By Steve Haner,

Several legislative attempts to either repeal outright or reduce the cost impact of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) will have their fifteen seconds in the sun later today.  Their chances of surviving until sundown are slim.

The various bills, all with Republican sponsors, are set to be discussed in the Virginia Senate Commerce and Labor Committee.  So far, that panel has been taking up various bills to expand or add complexity to the 2020 legislation’s various mandates.

Now come the efforts to kill it.  In 2022, following Governor Glenn Youngkin’s election, the House of Delegates with its refreshed GOP majority passed a VCEA repeal bill.  It could not clear the Senate, still controlled by the Democrats, and frankly that first repeal effort got no support from Youngkin or his team.

This year, the strong push to get Virginia out of this self-imposed energy straight jacket is coming from the Senate, and House Republicans didn’t mount a serious charge.

Adding a touch of drama, today is also the day the Trump Administration is going to repeal the 2009 Environmental Protection Agency ruling that carbon dioxide is a pollutant subject to air pollution regulations.  That “endangerment finding” is the justification for the state-level VCEA just as much as it is for all the federal efforts to ban coal and natural gas electricity. 

Senator Bill DeSteph, R-Virginia Beach, introduced the bill that repeals most aspects of the 2020 VCEA legislation.  His Senate Bill 752 would also remove the legislative authorization for Virginia to participate in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, making it a double boon for ratepayers. 

Democratic Senator Louise Lucas on Monday pushed through the same committee a bill intended to shift some rising energy costs off residential and small commercial customers and place them on large data centers.  Despite her claims, it did not cut energy costs one dime, or even lower future costs.  It just changed who will pay. 

DeSteph’s bill, if passed, would lower customer costs across the board, including for the large users and even the data centers, the favored energy scapegoats for this session.  The RGGI carbon tax would go poof, the billions of dollars in future payments for renewable energy certificates would disappear, and if new generation included more natural gas plants, Virginia’s reliance on PJM Interconnection capacity charges should diminish.

Most important, the State Corporation Commission (SCC) would be back in charge of deciding what mix of power generation, built on what timeline, best serves Virginia’s economy.  A list of construction mandates worked out with lobbyists in a closed room would not be driving the agenda and your energy bill. 

DeSteph is also offering a version intended to simply repeal the mandate that Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power buy an ever-increasing number of renewable energy certificates (RECs) to forgive their sin of continuing to emit carbon dioxide.  Carving that out and leaving much of the rest of the VCEA intact was like carving out a cancer that has spread, so Senate Bill 627 is more complicated to follow.

It was that mandate to buy ever more RECs over the next 20 years that led the SCC staff to recently warn that the VCEA was going to prove more expensive than many want to admit.  And the more RECs the utilities buy, the more they are admitting that their renewable energy goals cannot be met. 

Senator Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, put in Senate Bill 40 to repeal just one part of the renewable energy certificate mandate, the cash fine the utilities face if they do not buy enough RECs.  That deficiency payment is a problem, but to do any good the whole RPS structure needs to be deleted.  DeSteph’s bill saves ratepayers more money. 

A related bill was referred to another committee under the Senate’s opaque rules on committee assignment and has already met its fate.  That was Senate Bill 562 from Senator Luther Cifers, R-Farmville, which would have just delayed all the VCEA goals and mandates for 20 years.  The Senate Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources Committee dispatched it 8-6. 

One bill up today that should create some real discussion, and might not be easy to just vote down, states that it is the primary responsibility of the SCC in deciding all these matters to think about system reliability and ratepayer cost first. That is a back door dig at the VCEA.  Is that not already their mandate?  See Senate Bill 772 from Senator Ryan McDougle, R-Mechanicsville.

There are more than 200 energy issues floating around and many are showing no partisan pattern on voting.  The data centers under assault are finding friends and enemies on both sides and other aspects of energy regulation are shaded a deep grey, not red or blue.

But the strong signal from Senate Republicans that they understand the cost being imposed on Virginians and our economy by the unworkable zero-carbon electricity goal of the VCEA deserves recognition.