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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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A 5-point plan for Virginia’s data centers

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Data center between housing community and a bike path
Data centers increasingly dot the landscape of Northern Virginia, like this one sandwiched between a housing community and the W&OD bike path in Ashburn. Photo by Hugh Kenny, Piedmont Environmental Council.

None of the sessions at last month’s Virginia Clean Energy Summit(VACES) in Richmond were devoted to data centers, but data centers were what everyone was talking about. Explosive growth in that energy-hungry industry has everyone — utilities, the grid operator, and the industry itself — scrambling to figure out how Virginia will provide enough new power generation and transmission. And, worryingly, no one seems to have an answer. 

Or rather, lots of people have answers, but none of them achieve the trifecta of providing data centers the energy they need while continuing the explosive growth trajectory that state leaders seem to want, and at the same time keeping Virginia’s transition to zero-carbon energy on track. Something has to give. Which will it be?

With no action, the “give” comes from the people of Virginia. Residents will see growth they don’t want, pay for infrastructure that doesn’t serve them, suffer from pollution that is not of their making, and see their tax dollars subsidize an industry that employs almost no one.

The no-action option isn’t a solution

But first, a quick recap. Northern Virginia already has the largest concentration of data centers in the world. As of late 2022, data center electricity demand had grown to 21% of Dominion Energy Virginia’s entire load, and likely an even larger percentage of the load of Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative (NOVEC), which serves much of Data Center Alley.

Worse, the industry is just getting started. Grid operator PJM’s grid forecast projects Dominion’s data center load will quadruple over the next 15 years, while NOVEC’s will rise to ten times what it is today. Other rural electric cooperatives in Virginia told PJM they also expect a huge demand from data centers, a prediction confirmed by news that Amazon Web Services expects to spend $11 billion on data centers in Louisa County, in the territory of Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. 

In its Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) filing in May of this year, Dominion told the State Corporation Commission (SCC) that due to data center demand, it plans to ignore Virginia’s commitment to achieving a zero-carbon economy. Instead of increasing the pace of renewable energy and storage construction, it wants to keep coal plants running past their mandatory retirement dates and even build new gas combustion turbines as well as billions of dollars’ worth of new transmission infrastructure. The result will be higher costs for consumers and massive increases in carbon emissions, violating the carbon-cutting mandate of the Virginia Clean Economy Act. 

Bill Murray, Dominion senior vice president for corporate affairs and communications, seems to have tried for a more conciliatory tone in talking to Senate Finance Committee members last week about the challenge of meeting data center load. Murray is quoted in the Richmond Times-Dispatch telling members, “We have worked through these challenges before.” Isn’t that reassuring? If only it were true. 

If Dominion’s response has been less than adequate, others have not done better. PJM, already woefully behind on approving new renewable energy generation interconnection requests, blames states for wanting clean energy rather than doing its own job to help the market provide it. A PJM representative told the VACES audience utilities should just keep their fossil fuel plants running until it can work its way through the backlog, hopefully by 2026.

Virginia’s Data Center Coalition doesn’t see energy as its problem to solve, and its members seem strangely content to run on fossil fuels. Others in the industry are trying to do better, though. Whole conferences are devoted to the subject of lowering the carbon footprint of data centers. In addition to a pledge to use renewable energy 24/7, Google has achieved remarkable levels of energy efficiency (for you nerds, they claim an average PUE of 1.1). Google, however, has only a small footprint in Virginia. 

Amazon Web Services, the biggest data center company in Virginia, buys renewable energy but is not striving for the 24/7 standard. AWS’ senior manager for energy and environment public policy, Craig Sundstrom, told a panel at VACES that by 2025, AWS will have offset its use of grid power with purchases of renewable energy on the PJM grid, and he pointed to 16 solar projects the company has in operation or under development in Virginia. That’s a great start, but it’s only a start. With no battery storage in the mix, AWS will still be using grid power from fossil fuels most of the time.

Wishful thinking will not solve this 

So what should data centers do? Or, since most of the industry doesn’t want to do anything, what should Virginia utilities and policymakers do? 

VACES conference attendees had a few suggestions. The nuclear energy true believers were there, touting small modular reactors (SMRs). Gov. Youngkin and many Virginia legislators are fans of nuclear, but the timing was unfortunate. A few weeks after VACES, the first SMR in development — the one that’s supposed to prove how great the technology is — lost its customers due to increasing cost projections. The chances of SMRs ever outcompeting solar paired with storage seems more remote than ever.

Green hydrogen, a vital part of our energy future, has cost and availability problems right now, too. Microgrids powered by hydrogen fuel cells would be a fantastic solution. I’ll set my alarm for 2030 to check on how that’s going. 

Meanwhile, representatives of Washington Gas and Roanoke Gas earnestly tried to sell the VACES audience on the virtues of methane captured from wastewater treatment plants and hog waste cesspools like those at Smithfield Farms’ concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). 

Some of this so-called renewable natural gas (RNG) may be available now, but it is exceedingly hard to imagine there would ever be enough to supply even the back-up generators at Virginia data centers, to say nothing of meeting 21% (and growing!) of Dominion’s total load. North Carolina has incentivized pig waste biogas for many years, but it still makes up only a fraction of a percentage point of that state’s energy supply.

To hear the gas folks tell it, though, RNG is not just carbon-neutral but carbon-negative, achieving this Holy Grail status by capturing and burning methane that would otherwise escape into the air. They assert that mixing a mere 5% of this biogas into ordinary fossil methane will effectively decarbonize the entire pipeline. In other words, we should be glad CAFOs are such an environmental disaster. 

