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Changes were still being made to the proposed state solar control bill just before Monday’s commission hearing. And officials in the commission expect there to be plenty more before it comes up for any type of vote in this Assembly session, if it gets that far. 

“I expect it will have to go through a significant amount of massaging through the legislative process,” said Creigh Deeds. “I would hope we can develop consensus around some of these processes.” 

The state senator, who represents the 25th District, said in Monday’s hearing that he recognizes there’s a lot of work still to be done on this proposal. For example, the first 13 pages of the proposal have already been removed. Those pages were concerning the different ways Assembly members wanted to make this new review board exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, the commission agreed to strip all of that from the bill. 

Before we go any further, just a quick refresher. This is about a proposed bill to create an entirely new wing of state government, the Energy Facility Review Board. Under this proposal, developers would submit their projects “of statewide significance” to both this board and local authorities. The board would review the project and make a decision.

Then, if the project is rejected by local officials, the developer would have the ability to file an appeal in circuit court. And this bill states that circuit court judges would be required to consider the review board’s decision as “fact”. In other words, if the review board says the project should be approved and the local county says no, the judge would be required to side with the review board, unless the county lawyers can present enough evidence to prove they’re right. 

Why make the change? 

But why is something like this needed? That was a question raised multiple times this week, first in subcommittee hearings and then in the overall commission hearing on the bill. Why does the Assembly need to step in and do this? And depending on who you listened to, you got several different answers. 

“This is driven solely by the fact that some localities in Virginia have chosen to create a thoughtful process for the review of alternative energy projects and some haven’t,” Deeds said. “This bill was really aimed at helping us achieve our goals with the Clean Economy Act.” 

Approved by the General Assembly in 2020, the Clean Economy Act requires just under two-thirds of the state’s electricity to come from solar or wind energy by the end of 2035. This Energy Facility Review Board would be focused on making that happen, having the authority to “facilitate the responsible siting of critical interconnection projects in the Commonwealth.” 

Virginia State Sen. Scott Surovell, who serves as chairman of the commission, fleshed out the argument a bit more. He said a solar control change was needed in order to help investors. 

“If we continue to have the completely unfettered free market, the whatever you want to call it system, where every locality can do whatever they want right now, we’re gonna continue to have 80% of all solar projects being rejected,” Surovell said. “All kinds of people who want to invest in this state are going to stop investing in this state because the system is so incredibly unpredictable.”  

But others pointed out that it’s hard to say this is a cure for an unpredictable system, when it’s still going through changes itself. For example, as mentioned earlier in this story, the bill now focuses only on projects deemed of “statewide significance”. That’s been defined, as of this week, as projects of at least 10 megawatts or projects on brownfields or disturbed land of at least 2 megawatts. Also, how is this a solution when nobody knows what it will cost or how many people will staff it? The current proposal would have this review board operating for free, as a group of volunteers. 

“We are creating a review board with truly extraordinary powers,” said Virginia State Sen. Mark Obenshain, who also served on the commission. “They have the authority to hire staff and hire consultants to do all of this work and I have no idea how much it’s going to cost or how big an organization this is going to be. There’s (even) language in there that allows them to take private contributions from organizations.”

What happens next with solar control? 

As we mentioned earlier this week, the solar control bill was approved by a majority of 7 of the 12 commission members, so it heads to the General Assembly. It’s going to be at least next Monday, however, before we find out what the next steps will be. Why? The Assembly met Wednesday to officially start the session and then they left. The reason is that during Winter Storm Blair, severe damage was done to Richmond’s water system and as of Wednesday night, the city had no water and wasn’t expecting that to be a quick fix. So the Assembly will try again next Monday to convene the session. If there’s no water still at that point, decisions will have to be made about potentially relocating, at least temporarily.