Author Archives: Ivy Main

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Nuclear power: lessons from Japan (and Murphy)

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Dominion Virginia Power said Monday that it intends to move forward with plans for a third reactor at its North Anna Power Station as the international nuclear energy industry reels from the disaster at the Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Japan.—WSLS10, March 15, 2011

The operator of Japan’s tsunami-hit nuclear power plant sounded the alarm on the gravity of the deepening crisis of containment at the coastal site on Friday, saying that there are more than 200,000 tons of radioactive water in makeshift tanks vulnerable to leaks, with no reliable way to check on them or anywhere to transfer the water. –The New York Times, August 23, 2013

A friend asked me recently whether I thought the ongoing disaster at the Fukishima nuclear plant in Japan would have repercussions here in Virginia, where Dominion Power operates four nuclear reactors at two plants and wants to build another. I feel pretty sure the answer is no. Economics will kill Dominion’s nuclear dream, but not risk. We just don’t think that way.

We think like this: Fukishima was taken out by a tsunami. There are no tsunamis in central Virginia. Ergo, there is no risk to Virginia’s nuclear plants from a tsunami, so Japan’s sudden revulsion against nuclear power shouldn’t put us off our feed half a world away.

So why did countries like Germany, which also has no tsunamis, freak out and swear off nuclear for good?

They drew an entirely different lesson: Japan is a smart, technologically-advanced nation. Japan did not anticipate the disaster that destroyed Fukishima. Ergo, unanticipated disasters happen even in smart, technologically-advanced nations.

Or put another way: Murphy’s Law also applies to nuclear plants. We ignore Murphy at our peril.

But ignore him we do. We had our own brush with nuclear disaster two years ago, when a rare, magnitude 5.8 earthquake shook central Virginia and led to a months-long shutdown of the two North Anna nuclear reactors. No one expected an earthquake of this strength there, least of all the plants’ designers. Fortunately, the reactors survived intact, but I don’t know of anyone who wants to repeat the experiment. Presumably Dominion intends the “next” North Anna reactor to be designed to withstand stronger earthquakes. Do you feel better about nuclear now, or worse?

Murphy’s Law operates with ferocity across the energy sector. An industry expert told me the BP oil spill in the Gulf happened in spite of four different safeguards in place on the drilling rig, each of which should have stopped the blowout from happening. And that spill was not an isolated incident; only the year before, a similar blowout off the coast of Australia created a 2,300 square mile oil slick—about the size of Delaware. U.S. papers largely ignored it. Spills are so common in oil drilling that they rarely warrant a headline. Yet somehow those who support offshore oil drilling off the coast of Virginia feel sure it won’t happen here.

Or take mountaintop removal coal mining (please). Right now powerful explosives are blasting away the tops of mountains in southwest Virginia and across Appalachia. The rubble is being dumped into stream valleys, while huge machines scrape off the thin seams of coal. Federal law provides that no streams should be harmed, and the mountains should afterwards be restored—requirements so fanciful that neither mining companies nor state officials take them seriously. So it’s not surprising that streams and rivers are polluted, species disappear, building foundations crack, and residents die young. That’s not the plan going wrong, it’s the plan.

In the past most Americans participated in an unspoken agreement to ignore the risks involved in producing energy, because we had no intention of stopping what we were doing. If it’s a choice between risky energy and no energy, we will go with risky every time. Denying the risks is a coping mechanism that lets us sleep at night. Not incidentally, this is also the strategy used by fossil fuel interests to keep the public from demanding action on climate change.

But the widespread availability of cleaner alternatives gives us energy options we didn’t feel we had before. Increases in energy efficiency and tumbling prices for wind and solar mean we can afford to look more honestly at the damage we do and the risks we run by powering our 21st century economy with 20th century fuels.

I like to think the Virginia legislature’s decision to maintain the ban on uranium mining—for now—shows that our ability to ignore risks has its limits. Mining anything hazardous is inherently risky in a climate like Virginia’s, where rainfall continually recharges the water table. Put nasty stuff between the rain and the water table, and you will find contamination downstream. The idea that water can be kept out of millions of tons of radioactive mine tailings for thousands of years strains credulity. The idea that this might be accomplished by a mining company whose sole purpose is to make money shatters credulity altogether.

The fact that a good many of Virginia’s politicians lined up on the side of the mining company anyway is not necessarily evidence of their capacity for ignoring risk. More likely, it simply demonstrates how extreme is the corrupting power of money in Virginia politics. Unfortunately, that shows no signs of changing.

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On-bill loans for energy upgrades: win-win

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This guest column by Seth Heald originally appeared in the Rappahannock News on July 18, 2013. 

A little-noticed announcement earlier this month about an energy-efficiency pilot project in South Carolina could mean good news for the hundreds of thousands of Virginians who get their power from electric cooperatives.

Both South Carolina and Virginia have numerous electric cooperatives that provide power to customers in rural areas (and these days some no-longer-rural areas). These co-ops date to the 1930s, when Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act to provide loans and establish co-ops to help bring electricity for the first time to people in areas where investor-owned utilities were unwilling to go.

South Carolina’s “Help My House!” program showed that a creative financing measure called on-bill financing can help co-op members pay for efficiency upgrades to their homes that reduce their electricity consumption by more than a third on average.  The program paid for contractors to upgrade heat pumps, add insulation, seal ducts, and take other common-sense measures to make customers’ homes more comfortable and energy-efficient.

