On October 15, Dominion Energy Virginia filed its 2024 integrated resource plan (IRP), and just as in 2023, the company shows no inclination to meet the carbon-cutting requirements of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA). Blaming soaring load growth from data centers, Dominion models only scenarios with increasing amounts of fossil fuel generation to supplement its investments in renewable energy and nuclear. A scenario that would actually comply with the law is discussed only as something stakeholders asked for, then dismissed as “infeasible.”
Tellingly, the company notes casually that its own scenarios “evaluate the impacts of” the VCEA, as if the law were merely advisory, while the utility retained the final say. It’s kind of like a driver thoughtfully “evaluating the impact” of a speed limit – and then accelerating.
To be fair, this used to work for Dominion. The State Corporation Commission (SCC) has a long history of criticizing Dominion’s IRPs and ordering the company to do better next time, but never outright rejecting a plan. If traffic cops only ever gave out warnings, you would expect to see more scofflaws.
This year, though, the three-member SCC has two new commissioners, and already they have shown they intend to take their oversight role seriously. The commission didn’t even wait to see what Dominion would come up with before demanding improvements. On October 11, four days before Dominion submitted its IRP, the SCC issued an order instructing the utility to supplement its filing with additional work, to be submitted by November 15.
The task list includes modeling plans that meet the requirements of the VCEA, with at least one that incorporates data center load and one that doesn’t, as well as least-cost plans with and without data centers. In addition, the SCC wants Dominion to break down the costs of new transmission projects to identify the expenses that are primarily due to data center demand.
The order tacitly acknowledges that the staggering growth of the data center industry in Virginia has upended utility planning. At the same time, the SCC is not giving Dominion a free pass, either on costs or on VCEA requirements. If Dominion believes it can only meet demand reliably by adding expensive gas peaker plants, it is going to have to prove it.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the SCC plans to convene a technical conference in December to examine issues around serving data center load. Of paramount interest to the commission are the questions of how much it will cost to meet the burgeoning demand, and how to protect other consumers from rate increases for new generation and transmission infrastructure needed only because of one industry.
The SCC is not alone in its concerns about Dominion’s cavalier approach to its IRP obligations. Last year, with a goal of improving utility oversight, the General Assembly revitalized its Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, which formerly served as a graveyard for utility reform bills. (CEUR used to be pronounced “sewer,” but commission members would dearly love it if you would now call it “the cure.”)
In a September 16 memo, CEUR director Carrie Hearne recommended members consider a list of reforms that would, among other things, require Dominion to include in its IRP “a VCEA conforming scenario that does not assume to exercise an immediate exemption due to reliability concerns.” This scenario would have to incorporate the social cost of carbon, meet energy efficiency metrics (another area where Dominion has fallen short), plan for the retirement of fossil fuel plants targeted for closure in the VCEA, and assume an “unobstructed” buildout of renewable energy and storage (removing the artificial caps Dominion currently employs).
In other words, CEUR would like Dominion to follow the law.
Ratepayer and environmental advocates have applauded the more muscular approach being taken by CEUR and the SCC. Dominion, however, has remained steadfastly oblivious to the hints flung at it from all sides.
The company remains unapologetic. In an op-ed, Dominion Energy Chairman Bob Blue insists the company is pursuing an “all of the above” strategy that will produce electricity that is “reliable, affordable and increasingly clean” – an assertion he repeats three times, as if saying it often enough makes it true.
As the IRP puts it, however, “perceptions of affordability are subjective.” Analyzing its favored scenario using the methodology directed by the SCC, Dominion projects residential bills will rise over the next 15 years from an average of $142.77 today to $315.25 in 2039.
Let’s be charitable, though. Maybe when Mr. Blue said the company was committed to affordable energy, he meant for data centers.
“Increasingly clean” is even more counter-factual. As reported in the Mercury, “The utility’s previous plan projection said about 95% of electricity generation would be pulled from renewable sources. Tuesday’s updated plan calls for about 80% of generation to be spurred by renewables.” And as with the 2023 IRP, Dominion plans to keep expensive and highly polluting coal plants operating beyond their previous retirement dates, putting the company even further away from “clean.”
Dominion’s 2023 IRP received considerable criticism for projecting a doubling of greenhouse gas emissions by 2048, a year when they should be at zero under the terms of the VCEA. Dominion appears to have learned a lesson from that public shaming, but not the right lesson. The 2024 plan shortens the emissions time frame to 5 years, cutting out reporting for the later years when the proposed new methane gas plants would be in service and spewing out CO2. Instead, the IRP brags about lowering “emissions intensity,” a success it can achieve without cutting carbon, just by selling more electricity.
Participants at a “people’s hearing” on October 29 protested Dominion’s plans for a new methane gas plant in Chesterfield, Virginia. Photo courtesy Friends of Chesterfield.
So much for affordable and increasingly clean. As for reliable, burning more methane will only exacerbate the climate change and extreme weather that have been wreaking havoc on southeastern utilities’ ability to keep the lights on. The recent storms should be a wake-up call for utilities to ramp up renewables, including distributed solar generation and storage to serve communities, rather than building more centralized, carbon-intensive fossil fuel plants to power data centers.
But some companies, like some people, never learn. Finding itself deep in a hole, Dominion proposes to keep on digging.
This article was first published in the Virginia Mercury on October 28, 2024.
A message to my Northern Virginia friends and climate advocates: please consider joining me at a fundraiser on Sunday, November 10 from 5-7 pm to support the work of the Sierra Club’s Virginia Chapter. Special guests include the fabulous Connor Kish, chapter director, and Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous. RSVP and get more information here. Hope to see you there!
The human population of the Earth passed 8 billion in 2022, up from 7 billion in 2011 and less than 2 billion just a century ago. The United Nations projects that by 2050, the world will hit 9.7 billion people and continue rising to 10.9 billion in 2100. The average number of children women have in their lifetimes remains above the replacement rate of 2.1.
So why is there so much hand-wringing about a population bust?
It is true that population trends are uneven across the world, and some European and East Asian countries are struggling to address a decline in numbers. This is not the case in the U.S., however. Although our birth rate has been below the replacement rate for years, the Census projects our population increasing by another 33 million before it peaks in 2080. By 2100, the Census expects there will still be almost 10% more people in the U.S. than there are today.
Frankly, it’s more than a little odd to worry about something that won’t happen for at least three-quarters of a century, while ignoring that in the meantime, an ever-growing population using too many resources is pushing the planet to the brink of ecological collapse. You would think we could worry about that now, and save the hysterics over population decline for the next century.
Yet conservatives see the sky falling. The fear is most palpable among white supremacists spouting replacement theory, the notion that pale-skinned people, who are having fewer children, will be swamped by brown people, who are having more. They are pretty sure this is, in fact, a nefarious plan concocted by Jewish people, who apparently don’t count as white, with a goal of destroying Western civilization and all the great things that America stands for — by which they definitely do not mean democracy and civil rights.
