Bacon's Rebellion

  • A $29 Billion Virginia Battery Bonanza, Unanimous in VA Senate

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    Steve Haner

    By Steve Haner

    A 137 megawatt battery storage facility in California. The pending legislation would mandate about 30 such plants in Virginia.

    Based on current pricing for the present-day energy storage projects, legislation pending at the Virginia General Assembly could cost ratepayers of the two largest electric utilities between $18 billion and $29 billion over the next 20 years.  

    That capital cost, based on the current $300,000 to $500,000 price per megawatt hour for the massive utility scale battery projects, may not include the financing costs that always accompany such large construction projects.  Both utilities would expect their standard annual profit margin on the investments, as well.  What regulators call the revenue requirement will dwarf the numbers mentioned above.  It is the revenue requirement that drives the cost on customer bills.

    And for all that money the utilities would not create a single electron of additional electricity.  The batteries envisioned simply store energy created by a real generation plant, releasing it to the grid when needed (such as when the sun is not producing solar electricity, or the wind has deserted the ocean turbines.)  The cost of producing the electricity they store is on top of the cost of the batteries themselves.

    The Senate version (Senate Bill 1394) of the legislation passed unanimously, but neither it nor the House version (House Bill 2537) are fully through the Assembly process.  There is time to face the reality of what this would cost.  No official fiscal impact statement of any kind has been produced by the State Corporation Commission or the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation.  That is because not one of 140 legislators has even asked. 

    In an earlier article discussing the battery storage mandates, the figure of $500,000 per megawatt hour (MWh) in capital costs was used and was promptly challenged by an anonymous renewable energy fan in the comment string.  That person is probably not aware of the cost of some smaller battery projects already approved by the Virginia State Corporation Commission, which make $500,000 per MWh look cheap.

    (more…)

  • Passing the Baton

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    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: Chat GPT

    by James A. Bacon

    I’m old enough to remember — waaaay back in the early 1980s — when Richmond was the dominant business center in Virginia. But as editor of the start-up Virginia Business magazine in 1986, it quickly became apparent that the mega-trend business story of the era was the extraordinary economic and demographic growth of metropolitan Washington. I recall publishing a magazine running a cover story describing Northern Virginia as “The Suburb that Ate Virginia.” By the late 1980s, it wasn’t even a contest. Northern Virginia had become the commonwealth’s growth driver.

    And so it has been ever since. Fortune 500 companies began moving to NoVa. The tech sector boomed. The population swelled. Household incomes soared. Northern Virginia, which once was thought to extend from Washington to the Occoquan, now in the public imagination reaches to the Rappahannock. Somehow, NoVa’s economic dynamism persisted despite the challenges of soaring housing prices, strained infrastructure, and arguably the worst traffic congestion in the country.

    For four decades, Virginia’s state capital was left eating NoVA’s dust.

    Then, suddenly, around the time of the Covid pandemic, something changed. Northern Virginia, once a massive magnet for domestic in-migration, became an exporter. The population continued to grow thanks to a steady influx of foreigners, but more “domestic” migrants (people moving within the country) were leaving the region than arriving. Meanwhile, more domestic migrants were moving to the Richmond metropolitan area than ever.

    Citing the work of Hamilton Lombard, who runs the demographic research group at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center, I’ve noted the sea change on this blog. Now the Richmond Times-Dispatch has taken belated notice that the baton of population and business growth has passed back to its hometown.

    In the past four years, Central Virginia has added more residents than any comparable period since the first census taken in 1790.

    (more…)

  • Interest-Rate Cap on Loans: Beware the Unintended Consequences

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    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: Chat GPT

    by James A. Bacon

    A bill capping financial loans to a maximum of 12% interest passed the state Senate Monday. If enacted into law, Virginia would go from having one of the most permissive caps among the 50 states to perhaps the most stringent. The measure could have a debilitating effect on lending to people with low credit ratings, effectively shutting them out of legal lending markets.

