Category Archives: legislation

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In this arms race, the public loses

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The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A year after Dominion Energy suffered its biggest legislative loss in decades, Virginia’s largest utility is back as the most powerful political force in Richmond. Its influence appears to be greater than ever, powered by campaign donations so large that they warp what it means for legislators to serve the public.

As recently as 2017 I could argue that Dominion did not buy legislators. The amount of money changing hands just wasn’t enough. Former Senate Majority Leader and famous friend-of-Dominion Dick Saslaw received $57,500 over the two-year period 2015-2016. Most rank-and-file legislators got $5,000 or less. It was a lot for those days, but if a politician were going to sell their soul to a utility, you’d expect them to demand a higher price.  

What Dominion’s campaign contributions did buy was access for its many lobbyists, which led to relationships of trust, which in turn produced friendly votes. But if a legislator decided to vote against Dominion’s interest, the threat of losing a few thousand dollars in campaign cash would not have been a serious consideration.

It’s harder to make this case today. The amount of money Dominion contributes to its favored politicians has reached staggering heights. According to the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), Dominion has given out more than $11 million in campaign contributions so far in the 2023-2024 cycle, with the top five recipients of its largesse — three Democrats, two Republicans — each receiving at least $400,000. (As in the past, Dominion gives almost equally to Democrats and Republicans.) 

VPAP shows the top recipient is House Majority Leader Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, whose campaign has accepted $720,000 from Dominion in this election cycle. Of this, $125,000 came in on January 5, 2024, five days before the start of the current legislative session. Legislators are not permitted to accept donations during session, presumably to avoid (or at any rate, slightly lessen) the odor of undue influence. 

Scott received a total of 12 donations from Dominion between the end of the 2023 legislative session and the opening of the 2024 session, some of them to his campaign, others to the PAC he controls, from which he doles out donations to other Democrats.

I don’t mean to pick on Majority Leader Scott. Or rather, yes, I do, too, but it’s not just him. House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah, reports receiving over $590,000 from Dominion since last April. Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott, has accepted $465,000 this election cycle. 

In the Senate, the top recipient of Dominion dollars is Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, at $515,000 in 2023. Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, reports $400,000 from the utility in 2023. Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, received “only” $280,000 from Dominion, which almost makes one question the strength of the relationship.  

The reason for the skyrocketing inflation in Dominion campaign contributions can be traced to a single source: the formation of the public interest group Clean Virginia in 2018. Wealthy businessman Michael Bills formed Clean Virginia specifically to counter Dominion’s influence. The deal was that Clean Virginia would donate to campaigns only if candidates agreed not to accept money from Dominion or Appalachian Power.

In its first couple of years, this meant Clean Virginia donated $2,500-$5,000 to most qualifying campaigns, which was more than ordinary rank-and-file members would have gotten from Dominion in the old days. Contributions in 2018 topped out at $12,659 for then-Sen. Chap Petersen, a well-known champion of campaign finance reform. Most, but not all, of those agreeing to eschew utility donations were Democrats, though the offer was nonpartisan. Clean Virginia’s contributions to all campaigns in 2018-2019 totaled $373,119. 

Bills probably had no idea he was setting off a campaign finance arms race. Dominion fought back by increasing its donations to legislators who still accepted its money, causing Clean Virginia to do likewise. The nonprofit’s total contributions skyrocketed to more than $7 million over the 2021-22 cycle — but Dominion doled out over $7.6 million. In just the first year of the 2023-24 cycle, Clean Virginia’s donations totaled over $8.5 million, while Dominion’s exceeded $10.6 million.

Clean Virginia has also matched Dominion in the generosity of its donations. Seven Democrats received $400,000 or more in 2023, with freshman Sen. Russet Perry, D-Loudoun, leading the pack at $593,149. Four Republicans also received Clean Virginia backing, in amounts ranging from $5,000 to $155,000.

Where does this end? So far, at least, Dominion seems to be doubling down. In addition to increasing campaign contributions tenfold, Dominion has nearly doubled the ranks of its lobbyists, from 16 in 2017 to 31 today, at a cost of millions of dollars more. Add in the gifts its charitable arm makes to pet charities of legislators it wants to curry favor with, and all this political influence gets very expensive. Clearly, Dominion believes it makes a return on its investment in the form of favorable legislative outcomes, or it wouldn’t be doing this. (And this legislative session seems to be proving it right, as I’ll discuss in my next column.) But how long will Dominion’s shareholders be willing to keep this up?

For his part, Michael Bills seems to have dug in for the long haul. No longer content to serve as just a counterweight to utility money, Clean Virginia has expanded its own team of lobbyists and become an advocate for ratepayer interests at the General Assembly. Its donations swamp those of all other public interest groups, including the environmental groups that have traditionally battled Dominion. But almost all of Clean Virginia’s funding comes from Bills. How long will he keep this up?

Ironically, the more money gets spent by both sides, the harder it may be to get campaign finance reform passed. The arms race may be just too lucrative for all legislators. 

Take what happened this year with Clean Virginia’s priority bill from Sen. Danica Roem, D-Prince William, which would bar campaign contributions from public utilities. Dominion opposed the legislation, as it always does. Nonetheless, the bill passed out of the Privileges and Elections committee on an 8-6 vote. The vote fell along party lines, but more telling was the fact that none of those supporting the bill accept money from Dominion; all those who voted against it do. 

The vote should have meant clear sailing to the Senate floor, but Louise Lucas, the powerful Chair of Senate Finance (and a Democrat), insisted on the bill being re-referred to Finance, where she never put it on the docket. As a result, the rest of the Senate never voted on it. 

Lucas, as noted before, accepted $400,000 from Dominion in 2023, four times as much as she received from the next largest donor, a homebuilder executive. Whether Dominion gave her so much money because of her long history of supporting the utility’s interests, or whether she supports the utility because they give her so much money, ultimately doesn’t matter. 

Almost all of the campaign reform bills introduced this year are now dead, most from the same kind of machinations that killed Roem’s bill. Sadly, it’s not just Dominion allies doing the killing. As the Mercury reported, the House counterpart to Roem’s bill died when not a single one of the 22-member House Privileges and Elections Committee made a motion for or against it, including those on Clean Virginia’s good-guy list. Their inaction may well have been on orders from their leadership, but the result is that the arms race continues.

However our senators and delegates justify their votes, this is bad for democracy. If a legislator can count on an easy $200,000 by taking Dominion money, or a just-as-easy $200,000 by not taking Dominion money, there’s a growing danger of small donors – of small voices  – becoming irrelevant.

And with the failure of election reform legislation this year, I’m afraid it will just get worse.

This post was first published in the Virginia Mercury on February 27, 2024.

Update: A colleague (not associated with Clean Virginia) wrote to complain that I had unfairly equated Dominion, a profit-seeking business entity, with Clean Virginia, a non-profit public interest group, making donations from both equally problematic. I would have said it is obvious that the public interest is not a special interest, but I have now made a memo to myself: if it goes without saying, say it anyway.

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To be or not to be a clean energy state, that is the question

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For the third year in a row, a tug-of-war is going on in the General Assembly over whether Virginia stays the course of the energy transition laid out in 2020 and 2021, or rolls it back hard.

Democrats remain committed to a renewable energy future to address pollution, high electricity costs and the causes of catastrophic climate change. Gov. Glenn Youngkin and most Republican legislators cling to the familiar (dis)comfort of fossil fuels. Republicans are still lobbing grenades at the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) and the Clean Car Standard; Democrats are holding the line on those advances.

Last year House Republicans used small subcommittees to kill Democrats’ energy bills, even those that passed the Senate on a bipartisan basis. This year the Democrats’ slim majority in both chambers will let more bills get to the governor’s desk. But with the threat of a veto tempering expectations, the party of clean energy is not running big, ambitious bills, but is instead focused on solving problems that have popped up along the march to zero carbon.

Committees have already begun work on the hundreds of energy bills filed in past days. That’s too many for even the Mercury’s dedicated readers to review without more caffeine than is good for you, so let’s focus on just some that would have the most consequence for the clean energy transition.

To be: Democrats work to further the clean economy

Many of the Democratic bills contain small fixes to existing law that add up to big gains for clean energy. One of these is HB 638, from Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, and SB 230, from Sen. Ghazala Hashmi, D-Richmond. Most of its provisions are tweaks to the VCEA. Among them are increasing from 1% to 5% the percentage of Dominion Energy Virginia and Appalachian Power’s renewable energy purchasing that must come from small projects like rooftop solar; streamlining the State Corporation Commission’s review of energy efficiency programs by creating a single cost-effectiveness test; and supporting competition in the development of renewable energy and energy storage facilities by specifying that “at least”35% of projects must come from third-party developers, instead of the simple 35% number currently in the law. 

