Tag Archives: Virginia

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It’s the fossil fuels, stupid

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For low-cost electricity, Virginia needs renewable energy — not gas plants

smokestack
Photo credit Stiller Beobachter via Wikimedia.

Southwest Virginia leaders are up in arms over electricity rate hikes. It’s understandable: Appalachian Power, which serves residents in 34 counties, has raised rates by over 46% since July 2021, and its rates now rank among the state’s highest. Last March, it sought another increase that would have resulted in residents paying $10.22 more per month on average. Although the State Corporation Commission’s November ruling granted APCo a much smaller rate hike, customers are raising a ruckus about the high bills.

Complaints have reached such a fever pitch that Del. James Morefield, a Republican who represents parts of five southwest Virginia counties, filed legislation this month to cap the rates APCo can charge. Over in the Senate, another southwest Virginia Republican, Travis Hackworth, has launched a direct attack on APCo’s monopoly: His legislation would allow any residential customer of APCo whose monthly bill exceeds 125% of the statewide average to buy electricity from another provider.  

These bills might be more performative than serious. But in this case, legislators themselves are at least partly to blame. In 2023, another Southwest Virginia Republican, Israel O’Quinn, drove legislation that excused APCo from having to write integrated resource plans (IRPs) – those pesky documents that tell regulators how a utility plans to comply with state laws and meet the needs of customers at least cost. Both Hackworth and Morefield voted for the bill. 

In 2024, O’Quinn also championed legislation that allows APCo to charge customers for costs of developing a small modular nuclear reactor. Hackworth also supported this new burden on ratepayers, though Morefield did not.

This year, the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation is promoting legislation to reform the IRP process, including making APCo file plans again. That may help. Fundamentally, though, the primary reason APCo’s customers are paying so much is that the utility remains so dependent on fossil fuels. As of the date of its 2022 IRP, APCo relied on coal and fracked gas for 85% of its electricity. Prices for both fuels spiked so high in 2021 and 2022 that utilities were left with huge bills to pay. 

 In 2022, APCo told the SCC it had spent an extra $361 million over budget on gas and coal. Virginia law allows fuel costs to be passed through to customers, so the SCC couldn’t prevent bills from rising to cover the outlay. Instead, the SCC allowed the company to recover the excess fuel costs from its customers over two years by charging roughly $20 more per month to residents, spreading out the pain but also extending it. O’Quinn’s 2023 legislation let the company finance the costs, which meant customers pay interest on top of the fuel costs.

 APCo was not the only utility passing along high gas costs. Dominion Energy Virginia also got caught off guard and asked to spread its excess fuel costs out over three years, adding an average of $15 to residential customer bills. Dominion customers are not happy either. 

 Gas prices have since dropped, and the remarkably short memories of legislators have led them to think they will now stay low forever. Having learned precisely nothing, they also insist that the only way to ensure an adequate supply of reliable, low-cost energy to serve the data center boom is for Virginia to increase its reliance on gas instead of transitioning away from it.    

 The evidence does not support this fantasy. Contrary to Republican orthodoxy, new renewable energy is cheaper than new fossil fuel generation. That’s why in 2024, 94% of all new power capacity in the U.S. came from solar, batteries and wind energy. Fossil gas made up just 4% of new generating capacity. Yes, many states are now proposing to build new gas plants, so the trend could reverse, but that’s only because the rush of data centers and new manufacturing has made large users desperate for more energy at any cost. 

 It’s true that solar, Virginia’s least-cost resource, only produces electricity when the sun shines. But even adding battery storage to solar energy, allowing it to serve as baseload power or a peak power resource, still results in lower electricity costs than the gas combustion plants that are used to produce electricity at peak times. (In Virginia, Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, has introduced legislation to expand storage targets for Dominion and APco, including for long-duration storage.)

 The era of low-cost renewable energy is fairly new, but it is already impacting utility bills across the country. Virginia used to boast of its low rates; now there are 22 states with lower residential electricity rates than Virginia. And of those, U.S. Energy Information data shows that all but five generate a higher percentage of their electricity from renewable energy. 

With data centers proliferating across Virginia unchecked, utility rates are under even more pressure now. The Joint Legislative and Audit Review Commission data center study, released last month, warns that ratepayer costs will inevitably rise under an “unrestrained growth” scenario that reflects current policy.

