Category: Infrastructure
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Talking Out of Both Sides of Their Mouths
by Dick Hall-Sizemore While perusing today’s edition of the Roanoke Times, I ran across an article that astounded me. It concerned a meeting recently in Southwest Virginia about the Coalfields Expressway. I remembered hearing about this proposed highway many, many years ago and thought that it had been dismissed as a pipe dream. It turns…
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Planning for Telecommuting’s Effects on Virginia
By James C. Sherlock I think that we don’t yet realize the full impact of the revolution being wrought by the telecommuting that accelerated during COVID. I am sure I don’t. But Virginians, and our state and local governments, must try to figure it out. We are moving towards a world in which white collar…
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Does This Highway Need to be Widened to Six Lanes?
by Dick Hall-Sizemore There is a campaign underway to expand a stretch of I-64 from Richmond to James City County. Currently, the Interstate highway is a four-lane divided highway. The proposal is to add an additional lane in each direction. The Department of Transportation estimates the cost of the project at $750 million. The first…
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Virginia’s Greens Need an Epiphany
by James C. Sherlock Headlines from the war in Ukraine have raised exponentially the interest in natural gas and the extreme price volatility caused by supply constraints. It is perhaps useful to understand the uses of natural gas, the prices Virginians pay relative to West Virginians, the decline of production in Virginia, and the costs…
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Infrastructure Bill, Meet Richmond’s United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
by James C. Sherlock The President and members of Congress have celebrated the enactment of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act into law. In Virginia and the other states (Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia) of the federal Fourth Circuit, good luck with that. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit just published two…
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Infrastructure Vote? Oh No, That’s Their Bill
by Dick Hall-Sizemore There has long been a consensus that America needs to pay more attention to its infrastructure. Last week, the House of Representatives passed President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure package and sent it to the President for his signature. Of the total amount, $550 billion was new money; the remainder was funding normally…
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The Other Side of the “Intensifying Rain” Claim
by Steve Haner and Kip Hansen With the rainy remnants of another hurricane heading for Virginia from battered Louisiana, the stories of a coming Climate Armageddon will again ramp up. A couple of good examples of what to expect recently appeared in Virginia Mercury, the main one quoting numerous sources claiming Virginia is seeing more…
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Silver Line Phase II — Now Four Years Late
Back when work began on the Washington Metro’s Silver Line under the Kaine administration, planners expected Phase II to be complete by 2018. Here it is, mid-2021, and the officials in charge now are hoping to open in early 2022. Phase I went relatively smoothly, but Phase II, which extends the commuter rail system to…
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Bacon Bits: More, More, More!
More fiber. A joint venture involving Annandale-based Tenebris Fiber expects to begin constructing a 680-mile regional fiber optic network in Virginia. The network will run through Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William Counties and connect with a Virginia Beach cable landing station that links to Europe and South America with subsea fiber-optic trunk lines, reports Virginia…
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The Transmission Bottleneck for Renewable Energy
by James A. Bacon You want more renewable energy? You’re going to need more high-voltage transmission lines to move intermittent wind and solar power around the country to balance fluctuating supply and demand. And you’d better get started. Transmission planning and construction involves long lead times, typically between seven and ten years. “The window may…
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Who’s Got the Best Water System?
The City of Richmond has the best water system among the seven Virginia cities included in a LawnStarter ranking of 2021’s Best Cities for Water Quality. The City of Chesapeake had the worst. LawnStarter, an online marketplace for lawn-care and landscaping services, ranked the 200 most populated U.S. cities based on metrics of consumer satisfaction…
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Do Something “Transformational” with $6.8 Billion in COVID Relief
by James A. Bacon The $1.9 trillion COVID-relief bill just passed by Congress will shower billions of dollars upon Virginia citizens, businesses and government. State Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne expects Virginia state government to receive about $3.8 billion and local governments to get about $3 billion, for a total of $6.8 billion. The crazy…
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Podcast: How the General Assembly Has Changed
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in Agriculture & forestry, Blogs and Blog Administration, Business and Economy, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Demographics, Economic development, Energy, Entrepreneurs and Innovation, Environment, General Assembly, Government Finance, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race RelationsBy Peter Galuszka I haven’t contributed much to BR lately since I am slammed with non-Virginia work. I did manage to help out on a Podcast about how the General Assembly has changed the state over the last two years as Democrats have gained power. This Podcast is produced by WTJU, the University of Virginia…
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The Virginia City Boondoggle
By Peter Galuszka Back in 2007, Dominion Energy was touting its new hybrid generating plant near St. Paul in Southwest Virginia as the wave of the future because it would burn coal and wood using advanced fluidized bed technologies. But for eight months this year, the 624-megawatt Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center operated at only…
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Bacon Bits: Good News for a Change
More wind turbines off the Mid-Atlantic coast. Electricity from the Kitty Hawk Offshore Wind project 27 miles off the coast of Corolla, N.C., construction of which could begin as soon as 2024, will be funneled into the electric grid via a substation in Virginia Beach’s Sandbridge community. Roughly 600 jobs will be generated within the…