Tag Archives: data centers

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Is it too hot for common sense?

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smokestack
Photo credit Stiller Beobachter

Maybe it’s the heat. Heat-addled brains might explain the thinking of many Virginia lawmakers that what we need to do right now is burn more fossil fuels. 

Scientists have documented the way high temperatures affect the brain, impairing cognition and causing impulsivity and trouble concentrating. And this summer is already starting out hot, which is saying something given that 2024 was the hottest year on record, bumping 2023 off its baking pedestal. Scientists say this global fever is the natural result of burning fossil fuels and driving CO2 levels to their highest in millions of years.

Since burning more fossil fuels will drive more global warming, it’s exactly the reverse of what we should be doing.  Yes, but, these state leaders respond, how else are we going to power ever more data centers? 

Northern Virginia is the data center capital of the world, and data centers are notoriously power-hungry. Without them, Virginia electricity demand would be flat, and we could easily meet our electricity needs while gradually decarbonizing along the pathway laid out in the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA).

Instead, Virginia taxpayers subsidize some of the richest corporations in America to the tune of almost a billion dollarsevery year to entice them to rip up land in Loudoun, Prince William and other Virginia counties instead of Atlanta or Dallas. In return, the tech companies keep construction workers busy, underwrite their host counties’ finances, make life miserable for nearby residents, raise everyone’s power bills, drain our rivers and aquifers and pollute our air with enough diesel generators to light up a major city.  

Virginia legislators obviously consider this a fair deal, because that’s what they keep voting for. Whether their constituents agree is another question; the evidence says they don’t.

For anyone just getting up to speed on data center issues, the Virginia Sierra Club’s new report, “Unconstrained Demand: Virginia’s Data Center Expansion and Its Impacts” (to which I contributed), covers the current state of data center development in Virginia and the problems that come with it. Fun fact: More than half of all the nation’s energy consumption attributed to data centers occurs in Virginia. 

That puts a special burden of leadership on our lawmakers. If we allow data centers to undermine our sustainability efforts here, we can only expect a race to the bottom in other states. As Virginia goes, so goes the nation. 

And yet we haven’t heard much outcry from Virginia leaders against the plans of our largest utility to build new generating plants powered by fracked gas. Dominion Energy laid out its plans in its 2024 integrated resource plan as well as a proposal for a 944 megawatts of gas combustion turbines in Chesterfield now pending before the State Corporation Commission. 

Dominion and its allies say more gas is needed for reliability, which could make it allowable under the VCEA. Indeed, “reliability” is a word that fossil fuel advocates frequently toss down like a trump card (in the unpresidential sense but with the same lack of thoughtful analysis). The claim is suspect. Fussing about reliability when your state ranks 24th in the nation for renewable energy is like worrying about the taxes you’ll owe if you win the lottery: we should be so lucky. 

Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Republican legislators are explicit in wanting to see the VCEA repealed and more gas plants built. Democrats defend the VCEA’s goals, but worry about the challenges of implementation and the effect on electricity rates. They all cite data center demand as the reason they contemplate backsliding on clean energy.

I wish I could say that our rich and powerful tech companies were aggressively championing carbon-free energy for their data centers in Virginia, but they are not. I attended a meeting of the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation where legislators were hashing out the problems of too much demand and too little supply. Representatives from the Data Center Coalition stood in the back of the room, observing but refusing to engage. Out of sight, they successfully lobbied against any bills that would slow the data center boom, force them to absorb more of its costs, or require them to source their own clean energy. 

Publicly, many tech companies tout their commitments to decarbonization. Amazon says it even met its goal to run its operations entirely on renewable energy. Yes, and I’m the Queen of Sheba. In fact, these companies are in a fierce competition to develop artificial intelligence as fast as possible. They’d like carbon-free power, but really, they’ll take whatever energy they can get wherever they can get it, and even among the industry’s best actors, climate now takes a back seat. 

Yet the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos would not be significantly worse off if forced to meet their climate commitments. Virginia leaders know – or at any rate, they have been exposed to the information, which I realize is not the same thing – that building new fossil gas generating plants is not just bad for the planet but more expensive than pursuing carbon-free alternatives.

Oh, I know, Congress just yanked back the federal tax incentives that helped make wind and solar as cheap as it is, one of the myriad ill-considered elements of the big beautiful debt bomb Republicans adopted against everyone’s better judgment. (Apparently heat affects spines as well as brains.) With passage of that bill, developers will need to have begun construction on new facilities by this time next year in order to qualify for the existing tax credits. 

There will be a mad rush to get construction underway immediately for facilities in the development pipeline. Thereafter, projects on the margin won’t get built. But others will, because even the loss of federal subsidies won’t destroy solar’s competitive edge against most new-build gas. 

Even so, utilities and their customers will pay higher prices for unsubsidized new renewable energy – as well as for existing fossil fuel generation that will command higher prices in the coming supply crunch. The Clean Energy Buyers Association estimates that commercial electricity costs in Virginia will be about 10% higher after the phase-out of federal incentives. 

A years-long backlog for orders of gas turbines will further squeeze energy supply and drive up prices for fossil power. On the plus side, the lack of available turbines will make fast-to-deploy solar not just the better option, but sometimes the only option.

I’ve never understood the conservative love affair with fossil fuels, when today’s clean technology is cleaner, cheaper and quicker to deploy. Trump would like to crush wind and solar altogether, which would eliminate 90% of the power capacity waiting to be connected to the grid and catapult the U.S into a serious energy crisis. In addition to much higher power prices, observers warn we would likely see a loss of data centers and other energy-intensive industries to parts of the world that are not on a mission to kill low-cost clean energy. 

Well, that would be one way to rid Virginia of the data center scourge.

Fortunately, the worst attacks on solar in Trump’s budget bomb did not survive, but the bill should nonetheless serve as a wake-up call for Virginia leaders. With little time left to secure federal clean energy incentives, our utilities need to acquire all the solar and storage they can right now. With or without data centers, locking in as much fuel-free generation as possible while it’s available at a discount is a prudent move to avoid the coming shortages and escalating costs of energy.

As for the tech companies, lawmakers should embrace the simplest approach to this problem, which happens also to be the one that spares ordinary Virginians from bearing the costs of the data center buildout: shifting responsibility for sourcing electricity onto the companies themselves, and requiring that they live up to their climate claims by making the power they buy carbon-free. 

It’s an approach other states can follow, holding Big Tech to the same responsibility no matter where they put their data centers. Certainly the tech titans can afford it; they just won big with massive tax cuts that our poorest residents will pay for. 

No doubt they will complain. Everyone would like somebody else to pay for what benefits them. But Virginians can’t afford to subsidize Big Tech, and we don’t want to. 

As for those legislators who think we should continue to do it anyway – well, all I can think is, it’s got to be the heat.

This article was originally published on July 8, 2025. On July 7, President Trump signed an executive order directing cabinet members to find more ways to hobble wind and solar energy, including directing the Secretary of the Treasury to interpret “beginning of construction” in a way that requires “a substantial portion” of a facility to have been built in order to qualify for tax incentives, counter to current regulation.

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Facing data center sprawl and an energy crisis, Virginia legislators leap into action. Nah, just kidding.

