Members of the Chesterfield community gather before a DEQ meeting about the proposed Dominion Energy gas plant. (Photo by Shannon Heckt/Virginia Mercury)
“Enough is enough,” Jason Woodby said in a crowd of Chesterfield residents at the Department of Environmental Quality’s Aug. 7 informational meeting for a new Dominion Energy gas plant air permit. The utility has said the new plant is necessary to help meet the state’s soaring energy demands.
Over a hundred community members showed up to the meeting in red shirts to decry the proposed peaker gas plant that Dominion wants to build in their backyard. Their biggest concerns are the cumulative health impacts on the largely low-income and communities of color that surround the plant, which they say have already been breathing in coal dust for decades.
The proposed Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center (CERC), at the site of a former coal-fired plant, is only meant to run 37% of the time during peak energy demand hours. It will be able to power up in a matter of minutes to run for several hours at a time to take the strain off the regional PJM power grid during the hottest and coldest days when energy demands skyrocket.
A rendering of the proposed Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center. (Photo courtesy Dominion Energy)
But environmental groups believe that the company should be focusing on renewable energy as mandated by the Virginia Clean Economy Act. In case filings to the State Corporation Commission, they have proposed other ways for the company to meet energy demands, including through solar, wind, and battery storage.
“This plant is dirty and expensive. No two ways about it. Burning methane is bad for our health,” said Rachel James, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center. “If allowed, this plant would spew out several harmful contaminants, including fine particulate matter, which is one of the most deadly air pollutants.”
Project background
The 1000-megawatt plant faced some permitting challenges at the original proposed location across the street, prompting Dominion to move it to the Chesterfield Power Station, just north of the Dutch Gap conservation area. The site used to be a coal-fired power station that began to be retired in 2018 and fully ended burning coal in 2023, after burning for over 70 years. The process of removing the ash from the pond on the site is still in progress.
The plant is still operational for gas production through two units that produce about 420 MW of energy. Those portions of the plant are not planned to be part of the peaker usage and will run more than the proposed 37% for the other units.
Dominion officials said this project is critical to meet the exponential growth of power demand – with Virginians expected to be using double the amount of energy they are now by the late 2030s. The CERC will be only used for peak energy demands on the hottest and coldest days of the year, according to Dominion. The plant can be fired up in about 15 minutes in order to help stabilize the grid on those high-use days, when the company gets the call from PJM that additional support for the grid will be needed.
“Our customers are using 5% more power every year, and by the late 2030s our customers will use twice as much power as they use today,” said Jeremy Slayton, a Dominion spokesperson. “…If we don’t do that, there’s going to be a power gap. Power demand will exceed power supply, and there won’t be enough energy for our customers on those hottest and coldest days of the year.”
Environmental, health concerns
Since the coal-fired plant fully shut down two years ago, air quality has improved for the surrounding communities, according to DEQ. The CERC facility is projected to have significantly less emissions than the coal plant.
Representatives from DEQ at last week’s community meeting also stated that the proposed gas plant is much more efficient than other facilities around the country. It would not significantly raise air pollution compared to the former coal burning.
However, residents feel that since they just started to see air quality improve, they don’t want to see additional pollutants put into the air.
“It seems like Dominion and now DEQ is using the fact that there was this coal ash plant here, running for 70 years, (as) kind of a cover for introducing even more pollution to the same area. From a community perspective, the fact that this community has been exposed to 70 years of coal pollution doesn’t justify exposing it to more pollution,” Woodby said.
DEQ uses air monitoring both inside the stacks of the plant and locally to ensure gas plants are meeting the air quality standards. They use the ambient air monitoring to make their assessments, but community members said the monitors are too far away to get an accurate read on the impact of the Chesterfield location and should be placed on the fenceline of the facility. DEQ officials said the modeling for the plant’s emissions and reads on ambient air show the plant will be within the requirements,
Dominion has been working to meet the state’s renewable energy goals laid out in the Virginia Clean Economy Act, according to the company spokesman. The utility has stated that an estimated six methane gas plants in the state will be needed to meet the growing energy demand, on top of renewable energy, to prevent a grid collapse during hot and cold days.
“We are all in, all in on offshore wind, all in on solar. The one thing you’re dealing with renewables like offshore wind and solar, is that they are intermittent resources,” Slayton said. “So those renewables work hand in hand with natural gas to make sure we are able to meet our customers’ power demand so we can keep the lights on for our customers.”
Advocacy groups have taken to the courts over the county allowing the project to move forward with a conditional use permit from 2010 instead of the project needing to apply for a new one. The county said the location was already permitted to be a plant and additional review was not needed. Residents also took issue with the county not doing a site suitability process for the project, with regulators stating the project meets all local ordinances.
“We have determined that the area will be, unless we got something wrong, data will show that it’s going to be suitable from an air pollution perspective,” said Alison Sinclair, an air permit writer for DEQ. “That’s all we can do from the air pollution perspective…That’s why we look to the counties, because they know where everything is and what’s going on in their county.”
Dominion held their own informational open houses about the project in the community despite not having to go through a conditional use permit process that would have required the county’s Board of Supervisors take a new vote on the zoning for the project. Advocates appealed the Chesterfield county decision to accept the old CUP permit in order to force a new vote by the supervisors, but a judge in July 2024 denied the appeal. Advocates said they would not give up their fight.
Dominion and the proposal’s opponents will present their cases to the SCC on Aug. 19. That panel will be tasked with determining if the energy project is necessary for grid reliability as the company claims and if it is a reasonable cost for ratepayers, who will be on the hook for some of the project funding.
DEQ has published the draft permit for the facility and has opened the public comment period. An official public hearing will be held on Sept. 8, where the community will have their comments officially recorded and submitted to DEQ before the permit is officially approved or denied.
If the permit is approved and the SCC gives the green light to move forward, Dominion anticipates construction to begin in 2026 and the plant to come online in 2029.