Megan Schnabel, reporter for the regional online Cardinal News, has extensively covered one such project, a 21,000-acre utility-scale solar array that is proposed in Charlotte County. 

She said getting a comprehensive view of solar in Virginia is difficult, because there is no central account of projects. 

“There's no way to really count them because every locality just keeps track of its own, and there's not any state repository currently,” Schnabel said.

This information, knowing how much solar we have now, would help measure how close Virginia is to meeting the Clean Economy Act’s requirements. The legislation catalyzed a lot of solar proposals, she said, but Virginia’s solar history goes back further than 2020. 

“Going back to around 2015, Virginia has become more friendly to large solar installations in a regulatory way,” Schnabel said. “The General Assembly has created legislation that provides incentives to developers and to localities, making it more attractive for localities to agree to these proposals.”

Miles, the CASE director, also described the legislation as the most recent push in this larger movement. 

“What started this trend toward greater solar deployment was prices coming down for solar equipment and installations, to a point where it became comparable, as far as energy units produced, to turn to solar as an alternative to fossil fuels for power generation,” Miles said. 

A greater understanding of the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change also contributed to this trend, he said. 

And recently, companies actually want to be green, said Elizabeth Marshall, who coordinates the Virginia Solar Initiative at the University of Virginia.

“Corporations don’t want to be consuming electricity that has large carbon emissions,” she said. “Some of them have adopted renewable portfolio standards that demand [clean energy]. To remain economically competitive, there’s a need for renewable energy.”

In an effort to meet the requirements from the Clean Economy Act, wind power proposals in Virginia have also increased, primarily offshore. 

“The areas where the winds are particularly well-suited for power generation tend to be especially offshore,” Miles said.

Central and Southside Virginia have seen most of the solar proposals, according to Schnabel’s reporting. Counties in these areas “have been particularly popular thanks to their flat to gently rolling terrain, their vast swaths of undeveloped acreage and their relatively low land costs,” she reported. 

CVE chose the Mackeys Lane parcel because it fit a variety of criteria for solar projects, said Weinand in an interview. These criteria include 15 to 50 acres of usable land and an interested landowner.

He also said that the Clean Economy Act was one of two pieces of legislation that made this project proposal possible. The other focuses specifically on shared solar programs. 

This other law requires the State Corporation Commission, the regulatory authority over utilities, to establish a shared solar program “that allows customers of Dominion Virginia to purchase electric power through a subscription in a shared solar facility.”

A shared solar facility is defined in the bill as “a facility that, among other criteria, generates electricity by means of a solar photovoltaic device with a nameplate capacity rating that does not exceed 5,000 kilowatts.”

For comparison, small nuclear stations have a maximum capacity of about 400 megawatts, though they can produce as little as 200-250 megawatts.

“It starts at a state level, right?” Weinand said in an interview. “We can only build these projects where the legislation has been passed.”

And though state-wide legislation has been passed, a lot of counties, like Rockbridge, still need to authorize special exceptions or conditional use permits for solar projects.

But no one really knows what a solar project looks like at the end of its useful life – around three decades. Some people, like Steve Hart, see this as a gamble.

Hart is a professional engineer who has taught about engineering and infrastructure at both Virginia Military Institute and United States Military Academy West Point.

“There’s only one way to get 30 years of experience, and that’s to wait 30 years,” Hart said.

The science is still catching up to solar power, he said. So, the resident concerns about damaging the agricultural land long-term are valid.

“There are legitimate concerns that, when you build solar facilities, you have potential for increased erosion,” Hart said. “If you erode or grade the topsoil, then it becomes problematic to go back into agricultural use.”

And developing agricultural land will disrupt the soil’s carbon sequestration, said several neighbors of the Mackeys Lane parcel. In fact, leaving the land as is might actually be more environmentally friendly than constructing a solar facility, they said.

One solution could be to consider more brownfields for solar projects. Brownfields are previously developed lands that are no longer in use, like land that has been used for mining or former industry.

“The idea that we can promote or encourage redevelopment of brownfields really falls into the category of comprehensive planning or long-range planning” for a county, Marshall said.

A piece of legislature, State House Bill 1925, incentivizes the use of brownfields by creating a fund for this purpose and making a handbook to guide localities on prioritizing brownfield redevelopment.

All these considerations result from the fact that solar is “constantly evolving and changing,” Marshall said.