The bill also contains a provision that goes beyond the VCEA. It states that the SCC has an “affirmative duty” to implement the Commonwealth Energy Policy at “lowest reasonable cost.” (Two other bills, one from Sen. Jennifer Carroll Foy, D-Fairfax, and the other from Del. Phil Hernandez, D-Norfolk, contain only this provision.) The energy policy is separate from the VCEA, and it sets ambitious goals for the decarbonization of Virginia’s whole economy, including a faster timeline for achieving net zero in the electricity sector. The catch is that the policy does not have teeth, and for that reason it is routinely ignored. Requiring the SCC not just to take account of it, but also to implement it, is a step towards broader decarbonization, though it is not clear how it would actually play out at the SCC. 

Legislation from Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax and Sullivan would resolve problems with the shared solar program in Dominion territory (including putting restraints on the minimum bill that the utility can charge) and expand it to Appalachian Power territory. 

SB 79, from Sen. Barbara Favola, D-Arlington, would save taxpayers money by requiring new or substantially renovated (over 50%) public buildings to have solar-ready roofs or, if solar is deemed impractical, to meet one of two high-efficiency alternatives. New or substantially renovated schools would have to be designed and built to net-zero energy standards, unless the locality determines that to be impractical or the school is a historic building. 

Sullivan and Sen. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Loudoun, have introduced legislation to resolve the interconnection problem that has stalled commercial solar projects across Dominion territory. The House and Senate bills specify that customers are responsible for costs on their side of the meter, while the utility pays for costs on its side, including upgrades to the distribution grid. 

A few bills seek to break through the local-level gridlock that has bedeviled utility-scale solar and wind projects. The most significant of these is HB 636from Sullivan and SB 567 from Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, which provides an alternative permitting process for larger utility solar (50 MW or more), wind (100 MW or more) and renewable energy storage projects (at least 50 MW nameplate and discharge capacity of 200 MWh or more) that go through the local permitting process but end up without permits. Developers get a second chance at the SCC if they meet a list of requirements. These include safeguards for farmland protection, stormwater, setbacks, wetlands, wildlife corridors, etc. Applicants are also charged $75,000 to cover the locality’s cost of participating in the SCC proceeding. (There is some irony here that small projects, which have less impact, are left at the mercy of local whims, while the most impactful projects have what amounts to a right of appeal.) 

Vehicle electrification would also get support from Democratic legislation. One bill of particular interest is Sullivan’s HB 118, which requires Dominion and Appalachian Power to take charge of upgrades to the distribution grid needed to support EV charging by non-residential customers. The utilities are also tasked with filing detailed plans to “accelerate widespread transportation electrification across the Commonwealth in a manner designed to lower total ratepayer costs.” 

Regardless of the fate of these bills, Virginia’s efforts to transition to a zero-carbon economy will be swamped by new demand from the fast-growing data center industry, unless the industry itself can be made part of the solution. A dozen or so bills seek to put conditions on the industry in one way or another, but one takes on the energy demand directly. HB116, from Sullivan, and SB192, from Subramanyam, condition data center operators’ receipt of tax credits on demonstrating compliance with minimum standards for energy efficiency and renewable energy procurement, as well as not using diesel generators for backup power. 

Not to be: Republicans try out arguments against the energy transition 

Many of the Republican anti-clean energy transition bills are blunt instruments that are more about campaigning in Trump country than low-cost energy. For example, HB 397, from freshman Del. Tim Griffin, R-Bedford, would repeal most of the important provisions of the VCEA, while declaring that development of new nuclear is “in the public interest” (a phrase that pretty much means “watch your wallet”). 

Similarly, five bills seek to repeal outright the Advanced Clean Cars law passed in 2021, which effectively put Virginia among the states that follow California’s path to vehicle electrification. The law does not kick in until 2025, but trying to repeal it has become a Republican standby. A more subtle bill from Del. Lee Ware, R-Powhatan, would condition repeal on the Virginia Automobile Dealers certifying that Virginia is not meeting its annual EV sales targets. 

Some anti-EV bills are merely performative. One non-starter, from Griffin again, would provide a tax credit for purchases of vehicles with internal combustion engines. A bill from Sen. William Stanley, R-Franklin, would require any business selling an EV or any EV component to a public body to provide a sworn declaration that there was no child labor involved not just in the manufacturing but at any point anywhere along the supply chain, starting with mining minerals abroad. 

If Stanley were truly concerned about child labor violations, of course, he would seek to apply this sworn declaration requirement to all industries. He could start with the domestic meatpacking industry, where child labor violations are rife, including in Virginia. Ah, if only that were the point. 

It’s not just state-level decarbonization that comes in for a brute-force attack. A bill from another new delegate, Eric Zehr, R-Lynchburg, makes its target any federal regulations that “may threaten the production or supply of affordable, reliable, and secure energy within the Commonwealth.” If alerted to such a threat by a utility or the SCC, the Attorney General’s office would be required to intervene. This sort of bill is not intended to survive its first committee hearing, if it even gets a hearing. Its only purpose is to show off the patron’s hard right bona-fides.

To be fair, there are Republicans who are actually trying to solve real problems in the energy sector. As one example, take SB562 from Sen. Travis Hackworth, R-Tazewell. His bill would create a ratepayer-funded pilot program for utilities to figure out a way to use coalbed methane for electricity without burning it (perhaps with fuel cells?). The problem is, he proposes to make this electricity eligible for Virginia’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS). It’s a creative, if expensive-sounding, response to the real climate problem of methane leaking from old and often abandoned coal mines, part of the true cost of coal. But calling fossil methane renewable is, shall we say, counterfactual. Some problems are more effectively tackled head-on, using tax dollars or tax credits, rather than being used to undermine the integrity of the RPS.

To be: somewhere else entirely

The reality of renewable energy is that we have to build a great many wind, solar and storage projects, each one taking months or years of design, permitting and construction work and requiring acreage we would rather use for something else. Yes, it means economic activity, investment and jobs, but it’s also something of a slog. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a magic solution that could just provide carbon-free electricity without all that bother?

That’s the dream that continues to attract both Democrats and Republicans to nuclear energy. Opinion is divided on whether small modular reactors (SMRs) could hold the answer to all our energy woes, or are just the latest con from an industry looking to attract a new set of deep-pocketed suckers. 

 Three things are clear at this point. One, SMRs are still many years away from commercialization, coming too late to solve the climate problem that is here and now. Second, SMRs are going to cost a lot. Not only is there no free nuclear lunch, there isn’t even a low-priced breakfast. And third, Dominion is frothing at the bit to build an SMR – but only if customers have to pay for it. 

Some legislators are happy to oblige, even with all these drawbacks. The most concerning of the bills are HB 1323 from Del. Danny Marshall, R-Danville, and SB 454 from Sen. David Marsden, D-Fairfax. The legislation would allow Dominion or Appalachian Power to charge ratepayers “at any time” to recover development costs of a small modular nuclear reactor, defined as a nuclear reactor not larger than 500 MW. Not only is that not small, but by the language of the bill it need not even be modular or use advanced technology. Heck, it doesn’t even have to be in Virginia. Dominion could build any kind of nuclear plant, anywhere it chooses, and satisfy the terms of the bill. 

But it’s that “at any time” language that should be a red flag for lawmakers. Charging customers for a nuclear plant before and during construction, including cost overruns and with no guarantee of completion, is precisely how residents of South Carolina got stuck paying billions of dollars for a hole in the ground. 

That amount of money buys a lot of low-cost renewable energy and storage, right in the here and now. Virginia needs to be a clean energy state for the sake of ratepayers, the economy and the climate, and there is no time to waste.

This article was first published on January 21, 2024 in the VIrginia Mercury.

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Fed up with leaf blowers? You’ve got company – and now, reason for hope

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Members of Quiet Clean NOVA demonstrate the noise level of gas-powered leaf blowers on the grounds of the Capitol on January 11. Photo: Quiet Clean NOVA.

Fifteen years ago, when my husband and I expanded our snug 1970s-era house, we added a screened-in porch where I hung a hammock swing. In good weather I carry my computer and coffee out to work from what I call my “summer office.”

Except on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays my neighbor’s landscaping crew descends, and then begins the racket from the lawn mowers, trimmers and, most annoyingly, leaf blowers — which somehow manages to last for hours. 

Less predictable is the neighbor on the other side of us, who seems to be addicted to his two-stroke gas-powered leaf blower. He’s outside with it several times a week in all seasons, in spite of not having a lawn. The noise is insufferable, and even if I could tune it out, the pollution produced by the apparently-not-very-well-maintained engine forces us indoors with windows shut tight. Not satisfied with his own efforts, last spring he hired a crew of day-laborers with gas-powered leaf blowers to spend most of the workday making sure not a leaf remained anywhere on the property, including (I kid you not) in the woods behind his house.

I love all my neighbors, but if I could vote these machines off the planet, I would. Gas-powered leaf blowers are far and away the worst instrument of neighborly ear torture known to suburban life, and that includes pickleball.

I’m not alone in making this assessment. Local governments across the country have banished them, citing air pollution, worker health risks, harm to wildlife and contributions to global warming, as well as noise. Two years ago in Virginia, an all-volunteer advocacy group called Quiet Clean NOVApromoted a bill in the Virginia legislature that would have given localities the power to regulate or prohibit gas-powered leaf blowers. Other lawn equipment and electric leaf blowers, being much less obnoxious, were not targeted. Even drawn so narrowly, the bill died in a House subcommittee on a 5-4 vote along party lines.