Even some liberal Americans say they’re worried about the birth rate, and argue we need child tax credits, mandatory parental leave and publicly-subsidized daycare to reverse the decline. Of course, progressives support these policies anyway, so it’s hard to know how sincere their concern over birth rates really is.
I’m not sure about the sincerity on the right, either. Most of the people who express alarm about a declining birth rate are red-state Republicans who celebrate rural living and the small-town lifestyle. They hate traffic and the plethora of rules necessary to make life tolerable in crowded communities.
Meanwhile, I guarantee you no one in New York or LA looks around and says, “You know what would make this place better? More people!”
Of course, the pro-population-growth crowd absolutely rejects the one sure way to increase the US population: allowing more immigrants in.
They say it’s not racism. Theirs is just a preference for people who look like them, sound like them and do things the way they do them.
Yet immigration does all the things that the population alarmists say we need. It fills schools with children, bolsters the workforce, and keeps contributions flowing to Social Security and Medicare, extending the solvency of these programs.
Vastly more would-be immigrants are knocking at our doors than we are willing to allow in, and the numbers will only increase as climate change and the collapse of ecosystems spark further conflict and make it harder to eke out a living in more parts of the world. Countries that are able and willing to absorb the outflow of migrants from devastated areas will not be challenged by depopulation.
The U.S. is home to more migrants than any other country. Clearly many Americans, themselves descended from immigrants, are ready to shut the door behind them, but economists agree immigration is the secret sauce of our economic strength. That doesn’t mean the doors need to be wide open, with no one managing the flow, or that we shouldn’t try to help solve the crises that drive people to leave their home countries in the first place. And we still urgently need to work on transforming our consumption-based economy into a sustainable one.
But it does mean we needn’t fear a population bust in our lifetimes. While other advanced countries are figuring out how to retool their economies for a shrinking population, we will always have the numbers we desire, so long as we remain a society committed to equal opportunity, democracy and the striving for justice.
Obviously, this is not what the nativist right wants. But what they want — more American-born babies and limitless population growth, achieved by controlling women’s bodies rather than by strengthening the welfare state — is a fantasy served up with a helping of bad policy.
This article was previously published in the Virginia Mercury on August 20, 2024.
A data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Photo by Hugh Kenny, Piedmont Environmental Council.
Somehow, we were not prepared for this. Artificial intelligence was in development for decades, during which time we fantasized about all the wonderful things it was going to do for us. And then the bots launched almost fully formed like Athena springing from the forehead of Zeus with her sword in hand, and only then did we have our epiphany: Oh man, this is not going to go well.
What happened to the AI utopia? We were expecting self-driving cars that would let us drink too much on nights out while eliminating highway fatalities. We anticipated the seamless integration of all our devices and appliances, maybe even without cords! We imagined an unlocking of efficiencies at home and at work; medical breakthroughs; scientific innovation on steroids. We’d have three-day workweeks and go hiking on the weekends while the robots cooked and cleaned.
Maybe these things are still there in our future, along with world peace, but so far what we’ve got is a new way for kids to cheat on homework, a lot of derivative art, pernicious deepfakes and raging arguments over intellectual property theft. Oh, and an unprecedented increase in the demand for electricity that threatens to overwhelm the grid and make it impossible for us to stop burning fossil fuels before global warming destabilizes societies worldwide.
The wonder is why we thought this would go well. Shouldn’t we have known ourselves better?
In my view, the biggest problem with AI is that either humans are in charge, or the robots are. If it’s the robots, there is a good chance they will decide to kill us all, and we won’t see it coming. So we need to root for the humans, who could use the powerful new tools of AI to address hunger and climate change but so far mostly use it for financial fraud, child pornography and adding to the absurd percentage of the internet devoted to cat memes.
And instead of helping to lower CO2 emissions, right now the effect of AI is to increase the burning of fossil fuels. U.S. electricity consumption had flatlined after the mid-2000s, but AI is pushing it up again, and sharply. Data centers, where AI “lives,” could consume as much as 9% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030, double that of today.
We have a close-up view of this in Virginia, the data center capital of the world. In 2022, when I first tried to quantify Virginia’s data center problem, industry sources put the state’s data center demand at 1,688 megawatts (MW) — equivalent to about 1.6 million homes. With the advent of AI and its enormous appetite for power, the industry added 4,000 MW of new data centers in 2023. By the end of last year, data centers commanded fully 24%of the total electricity generated by Dominion Energy Virginia, the state’s largest utility. Over the next 15 years, Virginia’s data center demand is expected to quadruple.
Citing the need to supply data centers with power, Dominion did an about-face on its plan to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. It now proposes to keep coal plants running past their previous retirement dates, and to build new gas-powered generation.
The problem is not confined to Virginia. Across the country, utilities are struggling to meet AI’s increased energy demand, and looking to fossil fuels to fill the gap.
And while tech companies talk a good game about meeting their power demand sustainably, the evidence says otherwise. Tech companies conspicuously did not push back on Dominion Energy’s plan, and their own efforts fall woefully short. Even Google, which has taken its carbon-cutting obligations more seriously than most companies, just reported a 13% rise in its greenhouse gas emissions in 2023, thanks to its investments in AI and data centers.
Apparently, Google and its competitors in the race to dominate AI think meeting climate goals is like getting a loan from a bank; you emit more today, grow your business and use the profits to clear the debt by emitting a lot less tomorrow.
But Mother Earth is not a bank. She is a loan shark, and she has started breaking fingers.
If we can’t rely on the inventors of AI to restrain their energy appetites, we have to turn to our politicians (sigh). Our leaders have to make and enforce limits on the growth of AI commensurate with the world’s ability to provide the resources without baking the planet. Admittedly, mustering that kind of willpower is hard to do in a country that has elevated corporations to personhood and defines the First Amendment to include both spreading lies and spending money to influence elections.
And that gets us to the second-biggest concern I have about AI, but the one that might upend society soonest: the unleashing of deepfakes in this fall’s elections, and the threat that the reins of government will go not to those most dedicated to tackling hard problems, but to those who prove themselves the biggest scoundrels.
The American Bar Association (ABA) defines deepfakes as “hoax images, sounds and videos that convincingly depict people saying or doing things that they did not actually say or do.” Noting that they have already been used in election campaigns in the U.S. and abroad, the ABA is promoting model state legislation to criminalize the creation of malicious deepfakes. Meanwhile, tech companies including Google and Meta have adopted advertising policies to require disclosures of altered content.
Both approaches are good as far as they go; websites should police content, and states should act swiftly to outlaw the deepfakes (though the ABA lists very few that have done so yet). But in a high-stakes situation like an election, punishing violators after the fact – if you can catch them at all – is very much a case of closing the barn door after the horses are out. Once voters have been exposed to “evidence” of a candidate’s unfitness for office, especially when media coverage has primed them to believe the lies, the damage is done.
Many voters, especially younger ones, are savvy enough to be wary of campaign-related materials generally, and of unattributed images that float around the internet in particular. But older people who came of age in the pre-internet-memes era are vulnerable to believing what they see and hear, and a lot of us won’t put ourselves to the trouble of questioning what feels true. A deepfake only has to fool some of the people some of the time to alter the results of an election.
