Category: Infrastructure
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Navigating the Clean Power Plan Maze
by James A. Bacon Stakeholders in Virginia’s electric grid got a close-up look last week at the wild and woolly world of Clean Power Plan regulation. One of the few things that can be said for certain is that the plan will make a complex industry even more complicated. To make an informed decision about how to proceed,…
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Dominion Doubles Down on Natural Gas
by James A. Bacon With the acquisition of Questar Corporation, a Salt Lake City-based natural gas distribution and pipeline company, Dominion Resources is making a $4.4 billion bet that natural gas represents the energy future. “Dominion expects the value of the Questar pipeline system to rise over time as Utah and other Western states seek…
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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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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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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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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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Speaking of Storing Electricity…
In the previous post, I quoted Dominion Resources CEO Thomas F. Farrell II as alluding to the impracticality of storing electricity on a large scale. He is indubitably right about the high cost of storage today, but scientists and entrepreneurs are looking for ways to drive the costs down. Battery storage of electricity is no…
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Another Reminder of the Impending WMATA Disaster
by James A. Bacon The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is a slow-motion train wreck unfolding before our very eyes. An article in the December 2015 issue of Washingtonian Magazine, “The Infuriating History of How Metro Got So Bad,” provides a timely reminder of just how dysfunctional the commuter rail system has become. One glaring example:…
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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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Richmond Boldly Plotting a Post-19th Century Mass Transit System
by James A. Bacon The City of Richmond has procured funding for a study to see if GRTC Transit System bus routes can be organized more efficiently, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The study will bring in the Jarrett Walker + Associates consulting firm that showed how rearranging the route structure could triple the frequency of bus service in Houston without requiring additional funding. “The…
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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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ODEC Goes Solar
by James A. Bacon The Old Dominion Electric Cooperative (ODEC) has joined Virginia’s solar club, awarding 25-year contracts to deliver 30 megawatts of electric output from solar power plants in Northampton County and Clarke County. Hecate Energy, a developer of renewable energy projects based in Nashville, Tenn., will build and operate the facilities. “Adding clean solar…
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I Want Me Some of that 1 Gigabit, Too
Cox Communications will spend $81 million to upgrade residential broadband service in Fairfax County to “gigabit” Internet service, providing speeds up to 20 times faster than most existing services. It will be the first Internet service of that speed available in the Washington, D.C. area, and one of only a few anywhere in the United States.…
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Verizon Decision Leaves Powhatan with Tough Internet Choices
By John Szczesny “How they heck can we get broadband internet?” That’s the question being asked in rural Powhatan County, where officials earlier this month held a meeting with frustrated residents living without a vital connection to the world around them. Cable never came to these folks; their neighborhoods weren’t densely settled enough to suit…