CHARLOTTE, N.C. ― The Southeast’s traditionally risk-averse vertically integrated utilities are now embracing the clean energy transition, driven by economic development in the form of new industry and data centers.

Their regulatory and legislative policies vary, but the states are united in their focus on meeting new corporate demand for clean electrons with “all of the above” mixes of power, in which new renewables are backed up with natural gas and nuclear.

Mississippi, for example, now boasts the tallest onshore wind turbines in the U.S.: AES’ 184.5-MW Delta wind project, with blades that reach 692 feet at their highest point, Jaxon Tolbert, senior program associate for the Southeastern Wind Coalition, said at the Infocast Southeast Renewable Energy conference in October.

A long-running narrative has maintained that the Southeast does not have enough wind for onshore development, but Tolbert said, “It just depends on how tall your turbine is, and so we’re really excited to see this new commercially available tall-wind technology …

“MISO-based wind is here, and MISO South is a new market, and I think the big issue is awareness.”

MISO’s interconnection queue now includes about 20 onshore wind projects located across Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky, he said.

Under North Carolina’s new carbon plan, which the state’s Utilities Commission approved Nov. 1, Duke Energy will procure up to 3,460 MW of new solar generation and 1,100 MW of battery storage, including 475 MW of standalone storage and 625 MW paired with solar, all by 2031.

However, the new solar will be counterbalanced by 3,620 MW of new natural gas turbines that the commission approved to go online in 2030 and 2031. (See NCUC Approves Latest Duke ‘Carbon Plan’ to Expand Renewable, Nuclear and Gas Generation.)

The Louisiana Energy Users Group, an industry group with heavy participation from fossil fuel companies, has floated a proposal to allow companies locating new facilities in the state to procure their own electricity from combined heat and power plants or from MISO’s wholesale market, at their own expense.

Whether a state participates in an organized wholesale power market could be a critical differentiator for renewable project developers and their corporate customers, said David Mindham, director of regulatory and market affairs for EDP Renewables.

Organized markets have “all the structures you need to power and contract for power outside of a regulated utility,” Mindham said. “And so that drives a massive amount of demand that isn’t seen in the rest of the South, and that demand can be data center load; it can be other manufacturers.”

At the same time, he sees the Southeast’s response to economic development and the resulting growth in power demand as “driving good and intelligent development of projects and renewables” across its investor-owned, municipal and cooperative utilities.

But interconnection remains a pain point for renewable developers in MISO South, reflecting uncertainty, rather than speculation, Mindham said.

“The queue today is a reflection of the uncertainty we have in the markets we’re approaching right now … where the transmission, where the number of data centers or new industrial loads, or whatever, where they are going to site, how many they are going to be,” he said. “We’re trying to anticipate the needs of a system that is full of uncertainties 10 years out.”

The Virginia Update

The growth of renewables across the South over the past four years has been significant, with many states doubling their megawatts of utility-scale solar.

According to figures from the Solar Energy Industries Association, cited at the conference, demand from the high concentration of data centers in Virginia’s Loudoun County has more than doubled solar in the state, from 2,629 MW in 2020 to 5,799 MW in 2024. Georgia has gone from 3,249 MW to 6,147 MW, and Alabama has grown its utility-scale solar from 283 MW to 823 MW.

But demand growth projections are also increasing exponentially. With data centers still crowding into Virginia, Dominion Energy has predicted its electricity demand will grow 5.5% per year for the next decade, ultimately doubling by 2039.

Speaking at the conference’s opening panel, focusing on Virginia, Scott Gaskill, Dominion vice president of regulatory affairs, said it took the utility “about 100 years to get to 20,000 MW [of demand], and we’re going to double that in about 15 years.”

The Virginia Clean Economy Act of 2020 requires Dominion to provide its customers with 100% clean power by 2045, setting up a major challenge for state lawmakers, regulators and other industry groups on how to meet growing demand and maintain reliability and affordability while meeting the VCEA goals.

Session moderator Cliona Mary Robb, board chair of the Virginia Renewable Energy Alliance, ran down a series of reports and hearings that will be looking at the thorny issues surrounding data center growth in the state.

The General Assembly in 2023 mandated the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission to study the particular challenges raised by data centers and issue a report by Dec. 10. The state Commission on Electric Utility Regulation has also been holding a series of hearings on data centers, with the next one scheduled for Nov. 26.

One of the ideas being discussed by commission staff is a shift “from having utilities file an integrated resource plan to instead filing an integrated system plan,” Robb said. “The integrated system plan would include transmission planning as well as generation resource planning, and specifically … it would address the use of grid-enhancing technologies.”

Finally, the State Corporation Commission has announced it will hold a technical conference Dec. 16, looking at the impact of hyperscale data centers in the state, with a main focus on cost allocation.

The SCC has yet to accept Dominion’s 2024 IRP, filed Oct. 15, telling the utility to come back by Nov. 15 with updated modeling “to address load growth with and without data centers’ price impacts [and] reflecting … updated capacity forecasts coming out of PJM,” Robb said. (See Dominion Releases ‘All of the Above’ Integrated Resource Plan for 2024.)

Gaskill noted that the VCEA does allow the SCC to delay the retirement of fossil fuel generation to ensure reliability on the system.

But Kim Jemaine, managing director of Counterspark, a clean energy advocacy group, countered that while demand growth is largely seen as inevitable, meeting the clean energy goals of the VCEA is now being talked about as optional, as opposed to finding clean energy options.

“In our view, meeting the VCEA should be treated with the same seriousness and vigor as demand growth,” she said.