Here we go again. As the 2025 election year heats up and warnings rise about electricity shortfalls this summer, the legislators behind Virginia’s coming ban on hydrocarbon electricity are pretending they see the problem.
A May 22 headline out of a recent legislative meeting on energy claimed that “Democratic leadership signals willingness to reexamine Virginia Clean Economy Act.” The reporter cited comments to him by two legislators made after the meeting after the microphones and public streaming cameras were turned off.
Fool us twice, shame on us. During the 2024 session of the General Assembly, similar “signals” that VCEA would be reviewed were sent and widely reported. But the legislation proposed and passed by the majority party this year focused instead on ways to hasten the path to an electricity grid more dependent on weather-vulnerable, intermittent generation from wind and sun. Ask the folks in Spain how that is working out.
Virginia was saved from most of those new laws only by a series of vetoes from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin. The vetoes only kept an existing crisis from getting worse. It fixed nothing. The long outage in Spain and Portugal, coupled with fresh warnings from the regional electricity trading entity PJM and the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation, should keep Virginia’s shaky grid infrastructure in focus. Wrote PJM of this summer:
This season also marks the first time in PJM’s annual assessment, however, available generation capacity may fall short of required reserves in an extreme planning scenario that would result in an all-time PJM peak load of more than 166,000 MW.
A vice president of PJM was at the meeting of the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation (CEUR) onMay 22 and made a long presentation on the risk being created by the retirement of reliable coal and natural gas generation at the same time demand is exploding due to the data center industry. Most of those retirements are being made not because the generators are too old or not economical, but because of policy mandates such as Virginia’s VCEA.
It was the PJM presentation that sparked the reporter’s questions and the legislative reactions after the meeting. But the presentation (see slides 22 through 49) was stuck near the end of the long and very rushed agenda and then interrupted by legislators who didn’t like what they were hearing. Many of the slides were never displayed or discussed.
CEUR Chairman Scott Surovell, a Fairfax County Democrat, interrupted to assert to the PJM vice president that the right combination of renewables and battery backup could pick up the load as coal and natural gas disappeared.
It was a high, slow pitch the PJM official should have hit out of the ballpark, obvious wishful thinking, but the presenter didn’t swing. Battery power has the same problem of intermittency as solar and wind and provides only a few hours of reliable dispatch. Battery power is also direct current, not alternating current, and that is another reason it creates an added risk of grid instability.
Later, in a text to the Virginia Public Media reporter, Surovell apparently wrote “We need to reexamine the law.” Speaker of the House Don Scott of Portsmouth, was the other Democrat quoted by the reporter as saying: “There are no Holy Grails when we’re trying to keep energy reliable and costs down.”
There was another moment during the PJM presentation when legislative wishful thinking emerged. After reporting that the response of PJM to a problem would be to enter a period of constrained supply, with big users asked to curtail operations, a legislator pushed back that there was nothing to fear about that.
The PJM official agreed the idea of “demand response” to deal with a shortfall is not new and has been done before. Two additional things should have been said, however, to correct the legislator’s unwarranted and smug comfort. A deep curtailment could shut down a manufacturer, sending workers home without pay for a day or many days. And what happened in Texas and Spain is the real risk, a collapse of PJM’s grid across a wide area for a long period.
Credit is due to somebody for inviting the PJM vice president to present at the CEUR meeting in the first place. His warning was echoed two days earlier by Virginia’s own Mark Christie, now chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He was speaking to a dinner gathering of the Thomas Jefferson Institute of Public Policy held at Tyson’s Corner.
Christie’s concerns about reliability have been reported here before, with this example now two years old. Earlier this year he highlighted some of the actions FERC has taken to address the problem since President Donald Trump elevated him to the chair. His remarks to the Thomas Jefferson Institute audience repeated parts of a recent presentation circulated on X which you can view if you have access.
The key Virginia-specific point Christie made in his talk last Tuesday evening is that being part of PJM is providing less and less protection to Virginia, especially that part of the PJM territory served by Dominion. That is where the data centers are located, the Dom Zone. When a PJM-wide crunch develops, the other utilities and service territories within PJM will look to their own needs first. A net importer of electricity like Virginia – and that mainly means the Dominion zone within Virginia – may have nowhere else to turn for excess supply, Christie warned.
The risk to Virginia, Christie said, only grows “if other states are not building (reliable generation), and I tell you, in PJM, the 13 states in PJM, they’re not. They’re not. Everybody is leaning on everybody else, and when everybody leans on everybody else, everybody falls down.”
Once again, this is not a new or unique insight. It was the reason that Dominion had to pay such incredibly high prices last year in an auction of PJM future capacity contracts, an auction about to be repeated in July. It has been obvious for some time that Virginia could run out of not just its own, but other people’s power.
The Virginia Clean Economy Act – the 2020 law that mandates the end of utility-owned hydrocarbon generation in Virginia and that prevents construction of new natural gas plants in the meantime – must be repealed. That law is indeed a “holy grail” for Virginia’s Democratic Party and its donors and any promises to “reexamine the law” are no more trustworthy than last year’s proved to be.
Steve Haner is a Senior Fellow for Environment and Energy Policy. He can be reached at [email protected].