Category: Infrastructure
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Making NIT More Productive, More Resilient
by James A. Bacon For the millions of Virginians living above the fall line, the struggle that Hampton Roads has with rising sea levels and increasing flooding may seem remote and far away. Why should we care? After all, does anybody in Hampton Roads give a hoot about our problems? Kit Chope, vice president of sustainability for…
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Why Is Virginia a “Dark State” for Solar Power?
by Erik Curren Around America, there’s a boom in solar energy. More solar power generation was installed in 2015 than ever before and 2016 could be even better, doubling in U.S. solar capacity. Although solar still provides less than one percent of America’s total electricity, it’s the fastest growing source of new energy since shale…
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Buena Vista: the Canary in Virginia’s Fiscal Coal Mine
by James A. Bacon The City of Buena Vista, which defaulted in 2014 on a $9.2 million bond issue to pay for a golf course that was supposed to spur growth in the city, has received some good news. It will be allowed to keep its city hall. For now. The office building, along with…
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Time for Richmond and Hampton Roads to Join Forces?
by James A. Bacon Virginia’s economic growth ground to a standstill in 2014 and lagged the nation in 2015. Recognizing that metropolitan regions are the growth engines of the early 21st century economy, civic boosters are looking to spur growth and development at the regional level — but that picture doesn’t look much prettier. The Brookings Institution’s Metro…
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Econometric Studies at Fifty Paces!
by James A. Bacon From the perspective of theoretical economics, the debate over the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) is getting quite interesting: To what extent do natural gas pipelines diminish the value of property they cross? A coalition of five community groups opposed to the pipeline contend that landowners along the proposed route will lose up…
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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?