By Steve Haner

An electricity drought is looming, not only for Virginia but also for much of the United States, if the political hostility toward the most reliable forms of electricity generation is not reversed.  Warnings that wind and solar power alone will not be sufficient resonated like a drumbeat from the podium of a two-day conference on Virginia’s energy future last week. 

Virginia is on the leading edge of the national risk because Virginia is ground zero for the expanding data center industry, including the massive power-hungry facilities needed to harness artificial intelligence.  Some use power measured in gigawatts, not megawatts.  Virginia’s electricity demand could double by the mid-2030s. 

“All the solar and all the wind cannot get you to the 24-7 baseload you need to run the AI economy,” reported U.S. Senator Mark Warner, D-Virginia, who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee.  Warner was one of many speakers to use the “all of the above” cliché to summarize his advice on needed power sources, but he focused on emerging small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear technology and recent federal legislation to accelerate it. The giant corporations are still standing by their public carbon-free promises, “without SMRs none of them will get there.”

Winning the international race to develop the dominant designs for the next generation of nuclear “ties directly into national security,” Warner said.  We cannot let the Chinese win that race.  

Virginia Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, another speaker at the Virginia Manufacturers Association gathering in Virginia Beach, highlighted his own support for those SMR reactors, and 2024 legislation that will allow Virginia utilities to collect their exploratory development costs from ratepayers.  But Youngkin was also blunt about the need not just to preserve natural gas as an electricity resource, but to expand it, including a contested new plant proposed for Chesterfield County.  

Without both more nuclear and natural gas, Youngkin warned, “get ready to be California in the summer or to be Texas in an ice storm.”  Both states have had high profile energy brownouts or failures, due at least in part to their heavy reliance on wind and solar power during very challenging weather. 

Out of the two full days of panels filled with policy and industry experts, experienced regulators and leading manufacturers, only Youngkin’s speech attracted reporters. One Hampton Roads television report included his key points, but the anti-carbon fuel outlet Virginia Mercury then quoted wind and solar advocates to dispute some of his points and insult him as anti-environment.  None of the other 30 or so conference speakers got a mention.  

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission member Mark Christie, who formerly served on Virginia’s State Corporation Commission, pointed out that the energy crunch is already evident.  On a hot day last week, PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization which includes Virginia, set a new 13-state record for electric usage of more than 153 gigawatts.  The PJM system did still have reserves available that afternoon, but only 11 gigawatts. (For comparison, Dominion Energy Virginia reportedly peaked at more than 23 gigawatts of demand that afternoon.)

At the peak that day at 5 p.m., 45% of the electricity being used in PJM was generated by natural gas and 20% by coal.  Two-thirds of the electricity came from two crucial fuels targeted for full elimination by Virginia’s Clean Economy Act and similar laws in other PJM states.  The fuel sources that VCEA was written to mandate, solar and wind power, covered less than 6% of the PJM load on that very hot afternoon.

All through the PJM territory, coal and gas power plants that run 80-85 percent of the time are closing or scheduled to close by 2030, with wind and solar projects less than half that reliable promised to replace them.  “The math does not work,” Christie said.

The whole point of the PJM system, the largest by power demand and population of the regional power pools, is to shift electrons to where they are needed.  Virginia needs to worry about what is going on through the entire PJM network, because it is routinely importing power.  As former Dominion Vice President Katharine Bond told the packed audience, “Eventually you run out of other people’s power.”   

Bond was of course borrowing a line from the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who said the problem with socialism was, “Eventually you run out of other people’s money.”  

The need is for “dispatchable” electricity, Bond said, with the on-off controls that wind and solar lack. Right now, 79% of generation assets are dispatchable, but 99% of those closing or slated to close are dispatchable and only 15% of planned replacements are.  There again is the equation for disaster Christie mentioned. 

James Robb of the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation, which has the job of worrying about meeting future electricity demands, said the number one priority for meeting the challenge is to connect as many of the pending no- and low-carbon energy projects as rapidly as possible.  Second, we need expansive transmission projects to tie them together. A crucial power line for just two states, Arizona and New Mexico, took 17 years to build.  Virginia’s new Mountain Valley gas pipeline needed an act of Congress to end the litigation delays after nine years.   

Robb calls his group the “trade association for physics” because it focuses on the hard scientific reality of how the electricity grid works.  The third overwhelming challenge will be to maintain the constant grid balance between supply and demand, and the key energy source for that remains natural gas. “We’ve got to stop making natural gas an enemy,” he said.  He told the audience gas would remain a core mainstay of the grid for the rest of their lives.  

Looking across the whole of North America, including Canada but not Mexico, at this point the PJM region is not considered the most vulnerable.  A NERC map he displayed shows the red high-risk areas in the middle west, heavily wind-dependent, and the orange elevated risk regions mostly in the far west.  He predicted a more dire outlook for PJM and perhaps another color when that map is updated. 

One of our Democratic U.S. senators is warning us.  Our Republican governor is warning us.  Our main electric utility is warning us.  The federal energy regulators charged with maintaining electric reliability are warning us.  Some of Virginia’s largest employers are warning us. Virginia and indeed most of America is on the wrong path.