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Two new battery projects on Virginia’s remote eastern peninsula could signal a growing trend in the clean-energy transition: midsize energy-storage units that are bigger than the home batteries typically paired with rooftop solar, but cheaper and quicker to build than massive utility-scale projects.
The 10-megawatt, four-hour batteries, one each in the tiny towns of Exmore and Tasley, represent this “missing middle,” said Chris Cucci, chief strategy officer for Climate First Bank, which provided $32 million in financing for the two units. Batteries are a critical technology in the shift to renewable energy because they can store wind and solar electrons and discharge them when the sun isn’t shining or breezes die down.
When it comes to energy storage, “we need volume, but we also need speed to market,” Cucci said. “The big projects do move the needle, but they can take a few years to come online.” And in rural Virginia, batteries paired with enormous solar arrays — which can span 100-plus acres — face increasing headwinds, in part over the concern that they’re displacing farmland.
The Exmore and Tasley systems, by contrast, took about a year to permit, broke ground in April, and came online this fall, Cucci said. Sited at two substations 10 miles apart, the batteries occupy about 1 acre each.
Beyond being relatively simple to get up and running, the systems could help ease energy burdens on customers of A&N Electric Cooperative, the nonprofit utility that owns the substations where the batteries are sited, said Harold Patterson, CEO of project developer Patterson Enterprises.
Wait times to link to the larger regional grid, operated by PJM Interconnection, are up to two years. So for now, the batteries will draw power only from the electric co-op, Patterson said. Once they connect to PJM, the batteries will charge when system-wide electricity consumption is down and spot prices are low. Then, the batteries’ owner, Doxa Development, will sell power back when demand is at its peak, creating revenue that will help lower bills for co-op consumers.
“That’s the final step to try to drive down power prices” for residents of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, Patterson said. “Get it online and increase supply in the wholesale marketplace.”
Though the batteries aren’t paired with a specific solar project, they are likely to lap up excess solar electrons on the PJM grid. And since they’ll be discharged during hours of heavy demand, they could help avert the revving up of gas-fired “peaker plants.”
“Peaker plants are smaller power plants that are in closer proximity to the populations they serve, and [they] are traditionally very dirty,” Cucci said. “They’re also economically inefficient to run. Battery storage is cleaner, more efficient, and easier to deploy.”
Gas peaker plants are wasteful partly because of all the energy required to drill and transport the fuel that fires them, said Nate Benforado, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy group.
“Then you get [the fuel] to your power plant, and you have to burn it,” Benforado said. “And guess what? You only capture a relatively small portion of the potential energy in those carbon molecules.”
Single-cycle peaker plants, the most common type, can go from zero to full power in minutes, much like a jet engine. Their efficiency ranges between 33% and 43%.
“Burning fossil fuels is not an efficient way to generate energy,” Benforado said.
“Leaning into batteries is the way we have to go. They’re efficient on the power side but also on the price side.”
Texas proves the financial case for batteries. The state has its own transmission grid, no monopoly utilities, and no state policies to speed the clean-energy transition. Yet it’s gone from zero to some 12 gigawatts of batteries in five years.
In Virginia, A&N Electric Cooperative isn’t the only nonprofit utility investing in energy storage: The municipal utility in the city of Danville, on the North Carolina border, announced earlier this year that it’s building a second battery project of 11 megawatts. Its first system, a 10.5-megawatt battery, which went online in 2022, is on track to save customers $40 million over two decades, according to Cardinal News.
“You look at Texas, where developers are trying to make money on projects,” said Benforado. “And now you see co-ops and municipalities saying, ‘This can save our customers significant amounts of money.’ That, to me, is very telling about the economics of batteries.”
Those economics are even rosier in light of the federal tax credits available for grid batteries, among the few green incentives to survive the budget bill that congressional Republicans passed this summer. Those credits start phasing down in 2033.
While nonprofit utilities in Virginia aren’t impacted by a 2020 state law that requires investor-owned Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power Co. to decarbonize by 2045 and 2050, respectively, they help show what’s possible for the state.
“We need to build things,” Benforado said, especially in the face of skyrocketing demand from data centers. “The question is, are we going to build clean resources or not? We need to build batteries, not gas.”
Climate First Bank and Patterson Enterprises, for their part, have more midsize energy-storage systems in the works. In fact, in December they expect to break ground on another 10-megawatt project — in Wattsville, 20 miles up the road from Tasley.
“We are talking to a lot of developers on projects ranging from 2 megawatts to 10 or 15 megawatts,” Cucci said. “A lot of those players are saying, ‘Let’s shift a little more heavily into storage.’”
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