Virginia’s General Assembly could make another attempt at changing how renewable energy projects, and specifically solar farms, are approved when the legislature reconvenes Jan. 8.

Del. Richard “Rip” Sullivan, D-Fairfax, and state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, sponsored separate bills in their respective chambers during the 2024 session that would have created an approval process overseen by the State Corporation Commission, rather than local governing bodies, for projects capable of generating 50 or more megawatts. It would have allowed developers whose projects are deemed to meet the SCC’s to-be-determined criteria but denied approval by their host localities to appeal the local vote to the SCC.

That same year, state Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Richmond, sponsored a bill that would have defined as unreasonable any “limits on the total amount, density, or size of solar facilities that can be developed” in a locality. Had it passed, the bill could have nullified the respective 2% and 10% acreage caps Isle of Wight and Surry counties enacted in 2023. VanValkenburg, in a 2024 floor speech, said his bill aimed to achieve benchmarks the General Assembly established in 2020 with the passage of the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which mandates Dominion Energy transition to 100% carbon-free energy sources by 2045.

All three bills, respectively dubbed HB 636, SB 567 and SB 697, were tabled to 2025.

More recently, the Virginia Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, or CEUR, voted 7-5 on Jan. 6 to recommend legislation be drafted to establish the “Virginia Solar Energy and Energy Storage Siting Advisory Board.”

The proposed body would be tasked with providing “an opinion” to localities on “critical interconnection projects” deemed to have “statewide significance,” which CEUR has recommended defining as projects located within seven miles of a power grid interconnection site and capable of generating or storing more than 20 megawatts.

A Nov. 21 letter by CEUR Executive Director Carrie Hearne to state Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Mount Vernon, recommended requiring energy developers to apply separately to their host localities for permitting and to the proposed advisory board, and notify the host locality of its intent to seek the advisory board’s opinion. Per the CEUR-recommended text, the advisory board would then have 90 days to issue its opinion, and the host locality would have 180 days after that to act on the local zoning or permit application.

The draft bill text would require a local governing body to issue a written explanation for any vote that differs from the state advisory body’s opinion, and would deem any project that goes more than 180 days without a local zoning decision to be deemed automatically approved. The draft text would allow any solar developer to appeal a local denial to that locality’s circuit court.

CEUR, which came into existence in 2003 from legislation allowing the transition to retail competition among electric utilities like Dominion, had been dormant for nearly six years before being reactivated in late 2023 to address rising statewide electricity demand. It consists of 10 legislators, three non-legislator members – one appointed by the Senate Committee on Rules, one by the speaker of the house and one by the governor – and a representative from the Attorney General’s Office.

According to Hearne, the CEUR-recommended bill would accomplish three purposes. It would create the review board as a separate new political subdivision of Virginia. It would create a model ordinance, which localities would be required to adopt, establishing parameters for how they’re to evaluate solar farm applications. It would also create what she termed an “energy consortium” that would “help inform the creation of the model ordinance” and provide expertise to regional and local planning.

This consortium would be “made up of our public universities, that would include historically Black colleges and universities, the land grant universities of Virginia State University and Virginia Tech and our other research institutions across the state,” Hearn said.

“This bill was really aimed at helping us achieve our goals in the Clean Economy Act,” said Deeds, who serves as one of the legislator members of CEUR.

“If we have the continued, completely unfettered free market, whatever you want to call it, where every locality can do whatever they want right now, you’re going to continue to have 80% of all solar projects being rejected and all kinds of people who want to come in and invest in this state who are going to stop investing in this state because the system is so incredibly unpredictable,” said Surovell, who chairs CEUR.

State Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg, who was among the five “no” votes at the Jan. 6 CEUR meeting, criticized CEUR’s recommended legislation as giving too much power to an appointed, rather than elected, state body.

“It gets first crack at this, deciding whether utility-scale solar projects should be approved,” Obenshain said. “If the local governments disagree, the board is presumed to be right and because of the limited standing that this draft bill creates, virtually nobody has the right to question or appeal a ruling of the review board. These are pretty significant issues that I think really need to be fleshed out and reflect an enormous shift in decision-making authority from localities who are in the best position to make determinations as to the appropriate siting, the compliance, to monitor the construction of these projects to an unelected state organization that is allocated the central responsibility for making these decisions from the top down.”

House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, also criticized the bill as “usurping” local authority.

Surovell, who described the bill as “constraining,” but not usurping local authority, told The Smithfield Times he planned to introduce legislation pertaining to the model policy while Deeds would introduce legislation pertaining to the creation of the siting advisory board.

Isle of Wight County Board of Supervisors Chairman Joel Acree said that while he respects the challenges at the state level in implementing the Clean Economy Act, he maintains that the approval or rejection of proposed solar farms “should remain at the local level.”

