By Dwayne Yancey
Abigail Spanberger says the state shouldn’t force localities to accept solar projects or data centers that they don’t want, but that the state could do a better job of offering localities technical information so they can make better-informed decisions.
She supports nuclear energy and says that the small modular reactor proposed for Dominion Energy’s North Anna power station in Louisa County is a good way to test the commercial viability of that technology.
She also says that Virginia is headed toward an energy crisis and the next governor needs to address it, but that any solution must be done in coordination with neighboring states that are on the same electric grid.
Those are three big takeaways from a recent interview with the Democratic candidate for governor. Once both parties confirmed their respective candidates in early April, I contacted both campaigns on April 8 to request a policy interview with their candidate focused on the intersection of energy and economic development issues in rural Virginia. The Spanberger campaign responded the next day and eventually arranged a meeting with the candidate on April 27 in Lexington. I have yet to hear from the campaign of Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, despite three inquiries and promises by several Republican legislators that they would encourage her to grant an interview. If she agrees, I will ask the same questions and write a similar column on her responses. For now, here’s what Spanberger had to say:
Solar development: No mandates but state can help localities get more information
The Clean Economy Act, passed in 2020, requires the state’s two biggest utilities to produce 100% of their energy from non-carbon sources — Dominion by 2045, Appalachian Power by 2050. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.) That act has triggered a wave of solar energy development across rural Virginia, particularly in Southside, where the land is relatively flat and prices are relatively low.
Not everyone has been happy with that solar development. Some farmers like it because they see it as a good way to generate revenue off their land, but some neighbors don’t like it because they see solar farms (a term some reject, by the way) as ugly industrial blight that changes the character of the rural landscape. While some localities have welcomed solar, others have rejected it. Mecklenburg County, after some unhappy experiences with solar, recently passed a zoning ordinance that essentially bans utility-scale solar (home solar is still allowed). The Virginia Solar Database, put together by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia, shows that since the Clean Economy Act took effect, approvals by local governments have been falling while denials have been growing (although that trend has reversed in the first months of 2025).
That’s raised questions about whether Virginia will be able to meet its clean energy goals, if meeting those state goals relies on local governments that are increasingly hostile to solar. In 2023, the General Assembly took up (but did not pass) a bill that would have “banned the bans” by prohibiting local governments from banning solar outright. This year it took up a different bill that would have required planning districts, which are composed of multiple local governments, to set regional targets for clean energy. Whether that was a “slippery slope” to state mandates or a way to make sure that all parts of Virginia are engaged in energy production was a topic of much debate — until the bill was defeated when two Democratic state senators with a lot of rural constituents (Lashrecse Aird of Petersburg and Russet Perry of Loudoun County) failed to support it. Some, such as state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, have warned that rejecting such measures makes it more likely that some day the state will have to impose some sort of mandate.
Meanwhile, the growth of energy-gulping data centers is increasing the demand for energy in Virginia, with the General Assembly’s investigative arm, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, warning that if data centers continue to grow unrestrained, the state’s energy needs will triple by 2040.
More energy needed, but local governments increasingly reluctant to approve energy sites — that was the backdrop for my conversation with Spanberger. Can Virginia make this work if the state doesn’t mandate rural localities accept solar projects?
Spanberger noted that “the goals of the Clean Economy Act aren’t wholly dependent on solar.” She pointed out that Dominion is building what will be the largest offshore wind project in the country off the coast of Virginia Beach and envisions more such projects. President Donald Trump has shut down offshore wind projects that aren’t under development yet, but his executive order doesn’t touch ones already underway, such as Dominion’s. She also called the SMR proposal at North Anna “another step in the right direction.” Her point: “It’s not solar or nothing.”
Not all solar needs to be in rural areas, either, she said. “There are rooftops galore.” The industry lingo for this is “distributed solar,” since the generation sites are widely “distributed.” The Institute for Local Self-Reliance shows Virginia behind even some politically red states in its amount of distributed solar on a per-capita basis. Hawaii has the most, at 588 watt-hours per person, although an island chain in the Pacific may be a special case. Among the continental states, Massachusetts leads with 515-watt hours per person from distributed solar, followed by Rhode Island at 455. Virginia is at 71, which puts us behind even Florida (112), Arkansas (92), Texas (81) and South Carolina (74). “I think there’s a lot of innovative work being done” that Virginia hasn’t taken advantage of, Spanberger said.
She also mentioned the idea of putting canopies of solar panels over parking lots. Gov. Glenn Youngkin this year vetoed a bill that would have given localities the power to require developers of large commercial property to use solar canopies over parking lots. Solar companies, though, haven’t always been excited about such facilities because they’re more expensive to build (and Trump’s tariffs on steel might make construction even more expensive).
Regardless, Spanberger said Virginia needs “more engagement” from the governor’s office about solar-related issues. “One of my goals is to make sure there’s engagement from the administration as it relates to solar deployment,” she said. “I think having some type of statewide strategy is important — not a statewide mandate, but a statewide strategy.”
As a member of Congress representing Virginia’s 7th District, Spanberger represented many rural localities in the northern Piedmont section of Virginia between the Blue Ridge Mountains and Interstate 95, some of which have seen solar development. “I understand why a lot of localities have a nervousness about solar,” she said. “I understand why some farmers do.”
Spanberger outlined several ways she felt the governor’s office could facilitate solar development but also avoid some local conflicts without relying on mandates.
First, she said, the state can serve as a kind of clearinghouse for solar developers so they can find suitable locations where they may be welcomed.“If solar companies want to come to Virginia — what sort of non-productive lands could they be making use of?” she said.
