“Can we all just get along?” Rodney King famously asked. 

That might also be a good catch phrase for state Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico County, although some who disagree with him might dispute that.

This legislator from the Richmond suburbs is of interest to those in rural Virginia (and lots of other places) because he is a key player in an issue that is roiling many communities: solar power.

In the past two General Assembly sessions, VanValkenburg has introduced bills to speed the construction of utility-scale solar projects; both were defeated. 

His 2024 bill SB 697 would have “banned the bans” by prohibiting localities from banning solar developments. 

He was back this year with a different bill, SB 1114, which could have created a standardized process by which a solar developer could seek an exception to local zoning. It was incorporated into a different solar bill which was ultimately defeated. Neither his bill this year nor the one it was merged into (by state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville) would have required local governments to accept solar, but that was the concern of opponents anyway. Those were primarily Republicans, but the Deeds bill was eventually sunk because two Democrats with a significant number of rural constituents — Lashcresce Aird of Petersburg and Russet Perry of Loudoun County — declined to support it. (See my previous column.)

Politically, the outcome here was that VanValkenburg has been tagged as a guy who wants to mandate rural areas accept solar farms, when there’s no realistic chance that his suburban district will ever have one. To be fair, that’s how a lot of General Assembly Democrats are now seen in rural Virginia, but VanValkenburg has been out front on this where others haven’t been. That led to our recent conversation where we talked a lot about solar — and also housing, another issue where he fears that some local governments are standing in the way of progress.

Let me assure any of our anti-solar readers, of which I know we have quite a few, that VanValkenburg is not some fire-breathing demon coming to scourge the countryside. You still might not agree with his positions, but I think you’d find him quite a pleasant and thoughtful fellow. His thoughts just lead to a different place than those of many in rural Virginia who find solar projects an ugly blight on the landscape.

VanValkenburg is a high school civics teacher who admits he tends to be idealistic. 

“I’m an eternal optimist,” he says. “I don’t know if I should be in this space.” He laments that energy has become so politicized. 

“I wish more people were willing to move forward on how we talk about energy,” he says. “There are a lot of ‘no’s’ — my party included. I think Democrats are much better on nuclear than five years ago,” but some are still reflexively anti-nuclear.  “Both parties can get in the way but when it comes to energy, everything tends to be D vs. R. … A lot of the conversation is us vs. them but it’s really a ‘we thing.’ We all need energy and we all need to play a role in this.”

That, of course, is where opinions may start to diverge because there are a lot of people who don’t think they, or their community, should play any role in generating energy. That’s not unique to solar power, by any means. Every form of energy generates opposition, particularly if it’s going to be nearby.

We just saw 10 years of opposition to the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline from West Virginia to Chatham. Over the years, proposed wind farms in Highland County and Tazewell County blew away after opposition. (Disclosure: That one in Tazewell, long before Cardinal first took flight, was proposed by Dominion Energy, which is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.) A wind farm currently proposed in Botetourt County has drawn opposition, some of it from people in Rockbridge County who have complained that they’ll be able to see the turbines. Some in Southwest Virginia opposed a nuclear plant that no utility ever proposed (the governor did, but he has no role in picking nuclear sites). Now, across rural Virginia, we see local governments increasingly voting down solar projects or, in some cases, enacting outright bans against them.

VanValkenburg thinks local governments should look at every solar project that comes before them. “Rather than the conversation being abstract or partisan or ideological, the conversation would have been the quality of the project, as opposed to a blanket ban,” he says. “I think it would turn down [the temperature on] the conversation if we could just talk about individual projects on their merits.”

However, the opposition to solar projects often isn’t on the merits of a particular site, or even ideological objections to solar versus, say, the fossil fuel of your choice. Many people just plain don’t like the looks of it. In practical terms, we have a problem here: The state, through the Clean Economy Act, has set a goal of making Virginia’s electric grid carbon-free by 2050. However, the task of actually achieving that falls to local governments, and they’re the ones blocking solar, not because they’re in the pocket of fossil fuel companies but because their constituents don’t want their pretty countryside turned into an industrial hellscape of solar panels. Or at least that’s how many people see it. This is an emotional issue for many. About a year ago, I went to Chatham to meet someone. I casually mentioned that I’d driven past a lot of solar farms on the way there. Boy, was that the wrong thing to say! He was furious about how awful they looked. 

