A debate simmering for years about the construction of utility-scale solar facilities on farms and forestland in Virginia has reached a boil in the new legislative session with decarbonization targets looming over the state and a proposed new facility review board threatening to infringe upon local decision-making.
The state’s Commission on Electric Utility Regulation (CEUR), recently reinvigorated to consider bills outside of Virginia’s 45- or 60-day legislative sessions, voted earlier this month to endorse proposed legislation to create the Virginia Energy Facility Review Board that would weigh in on proposed solar projects.
A new version of the bill, crafted in recent weeks in response to local opposition, would leave final decisions on solar and battery storage facilities in the hands of localities but require them to include targets for achieving statewide clean energy goals.
The revised bill drops a model ordinance the review board would have drawn up for all new projects, as well as review board authority to issue opinions on the advisability of new projects, unless a developer asks for one.
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“The CEUR-endorsed policy seeks to balance the needs of many competing interests, from the state and localities, developers and conservation groups,” said Carrie Hearne, executive director of CEUR, in an email to Inside Climate News. “It would bring more information into the record for localities to consider during initial permit reviews, and create a framework around local planning and policies.”
The updated bill “continues that mission,” Hearne told legislators Friday afternoon.
The solar siting legislation comes as the state labors to comply with the Virginia Clean Economy Act, or VCEA, a 2020 law seeking to decarbonize the grid by mid-century. Under the bill, the state’s two largest utilities are required to build substantial amounts of solar—Dominion Energy 16,100 megawatts and Appalachian Power Company 600 megawatts—as well as battery storage facilities.
Given a recent uptick in local government denials of solar project proposals, developers and environmental groups say they are concerned those targets will be missed. But the creation of a new Energy Facility Review Board to weigh in on siting has led to concerns among Virginia’s counties over the loss of character of agricultural and forested lands.
“If we’re serious about our energy targets, then we need to find a solution for it,” said Jim Purekal, director with Advanced Energy United, a trade association advocating for zero-carbon technologies that supports the bill, despite a weakened appeals process. “There’s simply no way to decarbonize Virginia’s grid without a diverse set of large-scale projects.”
Joe Lerch, director of local government policy with the Virginia Association of Counties, said the initial proposal was “starting down this path of preempting local decision-making authority.” The update is “in a much better place.”
“We’re supportive of all non-greenhouse gas emissions sources of meeting that (electricity) demand, whether it’s solar, it’s small modular reactors, it could also be geothermal,” Lerch said in an interview. “But we think it needs to be more of a comprehensive look at the whole energy picture, and not just favoring one industry over others when it comes to the local decision-making process.”
Democrats have control of both legislative chambers by narrow margins and have largely been supportive of solar energy. House Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, a member of the CEUR, voted to advance the original bill while saying, “I would do everything in my power to kill this bill if it comes before the body like this.” He believes the new siting board, as envisioned in that legislation, would have been too much of a top-down approach. He declined to comment Tuesday morning on the update.
The bill also faces tough sledding with Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who signaled opposition and called the VCEA a “quagmire” in his annual State of the Commonwealth address.
“Local communities must be able to exercise their rights with regards to land use,” Youngkin said.
The Goals
The VCEA has wide-ranging requirements for Dominion and Appalachian Power Company to spur the development of a diverse array of renewable energy projects.
Along with solar that has to be installed by 2035, Dominion must also petition for 2,700 megawatts of energy storage.
The company has reached interim targets with the State Corporation Commission, which regulates Virginia’s utilities, approving 4,400 megawatts of solar and 557 megawatts of storage so far.
The utility is mostly planning for an additional 700 megawatts of utility-scale solar a year, and annual amounts of storage increasing to 278 megawatts by 2035, according to its filing with the SCC.
Appalachian Power Company, the smaller utility serving Southwest, has smaller amounts to comply with and has been on track in meeting them.
The Struggle
The siting of solar facilities has emerged as a contentious issue, given an initial trend for unanimous approvals followed by a course reversal with rejections at the county level.
Prior to the passage of the VCEA, localities approved 100 percent of solar projects in 2016. By 2024, the approval rate had fallen to under 50 percent, according to information from the Virginia Solar Initiative at the University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center.
At the same time, denials have gone from under 10 percent to about 40 percent.
In 2016, localities approved just under 500 megawatts of solar. In 2022, localities approved 3,000 megawatts. Last year, that number fell to about 1,000 megawatts.
Solar developers acknowledge early builders may not have engaged in community outreach to explain the impacts of newer forms of development on their communities. But there’s also been misinformation—like erroneous reports that solar farms have drained acid rain onto fields— that have skewed perceptions of projects.
“I think (localities) see solar as a threat to their way of life,” said Purekal.
For Lerch, the increase in denials could be due to bad actors among solar developers having stormwater runoff and erosion issues. In May, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality fined the solar developer Energix, which declined to comment for this article, $158,000 after years of violations over those problems.
Issues with financing, or the backlog of projects waiting approval from PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator for Virginia, Lerch said, could also hold up actual construction after localities have approved over 13,000 megawatts of projects.
“The bottleneck is not my locality,” said Daniel Witt, county administrator in Charlotte County, located in a Southside region called “the wood basket” because of its forests harvested for the timber industry. There, Witt said his county approved over 1,507 megawatts of solar with the amount of time for construction to begin ranging from 299 days to 1,958 days.
Land Use Loss
The boiling solar siting debate in Virginia is fueled by the current rule of thumb that one megawatt of solar takes up about 7.5 acres of land.
According to a 2021 Virginia Commonwealth University report, solar had been built on 13,842 acres with about 90 percent going on forested, crop and pasture land.
