Every day, Piedmont Environmental Council staff engage at the local, state and federal levels to shape public policy with an eye toward protecting and restoring the lands and waters of the Virginia Piedmont while building strong, more sustainable communities. The Virginia General Assembly serves as the main stage for these efforts, and as of this writing, it has adjourned its 60-day session and sent bills on to the governor’s desk for her signature, veto, or proposed amendments. With the massive data center tax break at the center of a budget agreement impasse, legislators will return April 22 to consider the governor’s actions and begin a special session the next day to reach a budget conclusion.
Read on for updates on tentative outcomes of PEC’s legislative priorities for conservation, data center reform, energy and climate, and housing and land use.
Conservation
PEC supported bills to bolster conserved lands, including Virginia’s Great Outdoors Act, which proposed a $3-per-square-foot tax on data centers to establish a source of consistent, annual funding to address the long-term need for parks, trails and conservation. If passed, it would have generated up to $250 million per year for land conservation, but the bill did not make it out of the House. We did see success with a different bill that will disincentivize public utilities from condemning conserved lands for projects such as transmission lines by requiring them to repay state tax credits and local deferred taxes on the land.
Permanent land conservation provides the platform for sustained efforts to restore and protect wildlife habitat and clean water, and in this session we saw numerous bills that complement PEC’s land conservation goals. Efforts to protect wildlife corridors and curb the spread of invasive plant species have gone to the governor’s desk, including a bill on which PEC provided comments that will limit the planting of invasive species in highway right-of-ways. Unfortunately, a bill that would have increased education about light pollution and dark sky preservation — a practice crucial for our local wildlife and frequently promoted by PEC staff working on habitat restoration — did not pass.
The House and Senate agreed to allow only Falls Church to conserve and replace trees to improve stormwater management and protect wildlife habitat when land is developed: advocates are hoping that the Governor will broaden the impact of the bill to other communities in Virginia. The House, Senate and governor also still need to come to an agreement on how the final budget will fund the Virginia Agricultural Best Management Practices Cost-Share Program, which helps landowners pursue practices — like livestock exclusion fencing — that restore water quality and protect local streams.
PEC closely monitored other efforts to protect water quality, an issue core to the work we do through local policies and direct conservation and restoration programs like Plantings for the Piedmont. Bills to establish a Chesapeake Bay Pay for Outcomes Fund, which would have provided outcomes-based payments for projects that reduce nutrient and sediment pollution in the bay watershed, did not pass. However, efforts to improve PFAS monitoring and reporting, both imperative to conserve water quality throughout our region and beyond, were successful. PFAS, common water pollutants, are also called “forever chemicals” as they do not break down in the environment or the human body.
Data Center Reform
This session made clear that PEC’s Virginia Data Center Reform campaign and the growing voter awareness of the costs and impacts of data centers has forced legislators to recognize they need to take action on data center reform — though they disagreed on how much action to take.
This session’s biggest surprise came in the Senate’s proposed budget, which completely eliminated the data center sales tax exemption. Initially predicted at only $1.6 million dollars annually, the tax exemption has reached a startling $1.9 billion dollars in 2025 and will only continue to grow if not eliminated or substantially limited. The House budget instead proposed tying the exemption to renewable energy commitments and energy efficiency standards. At a stalemate, the two bodies failed to pass a budget during the session, and will reconvene April 23 for that purpose.
The Senate took a strong stance supporting additional oversight, transparency, ratepayer protection, and incentives for sustainability and mitigation. Unfortunately, despite widespread public support, most of the bills that passed the Senate were quickly killed by the House.
For example, the House killed key bills that would have added state oversight by requiring a certificate of operation from the State Corporation Commission for large-load customers like data centers, along with bills that would have protected other ratepayers from unfairly subsidizing electrical infrastructure needed to power data centers.
Amendments took the teeth out of other bills that would have increased transparency around data center proposals. A bill that would have required air quality monitoring and public notice for data center diesel backup generator permits near schools, as well as a transition to battery storage rather than diesel generators for backup power, was watered down significantly. The final version only requires data center backup generators to meet stronger emission standards, a proposal the Department of Environmental Quality is already pursuing. Similarly, the House and Senate many times debated efforts to require data centers disclose water use, before ultimately only requiring monthly water use reporting.
In the positive column, bills that require data centers to submit a noise assessment during permitting and that create a voluntary demand response program for large load customers both passed. These will better inform localities making decisions about data center siting and could reduce some impacts of data centers on the electrical grid during peak use times. Any reductions in peak demand can help reduce the overall investment in generation and transmission.
Energy & Climate
Years of PEC’s work and engagement led to a strong outcome for energy and climate legislation. Jumping off our agrivoltaics project ribbon cutting back in October, PEC worked with our partners at Virginia Farm Bureau to develop a successful bill that defines agrivoltaics and provides a building block for well sited, thoughtfully developed dual-use solar in the commonwealth.
Our staff also contributed to the passed Distributed Generation Expansion act, which would increase the amount of distributed generation Dominion Energy must build — including 1 gigawatt of solar on previously disturbed sites such as parking lots, brownfields and minefields. PEC champions distributed generation because it doesn’t sacrifice prime agricultural soils and forests, it connects clean energy to the grid much more quickly than large-scale centralized generation, and it can save individual families and businesses tens of thousands of dollars over time on electricity bills.
We actively informed and lobbied on other successful distributed generation bills that will, once signed into law: speed up rooftop solar permitting; allow balcony solar to lower energy bills and expand clean energy access; establish a Distributed Energy Taskforce to develop more thoughtful policy and incentives; expand solar consumer protections for rooftop solar contracts; enable more parking lot solar; and expanding shared solar in Dominion and Appalachian Power territories.
PEC staff also worked on a key energy storage expansion bill that will enable more well-sited energy storage, making our existing grid more efficient and decreasing the need for more new transmission and gas plants. We negotiated and supported bills on surplus interconnection, which will prioritize clean energy projects and decrease new generation costs and other ratepayer impacts. And we actively lobbied against bills that restrict local planning decisions around large scale solar siting.
Housing & Land Use
This year’s session saw many bills attempting to increase the housing supply, particularly in urban areas. Working with our Coalition for Smarter Growth team and partners in the Virginia Conservation Network, we supported bills that will enable local governments to address affordable housing. We also worked for compromises balancing state direction and local government authority on housing, including accessory dwelling units, minimum parking requirements and administrative approval of affordable housing on “faith land” and other property-tax exempt nonprofit land. Thanks to our engagement, the final versions of the “faith” bills ensure the housing is located on existing water and sewer connections and in compliance with environmental and historic preservation requirements.
PEC asked our supporters to help defeat a bill that would have limited local governments’ power to manage growth and development in their area — including large projects like data centers — by dramatically expanding a developer’s “vested rights,” or protection against any new regulation. The patron withdrew this bill after the House received almost 500 letters. PEC also worked to kill a bill that would have limited any third party’s ability to appeal a local land use decision and rewritten precedent in Virginia. We also encouraged a bill amendment intended to address a Charlottesville-specific issue, but that would have unintentionally restricted appeals to land use cases across the state, including the ongoing Digital Gateway case in Prince William County.
PEC believes that local communities are best positioned to make planning and land use decisions, and we worked to mitigate or defeat legislation that undermined local authority.
This article appeared in the 2026 spring edition of The Piedmont Environmental Council’s member newsletter, The Piedmont View. If you’d like to become a PEC member or renew your membership, please visit pecva.org/join.