VanValkenburg sees solar power in very different terms. He sees it as an economic issue. Solar is cheaper than other forms of energy. And then there are the consequences of not having enough energy. “If we don’t have energy, we’re going to have increased bills. If there’s a lack of energy, businesses are going to leave,” VanValkenburg says. “We should be looking at solar as an opportunity to build out an economy that can help working people.” That, of course, is not how the issue is framed when a solar project comes before some local planning commission with a roomful of people who think it’s going to ruin their neighborhood. 

Republicans would like to see more natural gas — unlike solar, it’s available around the clock, for one thing. Battery storage might someday fix solar’s intermittency, but VanValkenburg cautions against seeing natural gas as a better option than solar. Gas companies have the right of eminent domain, solar developers don’t. “That’s a much more violent process if you want to talk about how energy comes through your area,” VanValkenburg says. From his point of view, every solar project that a local government voluntarily rejects increases the likelihood of a natural gas pipeline where property owners won’t have a say at all. 

I asked him what he’d have to say to rural residents who just don’t want solar, period, and think they’re getting shafted to provide power for data centers on the other end of the state. “I totally get it,” he says. “I’m from rural upstate New York. My mom’s hatred of New York City runs strong. I don’t think it should just be on the rural areas” to produce power. 

That’s why he introduced a separate bill this year that encourages the development of small solar projects in suburban areas as a way to show that every area of the state is doing its part — and to try to alleviate the concern that rural areas are being forced to shoulder the entire burden of producing energy. That bill, SB 1040 (with a companion version, HB 1883 by Del. Katrina Callsen, D-Albemarle County) passed easily and now awaits action by the governor. 

Nonetheless, VanValkenburg is worried that Virginia is not going to be able to meet its clean energy targets. “Data centers make it a lot harder,” he says. A state report earlier this year said that if data centers continue to grow without restraint, Virginia’s demand for electricity will triple. The Clean Economy Act was passed at a time before legislators realized how much energy data centers would need. Converting the grid to carbon-free energy is hard enough without increasing the amount of energy we need — and making that carbon-free, too. 

“If we don’t get clean energy built, it’s not going to be a sustainable law,” VanValkenburg says. “Right now we’re not really trying to get there and that’s a problem.”

Of course, Republicans would be quite happy to scrap the Clean Economy Act. VanValkenburg’s not in favor of that, but he does acknowledge that the act could be in jeopardy, something other Democrats aren’t willing to say (at least publicly). “If we recognize we can’t get there, we need to change the Clean Economy Act,” he says. “If there’s not any legislative willpower, we’re going to have to change that act. Our goal gets harder as the energy load goes up.”

Unlike some Democrats, VanValkenburg is not focused solely on renewables. “That’s why I voted for SMRs; we should be participating in all types of clean energy,” he says. SMRs are small modular nuclear reactors; nuclear isn’t renewable energy but it is carbon-free. Whether that should be considered “clean” energy has been a separate debate. In any case, VanValkenburg says, “I think the governor’s focus on SMRs and fusion without focusing on solar is silly because long-term we should do both. From my vantage point, we should focus on the collective.” In other words: What’s good for everybody? And everybody should have to do their part, both rural areas and urban ones. 

Here’s part of the reality we face: Our old ways of producing power were concentrated in a relatively few places — coal mines in Southwest Virginia and coal plants here or there, for instance, and many of them were built in a time when there was little public opposition to such things. Our new ways of producing power (such as solar) take up a lot more space and are in a lot more places. The result: a lot more political conflicts. This past General Assembly session, many of the fiercest fights dealt with energy-related issues, and that’s why. “It seems much hotter than it was,” VanValkenburg says.

And, despite his optimism, it’s likely to get more so.