That dog won’t hunt. If gas companies get to claim the virtues of pig waste biogas, they also have to account for its vices, including the greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution associated with methane capture and leakage throughout collection and delivery.

Also, if factory farming is the answer to the needs of data centers, God help us. Maybe the tech industry should move to Iowa. 

A better approach

One of the better ideas coming out of VACES was a simple one: if clean energy can’t come to the load, the load should go to clean energy. Iowa, in fact, is just one of several states that get more than half their electricity from wind and solar. And indeed, some large tech companies are looking at separating their operations between those that are time-critical and need to be next to load centers and those that don’t, with the latter able to take advantage of better climates and greener energy.  

Tech companies don’t necessarily have to look beyond Virginia to take their operations to clean energy. Nothing prevents them from locating in rural counties where they can surround their data centers with fields of solar panels and banks of batteries. For that matter, a large operator like AWS could buy offshore wind, starting with the Kitty Hawk project that is still seeking a customer. 

Many Virginia data center operators, though, will still need to access the PJM market. They should be expected to follow Google and buy renewable energy and storage to meet at least most of their electricity needs on a 24/7, hourly matching basis. Given the PJM bottleneck, they will need a grace period of two or three years. After that: no renewable energy, no tax subsidy.

That’s point one of our data center strategy. Point two: data centers that have to source their own renewable energy will be motivated to use less energy, but Virginia can also set an energy efficiency minimum they should meet to qualify for Virginia’s tax subsidies. They need not match Google’s success, but they should come close.  

Point three: Dominion claimed in its IRP that it could not build enough solar itself to meet the soaring data center demand; this was its excuse for keeping expensive coal plants running beyond their planned retirement dates. If Dominion can’t build it, let others do it. The General Assembly should remove the 35% limit on the amount of solar and storage capacity that third-party developers can provide. A little free-market competition never hurt anyone.  

Point four: If the growth of data centers requires utilities to invest more for energy generation and power lines, the data centers should be the ones paying the extra cost, not residential customers. 

Point five: Leaders should not separate the joy they feel in attracting data centers from the pain their constituents feel in living with data centers and transmission lines, breathing pollution from diesel back-up generators and having the quality and quantity of their freshwater resources threatened. Data center developers and revenue-hungry local governments are not the appropriate decision makers for development at this scale. The administration should convene a task force with the job and power to do comprehensive planning for data center siting, development and resource use. 

Adopting these five points will not stop data centers from locating in Virginia, and that isn’t the goal. What it will ensure is that the development is well planned out, fair and equitable to everyone.

This article appeared in the Virginia Mercury on November 21, 2023.

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Houses can be built to use much less energy. Why aren’t they?

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A house under construction in McLean, VA
A home under construction in McLean, Virginia. Ivy Main

Every three years, a nationwide group of building safety professionals known as the International Code Council (ICC) publishes updated model building codes that form the basis for most U.S. state and local building codes. ICC codes address essential features like structural integrity, fire safety, plumbing and energy use. As technologies improve, so do the model codes. A home built to the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code(IECC), for example, uses 9.38% less energy than one built to the 2018 model code, which was itself a significant improvement on the 2015 model code, etc.

Most home buyers take these things for granted. We don’t know the ins and outs of building technologies or codes, and we don’t want to. It is the job of ICC professionals to set modern standards, and the job of state and local government to ensure builders meet them. Right?

Except it doesn’t always work that way. Some states and localities do adopt each new iteration of the model codes as a matter of course; Maryland is one such state. Across the river in Virginia, however, important energy efficiency elements of the residential building code are stuck all the way back in 2009, because the builder-dominated board in charge of Virginia’s building code refuses to adopt more rigorous standards. 

This intransigence has cost Virginia residents millions of dollars over the years in higher energy bills, especially for heating and cooling. A July 2021 analysis by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory showed that adopting the 2021 IECC would save Virginians $2.5 billion over 30 years, the typical mortgage term. Their analysis assumed mortgages included the added cost of meeting the updated requirements, so the $2.5 billion is pure savings, reflected in yearly cash flow savings averaging $250 per homeowner.

Faced with high utility bills, owners of existing homes sometimes spring for expensive retrofits to upgrade heating and cooling systems, install new windows and add insulation. These investments often pay off in lower utility bills, but it costs more to retrofit than to build it right the first time. There are also limits to how much energy can be saved through retrofits. It can be very difficult, for example, to add insulation to the walls of an existing home. The right time to make a house weather-proof and energy efficient is during design and construction. 

Builders resist meeting the highest efficiency standards for one simple reason: it costs more to build high-efficiency homes, cutting into profits. Builders insist they are just trying to keep home prices down, but that rings hollow. Anyone who has gone house-shopping knows the price of a home is determined by supply and demand, not building cost. Builders will charge whatever they can get. 

Builders also say home buyers don’t ask for efficient homes, but that claim is also suspect. Unlike granite counters and high-end finishes, energy upgrades are frequently invisible to buyers, so they don’t know to ask for them or how to evaluate any claims a builder makes about them. Let’s face it, most of us wouldn’t know an R-value if a batt of insulation fell on our heads. Nor should we have to know. This is why we have building codes.

Unfortunately, protecting consumers from drafty homes and high utility bills is not a priority of the building industry and its allies that control Virginia’s code adoption process. For years the Board of Housing and Community Development (BHCD) has refused to adopt the full model efficiency code, leaving old exceptions in place. Standards for wall insulation and air leakage (the measure of how drafty a home feels) haven’t been updated since 2009.