But maybe I’m being needlessly alarmist about the dangers of AI, even if I have a lot of company. So I did the obvious thing: I asked a bot if AI would save humanity or kill us all.
ChatGPT responded with a list of pros and cons of AI, including the familiar benefits and concerns that have spawned a thousand op-eds. You can try this at home, so I won’t reiterate them here. But I will note the curious fact that the bot didn’t mention either carbon emissions or election-altering deepfakes.
Maybe that’s an oversight, or maybe it means my fears are unwarranted. But maybe it shows something even scarier than AI itself: It’s AI pretending it isn’t trying to take over.
We urgently need action from U.S. and corporate leaders. Stiff new taxes on data center energy use would lead to greater efficiencies and nudge companies to price data storage and AI use appropriately. New laws should put the onus on internet platforms to stop deepfakes before they can spread. Tech companies should prioritize what is good for human beings over what is good for corporate profit. If they can’t ensure AI is used only for good, they should pull the plug until they can.
If all this doesn’t happen, and soon – well, let’s just hope the robots are kind.
This article first appeared in the Virginia Mercury on July 11, 2024.
If you’d like to hear a deeper discussion about the climate challenge posed by data centers and AI, I’ll be addressing this topic tonight at a meeting of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT) Chapter of Northern Virginia/Washington/Baltimore in Oakton, Virginia, which you can also attend remotely. The presentation will be recorded.. https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/424609
The only real question is why it has taken so long. (DOD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase)
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin can’t run for reelection, so it’s frustrating to see him spending so much time trying to score political points. The latest episode came earlier this month, when according to Fox News, Youngkin sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin questioning the Pentagon’s plan, announced back in January, to install solar panels on the building’s massive roof. Youngkin complained that the plan included no requirements for American-made technology, raising the question “whether American taxpayer dollars will be used to purchase solar equipment from the Chinese Communist Party.”
A few days later, Fox News reported the Pentagon offered reassurance that it had a “rigorous and extensive oversight process to ensure compliance” with the Buy American Act and other laws requiring domestic content.
According to this second article, a Youngkin spokesperson quoted the governor as “pleased that Secretary Austin will follow his recommendations to adopt the ‘Made in America’ requirements for procuring Chinese solar panels.”
Younkin’s attempt to snatch victory while still clenched in the jaws of defeat is amusing, but more than a little puzzling. Apparently Younkin is under the impression that solar panels are inherently Chinese.
Let’s be clear: Solar energy is one of the great American success stories. Americans invented solar photovoltaic technology, nurtured it and led the world in its development for half a century. American ingenuity put solar on the path to becoming today’s low-cost leader for power generation, to the point that it is projected to become the world’s dominant source of electricity by 2050.
However, as with a lot of American manufacturing, most solar panel production migrated overseas as the technology matured. Starting in 2010, China bet big on renewable energy, investing in solar technology itself and driving down panel prices to the point where most manufacturers in Europe and the U.S. were driven out of business. Only one U.S company remains in the top ten worldwide.
Chinese companies also likely benefited from the use of forced labor in the production of polysilicon, the raw material for most solar panels. The U.S. banned the importation of solar panels made with forced labor in 2021.
By then, however, China had developed a mature supply chain and technological know-how to support low-cost production. Today China dominates every aspect of solar manufacturing, with about 80% of the world’s market share. Chinese solar companies have expanded production capacity beyond the ability of world markets to absorb, driving down already-low prices by 42% in 2023.
Domination of the world market is only half the story, though. China also leads the world in deploying solar at home. China installed as much solar PV capacity in 2022 as the rest of the world combined, and then doubled that in 2023. China also leads the world in offshore wind deployment and electric vehicle sales and dominates production of lithium-ion batteries.
So the concern that the Chinese are winning the clean energy race is well justified, and Youngkin is not the only American who hates the taste of second place. But our leaders only have two choices: stand around talking trash about the competition, or get in the game.
That’s what Congress did in passing laws like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that support American investment in solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and other components of a green revolution. More controversially, President Joe Biden also extended Trump-era tariffs on Chinese-made polysilicon solar panels to give American manufacturers a chance to scale up.
Not everyone supports tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels, given the inflationary impact of trade barriers and the urgent need to deploy as much renewable energy as possible to lower CO2 emissions. Still, the learning rateof solar is expected to continue driving prices lower over the long term. Even with a less-mature, more expensive supply chain, American-made panels are projected to become cheaper than imported panels by 2026.
One year after the IRA’s passage, a Goldman-Sachs analysis found the law was meeting its objectives of driving private sector investment and job creation in the clean-tech sector, including manufacturing. This month, Wood Mackenzie reported that U.S. solar manufacturing capacity increased 71% in the first quarter of 2024, making it the largest quarter of solar manufacturing growth in history.
The Pentagon is not known for caring about saving money, so maybe it isn’t surprising that it is only now following the example of millions of Americans by putting solar panels on the roof. Defense Department officials say the move is intended to support the resurgence in American manufacturing and to deliver the benefits of increased energy resilience and reliability, including having an uninterrupted power source in case of a cyberattack or a grid outage.
Low-cost, clean power, resilience and energy security are all part of the great American success story that is solar energy. A note of congratulation, not complaint, would be the better response from Youngkin.
This article first appeared in the Virginia Mercury on June 26, 2024. It has been edited to remove a reference to the Pentagon being located in Virginia because, for reasons worth a digression, it is not.
Following the General Assembly’s failure either to rein in the explosive growth of power-hungry data centers or to remove obstacles to increasing the supply of renewable energy in Virginia, a lot of people are wondering where we go from here.
Dominion Energy Virginia’s answer, as described in its 2023 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), is “build more fossil fuels.” The utility is pushing forward plans to build new methane gas generating units in Chesterfield. Dominion argues that although its IRP calls for dramatically increased carbon emissions, it sort of complies with the Virginia Clean Economy Act anyway because the VCEA has an escape clause when reliability is at risk.
Dominion does not acknowledge that its own actions contribute to the problem. To be fair, though, it’s a huge problem, and even if our utilities were on board with the VCEA’s carbon-cutting agenda, we would need stronger legislative policy than we have now. Rejoining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is an important priority that Democrats are rightly pursuing, but the need for action goes much further.
Sen. Dave Marsden, D-Fairfax, convened meetings the week before last to hear from utilities, industry members, environmental groups and others to get suggestions on ways to reform the VCEA. The interest groups met separately, and members of one group were not allowed to attend other group sessions to hear what those stakeholders had to say. The meetings were closed-door and confidential, with the express purpose of preventing a nosy public from learning anything through Freedom of Information Act requests.
That secrecy makes me queasy, so I declined the invitation to attend the environmentalists’ session. I’d have cheerfully jettisoned my scruples, though, if I could have been in the utility session to hear what Dominion’s lobbyists were whispering in the senator’s ear. Alas, that was not on offer.
