By Peter Galuszka
For all the hew and cry over renewable energy sources and the “War on Coal,” it is extremely interesting to see just how much progress Virginia has made with renewable energy. The answer: hardly any to none.
A moment of clarity came when I was perusing blog postings by IvyMain, a D.C. area lawyer and Virginia Sierra Club activist who is quite often ahead of the curve on energy issues.
She posted a table of how Virginia compares with neighboring states in development of solar and wind power.
Leading her list is West Virginia with 583 megawatts of wind power. Next is North Carolina with 335 megawatts of solar power. Maryland is almost equally split between solar and wind with 262 megawatts.
And Virginia? A whopping 18 megawatts of solar and zip-o wind.
The State Corporation Commission has written against proposal EPA regs limiting carbon emissions saying it would shut down too many coal-fired plants. Solar and wind could make up some of it, but the SCC claims that “there is still zero probability that wind and solar resources can be developed in the time and on a scale necessary to accommodate the zero-carbon generations levels needed” to help meet the EPA’s carbon emission goals by 2030. Even more curious, the SCC used EPA figures that Virginia has 351 megawatts of renewable power. Hmmm.
One can almost see a clever and duplicitous scheme here. One reason why Virginia’s neighbors have remarkably more renewable power than Virginia is that they have mandatory renewable portfolio standards. In Maryland, 20 percent of all electricity generated must come from renewable sources by 2020. In North Carolina, it is 12.5 percent by 2021 and in coal-rich West Virginia, it is 25% renewable by 2025.
Virginia’s “voluntary” goal is 12 percent by 2022. Why so little and voluntary? Easy. Dominion Virginia Power has a legal deal going where it has a “monopoly” on electricity distribution and according to IvyMain cracks down wherever possible on independent solar generation. She notes that Dominion squelched a solar project at Washington & Lee University a few years ago and has attacked similar plans. After preventing renewable power from developing, Dominion and its allies can then say we must keep big, traditional facilities (nuclear, natural gas and coal-fired) going because there’s so little available on the renewable front.
Dominion, of course, is a huge political contributor. According to the Virginia Public Access Project, Dominion and Dominion Resources combined are the No. 1 corporate donors in this state. They gave about $1,042,580 this year. The No. 3 corporate donor is Alpha Natural Resources, a major coal company based in Bristol that gave $218,874.
Conservative commentators regularly pin the EPA’s flexible but stricter rules on a so-called “War on Coal” led by President Barack Obama. Yet, Virginia is a small coal producer compared to West Virginia, which is presumably ground zero in the fight against the Black Diamonds. So, how come West Virginia, the No. 2 coal state, has mandatory renewable standards and leads the pack in renewable energy?
The answer is that West Virginia’ leadership knows that its coal days are numbered and this started long before Obama came to power. The Mountain state has plenty of, well, mountains that can be great foundations for wind. So, too, does Virginia – the exact same mountain ranges in fact. But that doesn’t seem to matter. One noted right-winger blogged about the supposed “War on Coal” and then tried to preempt responses that broadened the reasons for coal’s demise:
“No lectures about the coal industry, please. I understand that the current woes of the coal industry stem in large measure from coal’s loss of competitiveness to natural gas as a fuel and to cyclical movements in the market for metallurgical coal (used by the steel industry). However, the Appalachian coal industry still produces a lot of steam coal for power plants, and the EPA rules would destroy much of that market. Clearly, the EPA rules, which are not yet in effect, have not yet destroyed a single coal-mining job. Come back to me in 2020 and it will be a very different story.”
Today’s New York Times has a story about political races in West Virginia where coal and Obama are naturally issues. The story contains this revealing passage:
“The coal industry’s long decline is economically complex. When Alpha Natural Resources, one of West Virginia’s largest coal operators, warned 1,100 employees of potential layoffs in July, it blamed a worldwide glut of coal, competition from cheaper natural gas, and lower-cost coal from western basis – as well as Environmental Protection Agency regulations.
“But in the charged political arena, complexities fade and both sides identify a sole culprit for the industry’s struggles: the administration’s anti-coal regulations.”
So there you have it. In Virginia, rules are set up to prevent renewables from being established while political types and their conservative blogger handmaidens beat the drum against the EPA and Obama.