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This was supposed to be the year the General Assembly did something about data centers. Two years ago, it crushed the first tentative efforts to regulate construction, choosing instead to goose the pace. Last year it again killed all attempts at regulation, punting in favor of a study by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC). 

JLARC’s report was released in December to a soundtrack of alarm bells ringing. Unconstrained data center growth is projected to triple electricity demand in Virginia over just the next 15 years, outstripping the state’s ability to build new generation and driving up utility bills for everyone. On top of the energy problem, the industry’s growth is taxing water supplies and spawning billions of dollars’ worth of transmission infrastructure projects needed to serve the industry.

Yet the most popular strategy for addressing the biggest energy crisis ever to face Virginia is to continue the status quo – that is to say, to keep the data center sprawl sprawling. Of the two dozen or so bills introduced this year that would put restrictions on growth, manage its consequences, or impose transparency requirements, barely a handful have survived to the session’s halfway point this week. 

The surviving initiatives address important aspects of local siting, ratepayer protection and energy, though they will face efforts to further weaken them in the second half of the session. Even if the strongest bills pass, though, they will not rein in the industry, provide comprehensive oversight or address serious resource adequacy problems. 

HB1601 from Del. Josh Thomas, D-Gainesville, is the most meaningful bill to address the siting of data centers. It requires site assessments for facilities over 100 MW to examine the sound profile of facilities near residential communities and schools. It also allows localities to require site assessments to examine effects on water and agricultural resources, parks, historic sites or forests. In addition, before approving a rezoning, special exception or special use permit, the locality must require the utility that is serving the facility to describe any new electric generating units, substations and transmission voltage that will be required. Existing sites that are seeking to expand by less than 100 MW are excluded. HB1601 passed the House 57-40, with several Republicans joining all Democrats in favor. 

SB1449 from Sen. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, is similar to HB1601 but does not include the language on electricity and transmission lines. SB1449 passed the Senate 33-6. 

Typically, when the House and the Senate each pass similar but different bills, they each try to make the other chamber’s bill look like theirs, then work out the differences in a conference committee. If that happens here, the House will amend SB1449 to conform it to HB1601 before passing it. The Senate might amend the House bill to match its own. In this case, however, Ebbin’s bill never had the language on electricity and transmission. It’s possible the Senate will recognize that HB1601 is better and pass it as is rather than watering it down to match SB1449; otherwise, the bills will have to go to conference.

Only two ratepayer protection bills passed.  SB960 from Sen. Russet Perry, D-Leesburg, is the better of the two. It requires the SCC to determine if non-data center customers are subsidizing data centers or incurring costs for new infrastructure that is needed only because of data center demand; if so, the SCC is to take steps to eliminate or minimize the cross-subsidy. The bill incorporates a similar measure from Sen. Richard Stuart, R-Westmoreland. It passed the Senate by a healthy 26-13, but leaves the question of why those 13 Republicans voted against a bill designed to protect residential customers from higher rates. 

Over in the House, HB2084 from Del. Irene Shin, D-Herndon, started out similar to Perry’s bill but was weakened in committee to the point that its usefulness is questionable. It now merely requires the SCC to use its existing authority during a regular proceeding sometime in the next couple of years to determine whether Dominion and Appalachian Power are using reasonable customer classifications in setting rates, and if not, whether new classifications are reasonable. It passed the House 61-35. Hopefully the House will see the wisdom of adopting SB960 as the better bill, but again, these could end up going to conference.

The only data center legislation related to energy use to have made it this far is SB1047 from Sen. Danica Roem, D-Manassas. It requires utilities to implement demand-response programs for customers with a power demand of more than 25 MW, which could help relieve grid constraints. It passed the Senate 21-17.

The data center industry and its labor allies were successful in killing all other data center initiatives, including the only bills that dealt with the energy issues head-on. This included legislation that basically called on the industry to live up to its sustainability claims. SB1196, Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville and HB2578, Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, would have conditioned state tax subsidies on data centers meeting conditions for energy efficiency, zero-carbon energy and cleaner back-up generators. Sullivan’s bill also set up pathways for data center developers to meet the energy requirements and work towards cleaner operations.

None of this mattered. Republicans were united in their determination not to put anything in the way of continued data center sprawl, and they were joined by a number of Democrats who were persuaded that requiring corporations to act responsibly threatens construction jobs. HB2578 died in subcommittee, with Democrats Charniele Herring and Alfonso Lopez joining Republicans in voting to table the bill. SB1196 was never even granted a committee hearing. 

Yet the idea of adding conditions to the tax subsidies is not dead. Senator Deeds put in a budget amendment to secure the efficiency requirements that had been in his bill. His amendment takes on a House budget amendment requested by Delegate Terry Kilgore, R-Gate City, that extends the tax subsidies out to 2050 from their current sunset date of 2035, with no new conditions whatsoever. 

It seems like a reasonable ask for the tech industry to meet some efficiency requirements in exchange for billions of dollars in subsidies and the raiding of Virginia’s water and energy supplies. Indeed, the industry could have had it worse. Senator Stuart had introduced a bill to end the tax subsidies Virginia provides to data centers altogether. Alas, like several other more ambitious bills intended to bring accountability to the data center industry, it failed to even get a hearing in committee.  

Now, maybe Virginia will get lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you look at it – and the data center boom will go bust. The flurry of excitement around China’s bid to provide artificial intelligence at a fraction of the cost of American tech joins other news items about efficiency breakthroughs that could mean the tech industry needs far fewer data centers, using far less energy and water. That would be good for the planet, not to mention Virginia ratepayers, but it would leave a lot of empty buildings, upend local budgets, and strand potentially billions of dollars in new generation and transmission infrastructure. A little preparation and contingency planning would seem to have been the wiser course.  

Failed bills.

Most bills to regulate data centers never made it out of committee, but the problems of data center sprawl and resource consumption will only increase in coming years. In addition to the energy legislation from Senator Deeds and Delegate Sullivan, here are other bills we may see come back again in another form. 

SB1448 from Sen. Richard Stuart, R-Westmoreland, would have required any new resource-intensive facility (defined as drawing more than 100 MW or requiring more than 500,000 gallons of water per day) to get a permit from the Department of Environmental Quality. DEQ is to permit the facility only “upon a finding that such facility will have no material adverse impact on the public health or environment.” The impacts are broadly defined and include transmission lines and cumulative impacts from multiple facilities in the same area. The bill reported from Senate Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources but was then sent to Finance and Appropriations, never to be heard from again. 

A bill from Del. Thomas would have required localities to change their zoning ordinances to designate data centers as industrial uses and to consider changes in how they evaluate data center siting, especially around noise impacts. HB2026 was tabled unanimously in subcommittee. 

HB2712 from Del. Ian Lovejoy, D-Manassas, would have authorized a locality that is weighing a permit application for a data center to consider factors like water use, noise and power usage, and to require the applicant to provide studies and other information. It lost on a bipartisan subcommittee vote. 

Lovejoy’s HB1984 would have required data centers to be located at least one-quarter mile from parks, schools and residential neighborhoods. It was killed on an 8-0 subcommittee vote. 