This year, Quiet Clean NOVA worked with Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, and Sen. Saddam Salim, D-Fairfax, on a similar bill introduced in both the Virginia House and Senate. On January 11, volunteers from the group descended on Richmond with gas leaf blowers to do elected leaders the dubious favor of clearing detritus from the sidewalks around the Capitol, at full volume.

The thing about leaf blowers is that owning one is not exactly part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When I was a child – lo these many years ago – leaves were removed from grass with a rake, and that didn’t seem to interfere with anyone’s quest for self-actualization. 

Then, in the late 1970s, California became the first state to embrace leaf blowers. It has now become the first state to ban the gas-powered version, though without an apology to the rest of us for unleashing the scourge in the first place. 

To be honest, I love power tools as much as the next homeowner. I’ve learned that a relaxed approach to leaves is better for wildlife and soil health, but a few times per year I bring out my electric leaf blower, connect it to an extension cord, and blow the accumulated leaves and debris off our roof. I do the same for our gravel driveway in the fall. The electric blower is about as loud as a vacuum cleaner, produces no fumes, and has never needed repair in the 20 years I’ve owned it. Should I ever need a new one, they sell for under a hundred bucks. 

It would be a bit much to expect landscaping crews to run around tethered to extension cords, but that is where advances in battery technology come in. Battery-powered leaf blowers cost about as much as gas-powered blowers, but they are cleaner, quieter, easier to maintain and more reliable. Not to mention, the sound doesn’t penetrate walls and drive the neighbors batty. The catch is that a battery may need recharging before a big job is complete (or for my neighbor, before every leaf is out of the woods). A landscaping crew would need to carry spare batteries, which adds to the cost. 

Opponents of legislation letting localities regulate gas blowers will argue that it isn’t fair to landscapers to make them invest in new equipment before the old equipment has reached the end of its useful life. A locality would have to weigh that consideration against the more diffuse, but much greater, costs to society imposed by the current use of gas blowers.  

But that’s an argument about whether and how to regulate. That discussion should be had at the level of government that operates closest to neighborhoods and people, at city councils and boards of supervisors. Quiet Clean NOVA’s bill gives those localities the ability to regulate but does not require them to.

In Virginia’s General Assembly, though, even a modest bill may get caught up in the political moment. Few Virginia Republicans represent densely-populated districts where noise and pollution are serious issues. Most are blessed to represent quieter rural areas. It’s easy for some of them to frame any local regulation as an infringement on personal liberty. Still, I question whether any of these gentlefolk, when settling in for a pleasant spell on the porch, greet the sudden roaring of a leaf blower by exclaiming, “Ah! The sound of freedom!” I think they say the same unprintable things I do.  

But I get the slippery slope argument. If you let communities decide for themselves whether to regulate things that harm people’s health and the environment, next thing you know they might start trying to control how people live their lives in private, possibly even banning things like drag queen story hours and library books about Black people.

Oh, wait. We’re there already, aren’t we?

So maybe let’s just look at this legislation as simply what it is: a way to give our local elected officials the right to hear the voices of their distressed constituents, crying out for a little peace and quiet.

A version of this article appeared in the Virginia Mercury on January 10, 2023.

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Commercial solar has stalled out in Virginia. Fortunately, there’s a simple fix.

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 A ribbon-cutting ceremony marked Norfolk Solar’s array installation at the historic Wesley Union AME Zion church in Norfolk in September 2022. (Wesley Union AME Zion Church)

In 2019, Ruth Amundsen and Alden Cleanthes formed a company with a mission to bring the benefits of rooftop solar to low-income communities. Targeting development in Qualified Opportunity Zones, Norfolk Solar installed solar at the historic Wesley Union AME Zion church in Norfolk, the Southside Boys and Girls Club, a Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and other nonprofits. To increase the local benefits, Amundsen and Cleanthes required installers to hire local, low-income and typically minority workers. All told, the company did $2 million in business between 2019 and 2022, while creating jobs for local residents in the clean energy economy.

And then, it all came to a screeching halt. Last December, Dominion Energy Virginia unilaterally imposed new – and prohibitively expensive – interconnection requirements for most commercial solar. A solar array seeking interconnection approval this year faces total project costs that are 20 to 40%  higher than they were last year under the old rules.  

Though Norfolk Solar had hundreds of thousands of dollars of investor money committed to new projects, Cleanthes told me they were forced to break contracts and turn away funders. The company has not done a single project in 2023. 

Nonprofits are not the only victims of Dominion’s move. Plans to put solar on schools and municipal buildings have ground to a halt all across Dominion territory. A community solar project that would have served low-income residents had to be scuttled last December when Dominion demanded the developer install a high-speed fiber optic line that would have increased project costs by 50%.

Solar array on high school roof
A new solar array atop Meridien High School in Falls Church received interconnection approval before Dominion imposed onerous new requirements for net-metered solar. Now, advocates fear it may be one of the last projects of its kind built in Dominion’s territory. Photo: Ivy Main

Dominion says its requirements are about safety and reliability. Solar developers challenge that, noting that the equipment they install already meets industry standards, and that other utilities don’t demand the upgrades Dominion wants. They suspect Dominion is trying to offload onto solar customers the cost of grid improvements that Dominion will use for other purposes, and in so doing to crush the small competitors it has battled with for years.  

The details of the dispute are, to put it mildly, highly technical, but the impacts are readily discernible in the near-collapse of Virginia’s commercial solar market. Most noticeably, solar school projects have stalled out across Dominion’s service territory. Schools that were counting on using solar panels to lower their energy costs have been forced to cancel plans.

Cathy Lin, energy manager for Arlington Public Schools, told me she was shocked when the county’s solar developer told her about the increased costs, which she considers exorbitant. “We want to put on more solar,” she said. “We can’t afford to. The extra interconnection fees make solar unaffordable for us.” 

The Distributed Solar Alliance (of which I am a co-founder as a solar advocate) has spent much of this year fighting Dominion at the State Corporation Commission. The SCC ruled in the DSA’s favor on all points in August, but in November an SCC hearing examiner unexpectedly authorized Dominion to impose many of the same requirements on an “interim” basis – with no end in sight. 

Taking off my advocacy hat for a moment, I actually have some sympathy for the hearing examiner. If a utility tells you it has to have the latest in fiber-optic technology and fancy-pants equipment as a matter of safety and reliability, you’d better have a pretty deep understanding of grid technology before you say no. This guy had no expertise. How surprised can we be that he basically punted?

But the results are terrible for an entire sector of Virginia’s economy. The ruling is bad for developers like Norfolk Solar, which will not be able to continue its mission to bring solar and job training to low-income areas. It’s bad for schools, universities and other customers, who can’t afford to complete long-planned projects that were supposed to bring energy savings. 

And though the fight at the SCC is specific to net-metered solar projects between 250 kilowatts and 3 megawatts, allowing Dominion to impose requirements without demonstrating that they’re actually needed has dire implications for all distributed generation up and down the scale – and, logically, even for distributed battery storage and EV charging. 

Really, this result is not even great for Dominion, because relying on a single customer to fund an expensive substation or line upgrade will usually result in no upgrade happening. That’s no way to run a grid.

Fortunately, there is a way to resolve this matter without risking safety and reliability, while at the same time reinvigorating the distributed generation market and allowing stalled solar projects to move forward. 

The General Assembly could simply clarify that solar developers are responsible for safety equipment and other costs of interconnection on the premises. For off site improvements – including new fiber-optic lines, substation upgrades, and other investments that enhance the distribution system for all customers – Dominion should be specifically empowered to undertake this work and recover the costs from ratepayers, subject to SCC approval, as it does for the rest of its grid modernization program.

This approach would tamp down suspicion that Dominion is gold-plating its interconnection requirements as a way of stifling third-party solar. More importantly, it would support the kind of distribution grid upgrades needed to support all the elements of a resilient 21st century grid.

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Up for a vote in this election: clean energy, data centers and utility influence

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Virginia voters will decide next month who will represent them at the State Capitol in January.

How much do Virginia’s elections matter in an off year? Measured by the turnout in past elections, you’d think the answer is “not much.” The percentage of registered voters who show up at the polls in Virginia typically drops well below 50% when no federal or statewide candidates are on the ballot. 

But measured by how much the outcome of this year’s election could affect the lives of regular people, the battle for control of the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates matters enormously. With a Republican in the governor’s mansion, a Democratic edge in either or both chambers would continue the status quo of divided government and (mostly) consensus-based lawmaking. A Republican takeover of both chambers, on the other hand, would lead to a wave of new legislation imposing the conservative social agenda on abortion, gay rights, transgender issues, education and welfare.

It would also put an end to Virginia’s leadership on climate and clean energy and lead to costly initiatives protecting fossil fuels, at the expense of consumers and the environment.

