New Article Exposes Dominion’s Plan to Stop Schools from Going Solar and Shows How One School Fought Back

“Just as Fairfax County was advancing a bid to downsize its electric bills by up to $60 million by outfitting 87 of its 199 schools with solar arrays, Dominion Energy concocted over-the-top fees that almost pulled the plug,” writes veteran energy reporter Elizabeth McGowan in a story published this month in an online magazine about energy.

“The 3-year fight for rooftop solar for Virginia’s schools: Why Dominion Energy’s requirements for expensive equipment mean fewer solar schools” in E/lectrify (free subscription required to view) explains that Virginia’s largest school division, and one of the biggest in the nation, was forced to scale back after the monopoly utility giant threw cold water on the school’s solar ambitions:

Determined not to be left in the dark, the Northern Virginia public school district has spent several years regrouping. Leaders are now powering forward with a pared-down proposal to put solar on 34 school rooftops—enough to save the district an estimated $15.7 million over the 25-year lifespan of the panels.

Why the drastic contraction?

Fairfax schools couldn’t afford the exorbitant, specialized equipment that Dominion began requiring in 2022 to connect larger rooftop arrays to the electric grid.

The article adds that Fairfax wasn’t alone. Dozens of school divisions in Virginia wanted to go solar and connect it to the public electricity grid, which is their right. But Dominion blocked their plans. Along with hospitals and businesses, these schools are having to cut back or cancel solar projects just when Virginia faces an electricity shortage that has already raised costs for Dominion’s customers.

Dominion vs Schoolkids

To students at Fairfax County schools, Dominion is acting like the Grinch who stole Christmas.

The schools got the idea to go solar in the first place from eco-aware students, and Karl Frisch successfully campaigned in 2019 for a seat on the school board as the students’ ally, promising to help make their solar dreams into reality.

“The kids were right,” Frisch said. “The idea of reaching carbon neutrality isn’t possible without alternative energy, and it seemed like a moral imperative.”

School administrators and local government officials agreed with the students. So, Fairfax came up with an ambitious plan to adopt solar power.

In what would have been the largest solar project by any local government in Virginia, Fairfax planned to install solar panels on 113 county buildings — including 87 schools — with 45 megawatts of solar, enough to power roughly 4,700 Virginia homes annually with clean energy projected to save $60 million in energy costs.

But then, in the middle of Fairfax’s solar development, Dominion stepped in and changed the rules for mid-sized solar customers to connect to the public electricity grid. They said it was for safety and reliability, but no other major utility in the United States imposes the same requirements. And technical experts say that the extra equipment is unnecessary.

Now, under the new rules, any solar array over 250 kilowatts in capacity would have to pay for extra equipment that could add as much as 50% to the cost of a solar project. Since those additional costs would make most of Fairfax’s solar arrays uneconomic, they had no choice but to downsize their solar projects to fall under the utility’s size limit, which reduced the size of their total solar plans.

With that scaled-down plan, Fairfax schools will save only 25% of what they planned to save on energy. And all because of requirements for grid equipment from their monopoly utility that are so clearly unnecessary technically that they appear only to have one purpose — to stifle competition to Dominion’s own solar offerings from small independent solar developers.

“The message is that you can get solar, as long as it’s utility solar. Otherwise, you’re out of luck,” said energy attorney Cliona Robb as quoted in McGowan’s article. “It’s outrageous to me that a utility can unilaterally adopt a practice that’s not consistent with industry standards.”

A Sense of Injustice and a Call to Fight Back

Taking solar panels away from schoolkids may not be exactly like taking candy from a baby.

But to Secure Solar Futures CEO Tony Smith, Dominion’s move still seemed pretty low.

So, under Tony’s leadership, the Virginia Distributed Solar Alliance (VA-DSA) asked state energy regulators to reverse Dominion’s new expensive interconnection rules for mid-sized solar projects at schools and elsewhere.

For the last three years, the VA-DSA, consisting of rooftop solar companies and environmental groups has been pursuing a case at the Virginia State Corporation Commission to require Dominion to interconnect larger solar projects without the additional grid equipment and the additional expense. Fairfax schools signed onto the effort.

It’s just the latest battle that Tony has helped the solar industry in Virginia to fight over the last couple of decades against the monopoly utility’s attempts to kill independent solar development. He still proudly displays the cease-and-desist letter he received from Dominion in 2010 when our company tried to use a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Washington & Lee University to finance a solar project that would eventually become the largest in the state at the time, by changing the PPA to a lease, thereby thwarting Dominion’s attempt to quash it. That prompted Tony to co-found and co-lead the VA-DSA to champion legalizing solar PPAs at the state level, which was achieved in 2013.

Of course, Tony has not fought alone. In the current battle over solar interconnection rules, the victories that he and his solar allies have achieved so far are a credit to solar customers like Fairfax schools as well as other solar developers who have all stepped up to share their stories with state regulators of solar dreams crushed by Dominion.

Local Solar Needed to Avert AI Energy Crunch

At a time when Virginia, the world capital of data centers and the biggest importer of energy among all 50 states, needs more power than ever and needs it fast to keep up with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and its demands for electricity, Dominion trying to slow or kill independent solar runs counter to the public interest.

All scales of solar power are urgently needed in Virginia to prevent energy price spikes and power outages. This includes big solar fields operated by Dominion itself and other utilities, along with solar arrays on top of homes across the state, and the mid-sized local solar projects developed at schools like those in Fairfax County. That’s because solar is faster to build and cheaper to produce than any other source of new energy, by far.

In addition, local solar offers two key advantages over centralized utility solar:

Since local solar arrays go on rooftops or small pieces of unused land adjacent to buildings, they avoid the controversy involved when big solar projects use farm or forest land and obscure rural views.

Also, though its scale is smaller, local solar produces power just where and when it’s needed most on the grid, on hot summer afternoons when air conditioning at data centers and everywhere else is pumping at full blast. This helps keep costs down and keep the lights on for everyone.

Solar from utilities like Dominion is not enough to avert a power shortage in Virginia, making the fight to save local solar more important now than ever.

When writer McGowan asked Tony why he has persisted in the current case against Dominion, he gave an answer that provides insight into his motivation to fight for local independent solar power over the last 15 years.

“We’re not here just to make a profit,” he said. “It boils down to a realization that we’re not just in the solar business. We’re in the solar policy business, too, and you can’t separate the two. This is about our children and grandchildren and the legacy we’re leaving behind.”

Read the full article by signing up for a free subscription to E/lectrify.