A third Lovejoy bill, HB2684, would have required Dominion to file a plan with the SCC every two years to address the risk that infrastructure built to serve data centers might become stranded assets that other customers would be left paying for. It was never docketed. 

A bill that did not mention data centers but originated with local fights over the siting of transmission lines needed to serve them was Roem’s SB1049. It would have prohibited new overhead transmission lines unless the SCC determined that putting them underground was not in the public interest. It lost in a 4-11 vote in committee.  

This article (minus the section on failed bills) was published in the Virginia Mercury on February 10, 2025.

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The data center energy crisis is now official

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

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a politician in possession of elected office must be in want of large economic development projects. 

It does not seem to matter that in the case of Virginia, this compulsion is catapulting us into a costly energy crisis that will raise utility bills for residents; that the public shows no love for this industry; and that the benefits to be gained (mostly in the form of construction jobs) will continue only as long as new projects follow one another in perpetuity until the landscape is consumed by concrete and transmission wires. 

To the credit of the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC), however, it has tried to sound the alarm. JLARC’s report, “Data Centers in Virginia,” released December 9, describes the challenges facing the state as a result of the massive, ongoing buildout of this astoundingly resource-intensive industry. Many of JLARC’s conclusions seem way too sanguine to me, especially around risks to regional water supplies and air pollution from diesel generators, and the policy options it offers don’t always hit the mark.

But on the threat to Virginia’s energy supply, JLARC is blunt: Building enough infrastructure to provide electricity for even just half the data centers projected for development across the state will be difficult, requiring far more generating facilities than are under development today. 

As for the current policy of allowing completely unconstrained data center growth – indeed, subsidizing it as we do now with tax exemptions to the tune of nearly a billion dollars per year – JLARC notes we are headed for a tripling of the state’s electricity usage over just the next decade and a half.  Meeting that much demand, says the report, would be “very difficult to achieve,” even if the state jettisoned the carbon emission limits imposed by the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA).

For those of you unfamiliar with the vocabulary of bureaucrats, “very difficult to achieve” is a term of art that translates roughly as, “This is nuts.”

It might have been better if JLARC had employed the vernacular, because as it is, Virginia’s elected leaders will probably take “very difficult” to be a sort of heroic challenge, like beating the Russians to the moon, when what JLARC means is more like achieving lasting peace in the Middle East. 

One problem is cost. The law of supply and demand dictates that a massive increase in energy demand that isn’t matched by an equally massive increase in energy supply will lead to higher prices for all customers. Yet new energy projects cost money, and under traditional ratemaking principles that also means higher rates for everyone. The result is that it will be impossible to protect residents from higher utility bills, unless changes are made to the way costs get allocated. 

(Figuring out how to protect residents and other non-data center customers is currently a focus of the State Corporation Commission, which held a technical conference on data centers on December 16th. Judging by what the experts it convened had to say, the SCC has its work cut out for it.) 

Even if ordinary residents could be protected, the bigger problem is that increasing the supply of energy to keep up with soaring data center demand will not be easy, fast or cheap. JLARC warns that providing enough low-cost energy requires that gas plants, solar facilities, battery projects and transmission lines all be built at a pace Virginia has never achieved before, along with onshore wind farms that have never found takers here (though that may be changing), offshore wind projects that currently lack a pathway to development, and starting ten years from now, new nuclear plants in the form of small modular reactors (SMRs) that haven’t yet achieved commercial viability.

Moreover, most of that new generation and transmission will have to overcome local opposition. On the gas side, Dominion Energy’s plans for a new plant in Chesterfield County face fierce resistance from the local community, which argues it has been burdened by fossil fuel pollution for too many years already. Why should residents suffer to benefit Big Tech?

Clean energy also struggles at the local level. Industry representatives told members of the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation (CEUR) on December 17 that more than 30 localities have effectively banned utility solar projects within their borders. Rural leaders openly take pride in their prejudice against solar. Yet legislators are squeamish about overriding local siting authority, even when counties that welcome data centers turn down the solar facilities needed to power them. 

And of course, generation projects involve willing landowners. When it comes to transmission lines that are forced on property owners through eminent domain – many of which will be needed only to carry power to data centers – the public backlash is typically even greater.

Given so much local resistance to new generation and transmission, the fact that so many legislators nonetheless remain wedded to the data center buildout testifies to the ability of the human mind to compartmentalize. 

For legislators who care about climate, JLARC has more bad news: Fully half the new data center growth coming to Virginia is slated to occur in the territories of rural electric cooperatives, which are largely unaffected by VCEA limits. In addition, very large customers of Dominion and APCo have their own VCEA loophole: if they meet certain requirements, they can leave their utility to buy power from competitive service providers. Thus, if Virginia is serious about decarbonization, it will have to tighten, not loosen, the VCEA.

The report comes with some caveats. JLARC used a team of consultants to model approaches to meeting the supply gaps, and a lot of assumptions go into the consultant’s report without a lot of details. The consultant group says it chose its mix of resources with a view to least cost, but it acknowledges that different assumptions would change the results. It may not have accounted for the fact that renewable energy and storage prices continue to drop; meanwhile, fossil gas prices are so volatile that the one certain  thing you can say about any price forecast is that it will be wrong. Moreover, it appears the effects of re-entering the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative were not modeled; nor were the social costs of carbon, both of which favor zero-emission sources over fossil fuel plants. 

Where there are details, some beg to be questioned. Both the consultants and JLARC take for granted that a shortage of generation in Virginia can be made up by importing electricity from other states. An easy way out, sure, but it works only if other states are producing a surplus. Unless tech companies are required to secure their own carbon-free energy supply, there is no way to guarantee imports will be available. Contrary to one of JLARC’s suggestions, then, retail choice should not be curtailed. The better move is to expand shopping options for large customers, so long as the electricity they buy is zero-carbon.

Even more suspect is the idea that, in order to comply with the VCEA, all gas plants will convert to burning green hydrogen in 2045. The report might as well say, “and then a miracle occurs.” A miracle would be more likely.

However unserious, hydrogen as a placeholder for any hoped-for technology that isn’t available today demonstrates the fundamental problem confronting Virginia’s damn-the-torpedoes approach to data centers. A refusal to put constraints on the buildout means taking a leap into the unknown and hoping something will happen to save us from the consequences of our profligacy.

And sure, maybe it will work out. Legislators tend to be optimists, and they are already betting on bright, shiny objects like SMRs, fusion, and anything else not close enough for its costs and drawbacks to be fully evident. (Not that I’m immune, but personally I’m betting on advanced geothermal, which is not just bright and shiny but already here.) And hey, for all we know, artificial intelligence, the technology most culpable for today’s energy crisis, might even produce some unexpected new energy source. 

Or it might not. Given that most of the data center buildout will happen in just the next five years, we might need an actual miracle. 

On the flip side, maybe new technology will reduce the energy demand of data centers by orders of magnitude. That would be a fantastic outcome from the standpoint of climate, water and energy — though it would end the construction gravy train in Virginia and leave a wasteland of empty concrete warehouses and stranded energy infrastructure.

Either way, the unconstrained buildout of data centers has handed Virginia leaders a problem that is, in the parlance of JLARC, “very difficult” indeed.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Virginia Mercury on December 24, 2024.

