e-Pilot
e-Pilot Evening Edition
Sign up for email newsletters
Sign up for email newsletters
e-Pilot
e-Pilot Evening Edition
Top Picks:
Recent price spikes in the price of oil and gasoline due to President Donald Trump’s war on Iran demonstrate the need for energy diversification and stress the urgency of reducing our reliance on fossil fuel consumption.
Solar and wind energy are cleaner, cheaper and abundant fuel sources that aren’t restricted by national borders, dependent on foreign trade or beholden to market forces. And while the Trump administration takes an antiquated and even hostile approach to green energy, Virginia lawmakers’ move to embrace renewables is by far the superior and beneficial view for the future.
For most people, the cost of energy is a top concern. Many can’t afford the luxury of turning to cleaner energy if it’s going to wreck their budget. Natural sources such as wind and solar energy have great potential to be both clean and affordable, if their production, use and distribution are handled wisely.
Most of us probably can’t harness wind energy at our homes; we will have to wait for industrial wind projects such as Dominion Energy’s massive Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project to begin contributing energy to the electric grid.
Solar energy, however, can be within the reach of homeowners and even those who are renters. Shared solar projects and rooftop solar power systems on individual homes can be good ways to expand the use of environmentally friendly solar power.
For those innovations to live up to their potential, Virginia’s lawmakers and regulators as well as power companies need to be open to new ways of doing things and willing to do what it takes to smooth the way for beneficial changes in energy production and distribution.
One good example is the growth of shared community solar projects. These projects fit somewhere between the solar panels on the roof of an individual house and the massive solar farms that may face opposition from neighbors who see them as a blot on the rural landscape. People, including renters who are unable to install rooftop solar, can subscribe to a specific project and earn credits on their electric bills.
Until recently, those in Virginia who hoped to save money on energy bills by joining shared solar projects were discouraged by high costs. After legislators authorized shared solar in 2020, details were slowly worked out.
The devil, as the saying goes, was in those details. Private solar developers such as Dimension Energy of Atlanta pay to build the shared projects and produce electricity. But utilities such as Dominion Power make the point that they shoulder the cost of transmission, so the State Corporation Commission decided that customers using shared solar should pay Dominion $55 a month on top of their bill for electricity.
Low-income customers were exempt, but that decision kept most people who had hoped for a break in energy costs from signing up.
Fortunately, lawmakers eventually told the SCC to think again, factoring in the benefits of shared solar. In November, the SCC decided that $55 is now a minimum bill, not an additional fee. Subscribers to shared solar can use the credits to reduce their power bill as low as $55.
That sort of approach is needed as the commonwealth moves ahead into the clean energy future.
With fewer than 3% of households having rooftop solar, Virginia is well behind the national average. An obvious solution is to switch to “smart permitting,” which uses streamlined, automated systems to quickly make sure contractors are installing systems that meet required codes and restrictions. Legislators can make that happen.
Other innovations, including Dominion Energy’s agrivoltaic projects that combine solar energy production with environmentally friendly agricultural enterprises, are succeeding. Dominion’s projects demonstrate that solar energy projects and agricultural heritage can coexist and flourish.
Lawmakers, regulators, utilities and individuals can and should all work toward a goal of making it easier for clean solar energy to become a much bigger source of Virginia’s electricity. Open minds and willingness to try new approaches will be essential to shaping a cleaner, safer, more affordable energy future to benefit everyone.
Copyright 2026 The Virginian-Pilot. All rights reserved. The use of any content on this website for the purpose of training artificial intelligence systems, algorithms, machine learning models, text and data mining, or similar use is strictly prohibited without explicit written consent.