But Marsden is asking the right questions, and of course, I always have answers, even when no one is asking. In my view, Virginia can stay on track to carbon neutrality by adopting four basic principles: data centers must pay their own way, both literally and carbon-wise; solar must be easy to build and interconnect; utilities must not build new fossil generation for “reliability” before exhausting non-carbon solutions; and efficient buildings must be added to the strategy.
Let’s start with the elephant outgrowing the room.
Data centers are sucking up all the energy
Without action, data centers will soon overtake residential customers to become Dominion’s largest category of customer. Already, they are driving the utility’s decision-making, as we saw from Dominion’s IRP. This year, the General Assembly deferred action to address the energy crisis until it sees the results of a study being undertaken by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC).
It now appears that study won’t be published before the 2025 session convenes, and in fact there does not appear to be a deadline of any kind. Yet we already know enough about data center energy demand and its consequences for everyone else that legislators will be derelict in their duty if they put off all action until 2026.
The General Assembly must choose from three options if it still cares about the energy transition: stop the growth of the data center industry in Virginia, put the onus on data centers to source their own clean energy from the grid, or dramatically increase renewable energy generation and power line construction.
Lawmakers show no desire to stop all data center growth, but as I’ve urged before, they can and should establish a joint state-local task force to choose appropriate sites for growth based on energy and transmission availability, water resource adequacy and good-neighbor factors, like distance from residential communities and parkland.
Legislators should also require data centers to meet industry-best standards for energy efficiency, use alternatives to diesel generators for backup power and source carbon-free energy from facilities located on the grid that serves Virginia. They could buy this power either on their own or through a specially-designed utility tariff, as long as it meets all of their needs on a 24/7, hourly basis. In no case should other customers see higher electricity bills for infrastructure that’s only needed because of data centers.
These measures will take time to put in place, yet data center development is proceeding apace while the General Assembly takes its nap. There is no avoiding Virginia’s need for a lot more carbon-free generation, pretty much right away. A couple of small modular nuclear reactors ten years from now aren’t a solution.
Don’t expect climate leadership from Dominion
Dominion’s fossil-heavy IRP marked a sharp break away from the climate report that the company released just months before, which projected solar dominating the grid by 2040. Whether the IRP should be dismissed as political pandering to a conservative governor, or taken in earnest to mean the utility has thrown in the towel on renewable energy, is something of a Rorschach test for Virginia leaders.
When Dominion releases its 2024 IRP this fall, we may get more clarity about what the company really thinks. More likely, we will still be left guessing. Dominion has a long history of playing to both sides to get what it wants, and what it wants is profit.
There’s nothing wrong with a company making a profit, of course, as long as the company isn’t also allowed to make the rules it plays by. Asking Dominion’s lobbyists to help make energy policy is like recruiting burglars for a task force on crime prevention.
Make it easier to build solar
While Virginia counties vie with each other to attract data centers, some are notably less keen on solar farms. Sprawling developments of windowless warehouses that suck power? Yes, they say. Grassy fields lined with rows of solar panels that produce power? No. Such is the horror with which some people view solar that localities have adopted moratoriums, acreage caps and other limits designed to keep projects at bay. The result is that an already-slow process for siting solar projects is getting even slower, more unpredictable and more expensive.
Lawmakers rejected legislation this year that would have allowed the State Corporation Commission to overrule local permit denials. Yet it seems doubtful whether, in a Dillon Rule state like ours, local governments actually have the authority to enact blanket prohibitions and caps on specific kinds of land use. Legislators may want to ask the attorney general to clarify this point rather than waiting for landowners to challenge in court a locality’s refusal to let them put solar panels on their property.
If the AG (or a court) rules these barriers illegal, localities would have to go back to evaluating the merits of project applications on a case-by-case basis — hardly a bad result. But it would be wiser and more orderly to pass legislation spelling out under what circumstances a local government may reject a solar project, and what the landowner’s recourse should be.
New gas plants are the wrong solution for reliability
Though Dominion’s 2023 IRP didn’t win approval from the SCC, Dominion is going ahead with plans to build new methane gas combustion turbines in Chesterfield. Given that these “peaker” plants generate dirty power at a high price, Dominion should not be permitted to build gas combustion turbines if other alternatives are available.
Which they are. Demand-response programs, advanced grid technologies and batteries charged by renewable energy are superior to gas peakers for reasons of cost, air quality and climate impact.
Dominion is building some large batteries and testing long-duration battery storage technologies (and of course, Virginia already has the largest pumped storage facility in the world), but our utilities have not even begun to tap the potential of batteries in homes and businesses. Subsidizing the purchase of batteries by homeowners and businesses in exchange for the ability to draw on the batteries for peaking power, as some utilities do, would also build resilience into the grid and address power outages more cheaply than burying lines.
Imagine: If data centers had installed batteries instead of the 11 gigawatts of diesel generators at Loudoun and Fairfax County data centers, Virginia would already have more battery storage capacity than any country in the world.
Let everyone build solar
The VCEA calls for 35% of its solar target to be satisfied by third-party developers. The purpose of this set-aside is two-fold: to attract more private capital, and to use competition to keep a lid on prices. Unfortunately, the SCC accepted Dominion’s argument that 35% should be read as a ceiling as well as a floor, to the detriment of ratepayers and solar developers. With Dominion now reneging on its solar commitments, it’s more important than ever that private developers be allowed to step in. One bill in the 2024 session would have corrected this problem by explicitly making 35% the minimum. The General Assembly should adopt that measure.
Fix interconnection
Possibly the most inexplicable failure of the General Assembly this year was failing to pass legislation to resolve the dispute between Dominion and commercial customers over interconnection requirements. The onerous requirements that Dominion adopted in December of 2022 — imposed even in the face of a contrary SCC ruling — have wreaked havoc on plans by local governments to put solar on public buildings and schools. That is fine with Dominion; though the goal of the new requirements was to acquire upgraded distribution infrastructure at no cost to itself, its monopolistic lizard brain is equally satisfied with the result of shutting down competition from small solar companies.
Legislators should not accept this result, though. The General Assembly adopted net metering years ago because encouraging residents and businesses to go solar is good for the economy and makes communities more resilient. Support for distributed renewable energy is even written into the Virginia Code as official policy.
And distributed solar is hugely popular. Indeed, the very people who oppose utility-scale solar projects almost inevitably argue that society should maximize rooftop solar instead. In this they are at least half right: If we are really going to meet the energy challenge ahead of us, the very least we can do is milk every kilowatt-hour from sunshine falling on rooftops.
Customers have always paid to interconnect their solar to the utility’s grid. The dispute between Dominion and its customers is about whether Dominion can insist they pay the entire cost of expensive new fiber-optic wire and other cool technology that could make the distribution grid better for everyone, but which any one customer can’t afford. These upgrades could enable not just more solar but also electric vehicle charging in our communities, vehicle-to-grid technology and programs allowing utilities to make use of customers’ battery storage. But if the technology really is that valuable (a determination that should be made by the SCC, not Dominion), then getting it shouldn’t depend on how deep a customer’s pocket is — especially when that customer is a local government and, therefore, effectively, the Virginia taxpayer.