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Data centers approved, solar farms rejected: What is going on in rural Virginia?

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If Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly are aligned on one thing, it’s their enthusiasm for bringing more data centers to the commonwealth. Where they part ways is in how to provide enough electricity to power them. Youngkin and most Republican legislators advocate for an “all of the above” approach that includes fossil gas as well as renewables; Democrats are committed to staying the course on the transition to zero-carbon energy, with a near-term emphasis on low-cost solar. 

Data centers are making the transition harder, but so is local resistance to building solar. General Assembly members mostly understand the connection, leading to a lively debate in last year’s legislative session over whether to override some local permit denials for solar projects – and if so, how to ensure the localities still have some say. Though none of the legislative proposals moved forward last year, the topic has become a central one for the recently revamped Commission on Electric Utility Regulation (CEUR). 

In January, the General Assembly is likely to consider legislation to override local solar permit denials in some cases, such as last year’s HB636 from Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, or another approach that would break the solar logjam. It remains to be seen, however,  whether legislators will take any action on data centers.

The problem has grown only more urgent as localities have continued to approve new data center proposals with little thought given to where and how they will get the power to serve them.

Ann Bennett, Sierra Club Virginia’s data center chair, has been tracking data center permit applications across the state. She counts at least two dozen Virginia counties with data centers under development, including rural areas far outside the industry’s stronghold in suburban Northern Virginia. By Bennett’s calculation, data centers existing and under development in Virginia will consume at least 100,000 acres. 

Even as local governments woo data centers, many have become hostile to solar development. A presentation from the Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia, which tracks solar permitting across Virginia, shows that far more local permits for solar facilities have been denied or withdrawn than were approved this year. 

In some cases, county boards that approve data center development also reject permits for solar farms. Sometimes, it happens even at the same meeting.

In an effort to understand this paradox, I watched footage from two county board meetings in Hanover County, one in March of this year and the other in September. At the March meeting, county supervisors approved a 1,200-acre data center complex for an area north of Ashland. Later the same night, they denied a permit for a utility-scale solar project. 

The parcels of land slated to be developed for the data center complex “included wooded areas, recently-logged areas, open fields, wetlands, ponds and stream corridors.” The developer plans to build about 30 data centers on the property, each 110 feet tall (about 10 stories), with setbacks from the property line ranging from 150 to 250 feet. The complex will require 700,000 gallons per day of cooling water. When fully developed, the data centers are expected to total a staggering 2,400 megawatts (MW) of power capacity, not far short of what all of Loudoun County had in 2022. There was no discussion of where so much electricity would come from. 

Public testimony was overwhelmingly negative. The objections echoed those that have been widely reported in response to projects such as the Prince William Digital Gateway: noise, light, a massive increase in truck traffic, secrecy surrounding the project, air pollution from diesel back-up generators. 

Yet the Hanover supervisors voted unanimously in favor of the project. It came down to money: the developer promised a tax benefit to the county over 20 years of $1.8 billion, plus upfront cash for road improvements and a $100,000 donation to a park. Supervisor Jeff Stoneman, who represents the Beaverdam district where the complex will be located, acknowledged his constituents’ concerns but noted that the revenue would be a “game-changer for this community.” 

Even for me, as thoroughly aware as I am of all the downsides of data center sprawl, the negative impacts on communities, the risks to our water and energy security, the possibility that folks will be left with nothing but regrets – well, I just have to say: It’s really hard to argue with $1.8 billion. Rural leaders see Loudoun County raking in revenue from data centers, letting it cut taxes for everyone else. Why wouldn’t they want in on that?

As I noted before, though, there was no discussion of how or where the enormous amount of electricity needed to power the data centers would be generated. This disconnect was underscored later in the same meeting when the supervisors voted to reject a 20 MW solar project on 100 acres of a 315-acre site, in the same district as the data center complex they had just approved. 

https://virginiamercury.com/2024/11/26/under-pressure-from-the-scc-dominion-reveals-the-true-cost-of-data-centers/embed/#?secret=jfq5xtYiIk#?secret=eWAcqNFGWg

It was especially hard to understand the denial of this particular permit. Supervisors agreed the project met all the terms of the county’s solar ordinance, including provisions for the use of native grasses and pollinator plants. Most of the property would remain untouched. The county would receive an upfront cash contribution of $438,600, in addition to the increased tax revenue from the project. The planning commission had recommended approval. No one testified against it; a number of people, including the farmer across the street, testified in its favor.  

Most of the discussion of the project focused on screening the solar panels from view. Supervisors fussed that the trees to be planted at the entrance were too small, and worried that some of the existing mature trees along the road might die off over time and not be replaced. The developer agreed to put larger trees at the entrance, and even to walk the perimeter annually to monitor the health of the trees, and replace any if they needed to.

It was no use. Two of the supervisors wanted to approve the project, but they were outvoted. Stoneman, the Beaverdam supervisor who had led the way in supporting the data center complex, said he worried that erosion might impair the creek on the property, in spite of ample natural buffers, and said he did not have a “comfort level” with the project.

Evidently, the county’s solar ordinance, adopted in 2023, was irrelevant, or at least, misleading. Such objective standards make a developer think it will be worth their while to put in months of planning, public outreach, and working with county staff. But then it turns out that what actually matters is whether a supervisor can achieve a certain undefined “comfort level.” 

Six months after the approval of the 2,400 MW data center complex and the denial of the 20 MW solar facility, another solar project met the same fate, again with Stoneman making the motion to deny the permit. 

This time the project would take up 250 acres of a 1,500-acre site and produce 72 MW of electricity, achieved through stacking the panels to a double height. Again, the project more than met the requirements of the county solar ordinance. The land was described as currently consisting of managed pine forest, already subject to being cut over at any time, and fully 70% of the property would be preserved for conservation. Native grasses would be planted, and sheep would do most of the vegetation management. The shepherd, Marcus Gray of Gray’s Lambscaping, attended the hearing to describe the sheep operations he runs successfully at other solar sites.  

Approval of the project would earn the county roughly $1.7 million upfront, and $300,000 in annual tax revenue. 

Supervisors praised the developer for “a really good application” that “respected” the ordinance and the environment, for the company’s willingness to listen and respond to concerns, and for agreeing to build stormwater basins and sacrifice buildable space in favor of conservation. 

Several members of the public testified in favor of the project, but this time there were also opponents. Some of them repeated common myths about solar panel toxicity and the risk of fires. One woman stated flatly, and obviously incorrectly, that it was not possible to raise sheep at a solar farm because they would die from the heat. 

The supervisors themselves did not appear ill-informed or misinformed, though one expressed surprise that Gray could successfully sell his lamb at farmers markets when buyers knew where they had been raised. (Watching, I could only laugh, because I’ve always thought of the solar-sheep synergy as a great selling point for climate-conscious carnivores.) 

The concern raised most often was the risk of impacts to the nearby North Anna River, though the developer had agreed to shrink the project to accommodate a much greater setback from the river than required. 