The people responsible for deciding whether to allow rows of solar panels to replace local farmland “should be the ones who have to look their constituents in the face at local restaurants, grocery stores,” said Acree, who in 2024 cast one of two dissenting votes on the county’s 3-2 approval Sycamore Cross, Isle of Wight’s 11th and largest solar farm slated to span 2,200 acres at the westernmost edge of the Isle of Wight-Surry county border.

Surry Board of Supervisors Chairman Robert Elliott declined to comment on the possible state legislation.

The six months the CEUR-proposed bill, if sponsored and approved, would give localities to act on solar farm applications could leave a much narrower window for a county-level review and decision than has been the case with past projects in Isle of Wight.

AES, the Arlington-based developer of Sycamore Cross, had submitted its application for a conditional use permit 17 months prior to its September approval in April 2023. That application didn’t reach the county’s Planning Commission for a public hearing and vote until May 28 of this year. It took six months for Florida-based Palladium Energy’s May 2023 application for the 523-acre Moonlight solar farm to reach Isle of Wight’s Planning Commission in November that year, and another seven months after that for county supervisors to deny the requested permit in June 2024, a delay due in part to the developer’s request to amend the application and the supervisor’s decision to send the revised application back to the Planning Commission for a new vote.

Hearne’s letter also recommended that by July 1, 2027, the state issue a report determining if annual targets on statewide energy goals are being met through the permitting of solar energy and energy storage facilities.

 

What’s driving the push for state solar regulation?

One of those stakeholders is a multi-state coalition of solar, wind and battery storage developers known as the Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition, or MAREC.

“When we look at the commonwealth we see that electricity demand is skyrocketing. That’s new compared to where it has been. … In the past we’ve been thinking mostly about replacing existing energy sources to build clean energy and now we’re really looking at just needing more energy, period,” said MAREC Executive Director Evan Vaughan in a Nov. 8 interview with the Times.

Since then, a Dec. 9 Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee, or JLARC, report to the General Assembly has concluded the proliferation of data centers is a large contributor to the uptick in demand.

“One of the smaller data centers recently constructed in Virginia can draw up to 18 megawatts of power. … This is roughly equivalent to a mid-sized automobile assembly plant, 60 large commercial office buildings, or 4,500 homes,” the JLARC report states. “… Some planned data center campuses are expected to consume well over 1,000 megawatts, once fully built out, which is more than the 950 megawatt generation capacity of the state’s largest nuclear reactor.”

In early 2024, Surry County supervisors approved a new “emerging technologies” zoning district and rezoned roughly 600 acres for Middleburg-based Green Energy Partners’ proposed first-in-the-nation combination hydrogen fuel hub and data center, which has promised to bring more than 1,300 permanent jobs to the rural county of 6,500 residents by 2036. Green Energy’s proposal calls for the data center to eventually be powered on-site by small, modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs.

“The commonwealth’s energy policy is laid out in the VCEA, the Virginia Clean Economy Act, but essentially you know the commonwealth has gathered together 100-plus localities and said we’ve got this problem to solve and then sent them all off individually to try to figure it out upon themselves and it’s not a good way to meet this kind of statewide concern by having each individual county basically making their own decisions without complete information,” Vaughan said. “Localities are frankly you know overstretched in terms of their administrative capabilities already and they’re being asked to sort of grapple with new technology like solar to figure out how to regulate it and I think that the result of that patchwork, that lack of resources seen at the locality level has contributed to the trends that we’re seeing where over 50 counties in the commonwealth have made it either totally impossible or more difficult and more expensive to build solar through their ordinances.”

According to Vaughan, MAREC has tracked 33 solar farm proposals over the past 18 months that have been denied or withdrawn across Virginia. Had they been approved, they would have had the capacity to generate up to 3.2 gigawatts. That’s roughly double the 1.6 gigawatt nameplate capacity of Dominion’s Surry nuclear power plant.

“There’s quite a lot of clean energy capacity, inexpensive energy capacity, that is not making it through due to local siting decisions and ordinances. … We’re not saying take away the authority of counties; we’re just saying that there needs to be a rebalancing so that county decision-making, which is very critical – very important – is balanced with property rights and it’s also balanced with the commonwealth’s electricity demand because ultimately, the decisions  Virginia, including its localities, are making in terms of economic growth, in terms of attracting new jobs, new businesses, new residents – that’s directly contributing to the energy demand that solar is trying to meet, and so we want to work with localities and figure out a way to move the ball forward,” Vaughan said.

One aspect Vaughan contends hasn’t been at the forefront of the debate over solar farms – but should be – is rate parity. The term refers to when a renewable technology such as solar can produce electricity for roughly the same cost as a traditional source such as coal or nuclear, so that when new solar farms are added to the state power grid, Dominion ratepayers don’t end up paying more. Generating electricity from solar panels placed on rooftops or atop parking lots, Vaughan said, is more expensive than using farm fields.

“If we’re pushing solar away from these private landowners and pushing it more toward rooftops … there is going to be a rate pare impact resulting from that,” Vaughan said.