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. (more…)