This year’s interconnection bill would have allowed a utility to recover the costs of these grid upgrades from ratepayers, with SCC oversight. Even Dominion would have been better off with the bill, something it would have recognized if its lizard brain weren’t in charge at the time. The General Assembly should pass the bill.
An untapped three gigawatts of energy are waiting off our coast
Dominion’s 2,600 megawatt Virginia offshore wind project is due to begin construction this year, but it is not the only game in town. The Kitty Hawk offshore wind area situated off North Carolina can deliver up to 3,500 megawatts of energy through a cable that will come ashore at Virginia Beach. All that is holding up the project is the lack of a customer. Offshore wind is more expensive than solar, but we have a lot of power-hungry data centers who could pay a clean energy tariff that would include Kitty Hawk wind.
Maximize efficiency in buildings
Possibly the best piece of energy legislation to pass this year was the bill that directs local governments and schools to build to higher efficiency standards and incorporate renewable energy, as appropriate. The language could have been even stronger, but as it is, it will deliver significant cost savings for taxpayers.
In fact, local governments will now build to better standards than most homeowners get for themselves when they buy a house. That’s because Virginia’s residential building code is pathetically behind the times when it comes to energy efficiency. Home buyers and renters would save more than enough money on utility bills to cover the upfront cost of better housing construction, but builders won’t voluntarily meet higher standards because it reduces profits. That should not be acceptable.
Legislation passed in 2021 directed the Board of Housing and Community Development to consider amendments that would strengthen the building code. BHCD, which is dominated by builder and real estate interests, simply ignored the law. The matter is now in litigation (and the governor is trying to weaken the code even further), but the General Assembly could resolve the matter by directing BHCD to adopt efficiency measures at least as strong as the national standards set by the International Building Code Council (itself under fire for allowing builder interests to weaken efficiency standards), and to allow local governments to adopt stronger “stretch codes” to help residents save even more money and energy.
Going further, new and renovated buildings should be required to use electricity in place of methane gas, oil or propane for heating, cooling and appliances wherever practicable. Though building electrification increases electricity consumption, electricity is a more efficient technology than burning fossil fuels in the home, so it contributes to lower energy costs for residents and a smaller carbon footprint for the state overall.
It’s a shame the General Assembly settled for simply not going backwards this year, but it is a good sign that Marsden and others are not waiting for next year to consider ways to get us back on the carbon-cutting wagon. With the climate clock ticking, we have no more time to lose.
A version of this article appeared in the Virginia Mercury on April 29, 2024.
Virginia’s 2024 legislative session wrapped up last month without any action to avert the energy crisis that is hurtling towards us.
Crisis is not too strong a word to describe the unchecked proliferation of power-hungry data centers in Northern Virginia and around the state. Virginia utilities do not have the energy or transmission capacity to handle the enormous increases in energy consumption. Dominion Energy projects a doubling of CO2 and a new fossil fuel buildout. Drinking water sources are imperiled.
The governor is unfazed. Legislators are going to study the matter.
Source: PJM
According to data gathered by regional grid operator PJM, half of the coming surge will occur in parts of Virginia served by Dominion Energy. In its 2023 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), Dominion said it would meet the higher demand by increasing its use of expensive and highly polluting fossil fuels and building new methane gas-fired generating plants. Dominion admitted this will push up carbon emissions at a time when the Virginia Clean Economy Act requires the utility to build renewable energy and cut carbon.
PJM projects equally huge data center growth in areas served by Virginia electric cooperatives, especially Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative (NOVEC). The cooperatives are exempt from most VCEA requirements, and NOVEC buys the bulk of its power from PJM’s fossil fuel-heavy wholesale market. NOVEC’s latest annual report cites load growth of 12% per year, almost entirely from data centers, but fails to even mention the increase in carbon emissions that will accompany that growth.
Undeterred by these alarming statistics, the General Assembly put the growth on steroids with a new round of tax breaks in 2023, while beating back any conditions that might have slowed the onslaught. This year it turned away every bill that would have placed limits on the industry or protected ordinary consumers from the inevitable cost increases.
At the same time, legislators rejected a host of bills that would have enabled more renewable energy development in Virginia and given customers a greater ability to secure their own electricity supply. Together these bills could have brought thousands of megawatts of new solar projects online, lowered demand growth through increased energy efficiency, and prevented the increases in carbon pollution that now appear inevitable.
Legislators did greenlight Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power’s ability to spend their customers’ money on initial development efforts for two nuclear reactors of up to 500 megawatts (MW), one for each utility.
This is not a fix. It is like scheduling knee surgery for next year when you are having a heart attack today.
There is, famously, much doubt about whether small modular reactors (SMRs) will prove viable in the coming decades, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the surge in data center development is happening right now. Virginia’s hoped-for nuclear renaissance would be both too little and too late to meet a data center demand that Dominion says grew by 933 MW in 2023 alone. It’s expected to reach almost 20,000 MW by 2034, the year Dominion’s IRP shows its first small nuclear reactor delivering power.
In rejecting every serious measure to address data center demand, General Assembly leaders said they wanted to wait for a study being conducted this year by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC). What the General Assembly didn’t do was defer new data center development until the study is complete. Another year has to pass before lawmakers will even consider bills addressing land use, power and water concerns around data centers or make it easier for renewable energy to come online.
The consequences of inaction could be deadly. It was only a year ago that Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) proposed allowing certain Northern Virginia data centers to violate their air quality permits by running more than 4,000 highly-polluting diesel generators during periods of grid stress. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the public health disaster we’d have had if 4,000 diesel generators kicked into operation last summer when smoke from Canadian wildfires had already made Virginia air quality hazardous.
DEQ backed off its proposal after a massive public outcry, but the idea is likely still percolating at the agency and might reemerge as an emergency demand-response measure. Even without allowing the generators to provide grid support, more data centers with more diesel generators will worsen air quality with every power outage and every round of equipment testing.
As I argued at the time, the diesel generator fiasco could have been avoided in the first place if data centers had been equipped with renewable energy microgrids and battery storage. DEQ’s decision not to require battery storage as the first line of defense against power outages deprived Dominion of a demand-response option that would have been far cleaner and more useful than diesel generators.
One of the bills the General Assembly rejected this year would have prohibited the use of backup diesel generators by data centers that receive state tax subsidies, and would have required greater energy efficiency. It was a missed opportunity that means the problem can only get worse in the coming year.
The governor, however, could still avert the crisis by imposing a pause in data center development while the JLARC study is underway. He could accomplish this through an executive order directing the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP) not to enter a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with any data center operator until the JLARC study is complete and legislators have had the opportunity to act on it. These MOUs are a requirement for data center operators to access Virginia’s generous tax exemptions. Without the tax subsidies, most data center developers would likely choose not to pursue development here.
This is not a novel idea. Last spring, data center reform advocates asked VEDP to include stringent efficiency and siting conditions in MOUs it entered with Amazon Web Services. They never got an answer.
