The winter storm last weekend left Virginia covered in ice, snow and political talking points.

Virginia’s new Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, got her first chance to don an emergency services jacket and be seen managing a crisis.

Meanwhile, Republicans got a chance to make the case that renewable energy isn’t reliable enough to get us through a winter storm.

Last Saturday, as the storm was about to hit, the grid operator for Virginia and 12 other states plus the District of Columbia warned the U.S. Department of Energy that it expected to hit a record demand for winter-time power. In response, the Energy Department issued an order that allowed power plants on the PJM grid to waive normal environmental rules and “operate up to their maximum generation output levels” through Jan. 31.

Early the next morning, Mark Christie, the former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and now director of the Center for Energy Law and Policy at the College of William & Mary, checked the website that shows what energy is on the electric grid at that moment and posted this on social media:

“At 5 am today, in the midst of the winter storm, the generation mix in PJM was GAS: 40%, NUKE 28%, COAL 23%, WIND 4.5%, SOLAR 0. So dispatchables: 91%. The claim that VA or any PJM state can run a modern grid without dispatchable gen is reckless. Facts are stubborn things.”

That afternoon, as the storm continued, PJM notified at least some utilities that they might need to “reduce electric load to maintain system integrity.” One of those utilities was the Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative, which then sent out an advisory that “there is the possibility that SVEC will be required to shut off power” for certain areas in Frederick County, Page County, Shenandoah and Winchester.

That “large-scale shutoff” never happened (neither did the record demand) but the mere threat was enough to prompt one of the Shenandoah Valley’s state legislators — state Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Rockingham County — to take to the Senate floor on Monday to warn that Virginia had a power crisis. Namely, “we just don’t have enough generation power in Virginia and it’s self-inflicted by the Virginia Clean Economy Act” — the 2020 legislation that mandates the state’s two largest utilities transition to a carbon-free power grid by 2050.

This is not a new concern. Democrats and Republicans have been jostling since at least 2020 over whether a carbon-free grid is desirable, or even possible, and what type of energy we ought to be developing. Christie, who served on the State Corporation Commission, the Virginia panel that regulates utilities, before he joined FERC, has long insisted that wind and solar can’t replace natural gas and coal because they’re not “dispatchable” — meaning something you can summon up whenever you need it.

“My point is energy policy has to be based on facts,” he said during a telephone interview. “We have to go on the facts and the facts are the physics. The physics doesn’t care about your legislation. We can’t do it without the generation mix you see on the dashboard now.”

Christie’s numbers above came just before dawn, when the night is coldest and demand is often highest — and obviously there’s no solar energy available then. However, I’m writing these words on a sunny day and the PJM dashboard put the energy mix shortly after noon at natural gas 40.7%, nuclear 25.2%, coal 22.8%, solar 7%, oil 1.5%, wind 1% and everything else lower.

At their height, though, the two main renewables added up to just 8% of the power on the grid. On another day, I found they rose as high as 10.8%. That does seem to raise a question: Can we realistically expect to build enough solar farms and wind farms to replace the 60%-plus part of the grid that’s powered by fossil fuels? And what do we do at night — especially cold winter nights — when solar panels aren’t producing any power at all?

That’s the question that animates most debates over energy, although there’s nothing like a polar vortex to sharpen the point.

The general answer tends to come in two parts — more nuclear power (although not everyone on the pro-renewable side of the ledger agrees with this) and more battery storage, which is our subject today.

Battery storage is exactly what it sounds like — big honkin’ batteries that can store energy for use later. Battery storage is already here and in use across Virginia — Danville and Martinsville are among the places that have such facilities. Power prices fluctuate throughout the day; the batteries take in power when it’s cheap and then inject it back into the grid when power is more expensive. That can be any type of power, renewable or otherwise. As they relate to solar, they’d store up solar power by day and then use it at night.

Now, here’s the catch: Those batteries don’t last very long. (Anyone who’s ever reached for their flashlight during a power outage and discovered the batteries have gone bad know this already, just at the D battery level.) The general standard is they can hold two to four hours’ worth of power. “We’re in a 5-day polar vortex,” Christie said Wednesday. “How is a 2-4 hour battery going to keep lights and heat pumps on?”