Some of the divisions between the two parties are well-known, and the consequences of one party edging out the other are clear. For some issues, however, the party positions are not as obvious, and it takes a look under the hood to understand where elections matter. 

Virginia’s clean energy transition is at risk

Let’s start with the obvious: the broad framework of Virginia’s energy transition to clean energy is a signature achievement of Democrats that Republicans have in the crosshairs. 

Three and a half years ago, Virginia made history as the first Southern state to commit to zero-carbon electricity by 2050 with detailed and specific guidance. The next year, the General Assembly followed up with legislation to begin the transition to electric vehicles. 

Clean energy investments soared after passage of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA). Solar installations in 2020 and 2021 dwarfed previous numbers, and the state solar market is now a $5.1 billion industry employing over 4,700 workers. Private investment dollars have poured into small-scale renewable energy as well, funding solar on schools, churches and government buildings. 

The VCEA’s support for offshore wind gave that industry the certainty it needed to move beyond the pilot project stage. Foundations for the first of 176 turbines of the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project are currently on their way to the Portsmouth Marine Terminal. By the end of 2026, the turbines are expected to provide enough electricity to power more than 600,000 homes. 

Communities benefited from Virginia’s entry into the carbon-cutting Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), as $730 million in new revenue flowed to the Commonwealth for flood mitigation and low-income home weatherization. 

And after passage of the Clean Cars law, sales of electric vehicles in Virginia are set to double by the end of next year, and to double again by 2026.

In 2021, however, the election of Gov. Glenn Youngkin and a narrow Republican majority in the House of Delegates put these gains at risk. Early on, Youngkin declared his intent to repeal the VCEA and the Clean Cars law and pull Virginia out of RGGI. Only a Democratic majority in the Senate stopped legislative rollbacks passed by House Republicans in 2022 and 2023. Loss of that majority would ensure repeal of Clean Cars and the evisceration of VCEA.

As for RGGI, the failure to repeal the law led Youngkin to attempt to pull Virginia out through an administrative rulemaking that will be contested in court. He could sidestep a court battle and do it legally through legislation if his party takes control of the General Assembly. 

“No-brainer” bills killed in small committees

While a clear divide separates the two parties on signature Democratic initiatives like VCEA and RGGI, party membership is the determining factor on other energy and climate bills in less obvious ways. House rules allow a subcommittee consisting of as few as 5 members to vote down a bill by majority vote, keeping it from being heard by the full committee. With Republicans in control of the House, every subcommittee has a Republican majority, and Democratic bills routinely die on 3-2 votes. This can be true even if a bill has already passed the Senate, and even if the Senate vote was bipartisan – or for that matter, unanimous.

The Senate operates very differently. There, a subcommittee can only make recommendations. It takes a vote of the full committee to kill a bill in the Senate. 

You might wonder: if a bill is such a no-brainer that it passes the Senate unanimously or by a wide bipartisan majority, why would it get voted down in the House at all? Wouldn’t the bipartisan endorsement suggest this is actually a good bill that even the party in charge of the House would want to support, or at least have heard in full committee?

Indeed, when a no-brainer bill is killed in a tiny House subcommittee along party lines, it is rarely because the bill’s patron just happened to find the only few people in the General Assembly who don’t like the bill. More typically, it’s because the governor or the caucus itself has taken a position against the bill, but doesn’t want to draw attention to that fact. The subcommittee members tasked with doing the killing let everyone else in the party keep their hands clean. 

This explains the fate of Fairfax Democrat Sen. Chap Petersen’s bill to study the effect of data centers on Virginia’s environment, economy, energy resources and ability to meet carbon-reduction goals. The bill passed unanimously by voice vote in the Senate before dying at the hands of three Republicans in a five-person subcommittee of the House Rules committee. 

The data center study was the very definition of a no-brainer bill. The unbridled growth of data centers has ignited protests in communities across Virginia, and the industry’s voracious appetite for energy is blowing up Virginia’s climate goals, according to Dominion Energy. How can it be that House Republicans don’t even want to study the issue?

The answer lies in the fact that the Youngkin administration testified against the three data center bills that were heard in the Senate. One of Youngkin’s proudest achievements in office was the deal with Amazon to bring another $35 billion worth of data centers to Virginia. He does not want a study that would bring negative realities to light, so the bill had to die. The Republican members of the subcommittee were merely the executioners.

Another no-brainer bill that never made it to a full committee vote is one that gets introduced year after year: a prohibition on using campaign funds for personal purposes. This year’s legislation passed the Senate unanimously before just five Republicans voted to scuttle the bill in a House Privileges and Elections subcommittee.

My guess is you could not find a voter anywhere in Virginia who thinks legislators should be able to take money donated to their election campaigns and spend it on themselves. Justifying it requires legislators to turn themselves into logical pretzels. 

The combination of unlimited campaign giving by donors and unrestricted spending by the recipients makes it easy for powerful corporations like Dominion Energy to buy influence. Dominion has long been the largest corporate donor to legislators of both parties. The company’s influence has cost consumers billions of dollars and kept its fossil fuel plants burning.

Dominion’s influence was clearly at work this year when a House subcommittee killed a bill from Fairfax Senator Scott Surovell that would have made shared solar available to more Virginians, over Dominion’s opposition. The bill passed the Senate with bipartisan support before losing 4-2 on a party-line vote in a House Commerce and Energy subcommittee. 

It is less clear whether Dominion had a hand in the death of a bill that would help localities put solar on schools. The legislation passed the Senate unanimously before being killed in House Appropriations, again on a straight party-line vote. 

Certainly, there have been plenty of Democrats over the years who have voted for Dominion’s interest time and again. Conversely, not all the no-brainer bills killed by House Republicans reflect a hostility to the energy transition; sometimes the problem seems to be a hostility to environmental protections in general. Thus a bill to require customer notification when water tests show contamination from PFAS – known commonly as “forever chemicals” – passed the Senate unanimously and then was killed in a House subcommittee on, yet again, a party-line vote. 

It would be hard to identify a consistent line of reasoning behind all the anti-environment votes across all the various subcommittees, but the pattern is clear enough. It reflects not just the positions of individual legislators, but a firm party line. 

Whether voters care about these votes now is not clear, mainly because the news media rarely look at the role of the environment, climate and energy in elections. Regardless, these issues will be very much at stake at the polls next month. 

This article originally appeared in the Virginia Mercury on October 4, 2023.

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Yes, RGGI works

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At the heart of the political fight over Virginia’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a seemingly simple question: does a requirement that Virginia power plants pay for the right to spew CO2 actually lower CO2 emissions? Critics argue no; supporters say yes. There is evidence for both, but in the long run, the benefits of RGGI for both Virginia and the climate are clear.

RGGI operates as a carbon cap-and-trade agreement between 12 northeastern states. Carbon-emitting power plants must buy allowances through an auction process. This makes high-carbon fossil fuel electricity more expensive relative to zero-carbon sources like wind, solar and nuclear. The result, in theory, is that utilities are incentivized to buy less of the former and more of the latter. In states like Virginia, where utilities own generating plants, RGGI provides an incentive for them to abandon coal plants and build more zero-carbon sources. 

RGGI administrators say it has succeeded in lowering carbon emissions in member states by more than 50%, twice as fast as the nation as a whole. RGGI states typically spend at least some of the money raised in the carbon allowance auctions on energy efficiency improvements that allow people to use less electricity, further reducing emissions.

But RGGI doesn’t operate in isolation. Several RGGI states are members of the PJM regional grid, comprising 13 states, including some that don’t participate in RGGI. Critics point out that, instead of building or buying renewable energy, a utility in a RGGI state can buy electricity produced in a state that doesn’t participate in RGGI. Fossil fuel plants in a non-RGGI state like West Virginia don’t have to pay to pollute, giving them a competitive edge over similar Virginia plants. 

This is known as “leakage,” a loophole that lets fossil fuel energy “leak” into RGGI states. If there were enough leakage, lower carbon emissions in RGGI could be offset by the higher emissions elsewhere in PJM, leaving overall emissions unchanged.

Stephen Haner, a respected advocate for low energy rates at the conservative Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, says this is what’s happening in Virginia. He cites data to show a big jump in electricity imports from 2020 to 2022. According to this calculation, CO2 emissions actually increased under RGGI, when they were supposed to be decreasing.

But there are problems with this analysis, starting with the fact that Virginia entered RGGI in 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. That year saw energy demand — and emissions — plummet. It would be strange indeed if Virginia emissions did not rise when the economy rebounded. 

Energy demand is also increasing in Virginia due to the boom in data center construction. Data centers are huge energy hogs, and they are being built faster than our utilities can build new electricity generation to serve them. The new generation will be zero-emission solar and, soon, offshore wind; meanwhile the electricity has to be imported from elsewhere in PJM.