The cost to residents mounts with each failed opportunity. Most people don’t buy new homes, after all. They buy (or rent) existing homes built according to previous building codes. BHCD’s repeated failures to raise standards condemns residents to decades of poorer-quality homes. Lower-income Virginians, in particular, end up energy burdened by living in homes that are unnecessarily expensive to heat and cool.

The General Assembly knows this is a problem. Virginia law has long required BHCD to adopt standards consistent with model codes such as the IECC. Faced with the board’s continuing intransigence, in 2021 legislators passed a new  law directing BHCD to “consider adopting Building Code standards that are at least as stringent as those contained in [each] new version of the IECC.” 

“Consider” looks like a loophole you could drive a truck through, but the new law goes on to add a specific requirement that the BHCD “shall assess the public health, safety, and welfare benefits of adopting standards that are at least as stringent as those contained in the IECC, including potential energy savings and air quality benefits over time compared to the cost of initial construction.”  

Now that sounds like a slam-dunk for adoption of the IECC standards, given the studies confirming that building to the higher standards benefits occupants and the public with better air quality and with utility bill savings over time that far exceed what it costs a builder to meet those standards. Legislators and advocates who worked to pass the legislation reasonably expected BHCD to adopt the 2021 IECC in its entirety, if not go beyond it.

That did not happen. During the slow process of updating Virginia’s residential building code over the ensuing months, BHCD never took the new law seriously. It never conducted the required analysis, and there is no indication it even “considered” adopting the full 2021 IECC standards, in spite of in-depth comments from experts and testimony from the public.

The building code update BHCD proposed in December of 2022 and approved in its final form on August 28 of this year neither removed past weakening amendments nor adopted more stringent standards.  Indeed, BHCD even decided this year to roll some commercial efficiency standards back to 2006 levels! 

Perhaps this sad state of affairs should not surprise us too much, given who our governors  – past and present  – have appointed to the board. By my count, 8 of the 11 appointed members  represent home builders; another member works for a mortgage company. The foxes are in charge of the hen house. 

Those appointments were not a matter of luck. Public records show construction and real estate companies gave almost $13 million to Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 campaign for governor, the second largest industry donor to his campaign. Four years previously, the industry donated “only” $2.5 million to the campaign of Youngkin’s Democratic predecessor, Ralph Northam. In both cases, the board appointments that followed heavily favored the home building industry, with the result that Virginia’s residential building codes seem to be permanently stuck in the past.

Virginia leaders pride themselves on being pro-business, but that doesn’t have to mean being anti-consumer. The commonwealth as a whole would benefit from a housing stock that is more weather-resilient and healthier for occupants, that saves energy, and that reduces residents’ utility bills.   

Is that really too much to ask?

This article first appeared in the Virginia Mercury on October 19, 2023.

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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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A bright spot at the intersection of farming, electric vehicles and solar energy

by
Peggy Greb, USDA

The energy transition is in full swing across the U.S. and the world, but the changes now underway are not simple or linear. In an economy as complex and connected as ours, progress in one area will often affect other parts of the economy, creating winners and losers. 

And then there are the changes that work together synergistically and leave everyone better off. This is what we will see as renewable energy overtakes fossil fuels and electric vehicles go mainstream. These transformations will deliver another enormous benefit, this time to farmland, as they pull the rug out from under the expensive and wasteful ethanol industry. 

Counting Corn

Across the United States, more than 30 million acres of farmland is currently devoted to growing corn for a purpose other than feeding humans and animals. The corn – over 5 billion bushels every year — is processed into ethanol and then added to gasoline to comply with a federal mandate.

The U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), enacted in 2005, requires the nation’s oil refiners to mix 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol into the nation’s gasoline supply annually; this is the reason why most gasoline sold in the U.S. includes 10% ethanol. The mandate was intended to cut U.S. dependence on energy imports, support farmers and reduce emissions. 

As it turned out, the RFS was primarily successful in increasing the acreage devoted to growing corn. Because of the ethanol mandate, an additional 6.9 million acres of corn were planted between 2008 and 2016. Corn is now the nation’s number one crop and, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, ethanol production accounts for 45% of the U.S. corn crop. Most of the rest goes to animal feed, with only 15% destined for human consumption. (A mere half of one percent of the total corn crop is sweet corn, a different plant entirely.) 

As a way to reduce emissions, however, the mandate proved a failure. A study funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Wildlife Federation concluded that ethanol is at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline, once land use impacts are factored in. 

It’s a bad deal for taxpayers, too. In addition to the ethanol mandate, the U.S. government subsidizes corn farmers through the federal crop insurance program, with taxpayers covering an average of 62% of the cost of insurance premiums. More than a quarter of the insurance subsidy goes to corn, and very little goes to small farms. Add to this the many concerns about water use, fertilizer, pesticides and land degradation, and it is hard to find much good in the corn ethanol program.

EVs threaten King Corn

The world is a different place now than it was in 2005, with the U.S. having become the largest oil producer in the world and a net exporter. Yet the ethanol subsidy is fiercely guarded by the corn lobby and, in spite of occasional bipartisan efforts at repeal, it seems to be untouchable politically. Indeed, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Democrats, actually contains new credits for biofuel production that corn-state Republicans are keen on keeping even as they continue to seek rollbacks of other clean energy incentives. 

The biggest threat to the corn lobby, though, isn’t a repeal of the mandate, it’s electric vehicles. When people no longer need gasoline, they can no longer be forced to buy corn ethanol. 

