Nearly half of Virginia’s solar power generation approved by local governments in the past decade has been in Southside.
And while local officials have approved about 13,000 megawatts of solar projects, about a quarter of that amount has yet to receive the necessary state permits for operation.
Furthermore, the percentage of proposed new solar projects that local governments have approved in the past eight years has steadily declined, while the share of projects they’ve denied has risen.
These are just some of the conclusions drawn from a new database tracking large solar projects across the commonwealth. The database, from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, debuts as various stakeholders consider how Virginia can meet state-mandated clean-energy goals and navigate a state-versus-local tension over who approves or rejects new solar projects.
The Virginia Solar Database aggregates publicly available information on more than 490 projects that are each over 1 megawatt of capacity and have been advertised for a public hearing. Government and school solar installations are excluded.
The database arose out of a 2022 survey that revealed a lack of comprehensive information about Virginia’s solar projects, Elizabeth Marshall, senior program manager of the Weldon Cooper Center’s Virginia Solar Initiative, said last week.
“We know that record-breaking energy demand forecasts are going to indicate that demand for solar facility siting, and frankly other technologies as well, will continue,” Marshall said.
“And so in recognition of that, we’d like to provide reliable data for policy-making and to have informed public discussions around policy, provide a central source of truth that people can rely on and also provide a mechanism to track projects from the local level all the way through state permitting and interconnection.”
Interconnection refers to connecting energy-generating resources, such as solar projects, to the electric grid.
Marshall was addressing the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, a group of state lawmakers and citizens who are evaluating legislation that could impact Virginia’s electric utilities.
Marshall highlighted several findings for the commission, including:
- More than 6,000 of the 13,000 megawatts of solar projects that have been locally approved in Virginia have been in Southside — a figure that exceeds that of any of seven other individual regions and comprises nearly half of the state total.
- Active solar permits at the state level total about 9,300 megawatts, or about 70% of the locally approved 13,000 megawatts. Marshall wants to find the reasons behind that difference: “There’s about 3,700 megawatts that are missing that maybe fell out or got lost or just haven’t made it to state permitting yet.”
- The percentage of proposed projects approved by local officials decreased from more than 80% in 2017 to just under 50% this year. The share of projects that local officials have denied reached a peak of about 40% this year. Some projects were also withdrawn by developers.
The database’s information comes from local governments, Virginia Department of Environmental Quality permitting records, State Corporation Commission records, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, PJM — the regional transmission organization that coordinates wholesale electricity movement across Virginia, 12 other states and Washington, D.C. — and “various press, utility, industry/developer, and stakeholder media,” according to its website. The plan calls for it to be updated at least quarterly.
Marshall told the commission last week that building the database brought challenges, including that the relevant data is not standardized across localities, state-level data can be hard to obtain and it can be difficult to reconcile PJM data with local information.
The database joins another publicly available tool to track solar projects across Virginia: the Solar Project Pipeline Analysis map from the Solar Hands-On Instructional Network of Excellence, or SHINE, a public-private initiative promoting solar workforce development.
SHINE’s map focuses on solar projects in the works for future development with an emphasis on the jobs and wages that they could create. It does not include completed projects that are up and running.
Database might help inform solar siting policy
As lawmakers consider how to achieve state-mandated clean energy targets, the commonwealth faces rapidly increasing electric demand.
Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power, Virginia’s largest electric utilities, are required by the Virginia Clean Economy Act of 2020 to achieve carbon-free energy portfolios by 2045 and 2050, respectively.
[Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]
While much of the recent rising electric demand is driven by data centers in Northern Virginia, many of the proposed solar projects have been in Southside because developers have been drawn to the region’s abundance of relatively flat, inexpensive land.
Some Virginia localities have opposed new large solar facilities, citing impacts on the environment, property values and rural aesthetics, and have enacted land caps or outright bans to limit their development.
Now, the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation is examining bills that were carried over from the last General Assembly session, when a state-versus-local tension arose over who should have authority to approve new solar projects.
Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, and Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax County, have bills to allow solar developers to appeal to the state if localities deny their projects under certain conditions.
The commission also is looking at a so-called “ban on bans” bill from Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico County, to prevent localities from enacting blanket restrictions on new solar proposals.
Future hopes: More data, more funding
Marshall told the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation that the newly launched database has 27 data points for each project but that researchers are collecting 25 more, including summaries of actions taken by local officials for each project.
Del. Michael Webert, R-Fauquier County, asked if the database showed reasons why projects were denied.
“As of today, no, that is not one of the data points we were able to release,” Marshall answered.
Marshall said the database shows when a local action was taken, and a user could use that to look up meeting minutes from the appropriate local government to see why a project was denied.
The solar database program has been funded by a mix of public and private money. Some funding expired in May, so researchers are at “reduced funding,” she said.
“Currently we are open to funding opportunities to continue the work,” Marshall said.
Asked by Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg, about the source of private funding, Marshall said it comes from one foundation but declined to name it, saying the funder has asked program officials not to “publicly celebrate” it.
Obenshain followed up by asking if that foundation had a “role in determining the source of truth” for the database, to which Marshall replied, “No.”
