From the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record:
JMU and seven universities in Virginia hope to shore up $4.8 million in state funding to research harnessing energy from Virginia’s offshore wind, ocean waves and algae during the next two years. But due to budget cuts, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine proposed only half of that amount for the research.
If we have to rely upon the state to fund renewable energy innovation, we’ll be waiting a long, long time. And then there’s this from Dominion spokesman Jim Norvelle, spinning an article in the New York Times:
Dominion believes a reason that electricity rates in Virginia are below the national average and stable today is because it uses a diverse fuel mix of nuclear energy, coal, natural gas, oil and hydropower to generate electricity. Our customers are not beholden to price spikes in any one fuel source, such as what happened in the natural gas market a few years ago. Our future generation plans would continue this trend.
Certainly energy conservation will play a growing role and Dominion is testing programs to see which ones our customers will adopt vigorously. But no one should expect conservation and renewable energy sources to replace generation; it will play a role in slowing the growth in electric demand.
I am confident that conservation and renewable fuels will play a huge part in Virginia’s long-term energy future. I am worried, however, how long it will take and what it will cost to get from here to there. Clearly, we need to move faster than Dominion and other electric utilities want to go. But we cannot do so heedless of the costs. It’s a tough balancing act.
