The 2024 General Assembly ended with a promise from its majority Democrats to review and perhaps revise the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which mandates the end of hydrocarbon electricity. The revisions are now pending at the 2025 General Assembly and are uniformly bad.
One positive development this session has been an increased and more honest focus on the consumer cost these laws will impose on Virginia’s residential and business energy users. But a leading Democrat, during a floor debate Friday, dismissed the billions of dollars extracted by VCEA as a cheap investment to prevent hurricanes and cure cancer. Watch it yourself.
Governor Glenn Youngkin opened the session with a speech in which he called the VCEA a “quagmire” that wasn’t working and was a threat to our economy. Legislation from his fellow Republicans to reform it has failed on party-line votes. His last option will likely be another round of vetoes after adjournment of the Democrat’s bills.
First on the veto target list should be a bill to make it easier to override local objections to the placement of large solar and battery facilities. The VCEA mandates more than 10,000 megawatts of additional solar panels which will need several square miles of land and extensive new transmission lines.
Companion bills were introduced in both chambers to create a Virginia Energy Facility Review Board with extensive powers to intervene in local permit debates. Its endorsement of a contested project would have made a denial by a local government body far harder to defend in court. Because this is one bill that has been widely reported and drew opposition from the public and local governments, the versions which are pending have changed. The substitutes are subterfuge.
The substitute for House Bill 2126 now creates an Interagency Renewable Energy Advisory Committee, which still has the authority to issue an advisory opinion on individual projects which the locality is required to consider before it denies any application. Which means, again, the state blessing will be part of any court case over a denied permit.
But the real way the state is dictating to the localities is the mandate that every local comprehensive plan, a key document in any zoning decision, be amended to focus on renewable energy goals. From the first paragraph of the bill:
…each locality shall incorporate into its comprehensive plan targets for energy production and energy efficiency based on its regional energy plan as developed by its planning district commission pursuant to § 15.2-4209.1.
The plan will be based on targets imposed by the Virginia Department of Energy:
…for energy production and energy efficiency to meet the renewable energy and energy efficiency goals of the Commonwealth, including the development of energy efficiency, distributed generation solar energy, shared solar, utility-scale solar, onshore and offshore wind, and battery energy storage.
Once those targets are part of the official plan, denying a subsequent application becomes that much harder. The idea that every regional planning district and every city or county must have a comprehensive energy and energy efficiency plan enshrining the VCEA is the heart of this bill.
Less public attention has been paid to a proposal to revise the State Corporation Commission’s process for utility future planning and bring it more in line with the VCEA. House Bill 2413 (still in its original form) and Senate Bill 1021 (now a substitute) amend and greatly expand the integrated resource plans required of Dominion Energy Virginia and Appalachian Power Company.
For the first time it would require the SCC to include in all its cost and benefit calculations an intangible factor called the “social cost of carbon.” That figure, usually measured in dollars per ton of emissions produced, eliminates any chance that a hydrocarbon electricity plant can be considered reasonable and prudent. The original 2020 VCEA asked the SCC to determine a Virginia-specific “social cost of carbon,” but so far it has not. Now it will have to.
Revisions to the planning process to increase barriers for hydrocarbons was telegraphed by the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation (CEUR), which is chaired by Surovell. If you watched the YouTube snippet linked above, you heard him discuss the “social cost of carbon” and equate it to the full costs of storm damage, flood damage and human cancer.
Again, this bill needs to go away, by veto if necessary. Governor Youngkin should ignore the disappointing votes in favor of the House version by four House Republican delegates.
Then there is a pending House bill that makes perhaps the most expensive changes to the VCEA from a consumer cost standpoint. As is the case with all these bills, there is no published estimate of the impact on rates. When the CEUR was created, that was one of its purposes, to provide ratepayer impact statements. That hasn’t happened.
House Bill 2537 expands the mandate within the VCEA for utilities to add battery storage. It does push the targets back by several years, from 2035 to 2040. But the targets grow substantially. For the first time it specifies that some of the batteries will be short duration (four hours) and some long duration (ten to 24 hours).
What these batteries cost now may have nothing to do with what they will cost in a decade. Whether today’s technology will even be used in a decade is pure speculation. To dictate how many batteries for what durations are needed in 15 years is just play acting, virtue signaling. The bill should die for that reason alone.
But the current cost is eye-opening. A 500-megawatt battery which runs for four hours produces 2,000 megawatt hours of electricity. That is the important metric, megawatt hours. A 500-megawatt battery which runs for ten hours produces 5,000 megawatt hours. The current rule of thumb on battery technology is $500,000 capital cost per megawatt hour.
The bill dictates 520 megawatts of long duration batteries for Appalachian ($2.5 billion for today’s technology) and 3,480 megawatts of long duration batteries for Dominion by 2045 (about $17 billion). That is more in current dollars than the cost of the offshore wind facility, so the rate impact would be massive.
Batteries only store power; they do not make electricity. The cost of making electricity is extra.
For some reason, the Department of Fire Programs is brought into the battery planning process by the bill. If not realistic about the cost perhaps the Democrats are waking up to the risks posed by current large battery projects.
For 2025 at least, Virginia has a governor likely to stop these bills. The situation in 2026 could be very different.

Steve Haner is a Senior Fellow for Environment and Energy Policy. He can be reached at Steve@thomasjeffersoninst.org.