HWNEWS
Dominion says data centers could make up over half its sales by 2035. Virginia just wrote a law to put solar and crops on the same acres — and left the production floor for the next fight.
At Gray's Lambscaping in Pittsylvania County, 1,500 ewes graze across roughly 4,000 acres of solar sites, from the home farm down to Chesapeake. The sheep, not the panels, are the point: the operation has used grazing revenue to scale its cattle herd from 2 head to 50 in about two years, proving that a solar array can be a working farm, not a paved-over one.
Virginia just wrote that model into law. Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) signed a bill in June at a Loudoun County ceremony that officially defines "agrivoltaics" as the dual use of land for agriculture and solar PV. Virginia is now the fourth state in the country to pass such a law, per the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators. The bill passed the Democratic-led General Assembly with bipartisan support.
Two pressures converged on the same acres. Dominion Energy, the state's largest utility, estimates data centers could account for more than half of its electricity sales by 2035, driven by the cloud and AI buildout in Northern Virginia. The forecast sets the clock on how the next decade of land-based renewables gets sited.
VCU researchers project that large-scale solar's footprint in Virginia could triple to over 3% of former cropland by 2035. Virginia is already losing farmland faster than most of the country, and the political resistance to solar is the response to that math: as of early this year, nearly two-thirds of Virginia counties have outlawed or severely restricted large-scale solar, per the MAREC siting reform tracker.
The 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act, the state's signature clean-energy mandate, requires Dominion and Appalachian Power to build more than 16 gigawatts of land-based renewable energy on the way to a zero-carbon grid by midcentury. Without a production floor in the new law, the next 16 gigawatts are being permitted in the same zoning fights that have stalled prior bills to weaken county-level restrictions.
"The new law rejects the 'either-or' solar-vs-farming mindset," said Josephus Allmond, the governor's chief energy officer, at the bill signing. The statute, on the language reported, is narrower: it creates a category for agrivoltaics and tells regulators that such projects exist; it does not require the land under the panels to stay in active agricultural production, nor bar a developer from counting an idle hayfield as "agrivoltaics" because sheep could in principle graze there.
About 13 agrivoltaics projects already operate in Virginia, per the InSPIRE Agrivoltaics Map, and they look very different from each other. Some are the Gray's Lambscaping model of sheep keeping the grass down and the farmer earning rent. Some are utility-scale arrays with no current agricultural tenant. A county permitting officer reading the new law has to decide which ones count.
The lobbying fight that did not happen in this session points the same way. Legislators debated, then dropped, proposals to require tech companies to build their own clean energy to feed their data centers. Without a mandate, agrivoltaics is the only policy lever the state is currently turning on the data-center demand curve, and it is a definition, not a production requirement.
Spanberger's bill gives Virginia the vocabulary the next 16 gigawatts of land-based renewables will be permitted in. Whether the words mean what the ewes at Gray's already do is the part that will be litigated in county zoning hearings long before it is tested in Richmond. Proponents say they will push the General Assembly next session for a "bona fide agricultural production" floor that would force developers to show a real farm, not just an eligible one, to qualify.