Which way the Venn blows

It feels like one of those logic puzzles high school students grapple with on the SAT: If Delegate Sally passes a law to require utilities in her state to generate all their electricity from renewable, carbon-free energy sources like wind and solar by 2045, what is the latest year CEO Tom’s power plant can stop running on natural gas?

Like many things in life, business and especially government, the answer to this question is hardly clear-cut. It lies somewhere within the intersection of the Venn diagram formed by the overlap of Virginia’s fast-growing energy and data centers industries — topics well covered by two of our feature stories in this month’s issue.

As reported by contributing writer Stephenie Overman in her April story, “Natural selection,” the state’s primary electric utility, Dominion Energy, is seeking to build a $600 million-plus, 1,000-megawatt natural gas power plant in Chesterfield County even though it’s under a state mandate from the Virginia Clean Economy Act to eliminate fossil fuels as an energy source by 2045.

This comes amid a tidal wave of data center development in the commonwealth that has sparked pushback from some local politicians, state legislators and citizens’ groups, reports contributor Elizabeth Cooper in her story, “Digital Divide.”

Between 2011 and 2020, Amazon Web Services alone spent $35 billion building data centers in Virginia, a figure the company plans to double by 2040. And recent rapid advancements in artificial intelligence are expected to grow demand for data centers even more. By some estimates, these electricity-chomping facilities, which support modern staples of life like streaming entertainment media, cloud computing and videoconferencing, could quadruple their power usage by 2038, accounting for about half the state’s electricity use.

Meanwhile, the automotive industry is also trying to boost adoption of electric vehicles instead of gas-burning cars, putting more strain on the grid. (A California government study estimated that by 2035 EVs could siphon 10% of that state’s electricity during peak periods.) And of course, people are cranking up their AC amid record hot summers caused by climate change.

A group of nine Democratic Central Virginia state legislators who put out a statement in March opposing the proposed Chesterfield natural gas power plant noted that Dominion notified the State Corporation Commission last year that the utility expects its carbon emissions will increase to as much as 43.8 million metric tons by 2048 — more than twice its emissions as of 2021. Needless to say, that’s not the trend the legislature had in mind when it passed its carbon-free power mandate.

For its part, though, Dominion has said that it’s trying to meet the 2045 deadline through massive investments in solar farms and the $9.8 billion offshore wind farm it’s developing off the Virginia Beach coast. But it also says that current technological limits on battery storage of renewable energy may mean that natural gas has to remain in the power generation mix past 2045 to ensure grid stability. Dominion is also considering other potential carbon-free solutions such as small modular nuclear reactors, but those are still very much experimental, with none yet operating outside of Russia and China.

Virginia is hardly alone in facing this power conundrum. Just in the Southeast U.S., utilities are proposing about 33,000 megawatts of new natural gas projects, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center. One of its senior attorneys noted to The New York Times in March that this is “completely at odds” with cutting carbon emissions to stem climate change.

It’s not clear what the solution is, but the answer will need to be found at the intersection of science, industry and government. And quickly.