The developer of a proposed battery storage system off White Marsh Road in Surry County has scheduled a community meeting on April 30 for residents to learn more about the project.

According to a notice sent to neighbors and published on the county’s Facebook page, the meeting will be from 5-7 p.m. at the Surry Community Center, 205 Enos Farm Drive.

The meeting will be an open-house format with an opportunity to meet representatives of Idaho-based Clenera, which has proposed plans for a 20-acre facility capable of storing up to 320 megawatt hours of electricity. It would be named Bear Island Battery Storage.

At the request of Clenera, county supervisors voted on April 3 to approve a zoning ordinance amendment that would allow and regulate battery storage facilities on agricultural-rural or industrial-zoned parcels by conditional use permit. Clenera would still need to go through the conditional use permit approval process for its specific project, which will entail hearings and votes by the county’s Planning Commission and supervisors.

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.

Clenera’s project would not be tied to an existing or proposed solar farm, according to county officials.

Each battery unit would consist of individual battery cells that get placed into modules that are stored in racks similar to server towers at a data center. Those racks and a battery management system programmed to keep the units at an acceptable temperature then would be placed into the final shipping container-sized outdoor units.

Clenera says battery storage arrays increase the reliability of the power grid amid rising demand for electricity, which a Dec. 9 Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee, or JLARC, report to the General Assembly says is being driven by the proliferation of data centers. Most of the state’s data centers are concentrated in northern Virginia, though a data center campus that would eventually be powered by on-site small, modular nuclear reactors is proposed for land adjacent to Dominion Energy’s Surry nuclear plant.

Ed Rumler of Clenera told the supervisors at a recent meeting that the batteries would charge during periods of low demand, such as the early morning hours, and send out the stored power when there’s high demand, which typically occurs between 5-7 p.m.