It’s too early to tell whether any of the many bills to protect residential ratepayers and put guardrails on data center development will pass. For now, the governor and many Republicans seem to prefer to use the crisis to crush the transition to renewable energy. As in past years, Republicans have introduced bills to repeal the Virginia Clean Economy Act or undermine it in various ways.

Making solar more difficult and expensive to build is also part of the strategy. The party that used to stand for individual liberty and personal property rights now instead champions local governments that deny farmers the ability to put solar on their land.

Talking up fossil fuels and dumping on solar may make for good politics with the folks in rural districts. That doesn’t mean it’s in their interests. If high utility bills are what really matter, legislators should be pushing renewable energy and storage, not expensive gas plants. 

This article appeared in the Virginia Mercury on January 20, 2025. Interestingly, today writers at two other publications, Cardinal News and Bacon’s Rebellion, took up one aspect of this topic that I only alluded to, the fact that Virginia “imports” more electricity than any other state. Virginia politicians have been exercised on this topic for as long as I’ve been writing, and it has always struck me as strange. It’s not like we need to worry about the political ramifications of a trade imbalance with Pennsylvania.

But as Duane Yancey noted, those electrons coming into Virginia from elsewhere in PJM do tend to be dirty. That’s especially the case for APCo, which operates coal plants in West Virginia and has been ordered by the West Virginia Public Utilities Commission to run those plants at a 69% capacity factor, regardless of the economics. I have not been able to find out anywhere the percentage of APCo’s generation that comes from coal as opposed to gas, but the West Virginia PUC order unquestionably means APCo’s Virginia customers are paying too much.

One other thing to note on the topic of imports: when I wrote that APCo’s resource mix is 85% fossil fuels, that did not mean the other 15% is renewable. In fact, most of the rest is purchased power, meaning mostly fossil fuels also.

By the way, readers may notice a few discrepancies among the articles, which is worth explaining. Both Yancey and James Bacon cite figures for Virginia electricity rates and how they compare to other states that are different from my numbers. The reason is that they are working from combined rates for residential, commercial and industrial, where I’m using residential only. Virginia’s combined rate compares more favorably to those of other states than does its residential rate because our commercial and industrial rates are lower.

Virginia’s low commercial rates have been a major draw for data centers. But if you’re a residential customer right now, maybe that’s pretty cold comfort.

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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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Is sewage sludge laced with ‘forever chemicals’ contaminating Va. farmland?

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It’s out of sight and out of mind, and it might just be killing people.

For decades, American factories have been sending their wastewater to municipal sewage treatment plants across the country, which handle it along with the effluent from other industries, homes and businesses. At the other end of the process, the separated and dried-out solids are often delivered to farmers as free fertilizer. The land application of this “sewage sludge” has long been encouraged by environmental regulators as a way to deal with what would otherwise be a vexing waste disposal problem. 

Yet not all of that wastewater, or the sludge that becomes fertilizer, is benign. An increasing number of industries discharge effluent laced with toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which most treatment plants aren’t equipped to remove. PFAS are notoriously long-lasting, so much so that they are nicknamed “forever chemicals.” And now some states are finding that PFAS-laced sewage sludge is contaminating farmland and poisoning consumers. 

PFAS are a relatively new class of synthetic chemical, emerging commercially in the 1950s to find their way into a wide range of useful products, including non-stick pans (most notoriouslyTeflon), waterproof clothing, stain-resistant fabrics and firefighting chemicals. Unfortunately, exposure to PFAS has been shown to cause an almost equally-wide range of environmental and human health harms, including cancer, kidney disease, thyroid disease, reproductive problems and obesity. 

After years of foot-dragging, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finally took action against two early types of PFAS that had already fallen out of use, setting drinking water standards for those and a few others. At the same time, however, chemical companies have been turning out literally thousands of new iterations that have been little studied and remain largely unregulated. PFAS have become so ubiquitous in the environment that scientists estimate 98% of Americans — and even some newborns — have detectable levels in their blood.  

In recent years, public health advocates have started to worry that PFAS may also be entering our food supply via the sewage sludge applied to farmland. According to the New York Times, five states – Texas, Michigan, New York, Maine and Tennessee – have detected PFAS on farmland treated with sewage sludge, sometimes in high levels. Crops grown in contaminated soil absorb the chemicals and pass them up the food chain. 

