Democratic leadership in the Virginia General Assembly is finally acknowledging what has been obvious for a few years now: The Virginia Clean Economy Act, a sweeping 2020 mandate of carbonless electricity production in the state by 2045, is unworkable.

Legislative leadership has a choice: Either leave the VCEA in place and force a series of bad policy decisions by lawmakers in the years ahead, or take a step back and replace it with more realistic goals that can be adjusted to reflect realities of the modern economy.

Fortunately for Isle of Wight, Surry and other rural communities that would bear the heaviest burden for VCEA compliance, Virginia Democrats, who control both the House and Senate, are for the first time signaling a willingness to be pragmatic rather than draconian.

“We went a long while with more supply than we had demand; now it’s flipped upside down,” House Speaker Don Scott told a reporter last week after a meeting of the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, which learned from experts just how much electricity demand is increasing thanks to the proliferation of energy-hogging data centers. “We have much more demand than we have supply. And so, we have to respond. And I think sometimes you have policies we have to examine and make sure we meet demand and keep costs low.”  

The Clean Economy Act has main requirements for modernizing the state’s power generation:

• To have at least 16,100 megawatts (nearly two-thirds) of the state’s electricity come from solar or offshore wind farms by the end of 2035.
• For Dominion Energy, the state’s major utility, to transition to 100% carbon-free energy sources by 2045.

The VCEA was initially viewed as a long-overdue move toward clean energy, but its feasibility is now in question as legislators balance clean energy goals with reliability and costs for both producers and consumers, not to mention President Donald Trump’s funding cuts for alternative energy projects, most of which cannot proceed without federal support.

Isle of Wight and Surry dodged a bullet in the last two General Assembly sessions as lawmakers considered, but ultimately defeated, bills to strip localities of their current authority to regulate siting of the industrial-scale solar farms that are already covering swaths of countryside.

If the Clean Economy Act remains in force, the state will have no choice but to take zoning authority away from localities and blanket rural Virginia with solar panels. Same for data centers, which we happen to prefer strongly over solar farms and warehouses for building a tax base, but such decisions should be made by local elected leadership, not lawmakers in Richmond. 

Scott, whose face, according to Radio IQ, “oscillated between a grimace and exhaustion” during the two-hour Commission on Electric Utility Deregulation meeting, acknowledged: “We have to look at everything. There are no Holy Grails when we’re trying to keep energy reliable and costs down.”