    The most astonishing thing about SB 1252, sponsored by Senator Lamont Bagby, D-Richmond, is that it passed with significant Republican support. Only six Republicans voted against it; the rest voted for it, along with all the Democrats. If the measure passes the House as well, I hope that Governor Glenn Youngkin, who as a successful businessman has a basic grasp of economics, will veto it.

    The usual justification for capping interest rates is that high rates on credit cards, consumer loans, consolidation loans and payday loans can trap people on a treadmill of indebtedness, with interest charges piling up faster than borrowers can pay them off. To be sure, this is a real problem, and I don’t pretend it isn’t. The question is whether the cure is worse than the illness.

    (more…)

  • Take That, TurboTax

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Each year when I finish using TurboTax to prepare my tax returns, I file my federal tax return electronically. However, in order to file my state tax return electronically, I have to pay extra. I refuse on principle. I print off the completed state return, sign it, put it in an envelope, and mail it to the Virginia Dept. of Taxation.

    I do this because I am still peeved about the state capitulating to the private tax preparation industry 15 years ago.

    For several years, the Commonwealth had a perfectly good system that enabled most residents to prepare and electronically submit their state tax returns. That changed with the passage of HB 1349 in 2010. The effect of that bill was to prohibit the Dept. of Taxation from operating a free preparation and filing system, available to all residents, and instead operate the Virginia Free File program. The legislation directs the state to “enter into a non-monetary agreement with companies in the electronic tax preparation and filing industry (the “Consortium for Virginia”) to work together to offer free, online tax return preparation and filing services to 70 percent of Virginia taxpayers with the lowest incomes.” For anyone interested, the Tax Department has provided an excellent, detailed history of this legislation and its aftermath in its fiscal impact statement for HB 2264.

    (more…)

  • More Pathetic Excuses

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    James A. Bacon

    AI-generated image of an MS-13 gang member. Needs mommy and daddy to help answer question about immigration status. Welcoming communities should embrace his humanity. And he commits crimes at lower rates than the rest of society.

    by James A. Bacon

    Democrats in the General Assembly are killing Republican bills right and left. In one incident that drew my jaundiced attention this morning, the Senate Courts of Justice Committee voted yesterday to spike a Republican-sponsored bill that would make it easier to deport convicted violent felons. I almost feel guilty writing about this. Mocking the people speaking against the proposal is easier than losing socks in the laundry.

    State law requires law enforcement authorities to check the immigration status of adults convicted of violent crimes. But the law does not require the same for juveniles, creating a loophole for youthful lawbreakers who enter correctional facilities as juveniles but are not released until after they have aged into adulthood. Senator Tara Durant, R-Fredericksburg, submitted SB 1268 to require authorities to check the immigration status of juveniles as well, and to forward that information to U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE).

    Sophia Gregg with the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia countered that juveniles should not be questioned about their immigration status without a guardian present. “There is no reason that we should treat children the same way we treat adults,” The Virginia Mercury reports her as saying.

    Sheila Herlihy of the Virginia Interfaith Center said the interrogation of immigrants conflicted, in the Mercury’s words, with the values of welcoming communities.

    Senator Jennifer Carroll Foy, D-Prince William, called the legislation “unnecessary, duplicative, and a messaging bill,” and said that it unfairly vilified immigrant communities. “At the end of the day, the studies and statistics show that immigrants who do commit crimes commit them at a lower rate than the people who are actually here lawfully.”

    I am not making this up.

    (Bacon rubs his hands gleefully.) OK, let’s get to work.

    (more…)

  • Dominion’s Wind Farm Price Jumps $900M

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    Steve Haner

    Dominion’s offshore wind project.

    Dominion Energy Virginia has announced a $900 million increase in the capital costs of its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, bringing the new projected total to $10.7 billion. The additional expense will be incurred on transmission interconnections needed to allow the power to move within the PJM regional electricity market. 

    The news came in a company press release Monday. The construction of the 176 turbines and related substations off Virginia Beach is still on budget, the company reported. The project is still set to be completed and operational in late 2026. From the release:

    New electric generation resources constructed within PJM, like CVOW, are assigned costs by PJM that are deemed necessary to effectively integrate these resources and ensure the reliability and stability of the electric grid. Higher network upgrade cost estimates by PJM reflect the significant increase in demand growth that require incremental generation and transmission resources across the system. 