Ultimately, however, Supervisor Stoneman’s argument for denying the permit rested on a different argument. He praised the developer for doing a good job, and noted the project was in accordance with all requirements. But, he said, “Beaverdam is just a different place.” People take pride in the rural character and forest and farmland. Our job, he noted, is to protect the trees that are harvested on the site currently, something “that is as important as the power.” 

“Money is not the most important thing,” concluded the man who led the cheering squad for a data center complex in his district six months earlier.  

The two supervisors who had supported the smaller solar facility that had been rejected in March made their best arguments for this project as well, though they ultimately voted with Stoneman as the home supervisor. One said she supported solar “because I’m pro-farm,” and solar is a way to preserve farmland from development. The other noted that the land would certainly be developed one way or another, and the results would almost certainly be worse. Maintaining rural culture is important, he noted, but “we are approving residential development and seeing by-right development that people don’t want either.”

He also warned his colleagues, as he had in the spring, that rejecting good solar projects was going to result in legislation that would take away local authority and give it to the unelected State Corporation Commission. He said he would go along with Stoneman’s motion to deny the permit because “I assume he knows something,” but he made it clear he considered it the wrong decision, and a dangerous one for local autonomy.

Evidently, he had been paying attention to the conversation at the General Assembly.

To be clear, my sympathies lie wholeheartedly with people whose instincts are to protect the woods and fields around them. I share the one Hanover supervisor’s belief that solar is a means to preserve land from permanent development and even improve soil health and wildlife habitat, but I also understand it may be years before some people see sheep grazing under solar panels as a welcome feature in their landscape. 

So I get how a rural county, having sold a little bit of its soul for $1.8 billion, might then slam the door to other development, even after applicants had worked with the county for months in good faith and done everything asked for. 

It’s not a choice I’d make – I’d take solar over data centers every time – but then, no one made it the county’s responsibility to contribute electricity to the grid that serves it, much less to produce the electricity needed to run the data centers it embraced.

This article originally appeared in the Virginia Mercury on December 3, 2024.

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Under pressure from the SCC, Dominion reveals the true cost of data centers

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New filing shows electricity demand would be flat without the industry

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

Ever since data centers started spreading across the Virginia landscape like an invasive pest, one important question has remained unanswered: How much does the industry’s insatiable demand for energy impact other utility customers? Under pressure from the SCC, this month Dominion Energy Virginia finally provided the answer we feared: Ordinary Virginia customers are subsidizing Big Tech with both their money and their health.

Dominion previously hid data centers among the rest of its customer base, making it impossible to figure out if residents were paying more than their fair share of the costs of building new generation and transmission lines. Worse, if data centers are the reason for burning more fossil fuels, then they are also responsible for residents being subjected to pollution that is supposed to be eliminated under the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA). The VCEA calls for most coal plants in the state to be closed by the end of this year – which is not happening – and sets rigorous conditions before utilities can build any new fossil fuel plants. 

Dominion’s 2023 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), filed a year and a half ago, projected steep increases in energy demand and the cost of electricity. The utility asserted that for reliability purposes it needed to keep coal plants operating, build new methane gas generating units without meeting the VCEA’s conditions, and add small nuclear reactors beginning in 2034.

Dominion’s failure to file a plan that complied with the VCEA led to an unusual stalemate at the SCC, with the IRP neither approved nor rejected. Ignoring the foul-weather warning, Dominion filed a similarly-flawed 2024 IRP in October.  None of the modeled scenarios showed coal plants closing, none met the energy efficiency requirements set by law, and all proposed building new gas and nuclear reactors, with the first small nuclear plant now pushed off to 2035.

Neither of the two filings separated out the role of data centers in driving the changes. 

Even before the 2024 IRP was filed, though, the SCC directed the utility to file a supplement. It was obvious the IRP would project higher costs and increased use of fossil fuels. How much of that, the SCC demanded to know, is attributable to data centers? 

A lot, as it turns out. Though Dominion continues to obfuscate key facts, the document it filed on November 15 shows future data center growth will drive up utility spending by about 20%. Dominion did not take the analysis further to show the effect on residential rates.  

The filing also shows that but for new data centers, peak demand would actually decrease slightly over the next few years, from 17,353 MW this year to 17,280 MW in 2027, before beginning a gentle rise to 17,818 MW in 2034 and 18,608 MW in 2039. 

In other words, without data centers, electricity use in Dominion territory would scarcely budge over the next decade. Indeed, the slight decrease over the next three years is especially interesting because near-term numbers tend to be the most reliable, with projections getting more speculative the further out you look.  

Surprised? You’re not alone. We’ve heard for years that electric vehicles and building electrification will drive large increases in energy demand. When Dominion talks about the challenges of load growth, it cites these factors along with data centers, suggesting that ordinary people are part of the problem. We’re not. 

Decreasing demand is a testament to the profound effect of energy efficiency, as advances in things like lighting, heat pumps and other appliances allow consumers to do more with less. Presumably, the electrification of transportation and buildings will eventually outpace gains in efficiency – no doubt reflected in the projections for slightly increasing demand over the 2030s – but the effect is still modest. Electrification is not to blame for demand growth; data centers are.

In a future without new data centers, there should be no reason for Virginia’s energy transition to get off track. Solar, offshore wind and battery storage could increasingly displace fossil fuels, clean our air and bring down greenhouse gas emissions at an orderly pace. 

At least, that’s the intuitive result, though Dominion fights hard to counter it. The new filing is supposed to show what a VCEA-compliant plan would look like without data centers, but it retains assumptions from its IRPs that skew the results in favor of fossil fuels. These include limiting energy efficiency and artificially capping the amounts of solar and storage that its computer model could select. Obviously, if you won’t invest in low-cost energy efficiency and solar, you need more of something else. 

Dominion’s computer model also doesn’t choose offshore wind in spite of the fact that the 2,600-MW Virginia Coastal Offshore Wind project is under construction. No doubt the higher cost of offshore wind is responsible for this counter-factual omission, but again, leaving it out requires that something else be selected. Nuclear similarly doesn’t make the cut due to cost. 

By limiting or eliminating all zero-carbon options, Dominion would like you to conclude that, with or without data centers, it “needs” more gas plants.

There are other reasons to be skeptical of this manufactured result. As with the 2024 IRP itself, Dominion does not appear to have incorporated the social cost of carbon in its supposedly-VCEA-compliant plan, a mandatory consideration for any new fossil fuel generation. It’s also worth noting that Dominion will once again have to buy carbon emission allowances to run its coal and gas plants now that a court has nullified Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s illegal withdrawal of Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). (Youngkin has vowed to appeal.) 

On the other hand, President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress seem likely to overturn new EPA regulations tightening pollution standards for fossil fuel plants. That would make fossil fuels appear cheaper by shifting costs onto residents in the form of worse health outcomes and climate-related weather disasters. 

In addition to showing what the energy mix might look like without data centers, the SCC directed Dominion to identify which of its approximately 200 planned transmission projects were needed solely because of data centers. The 4-page table in Dominion’s supplemental filing reveals that about half of the projects are solely data center-driven, with two or three dozen more serving a mix of customers that includes data centers. I tried to add up the numbers but lost track at a billion dollars’ worth of projects needed solely for data centers – and I was still on the second page. 

