Category: Environment
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Chesterfield Confronts Cost of Addressing Storm Water Runoff
by James A. Bacon Chesterfield County businesses could wind up paying $308 per year on average to fund the county’s $35 million stormwater utility program, while single-family households could be tagged with $24 per year, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Needless to say, a lot of people are unhappy with the prospect of a new fee.…
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Sparks Will Fly
by James A. Bacon Step aside Medicaid expansion. The big uproar in the General Assembly this year is over who gets the final say over the shape of Virginia’s Clean Power Plan: General Assembly Republicans or Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe. At stake is the future of Virginia’s electric grid. Democrats and their allies are pushing for 30%…
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The EVs Are Coming. Let’s Get Ready!
by James A. Bacon The market for electric vehicles has not matured as rapidly as many proponents hoped, and the low price of gasoline in the past year hasn’t helped. But when EVs do attain mass-market status, as eventually they will, there is a good chance that a crucial innovation helping them get there will have come…
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Marc Edwards, Virginia Hero
Just when you begin to lose faith in the system, when you think that spendthrift politicians, corporate cronyism and bureaucratic inertia can never be defeated, along comes someone like Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech environmental engineering professor who exposed the lead-poisoning scandal in Flint, Mich. Today’s Washington Post describes how he brought the story to light,…
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Wind Power Breakthrough
Virginia could finally get a wind farm. In a unanimous vote, the Botetourt County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to grant a permit to build 25 wind turbines on the ridge of North Mountain, clearing the way for construction of the first wind farm in Virginia. The 550-foot-tall turbines had sparked objections that they would…
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Putting a Price on the Priceless
How does the state put a dollar value on historic, cultural and environmental assets threatened by eminent domain? by James A. Bacon In its high-stakes effort to win regulatory approval to build a 500 kV electric transmission line to the Virginia Peninsula, Dominion Virginia Power proposed in December to spend $85 million to mitigate the project’s impact…
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A Humble Proposal for Addressing Recurrent Flooding
By James A. Bacon The recurrence of tidal/surge flooding in Hampton Roads has increased from 1.7 days of “nuisance” flooding yearly in 1960 to 7.3 days in 2o14, and with continued land subsidence and sea-level rise, the flooding will become even more common. So say the authors of “Building Resiliency in Response to Sea Level Rise…
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Clash of Competing Values
Virginians need pipelines and transmission lines to keep the economy humming. But we also value our historical, cultural and historical heritage. The trade-offs are getting harder and harder. by James A. Bacon In the 1970s engineers at Dominion Virginia Power envisioned the need to increase the supply of electric power to the Virginia Peninsula one day.…
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Five-Year Dominion Spending to Upgrade Grid
by James A. Bacon Dominion Virginia Power plans $9.5 billion in capital expenditures through 2020, almost two-thirds of which will go to upgrading the company’s transmission lines, substations and distribution system. Other priorities include $700 million for new solar generation and, if approved by the State Corporation Commission, additional funds for undergrounding vulnerable distribution lines. “We…
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Speaking of Land-Intensive Solar Plants…
In remarks made at a business conference Friday, CEO Thomas F. Farrell II noted how much land solar panels consume. As paraphrased by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, he said: A solar project that Dominion hopes to build near Culpeper would occupy 125 acres of land and power about 5,000 houses — about 30 percent of the time. By contrast, a…
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Clean Power Plan Will Cost Virginia “Billions” Says Dominion Chief
by James A. Bacon Thomas F. Farrell II might have publicly stated his opinions about the Clean Power Plan before, but I haven’t read or heard them. Comments he made Friday at a conference sponsored by the Virginia Bankers Association and the Virginia Chamber of Commerce provide insight into what the CEO of Dominion Resources, Virginia’s…
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The Throne behind the Power
Who runs Virginia’s electric power industry — the SCC? the General Assembly? or an obscure Pennsylvania company that doesn’t own a single megawatt of generating capacity or mile of transmission line?
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Commissioner Questions Constitutionality of Electricity Rate Freeze
by James A. Bacon The Virginia state Constitution clearly delegates to the State Corporation Commission the power to set electric rates. States Article IX, Section 2: “Subject to such criteria and other requirements as may be prescribed by law, the Commission shall have the power and be charged with the duty of regulating the rates,…
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Dominion Overestimates Electricity Demand on Peninsula, Say Transmission Line Foes
A quick hit here for lack of time… A new study by Princeton Energy Resources International contends that Dominion Virginia Power has overestimated future energy demand on the Virginia Peninsula in its justification of the Surry-Skiffes Creek transmission line project. Annual demand projections of 1.9% yearly were almost twice as high as actual growth from…
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Clean Power Plan Cost Still a Mystery
by James A. Bacon More than four months since the Clean Power Plan (CPP) established final state goals for reduced carbon dioxide emissions, no one is sure what compliance will cost. Here in Virginia, guesstimates have been all over the map, with the coal lobby suggesting that rates could more than double while environmentalists claim electric…