    Because of an agreement made at the time of the State Corporation Commission approval of the application in late 2022, Dominion and its capital partner Stonepeak will absorb some of the additional cost and not charge it all to ratepayers. But ratepayers will see a slight increase in monthly bills at some point as a result of the additional PJM charges.

    The project remains one of the few that seems to be surviving the turmoil in the wind industry caused by an executive order from President Donald Trump. Its final federal permits were issued under his predecessor and the project was well underway before the order. Dominion’s permits remain under attack for various claimed deficiencies, but there is no indication the federal government will pause the project. The potential cost impact of a cancellation on ratepayers was discussed earlier.

    On the same day as the Dominion announcement about the cost increase, New Jersey officials cancelled an ongoing solicitation for a wind project there:

    The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) has canceled its fourth offshore wind solicitation amid significant market challenges and Shell’s withdrawal from the Atlantic Shores project…The solicitation, which initially targeted between 1,200 MW and 4,000 MW of capacity, faced setbacks when two of three bidders withdrew, leaving Atlantic Shores as the sole remaining participant.

    — SDH

  • Virginia to Stop Mutilating Children

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Jason Miyares

    Health centers at the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University have stopped mutilating children!

    Not that the doctors are eager to stop. These patients-for-life are big moneymakers. They’re being forced to leave the kids alone.

    It took an executive order from President Donald Trump plus a stern warning letter from Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares for these Mengele-style experiments to end.

    No worries, their lawyers are looking for loopholes as you read this.

    The president signed an amazingly comprehensive executive order “PROTECTING CHILDREN FROM CHEMICAL AND SURGICAL MUTILATION” on January 28.

    Two days later, on January 30, Miyares fired off a letter of his own warning that noncompliance with the Executive Order poses a major legal and financial risk for these state agencies.

    Miyares’ letter reads in part:

    As the Executive Order takes effect immediately, I write to provide this prompt legal advice to enable the Commonwealth – including its agencies – to protect itself from significant legal risk and substantial financial exposure. Given the plain terms of the Executive Order, the chemical and surgical mutilation of children must end immediately. Any institution that continues to engage in such mutilation unacceptably and unjustifiably endangers not only itself and the commonwealth, but also the vulnerable children of the commonwealth.

    Continue reading.

  • Virginia Students Missing Even Low Expectations

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    by

    Steve Haner

    By Hannah Schmid

    Virginia students continued to struggle to meet national proficiency standards based on results in the recently released 2024 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Reading scores remained stagnant among Virginia’s fourth graders while math scores slightly increased. Among Virginia’s eighth graders, scores in both reading and math declined.

    Every two years, NAEP tracks the nation’s fourth and eighth graders’ proficiency in reading and math in the largest nationally representative assessment of student progress.

    Only 31% of Virginia’s fourth graders were proficient in reading and 40% in math on the national assessment in 2024. For eighth graders, only 29% were proficient in both reading and math.

    Parents, most of whom only read reports from the state’s Standards of Learning (SOL) assessment, will be shocked by this data showing such low rates of reading and math proficiency in Virginia. On the 2024 SOL, 73% of Virginia’s fourth graders were proficient in reading and 72% of eighth graders. In math, the 2024 SOL showed 71% of fourth graders were proficient and 63% of eighth graders.

    How does such a discrepancy exist?

    (more…)

  • A Rosetta Stone for Nursing Facility Articles

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    sherlockj

    A Rosetta Stone for Nursing Facility Articles

    by James C. Sherlock

    I will continue to pursue the public health crisis that is Virginia’s worst nursing homes.  

    I am quite aware that my articles on that subject are sometimes difficult to follow because I provide so much detail and data.  I am attempting to make a case to Virginia officials to act on this information. Such an effort is ineffective without such detail because much of the data are from federal databases perhaps unfamiliar to many.  

    I often refer to the federal Social Security Act Sec. 1819 because it directs all states what their nursing facility laws and regulations must at a minimum specify.