Down in Georgia, however, legislators just passed a Republican-led bill to suspend that state’s data center tax subsidies for two years pending the results of a study of grid capacity. Legislators expressed concern about Georgia Power’s ability to provide electricity to all the data centers that want to come to the state. And as Republican Sen. John Albers also noted, “The reality is these do not create many jobs. They create big buildings, but they do not create jobs.”
The Georgia tax subsidies were modeled on the ones Virginia implemented in 2010, which pushed our data center growth into overdrive. Isn’t it interesting that Georgia lawmakers so quickly learned a lesson that Virginia leaders refuse to even acknowledge?
This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on April 3, 2024.
Climate advocates felt hopeful last fall when Democrats won control of both the Senate and House with promises to protect the commonwealth’s climate laws, including the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) and the Clean Car Standard. It seemed possible the General Assembly might pass much-needed initiatives modest enough to avoid a veto from a Republican governor.
Apparently not. Democrats did fend off attacks on the VCEA and Clean Cars, and killed a lot of terrible bills. Through the budget process, they’re trying to require Virginia’s renewed participation in the carbon-cutting Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. But Gov. Youngkin won’t even get his shot at most of the priority bills from the environmental community. Of the bills that did pass, most were so watered down as to make their usefulness questionable. A few bills died even when they went unopposed. Some successful bills seem likely to add to Virginia’s energy problems rather than help solve them.
A lot of the blame can be laid at the feet of Dominion Energy, which took a bipartisan drubbing in the 2023 session, but was back this year stronger than ever like a plague that surges when we let our guard down.
But that’s only half the story. As a party, Democrats seemed to have simply lost interest in the fight. Climate change may be an urgent issue in the rest of the world, but in Virginia, a lot of lawmakers seem to think they already checked that box.
Two steps forward
In the spirit of optimism, let’s start with the positive highlights of the session, though admittedly they were more like flashlight beams than floodlights.
Most consequential for the energy transition is legislation establishing a statewide green bank, a requirement for accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for clean energy projects. The House and Senate versions are different and will go to a conference committee. A show of opposition from Republicans in both chambers could attract a veto, but most governors welcome free money.
Similarly, new legislation directs the Department of Energy to identify federal funding available to further the commonwealth’s energy efficiency goals.
Another encouraging piece of legislation updates and expands on existing energy efficiency requirements for new and renovated public buildings, a category that would now include schools. Provisions for EV charging capabilities, resilience measures, and onsite renewable energy and storage are included. The measure attracted only a couple of Republican votes, so it may be at risk of a veto.
Another change will bring sales of residential rooftop solar within the consumer protections that apply to other contractors. Virginia’s Board for Contractors will be required to issue regulations requiring relevant disclosures.
The net metering law that supports customer-sited solar will now include provisions for the leasing of solar panels and the use of batteries under a measure that is not expected to draw a veto. A solar facility paired with a battery of equal capacity will be exempt from standby charges, and the customer may use the batteries in demand-response and peak-shaving programs. Though none of the bill’s provisions were controversial, Dominion exacted a price in the form of a line directing the SCC to “make all reasonable efforts to ensure that the net energy metering program does not result in unreasonable cost-shifting to nonparticipating electric utility customers.” Our utilities hope this will undermine the current full retail value for net metered solar when the SCC considers the future of net metering in proceedings later this year and next year.
A bill to require the Board of Education to develop materials for teaching students about climate change passed mainly along party lines.
Another bill allows, but does not require, local governments to create their own “local environmental impact funds,” to assist residents and businesses with the purchase of energy efficient lawn care and landscaping equipment, home appliances, HVAC equipment, or micro mobility devices (like electric scooters). Almost all Republicans voted against it, so modest as it is, it may draw a veto.
Both chambers have agreed to request the SCC form a work group to consider a program of on-bill financing for customer energy projects such as renewable energy, storage and energy efficiency improvements. The SCC will also be asked to study performance-based regulation and the impact of competitive service providers. Dominion will now also have to assess the usefulness of various grid enhancing technologies in its Integrated Resource Planning at the SCC.
Efficiency advocates had high hopes for a bipartisan measure they dubbed the SAVE Act to strengthen requirements for Dominion and APCo to achieve energy efficiency savings and to make it easier for efficiency programs to pass SCC scrutiny. Unfortunately, the final legislation does almost nothing, with most improvements pushed off to 2029.
A bill passed that designates each October 4 as Energy Efficiency Day. (I said these were small victories.)
Finally, in a rejection of one of the more inane initiatives of the governor’s regulation-gutting agenda, both Houses overwhelmingly passed legislation preventing changes to the building code before the next regular code review cycle. I imagine the governor will have to veto the bill, and Republican legislators will then be caught between party loyalty and a duty to govern intelligently, but any way you look at it, eggs are meeting faces.
Two steps back
Failure to pass a bill might seem to leave matters where they are, with no winners or losers. Inaction in the face of climate change, however, means we lose time we can’t afford to waste.
Inaction can also have devastating consequences in the here and now. Solar projects on public schools and other commercial properties in Dominion Energy’s territory have been delayed or outright canceled for more than a year due to new rules imposed by Dominion in December of 2022 that raised the cost of connecting these projects to the grid exponentially. Legislation promoted by the solar industry and its customers would have divided responsibility for grid upgrades between the customer and the utility, while giving Dominion the ability to recover costs it incurred. Through its lobbyists’ influence on legislators, Dominion killed the bills not for any compelling reason, but because it could.
Dominion’s obfuscations and half-truths often work magic when the subject is technical. But of all the votes taken this year on energy bills, this one actually shocks me. No one listening to the committee testimony could have misunderstood the significance of the legislation, affecting dozens of school districts and local governments. In desperation, the solar industry offered amendments that (in my opinion) would have given away the store, to no avail.
A cross-check of votes and campaign contributions shows the legislation failed due to the votes of committee members who happen to accept large campaign contributions from Dominion. This dynamic tanked a number of other climate and energy bills as well, and underlines why utilities must be barred from making campaign contributions.
Dominion’s influence also killed a priority bill for the environmental community that would have required the SCC to implement the Commonwealth Energy Policy, slimmed down SCC review of efficiency programs to a single test, increased the percentage of RPS program requirements that Dominion must meet from projects of less than 1 megawatt, and increased the percentage of renewable energy projects reserved for third-party developers. Two other bills that were limited to the Commonwealth Energy Policy provision also failed.
Dominion’s opposition was also enough to kill a bill designed to expand EV charging infrastructure statewide, especially in rural areas, in part by protecting gas station owners who install electric vehicle charging from competition by public utilities. Sheetz and other fuel retailers testified that they want to invest in charging infrastructure but won’t take the risk as long as Dominion can install its own chargers nearby. The reason is that using ratepayer money allows a public utility to undercut private business. Other states have dealt with this by prohibiting utilities from getting into the EV charging business. Here, the retailers asked for 12 miles between themselves and any utility-owned chargers. Dominion opposed the bill, and the fuel retailers lost in subcommittee. A second bill that would have created an EV rural infrastructure fund passed the House but could not get funding in the Senate.