Those numbers come as Virginia has lost 500,000 acres of agricultural land between 2017 to 2022 due to thin profit margins and lack of interest from young farmers. The agricultural and forestry communities represent Virginia’s top economic sectors, with a 2021 state report finding the former contributing $82.3 billion to the state’s economy annually.
There are decommissioning plans for solar projects requiring a site to be returned to its natural state after its 30-year life cycle, and agrivoltaics pairing solar with agricultural practices, but those aren’t proven yet to the agricultural community.
“This is a larger concern that we are foregoing everyone’s ability to produce agricultural goods forever in these spaces,” said Williamson. “I look back at the passing of President Carter, which I think has put a lot of this conversation in perspective. We should have been talking about this since 1972 when he put panels on the top of the White House.”
However, an updated report from VCU and Advanced Energy United found that less than one percent of all of those land types in the state have been taken up by utility-scale solar.
Going forward, if solar were to meet 15 percent of the state’s energy demand, more than the current 6 percent solar currently provides, the updated VCU report estimates utility-scale projects could need 3.1 percent of all cropland and .5 percent of each forestland and cropland by 2035.
“Even at an aggressive (rate) … we’re only talking about less than six-tenths of a percent,” said Purekal.
What the Bill Would Do
The CEUR-endorsed bill was intended to provide more certainty for future development through several provisions. The update is more focused on helping localities.
The bill initially would have defined a critical infrastructure project as one that is over 20 megawatts, or 2 megawatts if it’s on previously disturbed land, and within a 3-mile radius of an interconnection point, or where it could link up with a transmission line.
A critical infrastructure project would have been submitted to the Virginia Energy Facility Review Board, consisting of several state agency representatives regulating energy, water quality, forestry and economic development.
The board also would have had two representatives from the locality in which a project was proposed and a representative of the Virginia Clean Energy Technical Assistance Center, a consortium created by the bill and consisting of Virginia universities to research requests.
The board would have offered an opinion to approve or deny the project with any restrictions on it.
Appeals of a locality’s decision could have been made only by the project applicant. In court, the locality would bear the burden of proving how the review board’s opinion was incorrect and inconsistent with a locality’s ordinance on solar projects.
That is gone now, except for a center to help with research. Developers submitting projects to localities could seek an opinion of a review “committee,” made up of the state agencies that would have been on the original review board, before localities approved or denied a project. Local denials could not be based on an “unreasonable basis,” which would be left up to the court if a project applicant filed a legal challenge, explained Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville.
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The original version of the bill approved by the CEUR board had localities needing to adopt solar projects based on a model ordinance created by the board which would not have allowed imposition of an “unreasonable restriction,” including a ban, which developers say is currently happening across the state.
Regional groupings of localities would have needed to devise review board-approved energy plans showing how they make “meaningful contributions” to the state’s energy goals, and add those to their comprehensive plans.
But the new proposal would have the Virginia Department of Energy develop targets for the regional groupings to meet the VCEA. A locality would need to incorporate those targets into its planning.
Possible Profits
The land use debate includes the desire to preserve personal property rights of farmers to supplement their income through leasing solar projects.
Energy Right, a solar development advocacy group focused on conservative principles of individual choices and economic development, released a poll this week showing 63 percent of Virginians think local governments should not “be able to limit landowner property rights by placing bans on solar development.”
That view comes as data from a Purdue University Ag Economy Barometer released in March 2023 that found 48 percent of respondents reported getting more than $1,000 a year per acre by leasing their property for solar.
And that income is coupled with funds solar projects can provide localities through revenue share agreements, deals that state law allows to consist of flat annual payments of up to $1,400 per megawatt. Payments increase next year by 10 percent and every five years after.
“The solar industry would prefer not to have (state) preemption,” said Evan Vaughan, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition, which backs the bill, in an interview. “We do have to be in these communities for 30 years. We don’t want to be in an oppositional relationship.”
The Political Path
The Commission on Electric Utility Regulation advanced the Energy Facility Review Board measure after legislative members grappled with the changes to local land use decision making to plan and review solar projects.
In response to questions on the precedence for requiring localities to adopt a model ordinance, Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, the patron of the VCEA and member of the CEUR, found the example of a model ordinance being drafted for bow hunting in Virginia, but not a requirement to put them in place.
Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Rockingham, initially had concerns over the appeals process, including how property owners adjacent to land proposed for solar can’t sue over localities’ decisions like they can in other land use cases—another means of showing favoritism for solar, as he sees it.
“Why should we bend over backwards and create this special process for the solar industry when commercial developers, housing developers don’t have the same process,” Obenshain said in an interview. “If I want to build an oil refinery in Lacey Spring, Virginia, I’m guessing that my neighbors and the county might have a problem with it. It’s meeting a need, but I got to go through a process to get there.”
Another rural Republican, Senate Minority Leader Ryan McDougle, R-Henrico, had concerns about the burdens of hosting solar facilities disproportionately in rural areas, given considerations such as land availability and cost.
“If you consider those things, even on a regional basis, it has to be in rural areas, it can’t be an urban area,” McDougle said.
This is an election year in Virginia for all 100 members of the House of Delegates, in which Democrats currently have only a 2-seat majority, with multiple districts that have a combination of urban and rural areas. The governor’s office, which Democrats are hopeful they can take back, will also be up for grabs. Senate elections will not take place for another two years.
Scott, the Democratic House speaker, said he’s concerned about government overreach into rural areas.
“As the bill goes through the legislative process, it may get to a point where it’ll get my support,” Scott told Inside Climate News. “I don’t want to get into the specifics of that negotiation, but…I think it’s always good to work with local communities and let them make those decisions.”
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