Bill Shobe, an economist with the Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia who has done extensive work in support of Virginia’s energy transition, told me in an email there are other reasons to be skeptical of the conclusion that RGGI caused Virginia’s carbon emissions to increase. I’ll spare you the weedy details, but among other things, Virginia’s nuclear production decreased significantly from 2020 to 2021, which has nothing to do with RGGI. And as Shobe notes, the data centers would get built somewhere, if not here, so perhaps they should not be counted against us.

I am not as forgiving of data centers as Shobe is. Tech companies have chosen Virginia for its fiber optic network and generous tax incentives, and they point to Virginia’s climate laws as progress in meeting their own sustainability commitments. Data centers are taking our money and busting our carbon cap; they owe it to us to procure their own renewable energy, if not in Virginia, then within PJM.

Data centers notwithstanding, Shobe’s own calculations show leakage to be much less than Haner’s data suggests. “It is abundantly clear that emission leakage is relatively modest,” he told me. “In the end, the other advantages of RGGI (lowering compliance costs, revenue for efficiency and flood resilience, etc.) will swamp the small leakage margin.” 

For RGGI critics like Haner and Gov. Glenn Youngkin, of course, effects on CO2 emissions are really beside the point anyway. They would gladly accept higher emissions if it meant lower rates. 

This is analogous to what happens when American manufacturers move operations to countries with cheaper labor and lax environmental laws. One way to stem the tide would be to lower our own environmental standards and suppress wages in the U.S., removing the incentive to offshore operations by making life equally miserable everywhere. 

The better alternative is to raise the bar everywhere so that everyone benefits. That’s not just the right thing to do; it actually works. In the international arena, American leadership on clean energy investment is already forcing other countries to discuss upping their game. Here in the U.S., RGGI has attracted new member states — like Virginia — and prompted discussions within PJM about creating a region-wide clean energy market.

Of course, Virginia alone doesn’t have the market power to force other states to change. Fortunately for us and for the climate, leakage will become less of an issue over time as renewable energy outcompetes fossil fuel power everywhere. PJM’s carbon emissions have trended steadily lower, first as methane displaced coal, and more recently as renewable energy displaces all fossil fuels. That displacement will accelerate with federal clean energy incentives in place and innovation continuing to drive renewable energy costs lower. 

Meanwhile, Virginia crafted its energy transition framework with an eye for ensuring our economy gains, no matter what other states do. As Shobe noted, lowering carbon emissions is just one benefit of RGGI membership; carbon auctions fund energy efficiency and flood control projects here, and the switch away from high-emission coal plants means our residents breathe cleaner air. 

Our RGGI law is also part of a larger package designed to create jobs and economic development here at home. The Virginia Clean Economy Act provides for utilities to procure electricity from solar and wind generating facilities and battery storage located in Virginia, which will reduce leakage over time. It also requires an increasing percentage of Dominion and Appalachian Power’s electricity to come from renewable energy. After 2025, most of that must come from in-state facilities. 

As I’ve shown before, building low-cost wind and solar helps to lower rates and provides price stability when fossil fuel costs spike. Virginia’s energy transition is just getting underway, but it will deliver benefits for years to come. 

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on March 29, 2023.

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A dog, a food fight and other highlights from the 2023 General Assembly session

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Cartoon describes Amazon replacing Dominion as the major political power in Virginia

For followers of Virginia energy policy, 2023 will be remembered as the year Dominion Energy lost its stranglehold on the General Assembly. The utility’s all-out campaign to boost its return on equity earned it little more than crumbs. By contrast, a bill to return authority over rates to the State Corporation Commission garnered overwhelming support. 

Another surprise loser was the nuclear industry. Gov. Youngkin and boosters of small modular reactors (SMRs) expected a lot more love, and incentives, than legislators proved willing to dole out this early in the technology’s development. 

Less noticed was the rise to political power of one of Dominion’s largest customers, Amazon Web Services. Many legislators may still not have caught on, but the corps of lobbyists who haunt the hallways of the General Assembly building know a 500-pound gorilla when they see one. As one lobbyist put it: “Amazon is the new Dominion.”

These are the standout takeaways from a legislative session in which, otherwise, few significant energy bills emerged from the scrum. Senate Democrats ably protected the energy transition framework established in 2020 and 2021, but modest efforts to accelerate the transition mostly failed. Of the roughly 60 bills I followed this session, only a handful made it to the governor’s desk. 

Republican attacks on the energy transition failed

The three foundational bills of Virginia’s energy transition — the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) and Clean Cars — all came under attack this year, as they did last year. And again, repeal efforts failed every time.

Senate Democrats blocked the one bill that would have pulled Virginia out of RGGI. Gov. Youngkin remains bent on achieving the pullout by regulation through  Department of Environmental Quality rulemaking. 

In the transportation sector, every bill to repeal the Air Pollution Control Board’s authority to implement the Advanced Clean Car Standard failed in the Senate as Democrats held the line. 

Efforts to undermine key parts of the VCEA failed, including House and Senate bills that would have given the State Corporation Commission more authority over closures of fossil fuel plants and require it to conduct annual reviews designed to second-guess the VCEA’s framework for lowering emissions and building renewable energy. 

A House bill that would have exempted certain industrial customers categorized as “energy-intensive trade-exposed industries” from paying their share of the VCEA’s costs passed the House on a party-line basis. However, with the bill facing certain death in Senate Commerce and Labor, patron Lee Ware, R-Powhatan, requested it be stricken. At the time, he had reason to expect that a compromise approach proposed by Sen. Jeremy McPike, D-Prince William, would pass. McPike’s bill would have had the SCC put together a group of experts to study the issue and make recommendations. After passing the Senate, however, McPike’s study bill went to House Energy and Commerce, which insisted on amending it to mirror Del. Ware’s bill. That did not go over well in the Senate, where the House substitute was  unanimously rejected. McPike then asked the Senate to kill his own bill, and the energy-intensive trade-exposed industries got nothing. 

Raids on the VCEA produced mixed results

One of the VCEA’s strengths is in creating incentives for clean energy. That’s also a vulnerability, because everybody and their brother wants in on the incentives — and this year, once again, the brothers came peddling some pretty sketchy stuff.

In the end, however, the VCEA sustained little damage. An effort to open up the renewable energy category to coal mine methane was modified to become simply a policy to encourage the beneficial capture and use of methane that would otherwise escape from old coal mines into the air. However, methane extraction jobs in four Southwest Virginia counties will now qualify for a “green jobs” tax credit.

More successful was an effort by the forestry industry to allow more woody biomass to qualify for the renewable portfolio standard (RPS); this was in spite of drawbacks including high levels of pollution, expense and large climate impact. As passed, the House and Senate bills will allow Dominion-owned biomass plants to remain open and have their output qualify for the RPS, so long as they burn only waste wood from forestry operations. Climate advocates opposed the change, but remain hopeful that Dominion and the SCC will want to close these uneconomic biomass plants to protect ratepayers. 

Two different House bills that tried to shoehorn nuclear and hydrogen into the RPS failed in the Senate. A third bill promoting small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) got more traction initially; it would have had the SCC develop a pilot program for SMRs with a goal of having the first one operational by 2032. After it passed the House, the Senate Commerce and Labor committee adopted amendments to require the SCC to examine the cost of any SMRss  relative to alternatives, and to prevent ratepayers from being charged for the costs if an SMR never became operational. The Senate voted unanimously for the bill with these protections included, but the House rejected them. Ultimately, the bill died, a remarkable setback for the governor’s nuclear ambitions.

Utility reform consumed most of the session (again)

Dominion’s money grabs have turned into near-annual food fights. This one almost wrecked the cafeteria. 

The action proceeded along two fronts. One consisted of bipartisan, pro-consumer House and Senate legislation promoted as the Affordable Energy Act, intended to return ratemaking authority to the SCC. As passed, it merely authorizes the SCC to modify Dominion’s or Appalachian Power’s base rates going forward, if it determines that current rates will produce revenues outside the utility’s authorized rate of return. If that strikes you as hard to argue with, you’re not alone; no one in either chamber voted against it. 

Far more divisive was Dominion’s own effort to secure an increased rate of return on equity (ROE). This legislation earned its own bipartisan support from Dominion loyalists, led by Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, D-Fairfax, for the Senate bill and House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore, R-Scott, for the House bill. 

As initially drafted, it probably should have been called the Unaffordable Energy Act instead of the reassuringly bureaucratic-sounding Virginia Electric Utility Regulation Act. The bill described a formula for determining Dominion’s allowed ROE that SCC staff calculated could result in an ROE as high as 11.57%, up from the currently-allowed 9.35%. SCC staff told legislators this could cost ratepayers $4 billion through 2040. In return, the bill offered some near-term savings for customers but also would have removed the last vestige of retail competition and opened VCEA coal plant retirement commitments to second-guessing by the SCC.

Dominion pulled out all the stops. The company supplemented its own in-house lobbying corps of 13 with another 17 top lobbyists from around Richmond. Former senator John Watkins signed on, as did former FERC commissioner Bernard McNamee. CEO Bob Blue showed up personally  to push the bill. Dominion ran full-page ads in the Washington Post and Virginia newspapers touting a provision of the bill that would save ratepayers $300 million (neglecting to mention that it was the ratepayers’ own money). The ad featured a dog so people could be sure Dominion was being friendly.