Bills in both the House and Senate would have required most new local government buildings to include renewable energy infrastructure, especially solar. The House bill, though unopposed, was killed by Democrats in Appropriations because a fiscal impact statement erroneously said it might cost something, in spite of bill language exempting situations where the improvements would not be cost-effective. Then the same committee felt tradition-bound to kill the Senate bill when it came over, although that bill carried no fiscal impact concerns and it was by then clear that killing the House bill had been a mistake. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but also of mindless rules.
Moving along: all of the bills that would have put limits on the ability of localities to bar solar projects in their jurisdictions failed, as did legislation that would have given solar developers essentially a right to appeal an adverse decision to the SCC.
None of the many bills supporting customer choice in electricity purchasing passed. Legislation to allow localities to regulate or ban gas-powered leaf blowers also failed, as did a bill that would have required Dominion and APCo to reveal how they voted in working groups advising grid operator PJM. This bill passed the House but, like so many others, it died in the heavily pro-utility Senate Commerce and Labor committee.
Two steps sideways?
Community solar, known as shared solar in Virginia, staggered a few steps forward, or maybe just sideways. Readers will recall that the Dominion program authorized in 2020 has proven a success only for low-income customers who don’t have to pay the high minimum bill Dominion secured in the SCC proceeding that followed enactment.
Trying to make the program work for the general public was the goal of legislation that advanced this year but may or may not help. As passed, the compromise language offers an opportunity to expand the program a little bit and to take the argument about the minimum bill back to the SCC with a different set of parameters.
In addition to modifying the program in Dominion territory, shared solar now has a modest opening in Appalachian Power territory under a similar bill. Again, the final bill offers far less than advocates hoped, and it lacks even the special provisions for low-income subscribers that make the original Dominion program work at all. Like Dominion, APCo fought the bill, though unlike Dominion, APCo’s rate base has been shrinking, so losing customers to alternative suppliers is a more legitimate concern.
(At least for now. All APCo needs to do to reverse the decline is to lure a couple of data centers from up north. Data centers are such energy hogs that they would swamp any losses from shared solar, and residents of NoVa would be glad to forgo a few. Or for that matter, a few dozen.)
Other new measures garnered support from many in the environmental community, but don’t really move the needle. One allows geothermal heat pumps, which reduce a building’s energy demand but don’t generate electricity, to qualify under Virginia’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS). Another allows an old hydroelectric plant to qualify for the RPS, a move that adds no new renewable energy to the grid but means the electric cooperative that gets the electricity from the plant can now sell the renewable energy certificates to Dominion and APCo.
Lying down and rolling over
In the face of the single greatest threat to Virginia’s — and the nation’s — energy security and climate goals, the General Assembly’s leaders chose to do nothing. In fact, doing nothing was their actual game plan for data centers. A quick death was decreed for legislation requiring data centers to meet energy efficiency and renewable energy procurement requirements as a condition of receiving state tax subsidies. Also killed were a bill that sought to protect other ratepayers from bearing the costs of serving data centers, and more than a dozen bills dealing with siting impacts, water resources, noise abatement, undergrounding of transmission lines and other location-specific issues.
The excuse for inaction is that the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee is undertaking a study to examine the energy and environmental effects of data centers. However, legislators did not impose a concomitant pause in data center development while the study is ongoing. Instead, for at least another year, Virginia’s leaders decreed that there will be no restraints or conditions on the growth of the industry, even as ever more new data center developments are announced and community opposition increases.
And falling for the boondoggle
Nuclear energy has always had its true believers at the General Assembly, and the prospect of small modular reactors (SMRs) has excited them again. Many of the same legislators who busied themselves killing climate and energy bills this year insist Virginia needs SMRs to address climate change. They are more than happy to let utilities charge ratepayers today for a nuclear plant tomorrow — or rather, ten years from now, or maybe never if things go as badly here as they did in South Carolina, Georgia and Idaho.
More cautious lawmakers say if Dominion or APCo wants to go all in on an unproven and risky technology like small modular reactors, they should shoulder the expense themselves and only then make the case for selling the power to customers.
Dominion has achieved a terrific success rate with boondoggles over the years. (See, e.g. its coal plant in Wise County, spending on a North Anna 3 reactor that was never built, and the so-called rate freeze, followed by the also-lucrative legislation undoing the rate freeze.) By now you’d think more legislators would have joined Team Skeptic. But as always, utility donations and lobbyists’ promises are the great memory erasers. So once again, the General Assembly voted to allow ratepayer money to be spent on projects that may never come to fruition.
This year APCo is in on the act as well. Two bills, one for APCo and the other for Dominion, will allow the utilities to charge ratepayers for initial work on nuclear plants of up to 500 MW. The final language of both bills requires SCC oversight and imposes limits on spending. That is, for now.
Will the real climate champions please step forward?
This round-up might leave readers thinking there aren’t many lawmakers in Richmond who take climate change seriously. Fortunately, this is not the case. Close to two dozen legislators introduced bills targeting stronger measures on energy efficiency, renewable energy, electric vehicles and utility reform. Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, led the pack both in the sheer number of initiatives he introduced and the tenacity with which he pursued them, but he was not alone.
A few Republicans also supported good energy legislation, and even, in the case of Del. Michael Webert, R-Fauquier, sponsored priority bills like the SAVE Act. With groups like Energy Right and Conservatives for Clean Energy making the case from a conservative perspective, maybe we will see progress towards a bipartisan climate caucus to build on Virginia’s energy transition.
If that sounds too optimistic, consider that the alternative right now is the near-total inaction that marked this year’s session; we just don’t have time for that.
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.
The divide politicians should be paying attention to is not between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between young people and old Republicans.
Photo courtesy of 350.org
Judging from the political rhetoric, you’d be justified in thinking that only Democrats feel the urgency of the climate crisis, while Republicans are united in dismissing it. Polling shows Democrats are better aligned with popular sentiment: the great majority of Americans support more climate action. But Republican leaders assume that even if their position is a losing one with the general population, at least they represent their party membership.
It turns out they are ignoring critical details. The divide they should be paying attention to is not between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between young people and old Republicans.
Recent polling from the Pew Research Center found that although 64% of Republicans over 65 oppose the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral, 67% of Republicans under 30 support doing so. Given that Millennials and members of Gen Z (those born after 1997) are less likely to identify as Republicans in the first place, you’d think the party leadership would pay close attention to the issues young Republicans care about, in hopes of growing their brand.
Instead, the party’s position on climate is driven by the opinions of the older, mostly white Republicans who dominate the conservative media echo chamber and control power in Congress and state legislatures. In Virginia, as in other states and Congress, lawmakers are older, whiter and more male than the people they represent. They can afford to dismiss climate change, because the worst impacts won’t happen until they have disappeared from the planet.
But that tendency of older voters to die off is exactly why catering to the curmudgeon bloc is a bad strategy for holding on to power in the long term. Greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase; the planet keeps warming. The choking smoke from Canadian fires is merely a warning of what lies ahead.
