Category: Regulations, Gov’t Oversight
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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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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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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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Free Airbnb!
by James A. Bacon Let’s say you’re a widow trying to make ends meet. You convert your basement to an apartment and rent it out to out-of-town visitors through Airbnb. Or, let’s say you’re a young couple. You’ve bought your dream house, but you don’t have any children yet, so you rent out a room…
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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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An Alternative to Expanding Medicaid: Market-Based Reforms
by James A. Bacon Republicans in the General Assembly are dead-set against expanding Medicaid and incurring a new budget-busting fiscal obligation. But what are they for? What solutions do they propose to help the hundreds of thousands of lower-income Virginians who can’t afford medical insurance? One approach explained yesterday by Del. John O’Bannon, R-Henrico, vice chair of…
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SCC Asks Tough Questions about Nukes, CO2 Emissions
by James A. Bacon Given the legal and regulatory uncertainties associated with Clean Power Plan, which requires Virginia to reduce CO2 emissions 30% by 2030, Dominion Virginia Power’s 15-year strategic plan filed in July 2015 is reasonable and in the public interest, the State Corporation Commission (SCC) ruled in a final ruling released today. However, the SCC…
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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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Radiation, Hormesis and Nuclear Power
by James A. Bacon I belong to a generation that grew up with a fear of nuclear war, fall-out and slow, agonizing death by radiation poisoning. We’d seen the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We lived through the scare of Three Mile Island and, years later, had our fears reinforced by catastrophes at Chernobyl and Fukushima.…
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Lots of Sunlight, Not Much Transparency
by James A. Bacon Two months ago the Department of Navy announced the signing of a contract with Dominion Virginia Power to purchase enough solar electricity to meet 6% of Naval Station Norfolk’s electric power needs for more than 10 years. The next day, Dominion announced the purchase the Morgans Corner Solar Facility, located within Dominion’s North Carolina…
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Battle Lines Forming Over Clean Power Plan
The partisan battle lines are forming over the implementation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which calls for Virginia to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from state power plants 32% by 2030. Attorney General Mark R. Herring, a Democrat, announced two weeks ago that Virginia will join a coalition of 17 other states supporting the Obama…
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How the Digital Trinity is Transforming Health Insurance
by Christopher Surdak, JD In his recent post, “The Politics of Big Data,” my friend and colleague Jim Bacon asked some pertinent questions regarding how our government, and our society at-large, can put data to use for the common good. In a fairly short discourse Jim hit on a range of explosive topics, from privacy, data…
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Virginia Hospital Profits Surged 11% in 2014
Speaking of government-coddled industries…. Virginia’s hospitals increased annual profits 10.7% in 2014 compared to the year before, according to the most recent data compiled by the Virginia Health Information data and reported by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy (TJI). “Hospitals campaign for Medicaid expansion, and want to maintain the state’s control over how hospitals and…