Tag: Stephen D. Haner
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Those Who Ignore History….
News reports of a substantial Marine expeditionary force embarked to the Persian Gulf sparked a musical memory. Jim Bacon may recall we had a colleague at the Roanoke Times, columnist Mike Ives, who was among the Marines that were the first ground troops ashore in South Vietnam circa 1964. Mr. Seeger always said it…
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Pray for Sun; Solar Is the Only New Power We Get
by Steve Haner The 2026 General Assembly has decided Virginia’s future energy eggs will come from a basket made of sunbeams. A series of approved bills are intended to accelerate the proliferation of solar panels on rural fields, rooftops, urban parking decks and apartment balconies, even if local objections need to be disregarded. Giving the…
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Assembly Found Nine Ways To Make Electricity More Expensive
by Steve Haner The 2026 General Assembly has passed at least nine separate new laws that will increase the cost of your electricity. Not one of the bills creates a single megawatt of additional energy for our use. Most of the bills create new ways for the utilities to take money from all their ratepayers and…
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March RGGI Carbon Tax Jumped 26% in One Year
by Steve Haner The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) held its first carbon allowance auction of 2026 Wednesday and the price came in at just under $25 per ton of emissions, 26% higher than a year ago. There should be no doubt now about predictions that imposing this carbon tax on Virginia electricity plants will…
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Public Union Bills Causing Angst Among Local Democratic Officials
by Steve Haner Legislation to expand the potential for union contracts to cover most local and state employees is on the verge of approval if Democrats in the House of Delegates and Senate can reconcile two versions of the bill. They might also have to reconcile with locally elected Democratic officials. Many of them have…
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The $4 to $5 Billion in Tax Hikes the Assembly is Approving
by Steve Haner The tax increase proposals still pending at the 2026 General Assembly will extract another $4 to $5 billion annually from Virginians if enacted, shared between the state and the local governments. The Democrats in political control have taken a bow for producing competing budget proposals that are not dependent on major…
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Expanded PIPP Pulls $360 Million from Power Bill Piggy Bank
by Steve Haner The expansion of an existing state electricity-bill subsidy program under legislation pending at the 2026 General Assembly could add up to $360 million to the annual cost during its first full year of implementation. The Department of Planning and Budget (DPB) has produced a detailed fiscal impact analysis for House Bill 884,…
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Cost of Undergrounding Program is Mostly Profit to Lenders, Stockholders
by Steve Haner Dominion Energy Virginia’s ongoing program to place selected neighborhood service lines underground, spreading the bill for the upgrades onto all its 2.7 million customers, will cost another $3.8 billion if the General Assembly blesses its extension for another ten years. Of that, about $1.6 billion is the cost of the construction work…
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The Data Center Scapegoat Led to Two Different Sacrificial Altars
by Steve Haner Virginia’s world-leading data center industry, once a source of economic pride to our Commonwealth, has become the scapegoat of the 2026 General Assembly. The State Senate and House of Delegates have built different altars for its sacrifice. The Senate is about to vote to strip away the major sales and use tax…
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Neither House nor Senate Budget Raises General Taxes
But the Senate Strips the Data Center Tax Break Next Year by Steve Haner The Senate and House of Delegates financial committees met on Sunday to approve competing sets of amendments to the next Virginia budget, neither proposing any general tax increases. The Senate version included modest tax reform: a small taxpayer rebate for this…
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No, RTD, That Bill Does Not Cut Future Electric Rates
by Steve Haner The nonsense that the General Assembly is passing a bill to shift huge energy costs onto data centers and off all the other utility customers is going to be a bipartisan meme. A bill that merely punts that issue to the regulatory State Corporation Commission passed on a unanimous State Senate vote. …
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They Think Your Electric Bill is Just a Piggy Bank to Raid
by Steve Haner Key energy legislation poised to pass the 2026 General Assembly will increase your future electricity bills, not lower them. The bills will worsen price increases already caused by the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which passed the last time Virginia was under one-party control. As the Assembly crosses its first deadline, with…
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Don’t Mess With Texas Natural Gas
Natural gas kept the lights on in Texas during the coldest days of this past January, just the way it did in Virginia.The popular Democratic nonsense narrative that Texas is achieving energy nirvana with all its solar and wind and battery assets should just be disregarded. You can see above what was working during the…
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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…