By Steve Haner

The top 2025 legislative goal of Virginia’s Climate Catastrophe Democrats will be to override local zoning controls on wind, solar and energy storage projects. But for now, they are begging Chesterfield County residents to fight a proposed natural gas plant by appealing to that same local control.

What’s a little hypocrisy when you are trying to kill a hydrocarbon plant?

This appeared in the email inbox, with the request that recipients forward it to one or more county supervisor:

The residents of Chesterfield County deserve a hearing and a vote on Dominion Energy’s dirty gas power plant. Dominion Energy has repeatedly stated that this gas plant is needed to serve the electricity demands of data centers mostly concentrated in Northern Virginia. Why should we see our electric bills increase to subsidize some of the richest and biggest tech firms in the world? As county leaders, you have an opportunity to keep our bills from rising and ensure Dominion doesn’t build this dirty gas plant in our backyard.

The message was signed by Glen Besa, claiming the title of chairman of “Friends of Chesterfield.” He is also retired head of the highly anti-hydrocarbon, pro-wind Sierra Club in Virginia, and is still very active. His current employer cries out for a future post. When the bill for state override of zoning on some energy projects is pending, he will be a cheerleader. If an amendment is offered to make it easier to site a hydrocarbon plant, as well, expect his opposition.

And that (giving away some free lobbying advice here) is how to kill that bill when it shows up. Insist that the state also take over control of the locations for natural gas and nuclear plants, supplanting local decisions. It should be a level field, right? At that point the idea becomes (pardon me, I couldn’t help myself) radioactive. 

How am I sure such a bill is coming? The groundwork will be laid in an agenda item at Wednesday’s Commission on Electric Utility Regulation. And Senator David Marsden, D-Fairfax, touted the idea at a big Virginia FREE luncheon up in Northern Virginia on Friday, which of course was totally ignored by the state’s media. I wasn’t present but was sent some notes of his speech.

Dominion’s proposed natural gas peaking plant for Chesterfield has become the main battlefront in the war on hydrocarbons. So far, the Chesterfield supervisors haven’t shown any inclination to stop it, and since it will now be proposed for location at an existing Dominion power plant, the land presumably is zoned properly already. The real regulatory battle will be over the state air permit and then down at the State Corporation Commission.

But for PR purposes a vote of opposition from the local elected folks would be useful to the opponents. None of them represent me, since we moved from that county in 2009, but if somebody who does live there wants to pass this along to a supervisor, feel free. Besa’s paragraph above is filled with utter nonsense. The supervisors should see these four rebuttal points:

First, every Dominion ratepayer within its Virginia footprint would pay for a new plant such as this, just as they all pay for every new plant. Would you ever see Besa sign a message complaining about the high cost of offshore wind or some battery project? Of course not.  

Second, Dominion has pointed to rising energy demand as a reason it is proposing this plant, but it has also been quite blunt that reliability concerns are the main reason. They are worried (and this came up at Virginia FREE, too) about over-reliance on intermittent solar and wind meaning the lights going out far more often, perhaps at a time when a power outage would kill people (a winter outage would kill more people than a summer one).

Third, if indeed the data centers are adding to demand (they are), does nobody in Chesterfield County stream Netflix, conduct online banking, read online news content or otherwise depend on the Internet and the data centers? Are there not massive data centers right here in Greater RVA? Of course there are. Are more coming? Yes.

Fourth, if the plant is not built in Chesterfield, some other plant will be built somewhere else, or perhaps Besa gets his wish and instead more solar and wind plants are built. The impact on the power bills of individual Chesterfield citizens is just the same – an increase to cover the capital costs. So why not build it where Chesterfield reaps the jobs and tax bonanza?