It didn’t work. The consumer advocates hung tough, and Gov. Youngkin, possibly a cat person, added his weight to the resistance. As the Mercury reported, the “compromise” that all parties now swear they are delighted with gives Dominion very little kibble. The coal plants will be retired on schedule, ratepayers will see savings and a larger percentage of over earnings will be returned to customers in the future. In exchange, Dominion’s future return on equity will be bumped up to 9.7%, but only for two years, after which the SCC will have discretion to set the ROE as it deems fair. (That is, if Dominion doesn’t start the next food fight first.)

Appalachian Power had its own troubles this session. APCo-only legislationthat would have replaced the requirement for an integrated resource plan with an “annual true-up review” was radically amended to become an entirely different bill. It now allows both utilities to finance the high fuel costs they’ve incurred due to soaring natural gas and coal prices. The amendments were welcomed both as a way to handle the fuel debt and so that no one had to figure out what a true-up review is. The bills passed handily.

One other successful piece of legislation may help avoid future food fights. Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, and Del. Kilgore worked together to resuscitate the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation (CEUR) and create more transparency around utility planning. The original bill also created a structure for state energy planning, but that proved too much for House Republicans, who amended it down to the lean bill that passed. 

Over the years CEUR earned a bad reputation as an entity that rarely met but that served as an excuse for legislators to defer action on pro-consumer bills. That makes advocates somewhat wary of this bill. On the other hand, provisions welcoming stakeholders into the utility integrated resource planning process seems likely to benefit the public, if not the utilities.  

Elsewhere, consumers did poorly

Dominion may have taken a drubbing on its money grab, but it did pretty well in guarding its monopoly. The Dominion-friendly Senate Commerce and Labor committee killed a bill to allow customers to buy renewable energy at a competitive rate from a provider other than their own utility. Bills to expand shared solar passed the Senate but died in the House. 

Indeed, the House turned into a killing field for any bill with the word “solar” in it, no matter how innocuous or popular. A House Rules subcommittee killed a bill that would have helped schools take advantage of onsite solar, though it had passed the Senate unanimously. A resolution to study barriers to local government investments in clean energy was left in House Rules. A bill to create a solar and economic development fund passed the Senate but was tabled in House Appropriations. A resolution directing the Department of Transportation to study the idea of putting solar panels in highway medians never got a hearing in House Rules. A consumer-protection effort for buyers of rooftop solar was tabled in House Commerce and Energy. A bill clarifying the legality of solar leases passed the Senate unanimously, only to be left in House Commerce and Energy. 

Do we detect a little frustration on the part of House Republicans at the complete failure of their anti-clean energy agenda? Why, yes. Yes, we do.

The only pro-consumer legislation to pass was a very modest bill requiring the SCC to establish annual energy efficiency savings targets for Dominion customers who are low-income, elderly, disabled or veterans of military service. But legislation that would have made homeowners eligible for low-cost loans through property-assessed clean energy (PACE) programs failed.

Offshore wind remains on track

Dominion beat back an effort to make it hold ratepayers harmless if its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project fails to produce as much energy as expected. A bill to allow the company to create an affiliate to secure financing for the project passed. 

Legislation to move up the VCEA’s deadline for offshore wind farm construction from 2034 to 2032 passed; the law now also requires that the SCC consider economic and job creation benefits to Virginia in overseeing cost recovery. However, a bill that would have required the SCC to issue annual reports on the progress of CVOW failed. That bill would also have required the SCC to analyze alternative ownership structures that might save ratepayers money. 

The gas ban ban fails again

This year’s attempt to bar local governments from prohibiting new gas connections passed the House on a party-line vote but was killed in Senate Commerce and Labor. A Senate companion bill from Democrat Joe Morrissey, which had caused something of a tizzy initially, was stricken at Morrissey’s request. 

And this year’s big winner is … Amazon!

With data centers now making up over 21% of Dominion’s load and since they have already sucked up over a billion dollars in tax subsidies, this should have been the year Virginia government woke up to the need for state oversight of the industry. Alas, no. Bills that would limit where data centers could be sited failed. Senate legislation that would have simply tasked the Department of Energy with studying the impact of data centers passed the Senate on a voice vote but was killed in a subcommittee of House Rules on a 3-2 vote, the same fate suffered by a similar House bill. 

Who could be against studying the impact of an industry this big? Aside from the data center industry that is enjoying the handouts, the answer is the Youngkin administration. The governor is so pleased with Amazon’s plan to spend $35 billion on more data centers across Virginia that he promised the company even greater handouts. 

Those handouts take the form of a bill creating the Cloud Computing Cluster Infrastructure Grant Fund, with parameters that ensure only Amazon gets $165 million. In addition, the far more impactful sales and use tax exemption, currently set to expire in 2035, will be continued out to 2040 with an option to go to 2050; again, this is all just for Amazon, unless some other company manages to pony up $35 billion in data center investments. In return, Amazon must create a total of just  1,000 new jobs across the entire commonwealth, and only 100 of them must pay “at least one and a half times the prevailing wage.” A jobs bill, this is not.

With the sales and use tax exemption already costing Virginia $130 million per year and growing rapidly, this legislation will be very costly. You would not know it, though, from the budget analysis performed for legislators. Through the magic of accounting rules, that analysis managed to conclude that the budget impact of this legislation would be zero. 

As preposterous as that is, it may explain why only a few legislators voted against the bill. They have no idea what the governor is getting us into.

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Small modular nuclear reactors:  A bad deal for Southwest Virginia! And all of us!

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Infographic shows how small modular nuclear reactors work
Source: U.S. Department of Energy

In announcing his 2022 Virginia Energy Plan, Gov. Youngkin said, “A growing Virginia must have reliable, affordable and clean energy for Virginia’s families and businesses.” The Governor’s plan to promote and subsidize Small Modular nuclear Reactors (SMnRs) in Southwest Virginia fails all three of the Governor’s own criteria:

  1. SMnRs can’t be reliable when they cannot reliably be built and brought on line in a predictable and timely fashion.
  2. SMnRs can’t be affordable because nuclear power is close to the costliest of all forms of electric power generation.
  3. SMnRs can’t be clean since they produce extremely toxic high and low-level nuclear waste, which has no safe storage or disposal solution.

Appalachia has long served as a sacrifice zone for rapacious energy ambitions of other regions. Southwest Virginians have had reason to hope that would change as opportunities for low-cost solar development emerged in recent years. Instead, politicians like Youngkin are making too-good-to-be-true promises about SMnRs, sidelining opportunities to promote solar, which can produce power in a matter of weeks, not decades.

Imposing SMnRs on Southwest Virginia is disturbing. My father worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s. The promise the nuclear industry and the government touted then – “electricity, too cheap to meter” – never has been realized. TVA and other utilities abandoned nuclear plants under construction, leaving costly monuments to that folly and sticking electricity customers with the bill. 

COSTS: It’s not at all clear that SMnR technology will succeed, or when. Levelized cost charts of electric power generation rate nuclear as among the very most expensive means to generate electric power at utility scale. If nuclear waste management, insurance, and decommissioning costs are counted, actual costs are far higher. (Some of these costs are already socialized for nuclear power – e.g. insurance in the Price-Anderson Act.) 

The first commercial SMnR is not expected to be completed until 2029, but already its developers have raised the target price of its power by 53%. This is not a surprise; nuclear power construction history documents an extremely strong correlation between new designs and cost increases and project delays. Indeed, the Lazard research shows that nuclear is the ONLY grid-wide generation source to increase in price, 2009-2021. The increase was 36%!

NUCLEAR WASTE, TRANSPORT, AND REPROCESSING: Nuclear waste and reprocessing are also serious concerns. Make no mistake, unreprocessed nuclear waste, for all practicable purposes, is FOREVER. The fact that we have become accustomed to risk does not, by any means, reduce risk. Nor will SMnRs generate less waste than their larger forebears. Indeed, a recent Stanford University study concluded that “small modular reactors may produce a disproportionately larger amount of nuclear waste than bigger nuclear plants.” 

Safeguarding this waste is already costing taxpayers and utility customers tens of billions of dollars. With the failure of the U.S. to designate a central storage facility, nuclear power plants are forced to continue to store the waste in pools on site. 

Yet nuclear waste recycling, known as reprocessing, is no panacea. In November, the Governor spoke in Bristol in support of recycling nuclear waste from SMnRs: “I think the big steps out of the box are the technical capability to deploy in the next 10 years and on top of that to press forward to recycling opportunities for fuel.” He may have had in mind BWX Technologies of Lynchburg, which is beginning reprocessing of uranium at its Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS) plant just south of the Virginia border in Erwin, Tennessee, for nuclear weapons. 

