A General Assembly subcommittee Tuesday derailed a simple energy transparency bill calling for an annual report on how well utility generation units perform. “The juice isn’t worth the squeeze,” sneered an environmental lobbyist just before the vote to table House Bill 766. 

It is solar “juice” that isn’t worth the squeeze, and the bill would have made that data easy to find.

Each generating plant, whatever the energy source, has an advertised maximum output in megawatts per hour (say 2,600 megawatts for the offshore wind turbines now being built), but they never achieve 100% of that 100% of the time. The actual energy produced when measured against the maximum possible output produces a percentage “capacity factor.” In the case of the wind project, that should be between 40 and 45% over a year. 

That is incredibly efficient compared to the utility-scale solar projects popping up all over Virginia, which are going to have to multiply like rabbits to meet the demands of the Virginia Clean Economy Act. Their capacity factors are abysmal, embarrassing — usually below 25% — and of course during the height of the storm all day Sunday they stood at zero. 

The table reproduced below is exactly the kind of information the solar industry and the utilities earning annual profits on their low-energy solar investments do not want anybody to see. So, I will show it to you again below. At this link you can see another similar table that shows how that actual output from Dominion Energy’s solar plants has failed to meet initial expectations. That was true of all of them.   

The utilities themselves have this data handy. The Federal Energy Information Agency has plant-by-plant reports, but bring your Excel skills. Testimony was that this information is known to the regulatory State Corporation Commission, but it doesn’t produce a report about it. In its fiscal impact statement on the bill, the SCC saw no problem or major expense in starting to do so.

But this Subcommittee #3 of House Labor and Commerce might as well be called the “we love only solar and wind” subcommittee, and the Democrats on it voted to keep the data obscure. The two Republicans present backed transparency. Just shut up with your questions and pay, Virginia.  — SDH