Electric vehicle sales reached 5% of the U.S. new car market in 2022, and already this year they’ve hit 8.6%. JD Power projects 70% of new vehicles will be electric by 2035, with California leading the way at 94% by then. 

Many agricultural communities are in denial about EVs, preferring to believe they will never catch on in numbers enough to threaten the importance of the corn crop. And indeed, it will take decades before the last gasoline-powered cars drive off to the junkyard. But most of us can see the writing on the wall. As more vehicles become electric, more land that is now devoted to corn ethanol will become available for other purposes. 

While the ethanol industry looks to jet fuel and other possible new uses for its product, a far more promising “crop” is renewable energy. Planting wind turbines and solar panels, either alone or combined with actual crops that feed people, provides higher returns with less risk and is better for the planet. 

“Planting” more solar energy instead of corn

Wind turbines already coexist with farmland across the Great Plains, but let’s focus on solar, since that is the form of renewable energy best suited to Virginia’s landscape. Solar energy is somewhat land-intensive, but not compared to corn. A decade ago, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory calculated that we could power the country’s entire electricity demand with 10 million acres of solar panels. That’s only one-third of the land now devoted to corn ethanol. 

Since that study, solar efficiency has increased, while electricity demand has risen only modestly. With the electrification of vehicles, buildings, and everything else that can be electrified, however, electricity demand is likely to double. But even if we had no wind energy, hydropower or nuclear, and we needed 20 million acres of solar to meet the demand, that would represent only two-thirds of the land currently devoted to corn ethanol, leaving millions of acres more freed up for food crops, land conservation and rewilding.

A comparison of the energy yield of corn vs. solar shows why displacing ethanol with solar energy would be a welcome change.  An acre of corn yields 328 gallons of ethanol, which is one-third less efficient than gasoline. If you could run an internal combustion automobile entirely on ethanol (you can’t), a car averaging 40 miles per gallon could go 8,738 miles on an acre of corn. 

But that same acre “planted” in solar panels would yield 394-447 MWh per year of electricity. Even at the low end, that’s enough to power a Tesla Model 3 for over 100,000 miles.

Much of the corn crop is grown in places like Iowa and Nebraska, but even here in Virginia, 540,000 acres were planted in corn last year, second only to soybeans. Assuming 45% of Virginia’s crop goes to corn ethanol (I could not find an actual breakdown by state), that amounts to 243,000 acres that could be put to better use. That’s worth keeping in mind for the next time someone frets about farmland being “lost” to solar development.

Solar is also a more reliable crop, and a better one for small farmers. The profitability of corn growing varies by state and by year, but it is never exactly a lucrative business for any but the largest farm operations. In a good year, such as 2022, corn might return a profit of $450 per acre, minus land rents (or taxes). In a down year, such as the current one, returns can be negative once land costs are accounted for. (Rents vary considerably, averaging about $325 per acre.)

Meanwhile, solar lease rates range from $250 to $2000 per acre, depending on location and suitability. A guaranteed payment for 20 or 30 years with no work involved is a pretty attractive deal. Even putting just a portion of a farm into solar provides a form of insurance, guaranteeing a steady income flow regardless of weather and commodity price swings.

Solar is also a better deal than corn for the community, since it provides tax revenue, diversifies the local economy and conserves water. If the developer plants pollinator-friendly species around the solar panels or uses sheep instead of machinery to control grass, the benefits to the local economy increase further. 

The ethanol industry is already looking for new uses for their product, but if they don’t find takers, it is one fuel we don’t need to mourn losing.

This article first appeared in the Virginia Mercury on September 19,2023.

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If Dominion’s plan is so bad, is there a better one? (Spoiler alert: yes, there is.)

by
Courtesy of Lowell Feld, Blue Virginia

In my last column I took Dominion’s Integrated Resource Plan (semi-) seriously, giving the utility the benefit of the doubt in its projections for data center growth and the alleged need for more fossil fuels to keep up with the power demands of that ravenous industry. But as I also noted, Dominion doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously with this document.

Under Virginia law, an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) is supposed to explain how the utility expects to meet demand reliably and at low cost within the constraints of the law. In this IRP, however, Dominion asked a different question: how to make Gov. Glenn Youngkin happy by keeping fossil fuels dominant regardless of both law and cost. 

Coming up with a favorable answer required Dominion to ignore the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), create arbitrary limits on solar deployment, use wishful thinking instead of facts and, for good measure, do basic math wrong. They also assume the Youngkin administration will succeed in pulling Virginia out of the carbon-cutting Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a move that is being challenged in court. This makes Dominion’s IRP, with its plan to double carbon emissions, a sort of evil twin to a plan from any RGGI state. 

Sure enough, the governor loves it. Elsewhere, however, this evil twin found a cold reception. Experts retained by environmental, consumer and industry groups all agree that this IRP should be chucked in the trash bin and Dominion told to start over.

It’s worth taking a look at the testimony from these groups to understand where Dominion went so badly wrong, and what a better plan might look like. 

It’s all about the data centers

Northern Virginia data centers are the driving force behind Dominion’s plans to burn more coal and gas, but there is some disagreement whether their growth will be absolutely off-the-charts crazy, or merely eye-poppingly huge. Dominion’s IRP projects the data center industry’s power use in its territory will quadruple over the next 15 years, rising from 2,767 megawatts (MW) in 2022 to more than 11,000 MW in 2038. At that point it would represent close to 40% of Dominion’s load. 

Experts testifying in the IRP case believe data center demand won’t reach the dizzying heights Dominion projects. They question whether Virginia communities will accept so much new data center development, given the pushback already evident in localities like Prince William and Fauquier Counties. Their thinking is essentially that if things can’t go on this way, they probably won’t.