    But for casual readers, I offer a Rosetta stone. Virginia’s Regulations for the Licensure of Nursing Facilities has a decent glossary of terms as well as offering what the title promises.  

    In general, Virginia nursing home regulations expand little on what the federal law requires. The definitions of terms comes first. I have added a table of contents with links to find whatever else readers may find helpful.  

  • How NOT to Reverse DEI

    Posted on

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Here in Virginia, conservatives are making principled arguments against Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in K-12 schools, higher education, and government.

    DEI bureaucracies cost millions of dollars and crowd out spending for other priorities. DEI compels speech in some instances (pronouns and diversity statements) and suppresses it in others (through fear of microaggressions). DEI labels some groups as victims and others as oppressors, feeding a sense of grievance, victimhood and division. Far from fostering a sense of “belonging,” DEI feeds alienation. And far from creating broad-based opportunity, it undermines the principle of meritocracy.

    But DEI is not the cause of everything that goes wrong. Given the polarization of our society today, it is vital for critics to be careful when indicting the ideology. Blaming it for tragedies, mishaps and abuses for which it bears no fault provides ammunition to its defenders, who don’t hesitate to label the entire anti-DEI project as racist, misogynist, transphobic, or whatever.

    Unfortunately, that’s what happened last week when a helicopter collided with an American Airlines jet in Arlington, causing the deaths of 69 passengers and crew. President Trump pinned some of the blame for the tragedy on DEI in the Federal Aviation Administration.

    (more…)

  • Eat More Bacon!

    Posted on

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Step aside, Artificial Intelligence, it’s time for a business story that really matters to every American household. Smithfield Foods, the Chinese-owned, Virginia-based pork producer, has gone public in an Initial Public Offering (IPO). The company’s big challenge, according to CEO Shane Smith, is persuading Americans to eat more pork. That shouldn’t be too hard, given the fact that bacon is the most delicious food in the history of mankind!

    “In a more than $50 billion pork industry that produces far more bacon, chops and hams than Americans will eat in a year,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “Smithfield needs to push U.S. buyers to fill up their bellies with pork.”

    While Americans’ per capita chicken consumption has tripled and beef consumption has declined since 1965, consumption of pork products has barely held its own — a sad commentary on American cultural norms.

    It seems that young people prefer chicken sandwiches, reports the Journal.

    Chicken? Really? Can you get any wimpier? I suppose there’s always tofu.

    (more…)

  • King Elon I

    Posted on

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    How do you feel about an unelected multi-billionaire “moving swiftly to exert control over vast swaths of the U.S. government,” as the Wall Street Journal put it, with plans to shut down spending and programs he does not like?

  • Too Many of Virginia’s Skilled Nursing Facilities Present a Public Health Problem

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    sherlockj

    Too Many of Virginia’s Skilled Nursing Facilities Present a Public Health Problem

    by  James C. Sherlock

    In a recent 12-month period overlapping 2022 and 2023, almost 8,400 Medicare patients alone were admitted to a hospital directly from or within 30 days after discharge from one of Virginia’s 280+ skilled nursing facilities.

    We simply do not know how many eventually died as a proximate outcome of poor care in those facilities.

    But we can examine some of the human costs.

    A death in Chesterfield County.  In late October of 2024, a Chesterfield County woman is alleged by the Commonwealth’s Attorney to have suffered horribly and died from an infection she acquired at Colonial Heights Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center (Colonial Heights).

    “Those arrested included multiple nurses and the charges include felony abuse and neglect of vulnerable adults, falsifying patient records, and obstruction of justice.”

    The charges include criminal abuse and neglect of a vulnerable adult resulting in serious bodily injury or disease.  The allegations in this case include:

    • Victim was left in her bed for days in her own urine and feces, not turned or changed, resulting in severe flesh wounds.
    • The wounds were so severe that they allegedly caused sepsis, which ultimately led to the patient’s death.
    • The patient’s foot was reportedly broken, and
    • She was given incorrect medicine that “poisoned” her.

    Some are further charged with falsification of records and obstructing justice to cover it up.  

