A renewable energy developer is proposing a battery storage facility in Surry County.

According to Community Development and Planning Director Horace Wade, Idaho-based Clēnera recently submitted an application requesting a change in the county’s zoning ordinance that would allow the proposed use on roughly 30 acres adjacent to an existing transmission line.

Wade, briefing Surry’s Planning Commission at its Oct. 28 meeting, did not specify the location. To allow the use, the Planning Commission would first have to draft a change in the county’s zoning ordinance to allow the use, hold a public hearing on the draft and vote to advance it to county supervisors for another public hearing and final vote. Only then could Clēnera submit its conditional use permit application for the specific project.

Clēnera has already drafted the requested change, Wade said. He estimates the required Planning Commission-level hearing will be scheduled for Dec. 16.

Clēnera is proposing a separate siting agreement, which Wade said has not been submitted to the county for review.

Surry County presently allows solar farms by conditional use permit in M-1 or M-2 industrial zoning, but neither its 2018-adopted ordinance regulating solar farms nor its 2023-adopted energy policy amendment to its comprehensive plan addresses battery storage.

The only reference to battery storage in the energy policy pertains to results from a 2023 county-administered survey of Surry residents, which had indicated between 10% and 15% of the 181 survey responses had an interest, either positive or negative, in battery storage.

Isle of Wight County too has no ordinance presently regulating battery storage. Developing such an ordinance was a top recommendation of a July report by Isle of Wight’s five-member energy task force, which had met monthly over the past year.

The issue is already affecting other Hampton Roads localities. In 2023, Crossroads Energy Storage LLC submitted plans for a seven-acre battery storage campus in Chesapeake’s Deep Creek area that, according to Virginian Pilot reporting, the city deemed a by-right use for the slated industrial-zoned parcel. It required no City Council approval except for a siting agreement, which the council approved 5-2 in March 2023.

On June 3 of this year, according to reporting by the Sussex Surry Dispatch, Sussex County supervisors voted 5-2 against a siting agreement for Blackwater Solar LLC, which, according to the company’s website, had proposed a 4,800-acre solar farm that would have included on-site batteries capable of storing 1,200 megawatt hours of electricity.

Clēnera was the parent company of Blackwater Solar.

The battery project in Surry, according to Wade, would not be tied to an existing or proposed solar farm. He told the Planning Commission he didn’t know yet where the electricity stored at the site would be generated.