They also suggest that some of the demand Dominion expects may also be reflected in the plans of other utilities serving Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley, leading to double-counting. A load forecast published by grid operator PJM shows that Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative (NOVEC) projects its data center demand to rise from about 400 MW in 2022 to 4,000 by 2028 and 8,000 by 2034. Two other cooperatives project a combined 3,000 MW of data center development in the same time period. 

Aside from data centers, demand for electricity in Dominion territory is flat or declining over the next fifteen years; presumably this is due to the increased efficiency of homes and businesses offsetting the increased demand from electric vehicles and building electrification. 

If you were already experiencing vertigo over Dominion’s data center numbers, and you are now hearing for the first time that Dominion’s numbers represent only half of the total projected data center load coming to Virginia, maybe you won’t find it all that cheering that some of that added demand could be illusory. Still, it is a reasonable point. If you reduce demand by a few thousand megawatts here and there, pretty soon you might not “need” a new gas plant.

As an aside, one Virginia utility stands out for apparently not expecting much in the way of new data centers in its territory. Appalachian Power, which serves customers in Southwest Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee, has experienced declining demand for years, and rural Virginia leaders would dearly love to see data centers come there. Yet the PJM forecast shows Appalachian Power’s parent company, American Electric Power (AEP), told grid operators it expected only about another 200 MW on top of the 500 MW of data center load it serves across its entire 11-state territory. AEP seems to regard this as quite a lot, which, when compared with what is happening in Northern Virginia, seems rather sweet.

I can’t help but wonder how Gov. Youngkin managed to make a deal with Amazon to bring $35 billion worth of new data centers to Virginia without securing a guarantee that many of the facilities would be located in a part of the state that actually has surplus energy capacity and desperately needs new economic development. Southwest Virginia voters may have put Youngkin in office; you’d think he’d be looking out for them.

Instead of real investment today, Youngkin promises the area a little nuclear plant a decade from now, when and if small modular reactors (SMRs) prove viable. Local leaders must be muttering, “Gee, thanks.”

And this leads to another point raised by several of the experts in the IRP case: All of the load growth Dominion projects is due to a single industry in Northern Virginia; elsewhere, demand is decreasing. Yet, instead of crafting a solution specific to the industry and region experiencing runaway growth, Dominion proposes to build a fossil fuel plant 140 miles away in Chesterfield and a nuclear plant 300 miles away in another utility’s territory.

Gregory Abbott, a former SCC Deputy Director, offers a particularly withering assessment of the IRP in his testimony on behalf of environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices. Dominion’s computer model, he says, “is proposing supply-side solutions that are not focused on solving the actual problem, are likely unnecessary, and driving costs higher than they should be.”

Although Dominion insists this IRP represents just a “snapshot in time,” Abbott says that’s misleading: The IRP “sets the stage for multi-billion-dollar investments that Dominion’s customers will pay for decades to come. If a future snapshot in time changes, based on new public policy goals or market dynamics, ratepayers are stuck with paying for these sunk costs.” 

Garbage in, garbage out

Abbott and others also note that unlike factories or other high consumers of energy, data center operators can shift some functions to other data centers elsewhere for short periods of time. Dominion could save money and reduce the need for new investments by capitalizing on this capability to develop demand-response programs tailored specifically to this industry. 

Instead, Dominion treated the surge in demand as if it were statewide and spread across all its customers; then it used a computer model to figure out how to meet the soaring demand. 

An expert for the Sierra Club, Devi Glick of Synapse Energy Economics, noted several problems with Dominion’s approach. Among them: the company told its computer model that it couldn’t select energy efficiency as a resource; it had to include gas combustion turbines in 2028; it had to adhere to artificial limits on solar, wind and battery storage; and it had to assume prices for solar that were “substantially higher than industry projections.” Dominion also did not instruct the model to account for proposed (and since finalized) new federal pollution limits that will raise the cost of burning fossil fuels, and miscalculated — by a billion dollars — the penalties associated with failure to meet the VCEA’s renewable energy requirements. 

As they say, garbage in, garbage out. The model did what it was told, and produced plans that limited solar and battery storage, called for new gas combustion turbines and/or SMRs, and kept uneconomic coal plants running past their previously-planned retirement dates. Accordingly, none of the modeled scenarios complied with Virginia law and all would be unnecessarily expensive for customers.

Synapse ran its own computer model that kept most of Dominion’s load and cost assumptions but corrected for the company’s errors and artificial constraints. The results, not surprisingly, show that building more solar and storage and retiring coal plants earlier than Dominion wants to will lower carbon emissions and “reduce costs for Dominion’s ratepayers by between $4.1 and $9.0 billion over the 25-year study period.”  

When Synapse then tweaked the model to reflect the new federal pollution rules and prices for solar and battery storage in line with industry projections, the results saw solar and battery investments soaring, while the “need” for firm capacity such as a new gas plant disappeared altogether during the planning period.  

Clean energy, vindicated

So finally, we begin to see a path forward founded on real data and not constrained by political expediency. With none of its plans meeting the basic requirements of Virginia law, Dominion should be ordered to go back to the drawing board. The company should reexamine its data center load projections and design a demand-response program tailored to that industry. Then it should re-run its computer model with energy efficiency allowed as a resource, with no artificial constraints on battery storage and renewable energy,with federal and state compliance costs associated with fossil fuels fully included and with cost estimates for solar and storage consistent with industry norms.   

