Category: Business and Economy
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SCC Rejects Effort to Reverse Its Gas Plant Approval
by Steve Haner The Virginia State Corporation Commission has rejected a petition for reconsideration pushed by opponents of Dominion Energy’s planned Chesterfield natural gas generators. The environmental activist groups could now appeal the SCC’s approval of the plant to the Virginia Supreme Court. The SCC is a court, after all, so its decisions can be…
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Big Batteries Lose Big Energy Every Charging Cycle
by Steve Haner An inconvenient truth of utility-scale battery operations is that they take in more power than they later put out. From an energy grid operations point of view they are considered “net load” and certainly not a generation asset. In a previous post about the battery mandate legislation now poised for passage in…
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Mandated Public-Sector Unions Will Drive Up Property Taxes
by the Liberty Unyielding staff In Virginia, the Democratic state legislature is likely to adopt legislation that requires local governments to engage in collective bargaining with public-employee unions. If the local government and the union can’t agree on a big wage hike, an arbitrator will still be able to order the big wage hike if the arbitrator…
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Several Senate GOP Bills Seek to Amend or Repeal Clean Economy Act
By Steve Haner, Several legislative attempts to either repeal outright or reduce the cost impact of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) will have their fifteen seconds in the sun later today. Their chances of surviving until sundown are slim. The various bills, all with Republican sponsors, are set to be discussed in the Virginia…
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Quote of the Day — Jim Murray and Meredith Woo
From their column in the Washington Post, “U.S. universities have lost sight of their core task“: America’s elite universities have superb engineering, computer science and medical programs that produce talented graduates. Yet even at the finest flagship schools, and certainly at the hundreds of other schools, too many of our most promising undergraduates remain in…
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Small Business Suffers More from Bad Policies
by Chris Saxman Small business costs and Virginia’s competitiveness in CNBC’s Top States for Business Small businesses are central to Virginia’s economic dynamism, job creation, and regional resilience. However, higher taxes, expanding labor mandates, regulatory complexity, and litigation exposure impose disproportionate costs on small firms compared to large employers. These pressures directly affect Virginia’s performance…
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Redefining Time
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Most people to understand a “day” to constitute a 24-hour period of time. They understand that the term “work days” generally exclude weekends and holidays. Furthermore, for those that follow government and politics, “legislative days” is understood to mean those days in which the legislature is in session. Notwithstanding those commonly accepted definitions, Virginia’s Republican…
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Assembly, Dominion Seek to Bill Data Centers for Rising Energy Costs
by Steve Haner Virginia’s major data centers could pay more for electricity and other customers less under a surprise legislative substitute that appeared in email inboxes Sunday and was rapidly approved Monday by a major Virginia Senate committee. The proposal is politically attractive, already being touted a major consumer rate cut, but the detailed accounting…
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Dominion Opposes Battery Mandate on Fire Safety Concerns
by Steve Haner Today a Senate committee is scheduled to take up the bill directing Virginia’s two investor-owned utilities to propose huge battery installations which will cover square miles of ground, cost ratepayers billions of dollars and which will produce zero energy to power our homes and businesses. The bill has Governor Abigail Spanberger’s endorsement. So far, legislators have been in a “see, hear and…
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Say Socialized Cost, Not That Other S Word
by Steve Haner A House of Delegates committee has approved expanding a state-managed program to subsidize electric bills for some lower-income Virginians, hoping to reach more people and offer them more assistance. It also approved a new plan to grant lower-income homes lower water rates. The utility companies involved will not absorb the cost of…
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Court Reverses Intent of 2020 Do-Not-Compete Reform
by Chap Petersen In the 2020 legislative session, the General Assembly – with a new Democratic majority – passed A LOT of bills regarding labor rights. One of the most important and least noticed was SB 840, which protected “low wage” workers, i.e. those making under the average state wage, from being subject to “covenants…
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Fern Versus Abigail, Storm Crushes Governor’s Energy Promises
by Steve Haner Governor Abigail Spanberger’s major campaign pledges to lower electricity bills have already been crushed by the harsh reality of last week’s Winter Storm Fern. Virginians everywhere are about to see their highest energy bills ever, and the energy sources Spanberger wants us to adopt were all but useless during the crisis. …
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Dominion Wind Price Jumps to $11.5B, Trump Blamed
Dominion Energy Virginia now expects its offshore wind facility, which has returned to full construction activity off the coast of Virginia Beach, will cost $11.5 billion. That is up about $365 million from the last report. It really wasn’t that long ago that Bacon’s Rebellion was aghast that the price had reached $8 billion. Oh,…
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A Chance to Lower Electric Bills the General Assembly is Ignoring
by Steve Haner Ignore what they say. Watch what they do. The Virginia General Assembly could cut the bills of Dominion Energy customers a bit, but instead will give the company another ten years to take your money and spend it on someone else (after skimming off its healthy profit). A ten-year program using money…
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Pending Paid Leave Bill Among Most Generous in U.S.
by Derrick A. Max Governor Abigail Spanberger campaigned on a promise to sign “paid family and medical leave” when it reaches her desk. But popular vote-getting concepts often ignore the damaging impact such policies have once they are implemented. Virginia’s paid family and medical leave program (Senate Bill 2/House Bill 1207) is a case study in…