The nothing-to-see-here narrative on climate change will only appear more fringe with every record wildfire season, every killer heat wave and every freak mega-storm. If Republicans don’t find a way to pivot, they will continue losing younger voters until they find themselves out of power.
That’s actually the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, Republicans win the presidency and Congress and, having backed themselves into a corner pandering to the curmudgeons, will feel forced to undo recent federal climate legislation including the Inflation Reduction Act. Consequences for the planet and the American economy would be disastrous. The IRA is not just the most impactful climate law the U.S. has ever passed, it has unleashed enormous infusions of capital into red states.
And what demographic benefits most from the millions of new jobs being created in green energy and electric vehicles? Why, that would be the young people.
Some Republicans in Congress and state legislatures do recognize the climate is in crisis. Behind closed doors, they may even concede their party needs to do more. But each lawmaker has a different excuse for failing to act. They fear a primary challenge from someone even farther to the right, or they depend on donations from fossil fuel apologists like the Koch brothers (again, old white men!), or they fear retribution from party leaders if they buck their caucus. In the end, they fall back on obfuscation, deflection, Democrat-blaming and wishful thinking.
Recent news stories have featured much wringing of hands and pointing of fingers over Gen Z’s tendency towards pessimism and nihilism. Surveys show these young people are more likely to believe it is too late to avert climate change, and more than half feel “humanity is doomed.” Close to 40% say their fears about the future make them reluctant to have children.
Many young people are channeling their anxiety and anger into action. Election turnout among younger voters has surged, though it’s still woefully behind that of older generations. Young workers are more likely to seek jobs with a positive impact for people and the planet — which makes the green job incentives in the IRA all the more relevant to their lives.
Indeed, the good news for this generation is that the urgency of the climate crisis has spurred a remarkable acceleration of research and development into climate solutions. For young workers especially, there are more opportunities for meaningful work than at any time in history. The kids are right to worry about hard times ahead, but their generation may be the one to save humanity from this crisis of their elders’ making.
Success, however, requires that those elders acknowledge the crisis, find the courage to move past partisan politics, and help.
This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on June 13, 2023.
Last December, Dominion Energy produced a remarkable document: a climate report predicting that by 2040 its electricity supply will be dominated by renewable energy. Coal will be gone by 2030, and methane gas will hang around in ever-smaller amounts, just to fill in the energy gaps. Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) probably won’t play a role for at least 15 years, during which time solar will become the mainstay of the electricity supply. According to the report, this strategy will allow Dominion to meet its goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2050.
Fast forward a few months, and the same company, using the same information, projects a future full of new methane-burning plants and SMRs. Dominion Energy Virginia’s 2023 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), released May 1, now insists that the phenomenal growth of the data center industry and, to a lesser degree, the adoption of electric vehicles require so much energy that it can’t possibly meet legally-mandated climate goals. Accordingly, the plan doesn’t even try.
Instead of decarbonizing in accordance with Virginia’s role in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) and the requirements of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), Dominion now says it must build new methane-burning plants and keep old, expensive coal plants running “beyond statutory retirement deadlines established in the VCEA.” All the alternatives examined in the IRP “assume that Virginia exits the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (‘RGGI’) before January 1, 2024,” in violation of Virginia law. Most of the alternatives include the same SMRs its Climate Report recognized as unready. Compared to Dominion’s 2022 IRP update (filed just last September!), now costs have ballooned and CO2 emissions will skyrocket.
What could possibly have happened in the course of a few months to produce this about-face? The astounding growth projections for the data center industry may be news to many Virginians, but not to the utility that provides their power. Vehicle electrification is hardly a surprise either. SMRs did not achieve any breakthroughs in technology or economics this winter, nor did anyone suddenly discover a way for new gas plants to make sense for the climate or ratepayers. Dominion makes a big deal out of the Christmas cold snap, but you have to try pretty hard to believe that requires upending all previous planning.
What did happen was the 2023 General Assembly session, in which Gov. Glenn Youngkin played a decisive role in handing Dominion a major – and unaccustomed – defeat. With Dominion Energy holding its shareholder meeting today, the company badly needs to show it is back in the governor’s good graces. And the governor, as we know, is not a fan of the energy transition.
In other words, the IRP is a political document, not a serious approach to meeting Virginia’s electricity needs, at a time when climate change is accelerating and fossil fuels are giving way to superior renewable energy technologies.
Market watchers will recall that Dominion’s stock price tanked in the fall of 2022, losing more than 30% of its value from August to November. So the company came up with a bill that would have increased the profit margin for its Virginia utility from 9.35% to 10.77%. This number was calculated to improve Dominion’s standing on Wall Street but would cost consumers an extra $4 billion, according to the State Corporation Commission’s estimate. The company also expected to be able to defeat pro-consumer legislation that would return more authority over rates to the SCC.
Dominion’s bill was widely panned, but that hardly made it a non-starter. In past years, the company has gotten what it wanted more often than not, thanks to powerful friends like Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, D-Fairfax, and House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore, R-Scott. This is the beauty of doing business in a state that allows corporations, even public utilities, to supply unlimited campaign donations to elected officials. Over the years, Dominion’s contributions to Republican Kilgore nearly match its contributions to Democrat Saslaw. Most other General Assembly members get contributions from Dominion, too, helping to cement bipartisan support for the company’s priorities.
As the patrons of this year’s money bill, Saslaw and Kilgore should have been able to deliver enough votes from members of both parties to ensure a profitable outcome for their biggest campaign donor. They were not counting on the governor poking holes in the plan.
Dominion’s beating this year grew from seeds it sowed in 2021. That year, Dominion made a bad bet on Democrat Terry MacAuliffe to win the governorship, secretly funding a dark money group to run ads attacking Youngkin.
This year, Youngkin took his revenge. As a Wall Street guy himself, he knows how to hit a corporation where it hurts.
Youngkin forced Dominion to accept changes to the bill that increase the company’s return on equity modestly (and only temporarily), but take away other avenues of profit. Adding insult to injury, the General Assembly also adopted the pro-consumer legislation that allows the SCC to set “fair and reasonable” rates in the future.
Dominion declared itself satisfied with the result, but Wall Street judged otherwise. The company’s stock, which had started to rally in January, reached a ten-year low this spring.
Aside from punishing Dominion, the governor achieved none of his energy goals in the legislative session. Rolling back the VCEA, exiting RGGI through legislation, reversing the Clean Car Standard — none of that happened. And as long as the Democrats keep control of at least one chamber in the General Assembly in this fall’s election, none of that is likely to happen.
So Dominion’s IRP violates Virginia’s laws and the public’s trust (such as it is), makes a mockery of its own climate plan and proposes “solutions” that will drive up both costs and carbon emissions. As a plan, it can’t be taken seriously.
All that, however, is beside the point. It makes the governor happy. And what makes the governor happy, Dominion hopes, will make its shareholders happy.
That assumes the shareholders don’t care about climate change, or that they hold values that are as malleable as those of Dominion CEO Bob Blue and the rest of the company’s leadership.
Climate change? What climate change?
An earlier version of this article was published in the Virginia Mercury on May 10, 2023.
Power for the People VA 