He sees battery storage as a useful complement to other forms of energy, but not a substitute. “We are not ready from a technological standpoint,” Christie said, to rely on battery storage. “We don’t have the technology to run a 13-state grid and keep people from freezing in the dark” without relying on dispatchable fossil fuels.

Energy debates are more complicated than they might seem. Sen. Danica Roem, D-Prince William County, told fellow senators that our energy needs wouldn’t be as high if it weren’t for energy-guzzling data centers. They accounted for about 26% of Virginia’s electricity in 2024, according to the Apollo Academy economy site, although their share of the overall PJM grid may still be in single digits. Nonetheless, they’re here, and are using power, so how do we keep the lights on while we transition the grid?

The Democratic leaders in the General Assembly most involved with pushing renewable energy agree that we won’t retire natural gas anytime soon. “We are clearly going to need natural gas for a while,” said state Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico County, via text message. “But the question is what is the right mixture of supply. And gas is more expensive and timely to produce. We should do what we can to get other sources online and at a cheaper cost to ratepayers.”

Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County and chair of the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation (which is the awful acronym CEUR, pronounced “sewer”), was more succinct about battery storage: “It would help.”

The question of just how much is unclear because, with the transition from fossil fuels to other forms of energy, we’re venturing into uncharted territory. My purpose today is not to rehash the usual debates over which form of energy is best or most reliable or cheapest, but to look at what’s possible. Technology is evolving every day; the smartphone in your pocket has more computing power than what the Apollo 11 astronauts used to fly to the moon and back. Just because battery storage now lasts 2-4 hours doesn’t mean it will forever be stuck at that range. So what’s possible? 

The Vermont-based Clean Energy Group says the duration of utility-scale batteries has doubled over the past eight years. “If these trends continue, new energy storage additions should reach an average duration of 8 hours sometime around 2035,” it says. That seems a long way away, but it’s also still 15 years before the Virginia Clean Economy Act deadlines.

Research is underway around the world to extend those times. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $505 million for research into long-duration batteries, defined as 10 hours or more — which, in theory, would be long enough to get us through long winter nights and then recharge the next day. As with many things these days, the country investing the money in long-duration storage research (and deployment) is not the United States, it’s China.

China currently has almost three times as much battery storage deployed as the United States, according to Visual Capitalist — 215.5 gigawatt hours to our 82.1. We should not mistake China for a “green” economy, though. Its single biggest energy source remains coal. China is simply investing in everything, energy-wise. Still, China is leading the United States in a technology that we will need if we’re intent on retiring fossil fuels (something that not everyone is, of course).

There are many things we don’t know yet. We don’t know how quickly battery storage technology will evolve and we don’t know how long can those batteries can be made to last. A harder thing to gauge is public acceptance: How much will people trust a technology that must be recharged every day? We don’t seem to mind having to fill up our cars with gas but will people feel uneasy if their utilities must essentially do the same? That trust may be harder to achieve than any technological breakthrough; technology changes but human nature doesn’t.

Finally, battery storage presents some of the same challenges that other energy projects do: Will people want one nearby? Just this week, the town of Clarksville in Mecklenburg County voted down a proposed battery storage site. One reason China has a lot more battery storage is that people there don’t get a chance to vote on what they want.

On Thursday afternoon, when temperatures remained below freezing and the forecast called for another storm, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that’s charged by the federal government with promoting the reliability of the grid, issued a warning of its own: “The continuing shift in the resource mix toward weather-dependent resources and less fuel diversity increasesrisks of supply shortfalls during winter months,” the North American Electric Reliability Corporation said in a 181-page report. The group classified the PJM grid, of which Virginia is part, as being at “high risk” of having energy demand exceed supply from 2026-30: “Current projections for resource additions do not keep pace with escalating demand forecasts and expected generator retirements.” That’s technical language for black-outs and brown-outs.

Both sides on Virginia’s energy debate agree we need more power, they just disagree over what kind. And some believe we keep to slow down, or even pause, data center development until energy production can catch up. The challenge for those on the green side is assuring people that renewables really can get us through a winter storm.

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