Spanberger made energy affordability a central pillar of her campaign, and the power plant her energy czar opposes could help lower prices
Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger’s (D.) newly appointed energy czar, Josephus Allmond, has spent months working to block a natural gas-fired power plant that is now seeking permits from the Spanberger administration.
As an attorney with the climate-focused Southern Environmental Law Center, Allmond has emerged as a quasi-leader of the movement opposing the proposed Expedition Generating Station in Fluvanna County, Va., speaking against it at local planning commission meetings and conducting community activist training seminars. He has argued that the plant’s projected economic benefits are irrelevant because of its negative impacts on public health, particularly in “black communities.” The plant’s operator has said there would be minimal impacts to air and water quality in the county.
“Jobs don’t justify harm,” Allmond added, according to the local outlet WVIR-TV, noting the hundreds of jobs the project would create.
Now, as Virginia’s first-ever chief energy officer and a cabinet-level official, Allmond is authorized to engage directly with the Virginia State Corporation Commission to “ensure Virginia meets long-term clean energy goals.” That agency will be responsible for awarding the Expedition plant one of its final state permits in the coming months. It is unclear whether Allmond has recused himself on matters related to the project, and a spokesman for Spanberger did not respond to a request for comment.
“For too long, developers and the energy industry have targeted low-wealth communities, black communities—promising jobs in exchange, as if that’s a fair shake,” Allmond remarked at a seminar for activists opposed to the Expedition project at a Virginia winery in September.
In addition to the jobs and tax revenue it is projected to create, the plant would generate enough electricity to power 1.5 million homes, according to its developer, Tenaska Energy. That could bring a much-needed power boost to Virginia—the state is a net importer of electricity, its power demand has skyrocketed in recent years and is expected to double over the next decade. Virginia’s residential electricity prices jumped 13.8 percent last year, more than the nationwide average of 9.5 percent.
As a result, the region’s independent grid operator added the Expedition plant to a list of projects that it determined are vital for meeting that projected power demand and ensuring the reliability of the grid.
Spanberger’s appointment of Allmond comes after she promised to make affordability a central pillar of her administration. During her campaign last year, Spanberger released a multi-step plan addressing energy affordability that stated Virginia must “speed up new energy projects, drive down costs, and increase certainty.”
Spanberger has been accused of backsliding on that agenda in the early days of her administration. In one of her first moves in office, Spanberger ordered the state government to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a green energy program the state’s largest power company projected would cost Virginians more than $1 billion over a four-year period.
“Virginia’s new energy czar has a career of stopping energy projects,” Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, told the Washington Free Beacon. “Watch prices rise, companies flee, budget surpluses get squandered as the governor and her energy czar celebrate ‘historic investments.'”
Allmond, meanwhile, is a proponent of environmental justice, has repeatedly pushed green energy projects in Virginia, and has backed legislation forcing the state’s largest utility companies to retire fossil fuel-fired plants by 2050. “After seeing the differences in how just a zip code can impact your quality of life and the pollution you bear, I was excited to try to tackle some of those inequities,” he said in 2023.
The Southern Environmental Law Center, where Allmond worked for six years before joining the Spanberger administration this week, favors aggressive measures to shut down oil, gas, and coal in favor of wind and solar. The center has sued the Trump administration for canceling solar energy and environmental justice grants, and for loosening regulations on coal plants.
Tenaska did not respond to a request for comment.