There is one more caveat to keep in mind. Since the SCC’s order applied only to future growth, Dominion’s new numbers don’t show the cost and energy impact of data centers in operation today. Data centers already make up a quarter of Dominion’s sales, and that growth was the main reason the utility pivoted back to fossil fuels in its 2023 IRP. 

Still, most of the data center growth lies ahead of us, as does Dominion’s plans for new fossil fuel and nuclear generation. With state leaders avidly chasing more data centers in the name of economic development, ordinary Virginians are left to watch the assault on their energy supply, their water, and their environment and wonder: Is anyone going to fix this?

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on November 26, 2024.

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The clean energy revolution will continue

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Photo credit iid.com

Eight years ago last week, I wrote a column titled, “Why Trump won’t stop the clean energy revolution.” Calling global warming a hoax, businessman and reality TV star Donald J. Trump had just been elected with a promise to save coal jobs and pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. 

Climate activists were deeply distraught then, as now. I wrote in 2016, “Reading the news Wednesday morning was like waking up from a nightmare to discover that there really is a guy coming after you with a meat cleaver.”

But as I also wrote, there is only so much damage a president can do when technology, popular opinion and – especially – economics don’t support his agenda. Trump couldn’t save the coal industry (though he tried). Instead, his administration oversaw a 24% decline in coal employment. And where coal supplied 30% of U.S. electricity in 2016, by the time Trump left office it had fallen to 20%. 

In the intervening years, Trump seems to have lost interest in coal mining, even as he continues to embrace fossil gas production. His enthusiasm for gas fracking fits with his drill-baby-drill approach to energy, but it was also intended to win over voters in Pennsylvania, a major producer of shale gas. Ironically, the gas industry insists on calling methane “clean” precisely because burning it emits less CO2 than coal. 

While coal was dying, wind and solar were well on their upswing when Trump took office in 2017, and they continued to advance through his first administration. By 2020, wind and solar had become the cheapest forms of new electric generation. Today, renewable energy supplies more than 21% of the nation’s electricity, while coal’s share has dropped further, to just 16%. Trump or no Trump, technological advances and a thirst for cleaner energy continue to drive new wind and solar generation.

Indeed, the offshore wind industry – famously reviled by Trump – wasted no time last week in congratulating its erstwhile foe on his victory and insisting, hilariously, that his election is a big win for the industry. The first Trump administration, they noted hopefully, “laid out the fundamental framework for our modern offshore wind industry.”

Well, okay. From their lips to Trump’s ears. Trump is hardly known for consistency, and it is not impossible to imagine him softening his position on an industry that is creating well-paying jobs for the blue-collar workers who make up a portion of his base. His Virginia acolyte, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, boasts of overseeing the building of the nation’s largest offshore wind farm. Why shouldn’t Trump pivot? 

Early in the Republican primaries, one candidate opined that all the solar panels and batteries sold in the U.S. are made in China. That wasn’t actually true. For years one U.S. company, First Solar, has ranked among the world’s top ten solar panel manufacturers. Among the domestic manufacturers of both EVs and batteries, one of the largest is Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk is now a Trump darling. It is going to be fascinating to find out whether Musk uses his influence to benefit the clean energy transition generally, or only himself. 

Yet the notion that China dominates solar and battery production is also not wrong. China is eating our lunch on clean energy. Chinese companies produce 80% of the world’s solar panels and more than half of its electric vehicles. Sadly, perhaps, these are not cheap imitations of superior American products. They are world-leading technology. 

Chinese dominance of the world market was a major reason that President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), put so much emphasis on supporting domestic manufacturing. Tariffs on Chinese goods, Trump’s preferred approach, help U.S. companies compete for American consumers, but they don’t support an export market when other countries produce better goods for less money. Even at home, critics note, tariffs mostly just raise prices.

Yet Trump has vowed to repeal the IRA, and given that Congress passed it without Republican support, there is certainly a danger that a Republican Congress will comply. On the other hand, observers note that 80% of the manufacturing tax credits have gone to red states, and this August, 18 House Republicans signed a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson asking to keep the credits. 

I don’t want to sound too optimistic. Wait, let me rephrase that: I don’t feel optimistic at all. We are facing headwinds today that weren’t around in 2016. At that time, gains in energy efficiency meant electricity demand was not increasing, in spite of a growing population. With wind and solar displacing coal, there was a clear pathway for CO2 emissions from the electric sector to continue falling. 

Today, however, the skyrocketing demand for electricity from data centers threatens the progress we’ve made on clean energy. It remains to be seen whether artificial intelligence will unleash efficiency gains and novel technologies that can put carbon reductions back on track. Right now, though, tech companies are so desperate for power that they will take it from wherever they can get it, and regardless of carbon content.  (I notice, though, that they still want it to be cheap and are happy to greenwash it to meet their sustainability goals). 

Perhaps the biggest change from eight years ago is simply that we are that much closer to reaching catastrophic climate tipping points. 2023 was the warmest year on record, and 2024 is on track to surpass it. The effects are evident in the number and costliness of severe weather and wildfires made worse by global warming. (Just ask insurance companies.) It is frustrating, to say the least, to contemplate losing the next four years to an administration that thinks climate change wouldn’t be an issue if we would just stop talking about it.  

Yet Americans of all political stripes continue to support renewable energy by wide margins. And apart from a small minority of vocal climate deniers, most Americans want the U.S. to take stronger action on climate. 

This election revealed deep fault lines among the American public, but one thing we all have in common is the faith that our ability to solve intractable problems is stronger even than our tendency to wish the problems away. 

That’s why, even in the face of such serious headwinds, the clean energy revolution will continue. 

This column was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on November 12, 2024.

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Geothermal energy is having a moment. Could it power Virginia’s data centers?

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National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Drill down far enough into the earth, and you will hit hot rocks. Energy companies have used this heat to generate carbon-free electricity for more than a century. It’s an elegant concept, but it worked only where pockets of heat lay close to the surface, accompanied by steam ready-made to turn turbines. Those limitations confined geothermal power plants to geologically active areas like Iceland, parts of Indonesia, and a few locations in the American West. As of 2023, geothermal energy made up less than half of 1% of U.S. electricity generation. 

Suddenly, that is changing. New technology derived from oil and gas fracking methods is allowing energy companies to drill deep into the earth in places far from geologic activity. Wells can reach miles beneath the surface before branching out horizontally and creating fissures in hard, hot rock. Water injected into the wells comes back to the surface as steam to generate electricity. The steam is recaptured and re-injected to take up heat again, in a virtuous cycle powered by the earth itself. 

The benefits

These “enhanced geothermal” systems can produce 24/7 baseload electricity or fill in around variable sources like wind and solar. They can even be used like batteries to store energy, including for long durations.   

Unlike drilling for fossil fuels, geothermal companies avoid the shale formations that hold hydrocarbons, instead targeting non-porous rock. And since the product is not fossil fuel but steam, the technology produces zero-carbon energy without toxic or radioactive waste. 

Freed from geographic limitations and using the same technology and workforce as the oil and gas industry, geothermal energy is ready to take off fast. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sees it spreading across the country to provide as much as 125 gigawatts (GW) of electricity by 2050. A global estimate suggests the industry could eventually produce 4,600 GW of electricity at a cost of 50 euros (around $55) per megawatt-hour or less.

