknowledging the reason.
Youngkin takes every chance he gets to slam the VCEA. As I’ve previously described, the governor sought to amend various energy-related legislation to become VCEA repeal bills, regardless of the original subject matter or how much good it could do.
Last month, Youngkin’s Director of the Department of Energy sent a report on performance-based utility regulation to the State Corporation Commission. With it was a cover letter that had nothing to say about performance-based regulation, but a lot to say about the big, bad VCEA. The letter insists that “By all models, VCEA is unable to meet Virginia’s growing energy demand” and urges the SCC to “prioritize ratepayer affordability and grid reliability over long-term VCEA compliance.”
Unfortunately for the Youngkin administration, affordability hasn’t been an argument in favor of fossil fuels for many years now. A new solar farm generates a megawatt of electricity more cheaply than a new fossil gas plant, and that will still be true even if Congress revokes renewable energy subsidies – though doing so will make electricity less affordable.
The argument from fossil fuel defenders then becomes that the cheapest megawatt is not a reliable megawatt. And that’s where meaning matters.
Reliability is so important that even the decarbonization mandate of the VCEA contains an important exception: a utility can build fossil fuel generation under certain circumstances, if it is the only way to keep the lights on.
Dominion Energy is relying on this escape clause as it seeks regulatory approval to build new fossil gas combustion turbines on the site of an old coal plant in Chesterfield. The move is opposed by local residents, environmental justice advocates and climate activists. (No word on whether they are alarmists or simply alarmed.) They argue Dominion hasn’t met the conditions set out in the VCEA to trigger the escape clause, including achieving energy efficiency targets and proving it can’t meet its needs with renewable energy, energy storage and demand response programs.
Virginia Republicans not only side with Dominion on this, they increasingly favor building gas plants over renewables as a general matter, urging the reliability point. It’s an argument that never made much sense for me, given that renewables make up only 5% of PJM’s electricity. That’s way less than the national average of over 21%, and other grids aren’t crashing right and left.
The light bulb went off for me while I was watching the May meeting of the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation. A PJM representative showed a chart of how the grid operator assigns numbers to different resources according to how they contribute to the electricity supply. Nuclear plants get the highest score because they run constantly, intermittent wind and solar sources get lower scores, with fossil fuel plants in the middle. PJM calls that a reliability score.
For some Republicans, that’s a slam-dunk: the chart proves renewable energy is unreliable. But in spite of its label, the chart doesn’t actually measure reliability; it gives points for availability, which is not the same thing.
As I once heard a solar installer testify, few things are as reliable as the sun rising every morning (or rather, the earth rotating). With modern weather forecasting, grid operators can predict with great precision how much electricity from solar they can count on at any given time from solar facilities arrayed across the region. Solar energy is highly reliable, even though it is not always available. Add storage, and the availability issue is also resolved.
Obviously, the grid would not be reliable if solar were the only resource operators had to work with. But it isn’t. PJM calls on a mix of different sources, plus storage facilities and demand response, to ensure generation precisely matches the peaks and valleys of demand. Reliability is a matter of keeping resources in sync and ensuring a robust transmission and distribution system.
The threat to reliability today comes from the mad rush to connect new data centers. PJM has been roundly criticized for not approving new generating and storage facilities’ connection to the grid at a fast enough pace to keep up with the increase in demand and retirements of old, money-losing fossil fuel plants. Scrambling to recover, recently it decided to prioritize a smaller number of big, new gas plants over the thousands of megawatts of renewable energy and storage still languishing on its waiting list.
Meanwhile, PJM wants utilities to keep operating coal plants even though it will make electricity less affordable and violate state climate laws. In this it is joined by the Trump administration, which wants to require utilities to keep running coal plants explicitly to support the coal industry.
Analysts say this is the wrong way to achieve reliability. A recent report from the consulting firm Synapse estimates that PJM’s approach will raise residential electricity bills by 60% by 2036-2040. By contrast, reforming its interconnection process and enabling more renewable energy and storage to come online would lower bills by 7%. By Synapse’s calculation, Virginia would see the most savings of any state.
In other words, Virginia Republicans are pursuing reliability the wrong way. Instead of pressuring Democrats to back away from the VCEA, they ought to be pressuring PJM to reform its approach. Reliable power doesn’t have to be expensive, if you take the politics out of it.
This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on June 3, 2025.
On May 5, attorneys general from 17 states and the District of Columbia — not including Virginia, regrettably — sued the Trump administration over its attacks on the wind industry. The lawsuit challenges an executive order, signed by President Donald J. Trump on his first day in office, stopping all approvals, permits and funding for wind projects across the country and offshore.
