When Green Turns to Brown: The Hidden Cost of Dominion’s Solar Buildout

Progress. (Adobe)

Dominion Energy just filed its 2025 Renewable Portfolio Standard plan with the Virginia State Corporation Commission. It’s their roadmap for meeting Virginia’s renewable energy mandates under the Clean Economy Act.

If you read through the filing, and I did, you’ll find the same words repeated again and again: environmental justice, clean energy, public interest.

What you won’t see is a real discussion of land efficiency.

Dominion’s plan covers roughly 11,500 acres of new solar and storage sites across Virginia - almost 18 square miles of ground. Out of all that land, less than two acres are on previously developed sites. The rest is farmland, forest, or open space.

That’s the part no one wants to talk about.

I’ve been reading a lot of Thomas Sowell lately. For those not familiar, Sowell is an economist and social theorist who’s spent decades studying how good intentions often lead to bad results. His main point is simple: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Policies should be judged not by what they promise, but by what they actually produce.

That idea fits perfectly with what’s happening here.

The only reason Dominion is building this much solar is because they have to. The Virginia Clean Economy Act forces them to add renewable capacity whether it makes sense or not. It’s not innovation — it’s compliance.

Dominion isn’t chasing better performance or reliability; they’re chasing checkmarks to stay in line with state mandates. The company’s lawyers and lobbyists made sure these projects are considered “in the public interest,” which means the SCC pretty much has to approve them - and customers have to pay for them.

Then, to make it sound righteous, the filing wraps everything in the language of “environmental justice.” The idea is to protect communities from the impacts of industrial development. But what it really does is push those same industrial impacts out to farmland and forest, where there’s less pushback.

Let’s look at the math.

Dominion’s CE-6 solar portfolio adds about 845 megawatts (MW) of new utility-scale solar capacity. On paper that sounds like a lot. But it takes over 11,400 acres to get there. That works out to about 13.5 acres per MW.

Now, if we convert that into energy produced, it gets worse. A typical solar farm in Virginia runs at a capacity factor of about 20% - meaning it produces one-fifth of its rated output on average over a year.

So Dominion’s 845 MW of solar will generate roughly 1.5 million megawatt-hours (MWh) per year. Divide that by the 11,500 acres being disturbed, and you get about 130 MWh per acre per year.

For comparison, a natural gas combined-cycle plant can produce over 2,000 MWh per acre per year - and it doesn’t need to clear forests or cover farmland to do it. Nuclear? Even higher.

If we’re measuring “clean energy” by how efficiently we use land - the greenest resource we have - solar doesn’t look so green.

This is where Sowell’s logic comes in. He’d call it a trade-off that no one bothers to calculate. Policymakers are focused on what’s seen: solar panels replacing fossil fuels, corporations checking the ESG box, and legislators claiming progress.

What’s unseen is the trade-off: thousands of acres of productive land turned into fenced-off glass and gravel, habitat loss, runoff, and a future recycling problem nobody’s pricing yet.

Dominion’s own filing shows that “environmental justice” rules steer these projects away from urban or industrial areas - meaning the disturbance shifts to rural counties where land is cheaper and resistance is low. So the same policy meant to protect disadvantaged communities ends up dumping the environmental cost on agricultural ones.

That’s not justice. That’s just geography.

The irony is that the people writing these policies seem to believe they’re helping the planet by trading fossil fuels for solar panels. But energy is energy - it still has to come from somewhere, and it still has consequences.

When you clear 18 square miles of Virginia land for panels that work at 20% efficiency, you’re not saving the environment - you’re just moving the damage somewhere less visible.

Sowell once said that the first lesson of economics is scarcity, and the first lesson of politics is to ignore the first lesson of economics. This is a textbook example. The land being used for these solar farms isn’t unlimited. Once it’s converted, it’s gone - and so is whatever it was producing before.

Dominion’s plan will cost ratepayers about $3 billion, recovered through the “Rider CE” adjustment on everyone’s power bill. The company says it’s “in the public interest.” Maybe. But the real question is which public they’re talking about.

The urban and corporate consumers who get the clean energy credits? Or the rural communities watching their open ground turned into industrial grids?

I’m not against cleaner energy. But efficiency should mean more than just emissions per megawatt-hour. It should also mean acres disturbed per megawatt produced, and real reliability per dollar spent. On that score, solar falls short — especially when built across productive land in the name of good intentions.

If you measure it the way a concrete guy would - output divided by what it took to build it - this version of “green” power starts to look more brown.

And if Thomas Sowell were looking at Virginia’s solar boom, he’d probably point to one of his simplest but most important lessons:

“There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs, and whatever you do to deal with one of man’s flaws, it creates another problem.”
- Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (5th Edition, 2014)

Dominion’s solar plan might sound good on paper. But when you look at the trade-offs - thousands of acres cleared, billions spent, and unreliable output - it’s hard to see who’s actually being served.