Supply, Demand Aligning for Solar in Virginia

Four percent of the nation’s power supply is used to power data centers. That figure will increase to 10% within the next decade. Meanwhile, major cloud providers are demanding clean energy sources consistent with their corporate values. For example, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook have joined the RE100 initiative committing them to generate 100% of their power from renewable sources.

Those numbers come from Garret Bean, vice president of development for sPower, the group behind Sustainable Power Group LLC’s proposal to build a 500-megawatt solar farm in Spotsylvania County. He spoke yesterday at the 2018 Virginia Energy Conference. Virginia Business has the story here.

It’s a lot easier to “live your values” when the price of generating a kilowatt of solar power has dropped from $96 in 1970 to about 4 cents today. Between developments on the supply side and the demand side, the potential exists to build a whole lot of solar in Virginia. Indeed, Bean counts some 212 solar companies and 22 manufacturers in Virginia vying for a piece of the action.

What makes Virginia a particularly attractive place to prospect, despite solar’s slow start here, is that the state is ground zero for building new data centers. High bandwidth connectivity is critical infrastructure for data centers, and 70% of the world’s internet traffic flows through the commonwealth.

At present Virginia gets about half of one percent of its electricity from the sun. Inherently variable solar output doesn’t create grid reliability issues until it accounts for 20% or more of the electricity supply, so there’s plenty of room to grow.