Virginia Regulatory Town Hall
Agency
Department of Energy
 
Board
Department of Energy
 
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9/16/22  10:41 am
Commenter: Robert Mackay / self

YES To More Solar – YES To Community Solar – YES To an Energy Transition Away from Burning Fossil Fu
 

Virginia’s political leadership should strive to ensure Dominion never needs to build another peaker power plant – or eventually - even to turn one on.  This goal can be accomplished by strong, unambiguous support to numerous solar initiatives in the Commonwealth.

  • Our State Leaders should also work to promote and incentivize increasing adoption of rooftop solar and community solar. 
  • Richmond must accept that that only greater distribution of energy generation (e.g. via residential rooftop solar) will provide Virginians with the grid resiliency we need and deserve – to avoid catastrophic outages like the Derecho of 2012. 
  • Virginia’s government should lead by ensuring every available roof surface on State and municipal government buildings is covered by solar panels, providing free, clean power to building residents and supporting grid resiliency.
  • The Governor and Virginia Legislature should promote incentives through the tax code and otherwise to increase uptake of shared solar, community solar, church solar, parking lot canopies and agri-voltaics.
  • Buildings such as those visible from aircraft on final approach to Dulles Airport (data centers, warehouses, distribution facilities, light industrial complexes) should all have solar PV on their rooftops – they represent a massive potential grid service and option for pushing electricity prices towards zero. 
  • Virginia’s leaders and the SCC should prevent Dominion Energy from zero-ing out its residential customers’ rollover generation credits after 12 months.  In exchange for the exceptionally generous monopoly status it enjoys from Virginia, the utility should be forced to pay fair market value for the distributed generation capacity and energy it absorbs from rooftop PV arrays. 
  • Governor Youngkin should remain in the RGGI and retain and strengthen the Virginia Clean Economy Act. 
  • Virginia should become a national leader in encouraging and incentivizing solar installations on Brownfields.
  • Virginia’s leaders should ensure that all counties adopt streamlined and standardized permitting around rooftop solar installation.
CommentID: 128696