In 2022 DOE launched an “Earthshot Initiative” to reduce the cost of enhanced geothermal energy in the U.S. to $45 per megawatt-hour (MWh) by 2035. If successful, that would put it at or below the cost of any other new, dispatchable energy source. 

Is this technology the answer to the surging demand for electricity from data centers and artificial intelligence? And could it allow Virginia to keep adding data centers without blowing up its climate goals?

The challenges

We do have to keep in mind that not all silver bullets prove to be sterling. Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) are evidence that some highly-anticipated technologies don’t follow the rosy timelines and price projections their boosters promise. 

Unlike SMRs, though, enhanced geothermal systems have already achieved commercial deployment. After successfully demonstrating the technology with a 3.5 MW pilot facility,  Fervo Energy signed a contract last year with Google to provide electricity for its data centers from a 115-MW enhanced geothermal power plant in Nevada. Fervo will deliver the power to the local utility, NV Energy, which will then charge a slightly higher price to Google via a proposed new “clean transition tariff.” Fervo has also signed a deal for an even bigger project that will deliver 400 MW to California utilities. 

Using a different fracking-based technology it calls a “Geopressured Geothermal System,” Houston-based Sage Geosystems recently agreed to supply 150 MW of power for Meta’s data centers beginning in 2027. Sage says it can make electricity not just by extracting heat but also by using pressure, an add-on technology that allows it to offer energy storage independent of steam production. 

Both Fervo and Sage say their methods can be used almost anywhere, and both cite advantages over established energy sources. Like wind and solar, geothermal is renewable and carbon-free, but it isn’t dependent on weather. It also doesn’t require fuel sources like coal and gas that are highly polluting and sometimes unreliable in extreme weather. 

Finally, with a small physical footprint relative to the energy produced, geothermal facilities could be located in urban areas or next to data centers and other large customers without the need for major new transmission lines. 

But of course, the fact that geothermal technology can be used anywhere does not mean it can be deployed profitably everywhere, or at least not yet. A map compiled by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows the most ideal areas are still in the West, where hot rocks lie within a few kilometers of the Earth’s surface. In most of the eastern U.S., deeper wells would be needed to reach the same temperatures. For this reason, DOE sees the technology proving out in the West first before spreading east.

But favorability is not purely a function of geology, according to Ben Serrurier, manager of government affairs and policy at Fervo. I wanted to know how soon geothermal systems could start providing electricity to the world’s largest concentration of data centers, in Northern Virginia. He said the biggest impediment for the industry is not location, but the high cost of capital and the paucity of government support compared to SMRs, hydrogen, and other new technologies. 

In spite of these challenges, Serrurier predicted geothermal would be deployed in Virginia by the latter part of the 2030s, noting that his company is already ahead of DOE’s projected timeline for the technology’s maturation. Eastern data centers present an especially attractive market, he said, because demand is increasing so quickly, and utilities have limited options for carbon-free energy. 

Alas, observers of the data center industry know that while renewable energy is nice to have, cheap energy is even nicer. So I wanted to talk about cost.

Serrurier told me Fervo’s first project will deliver power to NV Energy at a price of $107 per MWh, and Google will pay slightly more than that to the utility. That is twice DOE’s target cost for 2035, yet it still puts the price below the U.S average of 13.1 cents per kilowatt-hour ($131 per MWh) for commercial customers, and competitive with the average Nevada commercial rate of 10.92 cents, according to Energy Information Agency data.

That price is, however, more than the 9.54 cents/kWh that the average commercial customer in Virginia pays for electricity derived primarily from fossil fuels. And Fervo’s price is for drilling in the West, not in the less favorable geology of the East.

But heck, anywhere in the country, 10.7 cents for zero-carbon baseload power — with no waste to be cleaned up and no added healthcare costs from pollution — still sounds compelling. Google may have chosen to be a first mover in order to show leadership and promote a new technology, but it is also locking in a solid deal.

Sage does not make its costs public, but Lance Cook, the company’s chief technical officer, told me their process is competitive with combined cycle gas plants when the cost of fossil gas is above $6 per thousand cubic feet. (According to the Energy Information Agency, the price of gas is currently below that level in most states, though gas prices are famously volatile.)  

An additional benefit, said Cook, is that a geothermal plant could be co-located with a data center, foregoing a grid connection and obviating the need for transmission lines. “We can turn electricity into data,” he told me. “It is much easier to connect data than to wait for a grid connection.” 

Both Cook and Serrurier are confident that geothermal will beat new nuclear  price-wise, which today sounds like a safe bet. Analysts warn that cost continues to be a significant issue for the nuclear industry. Current projections for the cost of electricity from SMRs start at $142/MWh. 

Cook noted that Sage’s technology can also provide long-duration energy storage that isn’t dependent on the heat of the earth. This approach can be used anywhere to turn solar and wind power into baseload energy. Sage’s website claims it can achieve this for less than the cost of batteries or pumped hydro.  

With all this promise, enhanced geothermal has been slow to catch the attention of Virginia utilities and policy-makers. The Virginia Code includes geothermal energy in its definition of renewable energy, but enhanced geothermal is not on the list of energy sources that qualify for the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS). 

The General Assembly did pass legislation this year from Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, to include a similarly-named, but quite different, kind of geothermal energy – geothermal heating and cooling systems, also known as ground-source heat pumps – in the RPS. Geothermal heat pumps use the near-constant temperature of the ground just a few feet under our feet to help heat and cool buildings, much as air-source heat pumps do but with greater efficiency. A working group under the auspices of the State Corporation Commission is currently trying to figure out how to award renewable energy certificates (RECs) for a technology that does not produce electricity. 

But drilling down two miles or more and generating electricity at the utility level is quite another thing. Making enhanced geothermal systems eligible for the RPS would be essential to putting the technology on an even footing with other renewables for use in Virginia.

In an email, Surovell told me, “I have read about the Google geothermal project and believe there is significant potential in Virginia.I understand it is different, but we need to do all we can to try to meet the demand for energy created by data centers without upsetting the carbon-free goals we set with the Virginia Clean Energy Act.” He added, “Geothermal also has the potential to create thousands of well-paying trade jobs in drilling and pipefitting in the Commonwealth.”   

I also contacted Dominion Energy Virginia to gauge the utility’s level of interest. Dominion is facing an enormous challenge to meet the explosion of demand from data centers. Its 2023 integrated resource plan (IRP) proposed building new gas plants as early as 2028 and an SMR in 2034, but no geothermal energy. The plan failed to meet the carbon-cutting requirements of Virginia law, so the company ought to see the need to up its game for its 2024 IRP, due in October. 

Dominion’s answer was not encouraging. Aaron Ruby, Dominion’s director of Virginia and offshore wind media, responded with an email that made reference to the working group for geothermal heat pump RECs.

 “We’re certainly looking at the potential for geothermal in Virginia. The SCC is leading a geothermal working group, and there are lots of knowledgeable experts taking a close look. Most of the potential in Virginia appears to be geothermal heat pumps, with maybe less potential for power generation. The process is ongoing, so still more to learn.”

