More Information, Please, about Oceana’s New Solar Facility

solar_cloudsby James A. Bacon

The Department of the Navy  is collaborating with Dominion Virginia Power and the Commonwealth of Virginia to build a 21-megawatt solar energy facility at the Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach. The 100-acre facility, housing 179,0000 solar panels and scheduled for completion in late 2017, will supply enough electricity at peak production to power about 4,400 homes. Find the details here.

The project is good P.R. all around. Dominion, the Navy and the McAuliffe administration all get to bask in the glow of solar goodness. But the press release touches only glancingly on the economics of the project. Which makes me wonder…

The Navy was the driver, with Dominion and possibly the state (it’s not clear what the state’s role was) presumably stepping in to meet the Navy’s renewable energy mandates. Here’s what Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus had to say about the benefits of the project:

We’ve achieved $90 million in nominal energy cost savings, $62 million in energy security hardware upgrades to bases, 170 megawatts of access to power during outages, and 22 million tons of CO2 abated. And we’re just getting started.

Just a few questions:

What are “nominal” energy savings? Are they different from actual energy savings?

Why would it be considered an “achievement” to negotiate access to 170 megawatts of power during energy outages — presumably from Dominion — when Oceana already has access to Dominion’s distribution network?

How much does the project cost? How much are taxpayers paying in order to achieve 22 million tons of CO2 cuts? Are there more cost-effective ways of reducing CO2 emissions?

What are the $62 million in “energy security hardware upgrades,” and how do they factor into the calculation of benefits?

I’m on beach vacation this week, so I’m not in a position to answer those questions right now. But the fact that the press release does not mention the project cost much less the cost-per-kilowatt — information routinely released for any electrical generation project — I cannot avoid the suspicion that the Navy considered those numbers to be an embarrassment. I would think that taxpayers — including anyone whose priority is lower CO2 emissions — would want full transparency to ensure that the federal government is spending its money cost effectively.

Update: More information from Todd Flowers with Dominion…. Secretary Mabus’s remarks were referring to the Navy’s “global efforts and accomplishments. and were not meant to represent solely the Oceana project. The Navy’s benefit from Oceana will be in the form of electrical infrastructure upgrades (a new electrical feed) in exchange for our use of their land.