In Maine and Michigan, officials shut down farms after finding high concentrations of PFAS in the soil and in the meat of grazing animals. Maine officials found contamination on 56 farms and in 23% of more than 1,500 groundwater samples taken from farms and residences. 

In 2022, Maine banned the use of sewage sludge on agricultural land and prohibited most uses of PFAS in consumer products starting in 2030. The state is now working with affected farmers to compensate them or find alternative uses for contaminated land. Officials note that the testing programs are just beginning and fear that they may be seeing only the tip of the iceberg. 

The New York Times did not include Virginia among the states known to have PFAS-contaminated farmland. That’s not because we don’t have a problem. Rather, it’s because the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), which issues permits to municipal wastewater treatment plants, doesn’t require sludge to be tested.  

What little we do know is cause for concern. The conservation group Wild Virginia analyzed data submitted to DEQ in 2022 by a small number of drinking water and wastewater treatment plants that voluntarily tested their effluent. Limited and incomplete as it was, the information revealed that 20 of the 21 wastewater treatment plants that tested for PFAS found significant concentrations in their effluent. Only 8 of the plants also tested their sludge, but all 8 reported significant concentrations of PFAS. 

I talked by phone with David Sligh, Wild Virginia’s conservation director and a former DEQ employee, who told me the group plans to publish a report on this problem in the coming week. DEQ, he said, has the authority to regulate PFAS in treatment plants’ effluent and sludge and should be doing so to protect the public. His group has joined other members of the Virginia Conservation Network in calling on DEQ “to place the responsibility and cost of cleaning up PFAS on the industries that use and manufacture PFAS by requiring PFAS disclosure, monitoring, and limits in pollution discharge permits.”

DEQ, however, seems to be in no hurry. Neil Zahradka, manager of the land applications program at DEQ, wrote in an email to Tyla Matteson, a Sierra Club volunteer who works on sewage sludge issues, “To date, DEQ has relied upon the EPA biennial reviews to determine if additional regulation of biosolids is necessary beyond that contained in current permits, and no additional limits or criteria for PFAS have been set. … [A]ccording to the EPA PFAS Strategic Roadmap, they plan to complete the risk assessment for PFAS in biosolids this year.  We do plan to update the DEQ biosolids fact sheet once we have additional substantive information to offer landowners.”

Waiting for EPA to act first is convenient, but it does a grave disservice to Virginians. EPA itself has stalled for so long that Potomac Riverkeeper, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and other groups finally sued the agency this year for its failure to regulate PFAS in sewage sludge used as fertilizer. According to PEER, EPA identified 10 different types of PFAS among some 250 pollutants contaminating sewage sludge, yet insists it is only obligated to identify the toxics in sewage sludge, not do anything about it.  

I suspect EPA and DEQ’s hesitance is due to the fear of what they would find in any extensive testing program. If testing confirmed widespread contamination in sewage sludge, DEQ would – one hopes – feel obligated to stop the practice of spreading it across the farms that produce our food. After all, if you identify a poison in your product, the answer is probably not to spread it among as many people as possible. 

Annoying as it would be for DEQ, industry and even farmers to learn the truth, though, the alternative is worse. PFAS can be removed, either in the wastewater treatment process or, ideally, before it leaves its industrial source. Not testing and treating means needlessly exposing farmers, their families and their animals – and ultimately all the rest of us – to chemicals that have no safe level of exposure. 

Given what we know about the harms PFAS causes, DEQ’s inaction is inexcusable. If Maine can tackle this threat to its land and people, surely Virginia can do it as well. We should expect no less.

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on September 26, 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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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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The Pentagon’s plan to go solar: another chapter in a great American success story

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Aerial view of the Pentagon.
The only real question is why it has taken so long. (DOD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase)

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin can’t run for reelection, so it’s frustrating to see him spending so much time trying to score political points. The latest episode came earlier this month, when according to Fox News, Youngkin sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin questioning the Pentagon’s plan, announced back in January, to install solar panels on the building’s massive roof. Youngkin complained that the plan included no requirements for American-made technology, raising the question “whether American taxpayer dollars will be used to purchase solar equipment from the Chinese Communist Party.” 

