The Smithfield Times has learned the location of a proposed battery storage facility.

Surry County Attorney Lola Perkins, in response to a Surry resident’s Freedom of Information Act request, identified the site as a 416-acre parcel, designated 54-1 on the county’s GIS map, off White Marsh Road roughly 1.3 miles southwest of Route 10’s intersection with Bacon’s Castle Trail, and just over 2 miles from the Isle of Wight County line.

On Oct. 28, Community Development and Planning Director Horace Wade briefed Surry’s Planning Commission on what he described as an application for a text amendment to its zoning ordinance that would allow battery storage in the county. He identified Idaho-based Clēnera as the project’s developer.

Wade, however, said Clēnera had yet to submit a conditional use permit application for the specific project, and could only do so if county supervisors approve the requested change to the zoning ordinance once the Planning Commission advances the added text’s final wording.

In response to a FOIA request by the Times seeking Clēnera’s application for the text amendment, Perkins said the company had not formally submitted the application.

Wade, at the Oct. 16 meeting, estimated the Planning Commission would be able to hold its state-required public hearing on the proposed ordinance change on Dec. 16.

The Times has also reached out to Clēnera directly for details on the project’s proposed megawatt storage capacity and where the electricity stored would be generated, but as of Nov. 14 had not received a response. Wade, in response to a planning commissioner’s question at the Oct. 28 meeting, said he did not know where the power would be generated other than that it would not be tied to an existing or proposed solar farm.

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 guidelines for 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. 

On June 3, 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. 

Dominion Energy’s 2024 integrated resource plan, filed Oct. 15 with the State Corporation Commission, calls for 12,000 additional megawatts from new solar farms and 4,500 megawatts of new battery storage over the next 15 years to meet the Virginia Clean Economy Act’s mandate that the utility transition to 100% carbon-free energy sources by 2045.

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.