The General Assembly has a role to play, too, in ensuring the data center industry does not shift costs onto other customers and cause Virginia to fall short of its carbon reduction goals. Data centers should be required to meet energy efficiency targets and to secure an increasing percentage of renewable energy on their own as a condition of obtaining generous state tax subsidies. Likewise, the State Corporation Commission should be required to ensure that data centers pay for the transmission upgrades they need. Finally, the General Assembly should pass the data center study bill adopted by the Senate this year before being killed in the House.

Finally, it’s clear that the computer models will select as much low-cost solar as they are allowed to, so the General Assembly should make it easier to build solar projects at competitive rates. They can do this by further opening the market to third-party developers, who are currently constrained by an interpretation of the VCEA that caps their share of the solar Dominion procures at 35%.

The SCC will hold a hearing on the IRP beginning September 18.

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Virginia Mercury on September 5, 2023.

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Why are Dominion Energy’s customers footing the bill for Virginia’s data center buildout?

by
Dominion Energy headquarters, Richmond, VA


Virginia’s embrace of the data center industry produced new fallout this spring when Dominion Energy Virginia released its latest Integrated Resource Plan (IRP). With data center growth the “key driver,” Dominion projects a massive increase in the demand for electricity. As a result, the utility claims the state-mandated transition to clean energy is now impossible to achieve. 

Jettisoning its commitment to the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), Dominion proposes to keep running uneconomic coal and biomass plants that were previously slated for closure, build a new fossil gas plant and pay penalties instead of meeting state renewable energy targets, all of which mean higher costs for customers.

As I said at the time, this IRP is primarily a political document aimed at currying favor with a gas-loving governor. It is not a serious plan. For example, a Sierra Club filing with the State Corporation Commission describes how Dominion put artificial constraints into its computer modeling (including limits on new solar) to ensure the plan came out fossil-friendly. Moreover, Dominion’s demand projections are inflated, according to the clean energy industry group Advanced Energy United.

But for the sake of discussion, let’s take the IRP at face value. And in that case, I have some questions. How did Dominion let itself get blindsided by the data center growth spurt? Why are the rest of us expected to pay for infrastructure that’s only needed for data centers? Does the Governor understand that his deal to bring another $35 billion worth of new Amazon data centers to Virginia  is driving up energy rates for everyone else? 

Oh, and while I’m at it, are tech company commitments to sourcing renewable energy just a pack of lies?

Virginia’s data center problem is well known. Northern Virginia has the largest concentration of data centers in the world, by far. Data centers are Dominion’s single largest category of commercial power users, already consuming more than 21% of total electricity supply and slated to hit 50% by 2038. In addition to the new generation that will be required, data centers need grid upgrades including new transmission lines, transformers and breakers, with the costs spread to all ratepayers. 

Residents are not happy. Controversy around data centers’ diesel generators, their water use, noise and visual impacts have spread outward from Loudoun County into Prince William, Fauquier, and even other parts of Virginia as massive new developments are proposed. 

Data center developers don’t build without assurance they will have access to the huge amount of electricity they need for their operations, so they have to start discussions with their utility early. Yet in July of 2022, Dominion stunned the data center industry by warning it would not be able to meet new demand in Loudoun County until 2025 or 2026. The utility said, however, that the problem was not generating capacity, but transmission. So, what gives?

Not that it would be better if Dominion anticipated the oncoming tsunami but kept it secret until this spring. You have to wonder whether the General Assembly would have approved hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and tax subsidies for new Amazon data centers in February if legislators understood the effect would be to upend the VCEA and drive up energy costs for residents. 

Some Republicans are no doubt pleased that Dominion’s IRP undermines the VCEA, but they shouldn’t be. Dominion proposes keeping coal plants open not for economic reasons, but in spite of them. These plants were slated for closure in previous IRPs because they were costing ratepayers too much money. Now Dominion says it needs more generating capacity and can’t (or rather, won’t) build enough low-cost solar to keep up with new data center demand.

Dominion also proposes to build a new methane gas combustion “peaker” plant that wasn’t in its last IRP, and again the company points to data center growth as the reason. Peaker plants are an expensive way to generate power; on average, the cost of energy from gas combustion is about double that of a solar/storage combination, or even triple once you factor in federal clean energy incentives.

Keeping the fossil fuel party going instead of embracing more solar isn’t the only way this IRP drives rates higher for customers. Limiting its solar investments means Dominion expects to miss the VCEA’s renewable energy percentage targets by a mile. The shortfall would subject Dominion to significant penalties. The kicker is, Dominion can pass the cost of those penalties  on to ratepayers, too. 

Regardless of your political persuasion, then, this IRP is bad news for Virginia consumers. 

It’s also concerning that the driver of all these higher costs and carbon emissions is the high-tech industry that is so eager to be seen as a leader in sustainability. If these tech companies were meeting their power needs with renewable energy, Dominion wouldn’t be able to claim a “need” to keep its old coal plants belching away.  

Amazon, the number one beneficiary of state data center largesse, says it is the leading corporate purchaser of renewable energy globally. Its website claims the company is “on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025.” A map shows it has developed around 16 solar projects in Virginia, adding up to over 1,100 megawatts. That’s great, but the company’s Virginia data centers are such energy hogs that they would need many times as much solar, plus a huge amount of battery storage to meet their 24/7 demand. And of course, Amazon’s demand will skyrocket with that next $35 billion in new data centers.

That same map, by the way, shows that Amazon has on-site solar at warehouses and Whole Foods stores all over the Northeast, but none in Virginia. Northeastern states have higher commercial power rates than Virginia does, so on-site solar means bigger bill savings in those states. One cannot help but suspect that Amazon’s commitment to renewable energy is really just a commitment to cheap energy.  

