For the past several years, Dominion Energy has been working to hit ambitious clean energy targets mandated by state lawmakers.
The Virginia Clean Economy Act passed in 2020 requires the company to generate power from only renewable sources by 2045. About 16,000 megawatts is supposed to come specifically from solar and onshore wind, some through power purchase agreements.
Dominion is now seeking approval for 11 solar and battery projects as part of its race to meet those goals.
“It is the largest amount of solar and energy storage requests that we have made in our clean energy filings to date,” said spokesperson Tim Eberly.
Energy demand is exploding in Virginia, expected to nearly double over the next decade. That’s largely to fuel power-hungry data centers that are expanding to accommodate the rise in artificial intelligence. The issue is already hitting customers’ pocketbooks.
The utility has told state regulators that surging demand will make it nearly impossible to meet the carbon-free targets. The Clean Economy Act gives Dominion wiggle room to ask state regulators for more time if retiring traditional power plants would jeopardize energy reliability.
The company proposes building natural gas “peaker plants” to supplement other sources. Officials are also pursuing more nuclear power in the form of small modular reactors, which have not yet proven commercially viable.
“Solar and wind only operate when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, so that's a critical piece of why we have the ‘all of the above’ strategy,” Eberly said. “We need natural gas, where it is dispatchable, and we can power up and power down as we need it.”
Half of Dominion’s proposed power generation would come from solar, which is nationally considered the cheapest and quickest form of energy to build, he said.
The 11 projects are part of Dominion’s latest annual clean energy filing, which updates state regulators on how they’re going to meet mandates. The State Corporation Commission will then provide the final approval.
The projects would cost a total of $2.9 billion and include six utility-scale solar farms, three smaller sites known as “distributed solar” and two battery storage facilities. All are planned to come online by the end of this decade.
One is in Hampton Roads: Bedford Solar near Fentress in Chesapeake. Unlike most of the other proposed sites, it’s already in operation.
The large-scale facility includes more than 150,000 panels on 545 acres. It launched in 2021 but exclusively supplied the state of Virginia, exempting Dominion from certain requirements.
That contract ended and Dominion wants to transition Bedford to supply all of its customers, Eberly said. It will now need SCC approval.
The Chesapeake site contributes about 70 megawatts of energy, enough to power up to 17,500 homes at peak output.
Storage is another crucial part of Dominion’s plans.
It’s “sort of the unheralded component of the clean energy transition,” Eberly said. “If we are going to rely more and more heavily on renewables, we need multi-day energy storage.”
The two newly proposed energy storage sites would be in Middlesex and Richmond counties, the latter co-located with a previously approved solar farm. The projects use massive batteries in rows that resemble shipping containers.
But Dominion is waiting for storage technology to improve before pursuing it more widely, Eberly said. Their current lithium-ion batteries only allow a four-to-six-hour window to store energy before discharging it.
