Dominion’s Proposed Peaker Plant Flouts Environmental Justice, Community Says

CHESTER, Va.—For the first 60 years Duane Brankley lived here, about a mile and a half from a coal plant owned by Dominion Energy, coal ash coated the shingles on his roof and the insides of his lungs.

The coal plant finally closed in 2023, but soon Brankley could be facing an even more insidious air pollutant: fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5, from a new natural gas plant, the Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center, that Dominion wants to build on the site of the old coal facility. 

Given what he’s experienced, Brankley is concerned about the future air quality in his neighborhood as the utility seeks a needed air permit for its new facility, one of six future natural gas plants the utility claims are necessary to meet periods of peak demand on the electric grid that it says could soon be strained in Virginia by data center development. 

Along with an air permit review, the proposed natural gas plant needs a construction permit that includes Dominion’s environmental justice analysis that purports to evaluate the harm facing surrounding underserved community members, like Brankley. But attorneys from the Southern Environmental Law Center, representing the Chesterfield County Branch NAACP, Mothers Out Front and the Central American Solidarity Association, say it lacks community health information and does not adequately assess risk exposure to the plant. 

“They don’t care about the pollution harming people,” said Brankley. “It’s the cha-ching they’re worried about. Money, money, money.” 

Brankley is not alone. Aliya Farooq, another community member, lives a few miles away from the plant and is a plaintiff alongside Brankley and former Virginia Sierra Club Chapter director Glen Bessa in a lawsuit, now heading to the Virginia Court of Appeals, that challenges a local land use approval.

Farooq, who’s attended local meetings and briefings from Virginia’s regulators, is concerned about the air pollution and the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions exacerbating climate-related flooding. 

“Regardless, one gas plant or six, we are going to be harming the environment and we’re going to be adding pollution,” Farooq said in an interview earlier this month. “That bothers me because [of] the long-term impacts, not just locally but across the country and across the world. The death toll in Pakistan, last time I checked, was between 600 and 800 right now from the current flooding.”

Dominion maintains that the 1 gigawatt “peaker” plant is the best way to send electricity to the grid during periods of peak demand, which reached about 22 gigawatts in 2024 and is expected to grow by more than 10,000 MW by 2030. 

The utility’s service requirements, outside of the peak periods, are projected to grow from a demand of 17.7 gigawatts in 2023 to 33.7 gigawatts in 2048. While it is pursuing carbon free nuclear, offshore wind and solar and storage, the utility claims renewables can’t be relied on in the early morning and evenings when the sun isn’t shining, as well as when the wind isn’t blowing to meet periods of high stress. 

Asked about the utility’s environmental justice analysis of environmental impacts on nearby communities, spokesperson Aaron Ruby pointed to public comments that Cedric Green, senior vice president of generation, made before Virginia’s environmental regulators. 

The peaker plant’s air permit requires maximum reduction of emissions, Green said. “This project is located on the site of long-standing coal units, and I would emphasize that there will be less emissions from this project than from the coal units it replaces.”

Many in attendance at a Department of Environmental Quality hearing on the peaker plant earlier this month, including a Dominion Energy-backed group called the Virginia Reliability Alliance, spoke in support of the project because of what they said was its reliability promise. But opponents pointed to the project running counter to the state’s decarbonization law, the Virginia Clean Economy Act and an opportunity for battery storage to increase reliability of renewables.

Coal Plant Continuing to Give 

Although transitioning from burning coal to natural gas, the Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center would be allowed to release new pollutants into the community despite community members’ concerns.

The former coal plant began operations in 1944 and had four coal units that retired between March 2019 and 2023. Two natural gas fired turbines have remained, with a combined capacity of 420 megawatts.

The utility initially proposed the peaker plant in 2019 but shelved it as the state passed, with Democrats in control of the governor’s mansion and both legislative chambers, the Virginia Clean Economy Act. It required that Dominion transition to a 100 percent clean energy portfolio by 2045. 