    Now a 19th staffer has been arrested and charged with felony abuse.

    In a separate case, a physician was arrested two weeks ago in connection with the death of another Colonial Heights patient.

    All of those arrested, by working in an “administrative, supportive or direct care capacity” in that nursing home, were mandated reporters of suspected abuse, neglect or exploitation of aged or incapacitated adults.  We do not know if any made the required reports in this case or any other.  

    Systemic problems pre-dated by years the employment of some of the people arrested. Circumstances hauntingly similar to the neglect alleged in this case were reported pursuant to a state complaint inspection in 2021.

    But after all of this, a check with Colonial Heights admissions about a week ago revealed that it was accepting new patients.

    Thus motivated, I offer here a broad background for the evidence in the case.

    (more…)

  • Making VCEA Even More Expensive and Onerous

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    by

    Steve Haner

    By Steve Haner

    The 2024 General Assembly ended with a promise from its majority Democrats to review and perhaps revise the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which mandates the end of hydrocarbon electricity. The revisions are now pending at the 2025 General Assembly and are uniformly bad.  

    One positive development this session has been an increased and more honest focus on the consumer cost these laws will impose on Virginia’s residential and business energy users. But a leading Democrat, during a floor debate Friday, dismissed the billions of dollars extracted by VCEA as a cheap investment to prevent hurricanes and cure cancer.  Watch it yourself.   

    Governor Glenn Youngkin opened the session with a speech in which he called the VCEA a “quagmire” that wasn’t working and was a threat to our economy. Legislation from his fellow Republicans to reform it has failed on party-line votes. His last option will likely be another round of vetoes after adjournment of the Democrat’s bills.   

    First on the veto target list should be a bill to make it easier to override local objections to the placement of large solar and battery facilities. The VCEA mandates more than 10,000 megawatts of additional solar panels which will need several square miles of land and extensive new transmission lines.  

    Companion bills were introduced in both chambers to create a Virginia Energy Facility Review Board with extensive powers to intervene in local permit debates. Its endorsement of a contested project would have made a denial by a local government body far harder to defend in court. Because this bill has been widely reported and drew opposition from the public and local governments, the versions which are pending have changed. The substitutes are subterfuge.  

    (more…)

  • Voting Rights for All!

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    James A. Bacon

    (And by “All,” We Mean Cats, Dogs, Spotted Owls, Snail Darters….)

    by James A. Bacon

    There exists on the fringe of the environmental movement a proposition so crazy that some who first hear of it will think it a spoof: Nature has rights that should be granted legal standing in laws and representation in systems of government.

    But the Rights of Nature (RoN) philosophy is not a Babylon Bee parody. It is making inroads in the real world. The high court of the Indian state of Uttarakhand, for instance, has recognized the Ganges and Yamuna rivers as legal entities with rights. Colombia courts have done much the same for the Atrato River and Mexico’s with the Rio Atoyac and Rio Papaloapan rivers. New Zealand has granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River, which the Maori revere as a living ancestor. Ecuador’s constitution grants nature the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, while Bolivia has passed the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth. In Australia, a 12-person council has been established to advocate on behalf of the Yarra River. And in the United States, according to the Matador Network, “dozens” of communities across the United States have codified rights-of-nature laws.

    Endowing rivers, animals, plants, and ecosystems with legal and constitutional rights might sound deranged, but Noah M. Sachs takes the Rights of Nature ideology very seriously. Indeed, the University of Richmond law professor has published an essay in the Georgetown Environmental Law Review to critique the movement.

    Sachs is a political progressive. He believes climate change is a threat to humans and nature alike. A supporter of social justice movements, he celebrated when the Confederate statues fell in Richmond; he even composed a folk song in honor of slave rebel Gabriel Prosser. But he regards the Rights of Nature as profoundly anti-democratic. The philosophical principles are vague, self-contradictory and hideously impractical to implement, he asserts. If somehow “Nature” could be given rights and representation, the legal mechanisms could be easily co-opted by groups speaking in Nature’s name to advance their own self-serving aims.

    (more…)

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….

This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.

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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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