Since the order was signed, the administration hasn’t just blocked new projects, it’s issued a stop-work order for one project under construction in New York and revoked a permit for another. The actions inflict enormous damage on the wind industry and on the economies of states that need the energy and jobs this industry could deliver.
One state that will lose big under Trump’s order is Virginia, which has positioned itself to be a national leader in offshore wind deployment, supply chain and manufacturing. On top of that, Virginia badly needs the electricity from offshore wind to help meet the demand from data centers; it can’t afford to have a major new source of energy strangled in its infancy. Yet Attorney General Jason Miyares did not join the lawsuit.
Sure, Miyares wants to be a good soldier in the Trump putsch. And no doubt he wouldn’t feel at home among all those Democratic AGs (there were no Republicans signing the complaint). But he could at least speak up in his state’s interest. Some well-timed advocacy would go a long way in showing the administration that wind energy is not a partisan matter.
It doesn’t have to be just our attorney general, either. The silence from Gov. Glen Youngkin has been equally deafening. What are they afraid of? Youngkin can’t run for reelection, and Miyares has already secured his party’s nomination in his bid for reelection this fall.
Any politician who styles himself as pro-business ought to be pushing back on the Trump administration’s interference with contracts, destruction of American jobs and infliction of billions of dollars in damage to a growing domestic industry. Especially when it is happening to their own state, the big risk is in not speaking out.
And let’s face it, attacking wind energy is Trump’s own peculiar hobbyhorse, not his party’s. Though Republican support for wind energy has dropped a bit in recent years, it remains above 50%. Onshore wind is the largest source of electricity in Iowa and South Dakota and a major source in several other Republican strongholds. Wind power is responsible for billions of dollars in economic investment while keeping utility rates low in states that rely on it.
Offshore wind is more expensive, but states have embraced it for its potential to lower electricity bills over time while relieving grid congestion, creating well-paying jobs and providing clean, zero-carbon power to East Coast cities. Thirteen states have established offshore wind development goals, totaling over 112 gigawatts (GW) by 2050.
In Virginia, Republican leaders have been among the biggest boosters of offshore wind for more than 15 years. Legislators from both parties supported the creation of the Virginia Offshore Wind Development Authority. With a boost from then-Gov. Bob McDonnell, the Virginia Department of Energy partnered with Dominion Energy on a research project that produced the nation’s first offshore wind turbines in federal waters. Republican support also paved the way for Dominion’s development of the 2.6 GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project, now more than halfway to completion and expected to begin delivering electricity next year.
Nor is CVOW a one-off; the Virginia Clean Economy Act declares twice as much offshore wind power to be “in the public interest.” At the offshore wind International Partnering Forum held in Virginia Beach last month, Dominion displayed a poster of the projects it has in the works. These include a project off Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, which Dominion acquired last October, as well as a huge lease area east of CVOW, which Dominion secured in a lease auction from the federal government last August. All told, Dominion’s projects could deliver a total of 9 GW of clean, renewable power.
A poster displaying Dominion Energy’s planned offshore wind projects.
As important as the energy itself is, Virginia leaders believe offshore wind can be a driver of economic development and job creation for the Hampton Roads area. The Virginia Economic Development Partnership touts Virginia’s strategic location, strong maritime industry and ready workforce as draws for businesses up and down the offshore wind supply chain.
Some businesses have already set up shop in Virginia to serve the industry. These include most recently a Korean subsea cable manufacturer that is investing almost $700 million for a facility in Chesapeake. Gov. Glen Youngkin was on hand for the groundbreaking last month, calling it “a proud moment for Virginia.” Attracting the company was only possible because of Virginia’s commitment to the wind industry – as well as the availability of federal tax credits that Trump also intends to eliminate.
CVOW will likely survive Trump’s attacks (albeit at a higher cost due to his tariffs), but Virginia’s ability to develop an offshore wind workforce and supply chain are very much at risk. The Trump administration’s war on wind power already threatens developers with losses in the billions of dollars. With permitting at a halt, companies are headed for the exits instead of creating the project pipeline necessary for offshore wind to become the powerhouse industry that it is in Europe and Asia.
Trump may have planned his economic sabotage to hurt northeastern states with Democratic governors, but the collateral damage to Virginia is considerable. As it is, our economy has taken a hit from Trump’s mass firings of federal workers, thousands of whom live here. We can’t afford to lose four years of offshore wind progress for no better reason than that Trump wills it.
Silence is not an acceptable response. Miyares and Youngkin must speak up for Virginia.
Update: On May 20 we learned Trump’s Department of the Interior rescinded its order to shut down the $5 billion Empire Wind project in New York, reportedly after Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed to reverse a decision five years ago denying a permit to a natural gas pipeline. This is being billed as a “compromise,” which is apparently what extortion is called when the Trump administration does it.
Power for the People VA 