A few days later, Fox News reported the Pentagon offered reassurance that it had a “rigorous and extensive oversight process to ensure compliance” with the Buy American Act and other laws requiring domestic content. 

According to this second article, a Youngkin spokesperson quoted the governor as “pleased that Secretary Austin will follow his recommendations to adopt the ‘Made in America’ requirements for procuring Chinese solar panels.”

Younkin’s attempt to snatch victory while still clenched in the jaws of defeat is amusing, but more than a little puzzling. Apparently Younkin is under the impression that solar panels are inherently Chinese.  

Let’s be clear: Solar energy is one of the great American success stories. Americans invented solar photovoltaic technology, nurtured it and led the world in its development for half a century. American ingenuity put solar on the path to becoming today’s low-cost leader for power generation, to the point that it is projected to become the world’s dominant source of electricity by 2050. 

However, as with a lot of American manufacturing, most solar panel production migrated overseas as the technology matured. Starting in 2010, China bet big on renewable energy, investing in solar technology itself and driving down panel prices to the point where most manufacturers in Europe and the U.S. were driven out of business. Only one U.S company remains in the top ten worldwide. 

Chinese companies also likely benefited from the use of forced labor in the production of polysilicon, the raw material for most solar panels. The U.S. banned the importation of solar panels made with forced labor in 2021. 

By then, however, China had developed a mature supply chain and technological know-how to support low-cost production. Today China dominates every aspect of solar manufacturing, with about 80% of the world’s market share. Chinese solar companies have expanded production capacity beyond the ability of world markets to absorb, driving down already-low prices by 42% in 2023. 

Domination of the world market is only half the story, though. China also leads the world in deploying solar at home. China installed as much solar PV capacity in 2022 as the rest of the world combined, and then doubled that in 2023. China also leads the world in offshore wind deployment and electric vehicle sales and dominates production of lithium-ion batteries. 

So the concern that the Chinese are winning the clean energy race is well justified, and Youngkin is not the only American who hates the taste of second place. But our leaders only have two choices: stand around talking trash about the competition, or get in the game. 

That’s what Congress did in passing laws like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that support American investment in solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and other components of a green revolution. More controversially, President Joe Biden also extended Trump-era tariffs on Chinese-made polysilicon solar panels to give American manufacturers a chance to scale up.  

Not everyone supports tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels, given the inflationary impact of trade barriers and the urgent need to deploy as much renewable energy as possible to lower CO2 emissions. Still, the learning rateof solar is expected to continue driving prices lower over the long term. Even with a less-mature, more expensive supply chain, American-made panels are projected to become cheaper than imported panels by 2026.

One year after the IRA’s passage, a Goldman-Sachs analysis found the law was meeting its objectives of driving private sector investment and job creation in the clean-tech sector, including manufacturing. This month, Wood Mackenzie reported that U.S. solar manufacturing capacity increased 71% in the first quarter of 2024, making it the largest quarter of solar manufacturing growth in history. 

The Pentagon is not known for caring about saving money, so maybe it isn’t surprising that it is only now following the example of millions of Americans by putting solar panels on the roof. Defense Department officials say the move is intended to support the resurgence in American manufacturing and to deliver the benefits of increased energy resilience and reliability, including having an uninterrupted power source in case of a cyberattack or a grid outage. 

Low-cost, clean power, resilience and energy security are all part of the great American success story that is solar energy. A note of congratulation, not complaint, would be the better response from Youngkin.

This article first appeared in the Virginia Mercury on June 26, 2024. It has been edited to remove a reference to the Pentagon being located in Virginia because, for reasons worth a digression, it is not.

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DEQ’s proposal to end the solar wars makes lemons out of lemonade

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Wildflowers in front of solar panels illustrate pollinator plantings around solar panels
Who says solar can’t be an asset to the land? Photo credit Center for Pollinators in Energy, fresh-energy.org

It’s a problem that divides communities and stymies lawmakers: Virginia’s transition to clean energy depends on building thousands of acres’ worth of large solar facilities, but a backlash from some rural neighbors makes siting projects increasingly difficult. 