The Data Center Coalition’s filing in the IRP case does nothing to reassure us otherwise. Instead of chiding Dominion for reneging on its clean energy commitments, the Coalition’s Josh Levi essentially argues data centers are so important it doesn’t matter. 

I have no beef with data centers as a general proposition. They are an integral component of today’s economy, and the developments that now drive their explosive growth — machine learning and artificial intelligence — will also help us achieve a zero-carbon future.  

I just think data centers should try a little harder to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.  

This article was first published in the Virginia Mercury on August 16, 2023.

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I’m a climate alarmist (and you should be too), but we aren’t dead yet

by
Photo courtesy of the Sierra Club.

Until this summer, climate change was a threat most Virginians could ignore most of the time. It was like being hopelessly in debt: too upsetting to think about, so you may as well ignore it. But then smoke kept drifting down from Canadian wildfires and the planet experienced its hottest days on record. People are dying of the heat across the American South and in Europe. 

It’s as if the debt collectors suddenly switched from sending threatening letters to sending goons with baseball bats. Alarm is not too strong a reaction. 

If the goons have gotten your attention for the first time, you will want to acquaint yourself with the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The concise Summary for Policymakers that accompanies the IPCC’s latest report can get you up to speed. Like sorting out shambled finances, though, it’s both boring and terrifying: Boring because mountains of scientific research inform conclusions couched in dry probabilities; terrifying because those conclusions are bleak.  

Humans have overloaded the atmosphere with so much carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gasses that further climate disruption is now unavoidable, no matter how fast we decarbonize. We are in for longer and more frequent heat waves, more extreme weather events, longer and more intense wildfire seasons, accelerating sea level rise, more people migrating to escape newly-uninhabitable lands, more loss of plant and animal species and the further spread of diseases. 

On the plus side — oh wait, there isn’t a plus side. Not only is continued disruption inevitable, but if we were to continue business as usual, children born today would live to see New York and most other coastal cities underwater. Instead of 60,000 people dying from heat in a bad year, as happened last year in Europe, the number worldwide could reach well into the millions. 

Then there are the possible tipping points that would bring devastation suddenly rather than gradually, and in ways we aren’t prepared for. The latest prediction to hit the news (though it has been discussed for years, with few people listening) is that meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet could force the powerful Atlantic Ocean current to stall sometime between 2025 (gah!) and 2095. That would make the tropics even hotter but send Europe into a deep freeze — a cure for their heat problems, but not the one they’re looking for. 

However dismal these scenarios may be, though, we are not dead yet. In spite of the best efforts of the fossil fuel industry, business will not continue as usual. Efforts to decarbonize our economy started late and are taking too long, but they are working, and they will only accelerate. Investment in the energy transition equaled global investment in fossil fuels last year for the first time. In the course of this century, we will not just stop adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, we’ll begin removing the excess. 

The energy transition is just part of the changes ahead. We are in the early years of a golden age of invention that will make the 20th century look like a mere prologue. By the time today’s toddlers reach old age, they will have witnessed transformational innovations in technology, housing, transportation, industry, materials, food and agriculture. 

I keep a running list of breakthrough inventions and new technologies that together could solve our climate problem many times over. They won’t all pan out, of course, and I’ve learned not to put too much stock in promising ideas backed only by early research. 

On the other hand, something transformational could be in the mix that we don’t recognize yet. About 20 years ago I wrote a column mocking cell phones that could take grainy pictures as well as make calls, opining that only teenagers would pay $400 for such useless technology. Some ideas sputter and die, others change how we live. 

What is certain is that improvements in wind, solar, battery storage and electric vehicles will continue these technologies’ march to dominance, while fossil fuels become niche. Concerns about the land needs of renewable energy are overblown; you could power the entire U.S. with solar panels on just one-third of the more than 30 million acres currently devoted to growing corn for climate-unfriendly ethanol. Indeed, solar doesn’t even have to displace farming. Agrivoltaics is already making solar and agriculture compatible and creating money-saving synergies.  

In the near future, solar cells will be everywhere: on walls and windows as well as roofs, on top of electric cars and printed on paper.  We will also have cheaper, safer, and longer-duration battery storage; already, hundred-hour batteries are set for deployment in 2025. 

Innovative wind designs also promise more power for less cost. Offshore wind, still just getting started in the U.S., will be sending power to the East Coast, the West Coast, and Gulf states by the end of this decade. Longer term, autonomous, unmoored, floating wind turbines could guide themselves around the ocean, producing synthetic green fuels or performing direct-air carbon capture. 

Similar progress is happening in all sectors of our economy. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will reduce costs and speed up the ongoing work on low-carbon solutions, including in materials and chemicals. Some futurists predict a revolution in food production that will have us all eating cheap, nutritious and tasty microbes instead of animals by 2030 (yes, really), freeing up hundreds of millions of acres of agricultural land for reforestation and wildlife habitat. That seems like a tall order, but then again: cell phones with cameras.

Look, I am not by nature an optimist. I wish I were; it’s obvious that optimists are happier than pessimists (or, as I like to call us, realists). Nor do I kid myself that humans will suddenly lose our tendencies to self-centeredness, greed and bigotry. We have the most astounding capacity for doing the wrong thing even when the right thing is standing there waving its arms frantically in the air and yelling, “Ooh, ooh! Choose me! Choose me!”