When the coal plant operated two units that phased down between 2020 and 2022 before their retirement in 2023, about 43.99 tons of PM 2.5 and 221.96 tons of PM 10 were emitted on average each year, along with 165.28 tons of carbon monoxide, 19.29 tons of volatile organic compounds and 1.7 million tons of greenhouse gases.

The new facility will annually emit a maximum amount of 153.96 tons of each PM 2.5 and PM 10, 825.3 tons of carbon monoxide, 162.5 tons of volatile organic compounds, 2.215 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, 353.3 tons of nitrous oxide, 27.8 tons of sulfur dioxide, 17.92 tons of sulfuric acid and .01 tons of lead, according to Dominion’s application to DEQ.

While Dominion claims that is a decrease in emissions from when the coal units ran, the SELC contends the gas units will produce an increase in PM 2.5, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and greenhouse gases compared to 2022 levels. 

During the administration of former President Joe Biden, air quality standards for power plants were made more stringent, but now the Trump administration and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin are seeking to roll those rules back.

According to the American Lung Association, PM 2.5 exposure can lead to more asthma attacks, respiratory illnesses and more, including early deaths.

“There is no safe threshold to breathe in fine particles,” the association states.

A “Desktop Review”

Under the Virginia Environmental Justice Act, another law Virginia passed in 2020, an environmental justice community is defined as either a community of color or a low-income community that faces an increased health risk by being in close proximity to air pollution or disproportionate impacts from any “industrial, governmental, or commercial operation, program, or policy.”

Chesterfield County, with a population of about 364,548 people, has about 80,000 Black people and 40,000 Hispanic people. Biden’s environmental justice screen, a tool showing a demographic background for an area, found that 50 to 90 percent of people living in areas surrounding the plant are of color. Trump has since removed the tool.

Dominion’s EJ analysis found that 22 of the 24 census block groups within a three-mile radius of the plant qualify as an environmental justice community under Virginia’s law. While acknowledging those communities, the utility asserts the project “minimizes potential environmental impacts such that local community health and other aspects of the environment will be protected.” Dominion also adds that its analysis for the DEQ “will show no significant adverse and disproportionate impacts to EJ communities.”

DEQ officials did not respond to requests for comment. 

James, with the SELC, is critical of Dominion’s EJ analysis, calling it a “desktop review,” without further evaluating the community’s actual health conditions. When cross referencing the proposed location with a 2023 Chesterfield-Colonial Height Health Assessment, residents west of the site comprise a high social vulnerability index making them more at risk of disease. 

Loren Hopkins, a professor at Rice University in Houston who was hired by the SELC, noted a lack of community health information and only three air monitors 12, 11.5 and 7.5 miles away from the site, providing insufficient data.

“In this respect, to accurately project the plant’s health impacts, Dominion must not only complete a robust baseline study of community health (e.g., current rates of asthma attack, asthma incidence, cardiac events, stroke, diabetes, and cancer), but must also determine the existing concentrations of harmful pollutants at the site,” Hopkins wrote in a report.

Community members have conducted their own study. It involves work with Lakshmi Fjord, an environmental justice anthropologist with the University of Virginia, who helped compile data showing that a natural gas compressor station in Buckingham County had a disproportionate impact on Black people living within the surrounding area. That finding led the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the compressor’s permit. Now, those Buckingham Community members are speaking up again.

“Dominion came out with the same story, the same line, how it’s going to be productive, how its going to make a difference,” said Richard Walker, a leading activist against the Buckingham compressor station at a DEQ public hearing last week. “But the key thing that they do, they didn’t do an environmental justice impact study, and here we go again.”

Any environmental justice determination DEQ makes will be based on guidance that has remained in a draft form under the administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin and had issues in the eyes of James’ group.

“Our hope is that DEQ will consider the various comments that are submitted and evaluate the concerns that people have raised about the potential disproportionate health impacts,” James said in an interview. “That they’ll truly take on the responsibility that they have to promote and ensure that environmental justice is carried out across the commonwealth.”