The Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) hosted a two-hour debate on Tuesday about safety standards for future utility-scale battery installations, with tensions between the industry and the utilities on full display. Recent updates to published national fire prevention recommendations did not end the disagreements.
The technical conference on short duration battery safety standards was requested by the Virginia General Assembly as part of recent amendments to the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which added specific energy storage targets for both Dominion Energy Virginia and Appalachian Power Company.
During the debate on Senate Bill 448 and its House companion, the companies that make the batteries or package them into large projects expressed concerns that the utilities were setting safety standards far more stringent than required. A spokeswoman for an industry advocacy group explained to the three SCC judges that the requirements for wide spacing between battery components, which may assist with mitigating and containing fire outbreaks, can greatly increase the capital cost of the projects.
Diane Cherry of the Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition noted that in its last request to the SCC for approval of VCEA compliance projects, 17 of Dominion’s 21 proposals were rejected, largely because of cost. She had some specific cost comparisons based on spacing in written testimony she had filed in advance of Tuesday’’s hearing, but the SCC clerks had not posted it to the public file. The higher costs are not just from the additional land required, she said.
She complained that Dominion and Appalachian Power, and the insurance underwriter they use, have been demanding unit spacing up to 25 feet when other utilities or insurance underwriters accept spacing of 10 or as little as three feet in some instances. Her comments were echoed by Brian Scholl of the Energy Safety Response Group, bringing the perspective of fire fighters, and Jim Biggins of insurance underwriter The Baldwin Group.
When and if Cherry’s and the other written affidavits are filed for public view, they should be available here.
Six witnesses in all spoke with the judges, including several involved directly in development of the 2026 revision to the National Fire Protection Association’s standard 855 for “stationary energy storage systems.”
The new state law cites NFPA 855 as the standard to be used in state and local regulation and states the utilities cannot set standards which are more stringent. Dominion’s Justin Perry, director of corporate risk engineering, asserted the 2026 revised standard is not specific about spacing between units and said it will rely on large-scale fire testing by independent evaluators to demonstrate just what spacing margins or other mitigations are effective.
Those tests are still to come, and NFPA 855 remains “uncharted territory,” Perry said. He said Dominion would follow the law on accepting NFPA-complaint applications from outside developers. Cherry from the industry group expressed concern the utility might stick with wide spacing rules for its own internally built projects, which could be most of them.
Brandon Harrison, a lead engineer for Appalachian parent American Electric Power (AEP) Company, discussed what is at risk, describing how a fire in one enclosure of the battery installation can spread from the initial unit to neighboring elements. AEP has moved away from lithium-ion storage paired with nickel to technology pairing lithium and phosphate, which is slower to heat to thermal runaway temperatures, but it is also less energy efficient.
If something goes wrong, the folks who reached the consensus on NFPA 855 will not be the ones financially on the hook, noted another AEP senior engineer on the panel, Donald Hicks.
Perry of Dominion described a recent fire at that utility’s Dry Bridge battery facility in Chesterfield County, an incident that didn’t make the news. It did not spread beyond the initial unit and there was no need for the fire department to come in and spend hours preventing its spread, with the implication being it was Dominion’s decision for wide spacing that kept the incident minor.
SCC Chair Kesley Bagot’s questioning brought out that there are quite a few more such incidents than ever get news coverage. There apparently is no requirement to report all such incidents or investigate all their causes. Scholl described such incidents of controlled fires as “successful failures” but agreed more reporting would be helpful.
No specific application was before the commission, but with the new law the pace of battery proposals from the utilities and independent developers will have to accelerate.
Tuesday’s hypothetical discussions will be real soon enough, with high-stakes debates over cost and safety. “We owe it to Virginia ratepayers to figure out what the balance is,” Bagot said as the conference concluded.
