Solar Panel Roof Installation in Springfield, VA. Photo by Susan Laume.

Every four years, Virginia’s governor develops an Energy Plan that establishes the roadmap for meeting our Commonwealth’s energy needs over the following decade. 

Governor Abigail Spanberger released the 2026 Virginia Energy Plan on Thursday, October 1st. The plan addresses many of Virginia Conservation Network’s priorities, including protecting our existing climate policies, such as the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) and Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI); meeting growing demand with clean energy resources; holding utilities accountable for affordable energy; ensuring data centers pay their fair share of the costs associated with new energy demand; and accounting for the harmful impacts of air pollution on community health and our climate. 

The plan arrives as Virginia faces unprecedented projections for electricity demand growth, driven overwhelmingly by data centers. Nearly 100% of projected new electricity demand is expected to come from data centers.

While this plan appropriately focuses on meeting growing demand with clean energy, Virginia cannot build its way out of unchecked data center growth. Even with clean energy prioritized, the scale of data center demand puts significant pressure on Virginia’s natural resources and our wallets. The potential pathways outlined in the plan all contain tradeoffs and decisions around community health, near term climate pollution, and costs driven by the assumption that the Commonwealth should be meeting the unchecked energy demands of one industry: data centers. Virginia Conservation Network continues to call for a pause on new data center development until Virginia has strong, enforceable standards in place to fully protect communities, the environment, and ratepayers.

The Energy Plan identifies three priorities for supporting Virginia’s families and businesses:

The plan aims to lower energy costs for households and businesses by improving energy efficiency, reducing system costs, and limiting exposure to volatile fossil fuel prices.

Virginia will need reliable electricity as demand grows. The plan calls for developing clean, reliable resources and the transmission infrastructure needed to meet that demand while advancing Virginia’s clean-energy goals.

The plan emphasizes homegrown and distributed energy resources that can strengthen grid resilience, create local jobs, and deliver economic and environmental benefits across Virginia.

One of the most important parts of the Energy Plan is its analysis of five different policy pathways for reaching a net-zero power sector.

Rather than recommending a single path, the plan models different combinations of solar, energy storage, distributed energy resources, energy efficiency, demand flexibility*, nuclear power, offshore wind, gas, and other resources. The scenarios illustrate the costs and tradeoffs of different approaches to meeting Virginia’s future electricity needs.

*According to the Virginia Energy Plan, “demand flexibility” is the ability of data centers or other customers to reduce or shift their electricity use during periods of peak demand or grid stress, helping avoid costly new peaking plants and infrastructure. This could include on-site flexibility (e.g., curtailing operations, demand response, onsite batteries) or off-site flexibility through other distributed energy efforts, like virtual power plants. 

Here’s what each pathway means:

The “No Climate Protection Policy Goals” scenario considers what would happen if Virginia eliminated its core climate policies, including the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) and Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). 

The plan finds that this would be the most expensive pathway by 2050, driven in large part by nearly doubling projected fossil fuel emissions and the associated social and health costs of carbon pollution. This scenario would also require significant investment in new gas pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Overall, the plan estimates nearly $145 billion in health-related costs under this pathway, demonstrating that abandoning Virginia’s existing climate policies would come with significant economic and public health consequences.

The “Current Policies” scenario maintains Virginia’s existing climate policies, including the VCEA and RGGI, without assuming any major new policy changes. This pathway requires substantial deployment of solar, energy storage, and offshore wind, along with new nuclear generation and some natural gas resources to meet growing electricity demand and replace retiring power plants. 

Under the moderate load forecast, Virginia would need to roughly triple its current generation capacity to meet projected demand and replace retiring infrastructure, with data center growth accounting for much of the new demand. While this scenario moves Virginia toward a cleaner electricity system, it also demonstrates the enormous scale of new energy infrastructure that would be required to accommodate continued  unchecked growth in electricity demand from data centers.

The “Distributed Flexibility” scenario builds on Virginia’s existing climate policies while placing greater emphasis on managing electricity demand and expanding distributed energy resources. It assumes deployment of approximately 10 gigawatts of distributed energy resources by 2045 and that data centers could provide about 10% demand flexibility, reducing the amount of new generation needed to meet peak demand. The scenario also allows up to 5 gigawatts of non-combustion natural gas bridge resources while longer-term clean firm resources are developed.

The “Distributed Flexibility” scenario builds on Virginia’s existing climate policies while placing greater emphasis on managing electricity demand and expanding distributed energy resources. It assumes deployment of approximately 10 gigawatts of distributed energy resources, like rooftop solar, by 2045 and that data centers could provide about 10% demand flexibility, reducing the amount of new generation needed to meet peak demand. The scenario also allows up to 5 gigawatts of non-combustion gas bridge resources while longer-term clean firm resources are developed.

The “Moderate Solar/In-State Priority” scenario applies the distributed flexibility policies while placing greater emphasis on generating electricity within Virginia. It reduces the annual solar deployment limit from 1.8 gigawatts to 1.2 gigawatts and cuts reliance on out-of-state capacity purchases from 20 gigawatts to 10 gigawatts. With less solar and fewer electricity resources coming from outside Virginia, the pathway requires greater development of nuclear and offshore wind resources. The tradeoff is higher costs compared with the Distributed Flexibility scenario, along with increased carbon emissions and health impacts resulting from greater near-term reliance on fossil fuel generation. 

The scenario demonstrates that prioritizing in-state energy resources can reduce reliance on outside capacity, but limiting lower-cost clean resources such as solar can make the transition more expensive and increase reliance on fossil fuels.

The “No New Gas” scenario applies the distributed flexibility policies while prohibiting the construction of any new natural gas generation in Virginia, including both combustion and non-combustion resources. 

This pathway avoids expanding Virginia’s natural gas infrastructure and has a lower total cost than the Current Policies scenario, although it is more expensive than the Distributed Flexibility scenario. Like the other Distributed Flexibility scenarios, it produces somewhat higher near-term carbon emissions than the Current Policies scenario because demand flexibility reduces the need for some new nuclear and offshore wind capacity, resulting in greater reliance on existing fossil fuel generation in the near term. This underscores the importance of pairing a no-new-gas policy with rapid deployment of clean energy, storage, efficiency, and demand flexibility.

The five policy cases demonstrate that Virginia can meet rapidly growing energy needs with clean energy. Across the scenarios, the Energy Plan shows the value of energy efficiency, distributed energy resources, energy storage, and demand flexibility in reducing the amount of new generation Virginia needs. It also demonstrates the significant costs and health impacts associated with continued reliance on fossil fuels.

But the analysis also underscores a fundamental challenge that cannot be solved through energy supply alone: Virginia’s electricity demand is growing at an extraordinary rate because of data centers.

Virginia should not simply accept these projections as inevitable. Before building billions of dollars of new generation, transmission, and other infrastructure, policymakers must ask whether and how this growth should occur, who should pay for it, and what protections are necessary for the communities and natural resources affected by it.

The 2026 Virginia Energy Plan provides an important roadmap, but the end goal of meeting unchecked demand from one industry is not a foregone conclusion—Virginia still needs strong policies to ensure that the road we take protects Virginia’s communities, environment, and ratepayers.

Virginia Conservation Network Partners and other stakeholders released the following statements regarding the Virginia Energy Plan. Check back for more statements.

Last updated on October 5th, 2026 at 9 AM.