Echoing Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s rhetoric on energy, he added, “As you know, we’re experiencing an unprecedented growth in power demand. Reliably serving that growth requires an ‘all of the above’ approach, including offshore wind, solar, battery storage, next generation nuclear and natural gas. Emerging technologies like clean hydrogen, longer-duration storage and geothermal could also play a role.”

It’s not a great sign that Dominion ranks geothermal dead last. The company seems quite content to keep adding data centers to its customer base with no plan to meet its climate commitments. 

Data center developers, on the other hand, could vote with their metaphorical feet. If Dominion will not bring geothermal technology to Virginia data centers, maybe the data centers will go to the geothermal technology. Some data center operators say they need to be in Virginia to be close to customers in the East, but the industry’s rapid spread into other states shows many have flexibility. So why should they face public opposition and rising electricity rates in Virginia when they can go to Utah, Nevada or Texas to access low-cost, zero-carbon energy delivered 24/7 from a source that might even be located onsite? 

Especially since, in so doing, they would provide the capital and demand required for enhanced geothermal to achieve DOE’s goals ahead of time, and hasten the day when Dominion presents an IRP with a real zero-carbon plan.  

This article was previously published in the Virginia Mercury on September 10, 2024.

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Amazon claims to power all its operations with renewable energy. Yes, and I’m the Queen of Sheba.

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Greenpeace protesters at the site of Amazon’s HQ2 in Arlington, Virginia, in 2019 called out the company for failing to make progress towards its commitment to power the cloud with renewable energy. Since then, the company has actually increased its carbon emissions. Photo courtesy of Greenpeace.

When Amazon announced this month that it had achieved 100% renewable energy seven years ahead of schedule, that sounded like really good news for Virginia. Amazon owns more data centers here than anyone else, and data center energy demand is driving Dominion Energy Virginia’s plan to renege on its climate commitments, keep dirty coal plants online and build expensive new gas plants and transmission lines.  

Unfortunately, Amazon’s announcement is so full of asterisks it looks like a starry night. 

Let’s start with the good news. Amazon’s claim that it has purchased enough renewable energy to “match” its energy use is likely true, though its sustainability report doesn’t reveal essential details like how much energy the company uses. Amazon also says it is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world, an impressive achievement. 

Some of that renewable energy is in Virginia, so it is reasonable to say it serves the company’s data centers here. A map on Amazon’s website shows the company has invested in 19 solar farms in Virginia, with a capacity that totals around 1,386 MW  – about a quarter of all solar installed in Virginiato date. That’s terrific. If every company operating in Virginia did as much, we’d be rolling in solar, figuratively speaking. 

So what am I complaining about? 

One problem is that the energy appetite of Amazon’s data centers in Virginia far outstrips the output of all of its solar farms here. The other problem is that producing renewable energy in the middle of the day can only very loosely be said to “match” energy used at other times of the day and night. Meeting energy demand on a 24/7 basis is harder, and Amazon isn’t even trying. 

Let’s start with the numbers. Because the sun doesn’t shine all the time, a large solar array produces, on average, 22-25% of what it produces on a cloudless day at noon. (That percentage is known as the facility’s capacity factor.) At a 25% capacity factor, Amazon’s 1,386 MW worth of solar panels produce enough electricity to “match” about 347 MW of demand. 

Amazon keeps its energy demand in Virginia a secret, but we can be pretty sure its 110 data centers here use way more than that. A 2019 Greenpeace report estimated Amazon’s Virginia data center demand at 1,700 MW in operation or under construction, an amount that would call for 6,800 MW of solar. Amazon rejected Greenpeace’s estimate at the time, but it didn’t supply a better one. More recent estimates suggest Amazon’s energy appetite in Virginia is on its way to 2,700 MW, enough to require the output of around 11,000 MW of solar. 

Luckily for us, Virginia is part of PJM, a regional transmission grid that covers all or parts of 13 states plus Washington, D.C. Generation sources located anywhere in the region can serve a Virginia customer, and Amazon’s map shows it has utility solar and wind projects in several PJM states. By my count, these add up to as much as 4,000 MW of additional renewable energy that could be allocated to Virginia data centers, if Amazon had no other operations in those states that it wanted to power. (Which, however, it does.) 

Adding together its solar in Virginia and elsewhere in PJM still leaves Amazon short of what it likely needs. So, if the company is correct that it has secured enough renewable energy to match all of its demand, a lot of those facilities must be in other regions or other countries. Yet the climate benefit of Amazon’s solar farms in (for example) Spain, which gets more than 50% of its electricity from renewable energy, is significantly less than the climate benefit of solar in PJM, where the percentage of wind and solar combined still hangs in the single digits. 

I will – almost – give Amazon a pass on this point. PJM has been so appallingly slow to approve new generation that Amazon could well have as many projects in the “queue” as online. PJM claims it will catch up in the next year and a half, and when that happens, perhaps Amazon won’t feel the need to obfuscate.

Even if Amazon were “matching” all its energy needs with wind and solar in PJM, though, it’s the second problem that troubles me more. Building solar and wind is cheap; Amazon very likely makes a profit on it. Actually ensuring renewable energy provides all the juice for the company’s operations every hour of every day, on the other hand, would require a heck of a lot of expensive energy storage. And Amazon is not doing that.

Without energy storage, solar delivers electricity only while the sun is shining. The rest of the time, Amazon’s data centers run on whatever resource mix the local utility uses. In both Virginia and PJM’s territory, fossil fuels make up the great majority of the mix. Building more Amazon data centers in Virginia increases the burning of fossil fuels, causing more pollution and raising costs that are borne by the rest of us. 

The self-styled climate hero turns out to be a climate parasite, harming people to make itself look good.

Combining renewable energy with storage to achieve true carbon neutrality isn’t prohibitively expensive. Other leading tech companies seem to be making that extra effort, with Google notable for its commitment to meeting its energy demand with renewable energy and storage on a 24/7 basis.

Amazon’s failure to rise to this challenge explains why, in spite of its massive investments in wind and solar, the company’s carbon footprint actually rose by 34% since the launch of its Climate Pledge in 2019, when it set a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2040. 

That explains why, a year ago, the Science Based Targets initiative, a U.N.-backed organization that monitors corporate net-zero plans, removed Amazon from a list of companies taking action on climate goals. According to press reports, Amazon failed “to implement its commitment to set a credible target for reducing carbon emissions.”  

Among those least impressed with the company’s efforts are its own workers. Last year, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice accused the company of failing in its climate commitments, and the group released its own report this month alleging multiple climate failures, including using “creative accounting” to inflate its achievements.

If Virginia is serious about meeting the climate challenge, we can’t blindly accept rosy claims from corporations whose central goal is not sustainability, but growth. Data centers whose energy demand isn’t met on a 24/7 basis from zero-carbon sources located on the same grid are not part of the climate solution, they are part of the problem. And currently, Amazon’s data centers are making the problem worse.

This article was first published in the Virginia Mercury on July 24, 2024.

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AI could usher in a golden age of technological breakthroughs – if it doesn’t kill us first

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

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

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Data centers be damned, Virginia can still meet its climate goals

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Virginia's capitol building in Richmond.

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.