Most of the objections are aesthetic – few people prefer to look at rows of solar panels if they once enjoyed a bucolic country scene – but some opponents say they worry about the loss of farmland and trees. Solar, they fear, is bad for the land as well as the eyes. It doesn’t help that some early solar development suffered from corner-cutting that resulted in soil compaction and erosion. If that is solar, many people want no part of it.

In 2022, land conservation groups banded together with agriculture and logging interests to lobby for legislation requiring mitigation whenever a solar project would disturb more than 50 acres of forest or 10 acres of “prime agricultural soils.” House Bill 206 applies to any solar project developed under Virginia’s sort-of-streamlined “permit by rule” process, which is available to all but the largest facilities. 

The solar industry initially fought the legislation, joined by some climate advocacy groups. They pointed out that no other industry is subject to mitigation requirements, and that solar provides greater climate benefits than forests and agriculture. Moreover, solar panels can be removed and the land returned to farming or forestry. By contrast, once land is converted to a housing subdivision or strip mall or data center, the damage is permanent. 

Eventually the solar industry accepted compromise language that put off the effective date until the start of 2025 and gave industry members a voice in an advisory panel under the auspices of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). The law tasked this group with helping to develop “criteria to determine if a significant adverse impact to prime agricultural soils or forest lands is likely to occur as a result of a proposed solar project,” and if so, the actions that should be considered in any mitigation plan. DEQ was to use the working group’s conclusions to draw up regulations. 

As it turned out, the working group agreed on very little. Its 717-page report found consensus on only a few points, leaving DEQ itself with the task of resolving key issues. On May 13, the agency published its proposed regulations. The regulations are currently under executive branch review, after which Interested parties and the public will have the opportunity to comment.

Meanwhile, a few things have happened since the passage of HB 206.

In March of 2022, DEQ toughened its stormwater regulations to address the runoff and erosion problems that had given solar a bad name in some communities. Building on that, the agency just released a new stormwater handbook that will become effective July 1, 2024, with sections specific to solar development. 

Some solar industry members complain that DEQ’s stormwater regulations are unreasonably onerous, but no one questions the importance of preventing runoff and erosion. In any case, many companies are already using land-friendly practices that make it easier to meet tougher rules. One is the use of terrain following trackers, a technology that allows solar to be installed on uneven terrain instead of bringing in bulldozers to level the site. The trackers maximize solar production in hilly areas while preserving topsoil and vegetation. 

The new tracker technology is among the suite of low-impact approaches gaining ground as the solar industry matures. DEQ encourages another eco-friendly practice: planting native species among and around solar arrays. Native plants provide food and habitat for insects whose numbers have plummeted in recent years, threatening our ecosystems. Though only a few solar projects have achieved DEQ’s pollinator-smart certification to date, most of the developers I’ve spoken with say they are open to it. 

Photo credit Solar Power World and Nexamp

Gaining traction even faster is the practice of using grazing animals for vegetation management. Sheep hit the sweet spot: project owners save money they would have to spend on humans operating machinery, while the sheep thrive in the shade of solar panels and return nutrients to the soil. Already, 2% of sheep in the U.S. are being grazed under solar panels, according to an American Solar Grazing Association webinar, including at several large Virginia facilities providing power to Dominion Energy. Elsewhere, cattle graze under solar panels or crops grow between the rows, further erasing the distinction between solar facilities and agricultural use. 

All-terrain trackers, topsoil preservation, native plants and incorporating active farming or grazing: all these practices ensure farmland isn’t “lost” to solar. Yet DEQ’s tougher stormwater rules, the solar industry’s increasingly land-friendly practices, and even the passage of HB 206 haven’t allayed concerns among solar opponents. Instead, rural counties have stepped up the pace of bans, caps and moratoriums.  

One suspects the continued hostility isn’t because opponents lack familiarity with the ways solar can be eco-friendly, but because the opposition’s primary motivation isn’t preserving farmland. If what they really care about is keeping solar from cluttering up the viewshed (“preserving our rural heritage” is the euphemistic framing), then adding a new layer of mitigation requirements won’t change anything. 

Admittedly, I never supported HB 206 in the first place. From an environmental perspective, solar is no worse for the land than monoculture pine plantations or commodity crops grown with pesticides and petroleum-based fertilizers. Done in a habitat-friendly way, solar can increase biodiversity and help heal the land. And solar addresses our CO2 problem, far more even than trees.