And even this summer’s record heat won’t stop climate “skeptics” from insisting the climate is not changing, or as they say now, that “no one knows why” the planet is warming. They are dosing themselves with an attractive snake oil; who wouldn’t like to hope that Nature might defy physics and start cooling us off again, either on a whim or because she secretly works for Chevron? 

Let them have their snake oil. The rest of us have work to do.

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on August 3, 2023.

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Do carbon offsets offer climate salvation?

by
Image by DALL-E with prompt from Ivy Main

In medieval Europe, the Roman Catholic church encouraged sinners to get square with God by performing good works and acts of charity. Since both of these might require spending money, some resourceful church leaders streamlined the process, taking the money and letting the good works slide. A rich sinner could buy “indulgences” to cover adultery, eating meat during Lent, or any number of other transgressions. 

The historical record does not indicate that emitting carbon dioxide was among the redeemable sins. (Well, CO2 wouldn’t be discovered until 1754.) Still, medieval Christians would have recognized the attraction of buying indulgences in the form of carbon offsets rather than actually cutting back on CO2-emitting activities. We can’t help sinning, so if the act of atonement evens the score, why not grant absolution?

Here in the present, a whole industry has sprung up to sell climate indulgences to guilt-ridden liberals. As one website explains soothingly, “Carbon offsets work through supporting tree planting services and carbon offsetting projects to neutralize your emissions and mitigate your impact on the planet.” Buying these indulgences requires just a click of your mouse and a credit card. For $25 you can feel good about an airplane flight of up to 10,000 miles! That’s enough to get you from D.C. to Australia, where you can visit the Great Barrier Reef before it is completely destroyed by the ocean acidification resulting from your carbon emissions. 

(I’ve committed this sin myself: I’ve been to Australia, on a miserably long flight the CO2 emissions of which I did not pay $25 to offset. They hadn’t invented $25 carbon offsets at the time, or I might have.) 

Martin Luther, a 16th century priest who made a name for himself by opposing the selling of indulgences, put the matter succinctly:  “Indulgences are most pernicious,” he wrote, “because they induce complacency and thereby imperil salvation.”  

He meant saving souls, and we mean saving the planet; regardless, he had the psychology right. We’re more likely to excuse ourselves for driving gas-guzzlers and flying to cool places if we also pay to plant trees in Africa or bribe Brazilians not to deforest the Amazon. 

Sadly, that approach doesn’t work. By one calculation, it would require planting at least 200 billion new trees to suck up the excess CO2 emissions of Americans alone. This assumes we don’t lose any trees to fire, drought, disease or clearing. And how’s that working out? As of the end of June, fires had already consumed 20 million acres of Canadian forest this year alone, in large part as a result of climate change. All the carbon those trees had stored up is now back in the atmosphere. 

That doesn’t mean planting trees and saving the rainforest aren’t good works. They are. But there’s a high likelihood any carbon offsets you purchase will be among the 90% of rainforest offsets that a Guardian investigation found were worthless. 

Yet fear not, sinners! Great minds are at work to find effective ways to remove CO2 from the air or the ocean and squirrel it away more or less permanently. Some ideas now in the research or pilot stage involve capturing CO2 from industrial processes like cement manufacturing or from direct-air capture. The CO2 is then injected underground or used as an ingredient in concrete or other products. (Carbon-negative food, anyone?) Technologies that let nature do the heavy lifting include spreading basalt rock dust on farm fields as a soil amendment and using microbes to gobble up CO2 in water.

Getting more attention, likely undeservedly, is the effort to capture and bury CO2 from fossil fuel power plant emissions. This isn’t carbon negative; it simply reduces the amount of CO2 that makes it out of the smokestack. Capturing CO2 where it is most abundant — right where coal and gas are burned — is more efficient than direct-air capture, but it’s expensive and energy-intensive. Shutting the plant and replacing it with renewable energy will almost always be the better option for the planet, and the cheaper one for whoever has to foot the bill. 

Even with generous subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), cost remains the biggest barrier to a market for effective carbon offsets. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) projects still can cost upwards of $400 per ton of CO2. In 2021 the U.S. Department of Energy launched what it calls its Carbon Negative Shot, aimed at reducing the price of removing 1 ton of CO2 from the atmosphere to $100 in 1 decade. That would put the price closer to the U.S. Government’s current estimate for the social cost of carbon of $51 per ton, and below the $185 that might be the true cost. 

The market is potentially enormous. Aviation, shipping, steelmaking, chemical manufacturing and cement production are especially challenging to decarbonize. Consider that steelmaking generates about 1.85 tons of CO2 per ton of steel, and the industry produces close to 2 billion tons annually. 

Commercial aviation generated 900 million tons of CO2 in 2019. According to this handy flight calculator, that’s about 2.2 tons of CO2 for every passenger flying round-trip from Virginia’s Dulles Airport to Paris, France. It’s no wonder the voluntary carbon-offset market is expected to become a $250 billion industry by 2050. 

Still, let’s be real. Carbon-negative technology is only needed because we continue to flood the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses from activities we can mostly decarbonize at far less cost today. Money being thrown at expensive CCS or ineffective forest offsets would have a greater impact spent on weatherizing homes, putting solar on rooftops or building renewable energy in fossil fuel-dependent areas. 

In theory, buying renewable energy certificates can do this, too, but their effectiveness is questionable, in part because of the tendency of companies to use them for greenwashing. That is, they want carbon indulgences, but at a price that lets them continue business as usual. 

Medieval sinners would surely relate. 

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on July 19, 2023.

Update: This article in The Guardian challenges the worthiness of pretty much every carbon offset program in existence. Our search for climate indulgences continues.