oal-burning electricity plants are a hot button for environmentalists who somehow have shown more interest in Dominion Virginia Power’s $1.5 billion station in Wise County than the much bigger, $5 billion plus one planned by a group of electrical cooperatives not all that far from Colonial Williamsburg.
A Coal Plant Proposal Gets Even Dirtier
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9 responses to “A Coal Plant Proposal Gets Even Dirtier”
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Oh Peter, I could tell you some stories about what ODEC has exploited and how they work the system here. As the person who isn't "going to let [her kids] grow up across the street from a coal plant." I have some great ODEC stories….
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So, rangergirl – is the pitting of black against white and "haves" against "havenots" a manipulation by ODEC. Or, are the citizens legitimately at odds over the benefits of the project?
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Side note to EMR … I had a chance to talk with the head of engineering at a mid-western electricity company today. I asked him about line loss. He says a good rule of thumb is 7% of electricity is lost in transport – 3% in the transmission facilities and 4% in the distribution network.
I am not sure how you arrive at the estimate of 30% line loss in calculating location variable costs. It sounds like the number should be 3% not 30%.
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In what reality does changing bed linens prepare one for a well-paying job at a coal-fired power plant?
The big joke in Surry Co. is not that there are no jobs, it's that you can't get people to work full-time because they don't want to lose their unemployment/welfare check. Local businesses are always hiring. Some use prisoners just because they always show up and will work 40 hours.
If these people are for this proposal because they truly want local jobs (and are not just being manipulated by ODEC) why on earth will they not even speak to the union pipefitters, etc. who are trying to help Dendron/Surry require local jobs and training programs? The union people are at every Dendron meeting begging for them to consider adopting written conditions for these things. I'm sure they'll be there at the next one, and their words will fall on deaf ears. Again. And ODEC will sit there smugly, knowing that the majority of the counsel does whatever ODEC says.
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Groveton, I would say that yes, the citizens are legitimately at odds over the benefits of the project. However, ODEC manipulates the process in any way they can. The finest example of this is when (last May) Ken Alexander was quoted by the Smithfield Times as saying that the only thing coming out of the stacks was "water vapor". The immediate spin, both by ODEC and their attorneys, was that it was a misquote, then they said it was a misspoken statement, then they said it was taken out of context. I'm not sure which one they wanted us to believe. A few days later, as a council member, I was given a packet of information by an ODEC attorney. This packet included a photocopy of the same article (the reporter followed up on the story with a slightly more accurate accounting of what comes out of the stacks–all of which can be found on ODEC's DEQ application). But once said, a statement like this is insidious. I've heard less informed individuals make this statement more than a year later. ODEC could insist that they didn't mean what they said, but I think that the fact that the photocopy was included in information packets for governing bodies is gross negligence, at best; misconduct, at worst. Add to this their insistence that they aren't pitting the Surry governing bodies against Sussex's bodies–all while holding public hearings for both applications on both nights? And insisting that ACoE requires them to present two sites at one time? There is no such requirement–they are supposed to provide alternatives to design, and picking an alternative site it simply a way of both hedging their bets AND gaining the benefit of causing the two counties to jump at the applications without so much as a nod at true review.
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"I am not sure how you arrive at the estimate of 30% line loss in calculating location variable costs. It sounds like the number should be 3% not 30%."
It is worse than that, Groveton. youwould have to compare that 3% loss against the cost of the alternative(s). You can reduce line loss by having distributed power, but that has costs of its own, so you don't get the 3% savings.
Then, if you propose highly dense development areas, theyare going to need a lot of power, which means that your "distributed" source [of whatever type] has to be a lot bigger. If your source burns anything, you put more pollution closer to a bigger population. If it doesn'r burn anything then it needs a lot of space, which pushes it away form the densely populated areas, and back into line loss territoriy.
In my opinion EMR is and has been an abject failure when it comes to cost estimating, not to say deliberately misleading.
RH
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To EMR's credit, I'm not sure how your engineer came up with a fixed estimate. It would have to be so much line loss per mile, unless his estimate was an average over the whole system.
If that is the case then EMR is wildly wrong, but he will still claim to be correct, because within that average, some people must be living efficiently with little line loss, and others in less electrically efficient locations are getting [there's that awful word] subsidised.
Now all we have to do is figur out ow to reconcile the guy that is located electrically effficiently and make sure that happy spot is also water, sewer, jobs, shopping rcreation and transportation efficient.
RH
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Groveton:
Lets not get the line loss (and location-variable costs) mixed up with coal plants — although they are related.
EMR will try to find time to respond to your side note ASAP.
EMR
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Peter,
When ODEC contacted us, I was on deadline for our next issue, and I wasn't aware that you were blogging on this topic. As I told you on the phone, though you probably didn't hear it through your ranting, I just wanted until the next day to read your blog posts. I needed to see if your blog was news-based or opinion-based. I didn't pull the story. You chose to.
We have never hesitated to cover news. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't assigning a columnist to a news story.
Susan Winiecki
Editor in Chief
Richmond Magazine
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