by Steve Haner
The 2026 General Assembly has decided Virginia’s future energy eggs will come from a basket made of sunbeams. A series of approved bills are intended to accelerate the proliferation of solar panels on rural fields, rooftops, urban parking decks and apartment balconies, even if local objections need to be disregarded.
Giving the industry a further boost, a revision to the electric utility integrated resource planning (IRP) process for future generation deeply parallels the solar-heavy Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA). The new rules demand the State Corporation Commission (SCC) impose an intangible “social cost of carbon” to make natural gas appear more expensive and sets as a goal – for the first time in an IRP — a “carbon free energy grid.”
No legislation passed would override the authority the SCC has under the VCEA to approve expanded use of natural gas if grid reliability is threatened, but the legislators behind these bills are determined to prove solar can do the job if only enough of it can be built.
A distributed energy model known as a “virtual power plant.” which creates incentives for customers to develop their own solar and battery facilities and sell the output back to the utility at times, is now authorized to spread from Dominion Energy Virginia to the smaller Appalachian Power Company and the many rural electric cooperatives.