Still, DEQ’s job was to try to find a middle ground between the solar industry and its detractors, and in fairness, their effort gets some things right. The proposed rules recognize that there are degrees of impact a solar facility can have, and that practices like leaving topsoil undisturbed or incorporating agrivoltaics should be rewarded with lower mitigation requirements. A neat table delineates the various levels of impact and proposes differing levels of mitigation to match. Mitigation mostly takes the form of land set-asides, but can also be satisfied with per-acre payments. 

And yet the proposal misses the mark on at least three fronts. First, it fails to give full credit to solar projects that minimize soil disturbance and incorporate agrivoltaics. DEQ should recognize that adopting best practices is itself mitigation, which should obviate the need for land set-asides or monetary payments. 

Second, the proposed regulations make no exceptions for projects owned and operated by local farmers who incorporate solar into their farm activities in order to increase and diversify their income without having to sell their land. If the point of HB 206 was to protect farming, DEQ has shot wide of the mark.

Finally, the dollar amounts that DEQ proposes in lieu of land set-asides are punishingly high, with perverse effects. A solar company that has to pay a stiff penalty must pass that cost along in the form of a higher price for the electricity produced. If a utility has to pay more for electricity, ratepayers ultimately foot the bill. 

The alternative is equally counterproductive. I noted at the start that DEQ’s permit-by-rule process is available to all but the largest projects, but it is not the only pathway open to developers. Projects over 150 MW are required to go to the SCC for approval, but smaller projects aren’t foreclosed from doing so. If DEQ makes its own process too onerous, solar developers will go to the SCC instead. The SCC requires that a developer secure a local permit, but not that it employ soil-saving practices, agrivoltaics or mitigation.

It would be great if DEQ could turn the lemon that is HB 206 into a lemonade of a solar industry adopting eco-friendly development practices and incorporating pollinator plantings, sheep grazing, and other agrivoltaic businesses. What we have instead is a proposal that may kill the permit-by-rule program without producing any benefit to anyone – in effect, turning lemonade into lemons.

There is still time to get it right. DEQ may not be able to resolve the solar wars, but a good set of regulations would position Virginia to make the most of a solar industry that is essential to our future.

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on June 12, 2024.

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Will Virginia’s residential solar market survive the coming year?

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Installation of solar panels on the roof of a house.
Virginia utilities finally have an opportunity to attack net metering. Photo by Don Crawford.

When the Virginia Clean Economy Act became law in 2020, solar advocates celebrated. In addition to creating a framework for a transition to a zero carbon electricity sector by 2050, the VCEA and sister legislation known as Solar Freedom swept away multiple barriers to installing solar in Virginia. Among the new provisions were some that strengthened net metering, the program that allows residents, businesses and local governments who install solar onsite to be credited for excess electricity they feed back to the grid. 

Currently, the law requires that customers of Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power be credited for the electricity they supply to the grid at the full retail rate for electricity. The credit is applied against the cost of the electricity they draw from the grid at night. The policy makes solar affordable and supports small businesses across Virginia. 

However, the VCEA came with a ticking time bomb. It provided that in 2024 for Appalachian Power, and 2025 for Dominion, the State Corporation Commission would hold proceedings to determine the fate of net metering, and in particular the terms for compensating new net metering customers. 

Well, it’s 2024, and the bomb just went off. On May 6, the SCC issued an order directing the two utilities to file their suggested changes. Appalachian’s proposal is due by September 2; Dominion’s is due by May 1, 2025. The SCC will establish a schedule for each case that will include provisions for the public and interested parties to participate.

There are two important protections to note. First, low-income customers will have their choice of installing solar under either the existing rules or the new ones. Second, customers who install solar panels and interconnect to the grid before the SCC issues its final order will continue to be covered by the existing provisions for retail net metering. 

For anyone who’s been on the fence about installing solar, I can’t overstate the urgency of acting now. Nonprofits Solar United Neighbors and Solarize Virginia can help you get the best deal. Also check out the excellent advice and sample quotes from HR Climate Hub.

Make no mistake, utilities hate net metering and will destroy it if they can. The more customers who install solar, the less control the utility can exercise over them — and, even more critically, the less money the company makes for its shareholders from building new generation and transmission. 