Second, she said, the state can offer technical advice to localities that are considering solar projects, which might help address the concern that many small rural governments simply aren’t equipped to evaluate all the issues related to solar. “The state has a lot more that it can provide in terms of information and support to communities,” Spanberger said. “I think there are many reasons why a community may want to bring in solar installations or solar farms, but I don’t think that the state should be mandating where they go, which localities have to accept them, but I think the state does play a role in ensuring that when they come in they’re done right.” That, she said, may help relieve the worries of some localities that might otherwise simply vote “no” out of fear that they can’t properly manage the project.
We discussed last year’s solar controversy in Patrick County, where the board of supervisors voted 3-2 to approve a solar installation — only to have the company drop the plan after it discovered that the local Appalachian Power substation couldn’t accept the amount of energy the solar site would have been producing. Spanberger said she envisions her administration developing a checklist of questions that localities ought to be asking solar companies to avoid such problems. “It is empowering the localities with the questions they need,” she said. The localities attracting solar farms tend to be rural counties with small staffs anyway. “Now we expect them to be an electrical grid expert, a landscape architect, a siting manager?” Spanberger said. “Some of those things are pretty straightforward, but it’s just one more job description on somebody’s two-sided business card.”
Data centers: State can also do better job advising localities on what to insist on
Spanberger said the same sort of checklist can be developed to advise localities on data centers, as well: “What sorts of questions can be asked, what requests can be made?”
She said she’s spoken with some county administrators who have told her, “I think some of our neighbors don’t even know what they can ask for, what they should ask for.”
She said some localities have told data centers “we want this level of a setback and we want these giant trees for buffering, pretty significant demands.” Other localities didn’t know they could have enough bargaining power to insist on such things — “just the little basics that would make the community happier but they don’t know what to ask for, so you see these giant buildings with these little shrubs around it. That’s kind of a simplistic example, but it’s actually a quite real one.”
That’s why, she said, she’d like to see things more centralized. “There is something to be said for coming through the governor’s office, through the administration, to make sure localities get their questions answered where they chose to, or chose not to have, data centers or solar farms.”
Energy demand: ‘Crisis mode‘ is coming
The JLARC report on the possible tripling of energy demands was an eye-popping revelation that took many legislators by surprise. Everybody wants the lights to come on, but few people want an energy-generation site, no matter what kind of energy it is, next to them. How do we address this?
“We are headed toward an untenable time,” Spanberger said. “I’ve had some people say the solution is no data centers. Well, that’s only a solution in a world where nobody wants to save pictures to the cloud or order online, not to mention all these electrical appliances and ChatGPT.” Artificial intelligence is particularly energy-intensive.
Spanberger said the solution isn’t Virginia’s alone to solve. Our electric grid is connected to the grid of neighboring states through PJM Interconnection, which covers a region from eastern North Carolina to Pennsylvania and then west to parts of Illinois. If, for instance, Virginia said “no” to all data centers and they went to Pennsylvania instead, that would still have an impact on our electric grid. She said that addressing the rising energy demand is an issue that the next governor must address — and that she doesn’t have all the answers.
She said as governor she’d convene utilities and others “to have a clear understanding” of the scope of the challenge and figure out how Virginia’s response fits into what other states on the grid do. I haven’t necessarily given you the solution, but it’s an acknowledgement that it takes real leadership and a focus from the state,” Spanberger said. “Crisis mode is not tomorrow or even the week after that or year two. But if in this next administration we don’t really wrap our arms around it, we’ll get to crisis mode. It won’t be in the next governor’s term, but it means the next governor will potentially leave a problem that is four years behind the curve on the shoulder of [whoever follows].”
Nuclear energy: Virginia is ‘doing it perfectly’
The twin challenge of moving away from fossil fuels while generating even more energy has led some to embrace a form of energy that had fallen into disfavor: nuclear. The main criticism of nuclear energy (aside from fear of a Chernobyl-like accident) has been that a nuclear plant takes too long to build and costs too much. That has led to a new species of nuclear reactor — the small reactors known as SMRs. The concept of small reactors isn’t new; we’ve had them on nuclear submarines since the 1950s. What’s new is the idea that these reactors can be mass-produced, to reduce the construction time and lower the cost, and then deployed for commercial energy generation.
So far, only China and Russia have built operational SMRs, although additional sites are under construction in Argentina and Canada. Last year, Dominion and Amazon announced a deal to pursue an SMR at North Anna. Later, Appalachian Power announced plans for an SMR in Campbell County.
Spanberger said she thinks the Dominion project is a good idea; she didn’t address the Appalachian one. “I think Virginia is doing it perfectly, to be honest, because we already rely on nuclear energy,” she said. Dominion has nuclear sites in Louisa and Surry counties and Virginia gets about 28% of its power from nuclear energy, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. She said Virginia should “encourage judiciously and thoughtfully” the development of small reactors. “The idea that we would build out an SMR on the North Anna location is a perfect way for us as a state, but also as a people to have a better understanding of what SMRs are. … I think we’re very well-suited to demonstrate the benefit — what that looks like and learn from everything from the construction to the siting to how it works to how much it really generates, et cetera, before and in advance of potentially aggressive deployment across the country.”
There are certainly more issues related to energy and economic development that the candidates for governor ought to address, but these are the ones that I was able to get to during the interview. Spanberger said we’d talk again, so I hope to continue the conversation on other topics — and if Earle-Sears agrees to an interview, I’ll let you know her thoughts on these same topics.
Spanberger and Earle-Sears have already won their respective party nominations, and the entire Republican ticket is set, but Democrats are holding a statewide primary June 17 to pick their candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general. There also are 17 primaries for House nominations from both parties as well as some local nominations. Early voting is now underway. You can see who’s running and where they stand on our Voter Guide.