It took over a decade, but in 1984, Congress finally killed the last proposal to reprocess nuclear waste into nuclear fuel. The reprocessing would have taken place at the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, also south of the Virginia border, near Oak Ridge, TN. The concern then was the potential for accidental highly toxic “spills” of nuclear wastes or purposeful diversion of plutonium into the international weapons market. I recall this clearly because I spoke at a public hearing in Abingdon about the transportation of nuclear waste that would be bound for the Clinch River plant.

Transportation of SMnR nuclear wastes along Virginia mountain roads or railroads across the border to Erwin presents further risk of accident and contamination. Longstanding concerns about transportation and security of nuclear wastes have never been adequately addressed.

In addition, Princeton University physicist, Frank N. von Hippel reported in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, charged with protecting U.S. citizens from reactor disasters such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima, has moved toward offering greater flexibility for a nuclear industry plagued by cost overruns and calls for safety improvements, rather than hewing to its primary responsibility for maintaining safety of nuclear generating facilities and the American people. The Bulletin also reports that, because of longstanding financial troubles experienced by the commercial nuclear power industry, state legislatures are increasingly being asked and are feeling compelled to subsidize nuclear power. Gov. Youngkin’s state energy plan would take Virginia down that road, a road that could be very long. 

URANIUM MINING in VIRGINIA? Because of toxic pollution risks, mining uranium in Virginia is currently prohibited under a moratorium enacted by the General Assembly. Coles Hill in Pittsylvania County contains the largest deposit of uranium in the U.S. Just a month ago, Consolidated Uranium, a Canadian company, announced its purchase of Virginia Energy Resources, which owns Coles Hill. It sounds like those executives think that another run at overturning the mining moratorium might be successful. That this purchase announcement comes so shortly after Youngkin’s announcement of SMnRs in his Virginia Energy Plan feels like more than coincidence. 

Uranium mining in a wet, eastern location would present a far higher opportunity for contamination than mining that has for years had problems affecting water and public health in the West. We Appalachians know the social and environmental costs of an extractive economy. We should not support any enterprise that forces that kind of exploitation upon our neighbors, especially mining with known, pervasive health, safety and environmental risks.

CORPORATE CRONYISM and POLITICAL BOONDOGGERY: BWX Technologies of Lynchburg (formerly Babcock and Wilcox) is the nuclear contractor we can anticipate would be charged with Gov. Youngkin’s wish to reprocess nuclear waste into fuel. BWX has been on the ropes for years, since nuclear became so unpopular with utilities in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident. It has managed to stay afloat with military contracts and wants to develop the reactors it builds for subs and aircraft carriers for commercial power production. The SMnRs are its ticket, and Gov. Youngkin is playing both their salesman and the state’s purchasing agent. Some General Assembly members are angling to help their localities and favored industries cash in.

Here’s how the boondoggery works:

  • Del. Danny Marshall, representing Danville and Pittsylvania Co. – where those huge untapped uranium reserves lie – submitted HB 2333: “It is the policy of the Commonwealth to promote the development and operation of small modular nuclear reactors at the earliest reasonable time possible, with a goal of having the first small modular nuclear reactor operating by the end of 2032, and requires the State Corporation Commission to establish a small modular nuclear reactor pilot program…The pilot program shall be limited to three small modular nuclear reactor sites [note: the bill allows for multiple SMnRs at each site] in the Commonwealth… In considering an application for a certificate of public convenience and necessity for a small modular nuclear reactor under the pilot program…in the coalfield region of the Commonwealth.” The pilot program requires the SCC to grant coalfield SMnRs special treatment under a state-mandated SMnR pilot program. Under this bill, Virginia’s largest utilities, Dominion Energy and American Electric Power would be granted permission from the General Assembly to charge its customers for SMnR construction, regardless of whether these unproven facilities are ever able to produce a kiloWatt of power.
  • Del. Kathy Byron, representing Lynchburg – home of BWX Technologies – is patron for  HB2197, which defines “advanced nuclear [SMnR] technology…as renewable energy,” which allows SMnRs to access the benefits under law afforded to renewable energy under Virginia’s Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards, designed to incentivize  adoption of renewable energy by utilities.
  • Del. Israel O’Quinn, representing Bristol, Washington Co. area, introduced HB 1780, that would establish “A revenue-sharing agreement requiring the Counties of Buchanan, Dickenson, Lee, Russell, Scott, Tazewell, and Wise and the City of Norton to enter into a perpetual revenue-sharing agreement regarding advanced nuclear technologies and an advanced nuclear reactor to be located in one of these localities.” The legislation would have divided property tax benefits from SMnRs among coalfield counties by a formula, since no one yet knows which ones will have the “benefit” of hosting SMnRs. 

All three bills passed the Virginia House and moved to the Senate last week. A Senate committee has since rejected Del. O’Quinn’s bill.

UNDERMINING REGIONAL GREEN ENERGY DEVELOPMENT: Given the questions about cost, practicality, and safety, the governor’s choice of SMnRs as the cornerstone for future energy development in the coalfields of Southwest Virginia risks leaving residents here with nothing. This is especially worrisome as it pulls state support from proven, cheaper, and ready-to-deploy-now solar and energy storage applications. 

It also redirects government resources away from homegrown economic projects, like the New Economy Program, based on cleaning up and repurposing unrestored mine lands for a burgeoning utility solar energy industry, employing local residents and adding restored land to productive purpose and to the taxbase.

Counties across eastern and Piedmont Virginia are benefitting from a property tax bonanza flowing from utility scale solar development. Coalfield counties are being told to ignore a sure solar bet and place their few economic development chips on a risky, unproven, costly, pie-in-the-sky energy prospect.

Why should SWVA be forced to endure the burden of risky and more costly electric energy, subsidized by the state to benefit powerful corporations, which seek to exploit our region and its people? Why indeed, while the rest of Virginia benefits economically from low-cost, safe solar energy and advanced energy storage systems?

This same shell game occurred when state mining regulation allowed mountaintops to be blown away and thousands of acres of forestland despoiled. Once again, government officials are choosing to make decisions which benefit the interests of corporations outside the region instead of the people who actually live here.

Rees Shearer is a retired school counselor and community organizer who has researched and organized around regional environmental protection and clean energy issues for over 50 years. He lives with his wife Kathy in Emory, VA.

This article originally appeared in the Virginia Mercury on February 16, 2023. 

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Don’t give data centers a pass on pollution

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Senator Petersen and a group of advocates
Senator Chap Petersen talks with advocates at the General Assembly on February 3. Photo courtesy of Piedmont Environmental Council

In 2019, with Northern Virginia’s data center boom well underway, I worked with the Sierra Club to provide comments to the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) on a proposed major source air permit for a data center. 

We urged that the data center, owned by Digital Realty, be required to minimize its reliance on highly-polluting, back-up diesel generators by installing on-site solar and battery storage. While rooftop solar alone wouldn’t produce more than a fraction of the energy a data center uses, solar panels and batteries could provide a strong first line of defense against grid outages, without the air pollution. 

It wasn’t a new idea; other data centers elsewhere were using clean energy and storage or installing microgrids capable of providing all of the power the facility needed. Yet DEQ rejected the suggestion and gave the go-ahead for the data center to install 139 diesel generators with no pollution controls. 

Three years later, data centers have proliferated to such a degree that the power grid can’t keep up. DEQ is now proposing that more than 100 data centers in Loudoun, Prince William and Fairfax counties be given a variance from air pollution controls so they can run their diesel generators any time the transmission system is strained. DEQ is taking comments on the proposal through March 14 and will hold a hearing at its office in Woodbridge on February 27.

As a resident of Fairfax County, I’ll be one of the people forced to breathe diesel pollution to keep data centers running. Make no mistake: There would be no grid emergency without these data centers’ thousands of megawatts worth of electricity demand. And there wouldn’t be a threat to Northern Virginia’s air quality without their diesel generators. 

It’s fair to ask: Should these data centers have been built if the infrastructure to deliver power to them wasn’t ready? I’d also like to know why DEQ thinks it’s okay to impose on residents the combined pollution from many thousands of diesel generators firing at once, when it has known since at least 2019 that viable, clean alternatives exist. 

Batteries alone are an obvious solution for short-term emergency use, and can provide exactly the kind of help to the grid that will be needed this year. Instead of calling on data centers to run diesel generators, a grid operator can avoid the strain by tapping into a data center’s battery, a solution Google is implementing.      

But data centers can economically lower their energy and water costs as well as reduce strain on the electric grid by reducing their energy use and using on-site renewable energy. Global energy management companies like Schneider Electric, Virginia AECOM and Arlington’s  The Stella Group design microgrid solutions for data centers and other facilities that need 24/7 power.

I contacted Stella Group president Scott Sklar to ask how feasible it is for Northern Virginia’s data centers to meet their needs without diesel generators, given land constraints that limit their ability to meet demand with on-site solar. He told me data centers can start by reducing their cooling load by two-thirds by using efficiency and waste heat; cooling, he says, accounts for 38% to 47% of electricity demand. Cost-effective energy efficiency can reduce energy demand by one-third, and waste-heat-to-electricity can meet another 25% to 38% of the remaining electric load. “If you cut the cooling load and use waste heat to electricity, then you only need renewable energy and batteries for a maximum of half,” he concluded. “That’s doable.”