That’s not what our utilities tell legislators and the SCC, though. Instead, they promote a narrative that net metering customers impose extra costs on other ratepayers, creating a “cost shift.” The idea is that residents who go solar are making everyone else pay more of the costs of the grid while they themselves rake in money with their free electricity from the sun.  

This argument has raged across the country for years. Utilities often argue that solar customers should be paid for their surplus electricity only the amount of money the utility would otherwise have had to spend to generate or buy that same amount of electricity from somewhere else. This “avoided cost” can be less than one-third of the retail rate for residential electricity. (The net metering changes would also affect commercial and non-profit properties, which pay a lower rate than residential – but still well above avoided cost.)

With a payback period of nine to 15 years in Virginia, residential solar is a reasonable investment with retail rate net metering, but it’s hardly a get-rich-quick scheme. Brandon Praileau, the Virginia program director for Solar United Neighbors, said in an email that lowering the net metering rate would eliminate the energy savings that homeowners see from solar today. 

“It is the full retail 1:1 value of solar that allows solar to not be a boutique purchase that only fits a certain demographic but something that every homeowner can benefit from,” he noted. 

Praileau added that the loss of net metering would also hit Virginia’s solar installers hard and lead to job losses, something I confirmed with industry members. Russ Edwards, president of Charlottesville-based Tiger Solar, says any devaluation of solar would have a “significantly adverse” impact on local companies like his that serve the residential market.

But the “cost shift” argument doesn’t actually depend on whether rooftop solar is affordable for customers or profitable for installers. The way utilities think about net metering, a homeowner could even lose money on solar and still be guilty of shifting the costs of maintaining the grid onto other customers.

Net metering supporters counter that rooftop solar provides valuable benefits to the grid and to other customers that the utilities overlook, like relieving grid congestion and lessening the need for utility investments in new generation and transmission. Solar also has larger societal benefits like increased energy security, local resilience, clean air and carbon reduction.

Over the years this dispute has spawned literally dozens of studies estimating the value of solar. A Michigan study found that rather than being subsidized by other ratepayers, residents who install solar actually subsidize their non-solar-owning neighbors. Closer to home, a Maryland study also concluded that distributed solar provided a value greater than the retail cost of energy. 

But every state is different. California’s public utility commission recently slashed the net metering rate all the way down to a so-called avoided cost, in part because the huge growth of solar in the state has led to a power glut in the middle of the day. The residential solar market cratered as a result of the PUC’s action, with an estimated 17,000 jobs lost in the solar industry.  

Virginia does not have California’s problem. With only about 6.5% of our electricity generated by solar and the world’s largest energy storage facility in the form of Bath County’s pumped hydro plant, rooftop solar still helps Virginia utilities meet peak demand. We also face a skyrocketing demand for electricity from data centers, which militates in favor of all the clean energy we can generate. 

Ten years ago, Virginia set out to do a study on the value of solar, led by the Department of Environmental Quality. Unfortunately, our utilities pulled out when they didn’t like what they were seeing, so the study never progressed beyond a framing of the issues. 

Since then, Dominion and APCo have often repeated the “cost shift” narrative but have never backed it up with evidence. Their efforts have had some effect with legislators, most recently with passage of a bill instructing the SCC to “make all reasonable efforts to ensure that the net energy metering program does not result in unreasonable cost-shifting to nonparticipating electric utility customers.”

But of course, that simply begs the question of whether a cost shift is actually occurring. Under the VCEA, the SCC will now have to “evaluate and establish” the amount a net metering customer should pay for “the cost of using the utility’s infrastructure,” and the amount the utility should compensate the customer for the “total benefits” the customer’s solar panels provide. The SCC is also instructed to evaluate and establish the “direct and indirect economic impact of net metering” and consider “any other information the Commission deems relevant.” 

Presumably, this other information should include the state’s energy policy. The policy specifically supports distributed solar, including “enhancing the ability of private property owners to generate their own renewable energy for their own personal use from renewable energy sources on their property.” 

The SCC will now have to navigate these opposing positions in what are certain to be contentious proceedings. Meanwhile, residents and businesses would be well advised to get their solar panels up this year.

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on May 21, 2024.