If Virginia data centers don’t start taking these kinds of measures, the situation will get worse. This year’s grid strain may be relieved through construction of new generation and transmission infrastructure, but the industry’s staggering growth rate threatens to create future problems. In 2019, when the Sierra Club was urging DEQ to think about the environmental impact of data centers, the industry consumed 12% of Dominion Virginia Energy’s total electric supply. Today, that number has risen to 21%, a figure that does not include the many data centers served by electric cooperatives rather than Dominion.  

Just last month, Gov. Youngkin announced that Amazon Web Services will invest $35 billion in  new data centers in Virginia, at least doubling Amazon’s existing investments here. By way of thanks, Youngkin wants taxpayers to provide up to $140 million in grant funding to Amazon and extend Virginia’s already-generous tax subsidy program. Ratepayers would also subsidize the build-out by contributing to the cost of new generation and transmission.

Amazon claims to lead the list of tech companies buying renewable energy, though its investments are mostly in other states and abroad. A scathing report in 2019 showed Amazon owned the majority of the data centers in Virginia at that time, but had made few investments in renewable energy here. Since then, Amazon has developed new solar facilities statewide, including enough to power its new Arlington headquarters. But as I discussed in a previous column, all the solar in Virginia would not be enough to make a dent in the energy appetite of Northern Virginia’s data centers, of which Amazon owns more than 100.  

I have no special beef with Amazon, but I do think that a rich tech company with pretensions to sustainability leadership should do more to walk the walk in the state that hosts so much of its operations. Surely that includes not relying solely on diesel generators for back-up power at its data centers. 

I also have no beef with data centers in general. They provide necessary services in today’s world, and they have to go somewhere. Data centers could be a valuable source of revenue and economic development for Southwest Virginia and other parts of the state that are not grid-constrained, if there are guardrails in place to protect nearby communities and the environment, and if they help rather than hurt our clean energy transition. Right now, none of this is the case.

Unfortunately, Gov. Youngkin not only doesn’t want guardrails, he doesn’t even want to know where and why they are needed. On February 3, a representative of his administration spoke in committee in opposition to legislation filed by Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax that would have the Department of Energy and DEQ study the impact of data centers on Virginia’s environment, energy supply and climate goals. The Senate agreed to the study, but a similar bill died in the House, and a House subcommittee killed Petersen’s Senate version Monday on a 2-1 vote. (The vote was later changed to 3-2 when two delegates who missed the meeting, and the discussion, added their votes. Killing a bill in a tiny subcommittee is one way House procedures allow delegates to avoid accountability on controversial issues — but that’s a topic for another day.)

I spoke with Sen. Petersen by phone after the subcommittee hearing. He pointed out that the administration would have been able to shape the study any way the governor wanted, and would have had control over the recommendations as well. Petersen’s conclusion: “He just doesn’t want anyone looking at it.”

Refusing to look at a problem, however, never makes it go away. And in this case, the problem is just getting bigger.

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on February 15, 2023.

Update: On March 7, DEQ issued a new permit variance limited to data centers in Loudoun County. Although DEQ doesn’t say so, it appears that the original proposal has been modified. The comment period will now run through April 21, and another hearing will be held on April 6.

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These bills could bring more clean energy to your community

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Solar schools, climate resiliency, energy efficiency: Local governments are now involved in energy planning – whether they feel ready for it or not. Some localities have adopted climate goals that require them to look for ways to lower carbon emissions; others just want to save money on high energy bills.

Virginia has chipped away at the barriers to renewable energy and started putting hundreds of millions of dollars into energy efficiency programs, thanks to laws like Solar Freedom, the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) and the Clean Energy and Community Flood Preparedness Act, which made Virginia part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). 

But even a positive policy environment doesn’t flatten all barriers. At all levels of government — and for that matter, in homes and businesses — energy-saving projects get stalled by confusing information, lack of money or financing, layers of opaque bureaucracy or fear of uncertain outcomes. 

Attacks on Virginia’s clean energy transition framework and utility reform get most of the ink during this legislative session, but some less-noticed bills are focused on moving ahead by removing stumbling blocks to clean energy and identifying funding. 

I made a brief mention of some of these in my bill round-up last week, including House Joint Resolution 545 from Briana Sewell, D-Prince William, asking the Department of Energy to recommend ways to overcome barriers that keep local governments and their constituents from purchasing clean energy. There is also Senate Bill 1333 from Ghazala Hashmi, D-Richmond, to facilitate local clean energy projects for low- and moderate-income residents. Senate Bill 1419 from David Suetterlein, R-Roanoke, would allow retail choice in renewable energy purchasing, and Senate Bill 949 from Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, would allow residents to access low-cost public financing of clean energy. 

The shared solar bills I covered last week also allow local governments to participate. And although I’m not tracking them myself, there are other bills that encourage local resiliency planning, give localities authority to require electric vehicle charging infrastructure or support transit solutions. 

Overwhelmingly — but not exclusively! — the bills this year that try to move the ball forward on clean energy come from Democrats, a bad sign when the House and governor are Republican. I have seen many bills die in committee for reasons that have little to do with the bill, and Gov. Youngkin notoriously vetoed bills last year seemingly  as a “personal and political move” against the bills’ patron senator.  It’s also a short session this year, so if a bill is complicated or has opposition from favored industries, it goes into committee with a strike against it. 

But many of these bills support private investments or save money for taxpayers, which are thankfully still bipartisan priorities. And some energy innovations are now mainstream across Virginia, in red counties as well as blue. Among these are solar schools. 

So let’s take a deeper look at one piece of legislation, the solar school roofs study at the center of Senate Bill 848 from Barbara Favola, D-Arlington, and House Bill 1852 from Suhas Subramanyam, D-Loudoun.

solar panels on a school roof
Wilson Middle School, Augusta County. Photo courtesy of Secure Futures.

 I wish they all could be solar schools

In the summer of 2021, I was dismayed to learn that the school board for the city of Norfolk had been told none of their brand-new schools could be outfitted with solar panels because the roofs weren’t designed to take the extra weight. As a result, Norfolk could not do what dozens of school districts across Virginia have been doing: installing solar arrays to provide some or all of the energy the school consumed, saving money for taxpayers and giving students hands-on exposure to a fast-growing technology with terrific career potential.   

What a missed opportunity, and yet, Norfolk wasn’t alone. I soon learned about a new school in Richmond where educators were eager for solar, but the steep pitch of the roof on the main part of the building wasn’t suitable. That left only a flat-roofed side wing that couldn’t hold enough panels to meet more than a fraction of the school’s needs.

From conversations with architects and solar developers, I know that building a school with a roof that can hold solar panels doesn’t have to be an added expense; mainly, you just have to plan for it. Wyck Knox, the architect who designed Arlington’s two net-zero energy schools (among others), says even building a school that can produce as much energy as it uses doesn’t have to cost more, if you simply approach the design process with that goal. 

Designing a school with a solar-ready roof pays off when the school district enters a power purchase agreement (PPA) with a solar company that installs and owns the solar array. The school pays just for the electricity it produces, typically at a rate lower than what the utility charges. 

As of this year, the financing options have expanded. The Inflation Reduction Act allows tax-exempt entities like local governments and schools to claim federal tax credits for renewable energy and batteries directly. 

So why aren’t all schools solar schools? The answers might differ from one school district to the next, but generally it’s because nobody thought of it at the right time, or they don’t know how to go about it, or the right people aren’t on board. One stubborn facilities manager can stall a project indefinitely. 

The U.S. Department of Energy says energy is the second largest expensefor schools, after teacher salaries. Taxpayers should be able to expect their school districts will pursue strategies like onsite solar that reduce energy costs. 

Personally, I support requiring school districts to, at the very least, analyze whether they could save money with solar roofs before they lock in designs that don’t include them. However, House Republicans killed an effort last year to impose such a requirement. And some school officials say it isn’t needed because they want to do solar; they just need help with the process. 

With that in mind, Senate Bill 848 and House Bill 1852 task the Commission on School Construction and Modernization with developing recommendations to help schools incorporate renewable energy in the construction or renovation of schools. 

The commission itself recommended several pieces of legislation that are now before the General Assembly, including some around construction funding. That should make it easier to integrate solar recommendations into their other work. 

Favola said, “I am extraordinarily excited about the possibility of providing school systems with technical assistance on how to incorporate solar and other renewable energy components in their renovations and new buildings.”

You and me both, Senator. You and me both. 

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on January 26, 2023.

Update January 27: I may have given Republicans too much credit, at least those in the House. Although Senator Favola’s bill sailed through a Senate committee and is headed for a floor vote, a House subcommittee killed Delegate Subramanyam’s companion bill–in spite of a long line of speakers in support and no opposition. It was a bad meeting for Subramanyam; his shared solar bill also died in that committee. Senator Sutterlein’s retail competition bill has also been killed in a bipartisan vote in Senate Commerce and Labor, a Dominion-friendly committee.