With on-bill financing the South Carolina co-op members didn’t have to pay upfront for their home improvements. Instead they pay over time on their electric bills. And because electricity consumption was significantly down, customers’ total electric bills generally went down even with the loan-repayment charges tacked on.  Efficiency contractors benefited too, which can create good local jobs.

That’s about as win-win as you can get—home improvements and lower electric bills, and more jobs, with no sacrifice of convenience or comfort. And once the loans are paid off, electric bills go down even more. The co-ops win too, because reducing customers’ electricity consumption on a broad scale can postpone or eliminate the need to build expensive new generation plants.

Electric co-ops are owned by their customers, so the South Carolina co-op boards and managers deserve great credit for undertaking this new program, which promises so many benefits to their member-owners.

So why can’t we do this here in Virginia? The short answer is we can. And we should. Soon.

But some Virginia co-op managers and board members have been reluctant to move forward aggressively on efficiency programs, preferring the old-fashioned method of building more generation capacity rather than helping members make efficiency upgrades. And some Virginia co-op managers and boards seem to worry more about their total revenues than about helping their customers lower their bills. Some co-op boards apparently are unconvinced that efficiency measures on a broad scale can benefit not only customers but the co-ops themselves.

That’s begun to change in Virginia. My co-op has launched an efficiency pilot program. But Virginia still has a lot of catching up to do to achieve the remarkable results that South Carolina co-ops have now shown are possible.

One thing essential to South Carolina’s success was 2010 state legislation that allowed on-bill financing, including having the loan obligation “stay with the meter” if a customer sells his home before paying off the loan.  The South Carolina co-ops pushed for that change and got it.

Virginia co-op members, and more importantly their influential managers and boards, should press our state legislators and regulators to make the changes needed to allow on-bill financing here. If anything can win bipartisan support in Virginia, it ought to be a simple measure that can help hundreds of thousands of hard-working electricity consumers improve their homes with no upfront costs while also reducing their power bills.

Seth Heald, of Rixeyville, is a lawyer and a member of Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, which is one of the Virginia co-ops that co-own Old Dominion Electric Cooperative.

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Workshops on renewable energy for Virginia non-profits draw large crowds

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Photo credit: Corrina Beall

Photo credit: Corrina Beall

Over 90 people packed the fellowship hall of the Mount Vernon Unitarian Church in Alexandria on the evening of June 23d for a presentation on solar power opportunities for houses of worship and other non-profits. Later in the week, more than 50 people attended a similar workshop at Virginia Union University in Richmond, designed primarily for colleges and universities.

In both places, the audience was there to learn about an opportunity provided by a new law that took effect in Virginia July 1. The law allows non-profits to use what are known as “third-party power purchase agreements,” or PPAs, to finance solar and wind installations. The PPAs let customers use clean, renewable energy for the same price—or even less-–as grid-delivered power produced from dirty fossil fuels. PPAs have been the driving force behind most small solar installations nationwide in recent years, and advocates hope they will now do the same in Virginia.

For-profit entities will also be able to use the new law, but only if they install a project of at least 50 kilowatts in size. Residential systems, which are typically in the 4-8 kilowatt range, are excluded. The law applies only within the territory of Dominion Virginia Power, and projects must be installed within the next two years, unless the program is extended.

The groups that organized the workshops—the Sierra Club, Interfaith Power & Light, National Wildlife Federation and the Virginia Conservation Network—view the new law as an opportunity for Virginia to begin ramping up its tiny solar and wind industries.

The Sierra Club has worked closely with the solar industry nationwide as a way to increase the use of renewable energy in the U.S., largely as a way to combat climate disruption. The club’s Beyond Coal Campaign seeks to ensure that as the dirtiest coal plants are retired, America’s energy needs can be met with clean energy rather than fossil fuels.

For the church workshop, Sierra Club partnered with Interfaith Power & Light (MD.DC.NoVa) because of its experience with congregations in Maryland and DC, helping them to go solar. Interfaith Power & Light has been a vigorous advocate for clean energy within area faith communities. Similarly, Sierra Club chose to partner with National Wildlife Federation for the college workshop because of its ongoing “green campuses” initiative nationwide.

Photo credit: Corrina Beall

Photo credit: Corrina Beall

Getting solar projects done in Virginia poses a challenge. Many states have encouraged the growth of solar and wind power through aggressive targets for renewable energy backed up by incentives and utility mandates, but Virginia offers neither. The state’s wind industry is essentially nonexistent, and with less than 10 megawatts (10,000 kilowatts) of solar installed statewide to date, Virginia produces less than one percent of the solar energy that New Jersey does. It also remains far behind neighboring states like Maryland and North Carolina, which both have solar policies and incentives that Virginia lacks.

Yet the price of solar has declined so steeply in recent years that it can now make economic sense in Virginia, especially for nonprofits. Nonprofits often can access low-interest loans or bring in investors from the community to help them prepay some of the PPA, allowing them to achieve greater overall savings. And churches, colleges, schools and other nonprofits typically own their buildings for many decades, so they are able to view energy savings over a longer time horizon than do many residential and commercial building owners.

For communities of faith, payback may not even be the top consideration. More and more congregations see addressing climate change and being better stewards of the earth as part of their core mission.

Educational institutions similarly see benefits beyond energy savings. Putting solar panels in a prominent location can be a symbol of an institution’s commitment to sustainability. When Eastern Mennonite University installed its solar array, enrollment increased ten percent, according to Tony Smith of Secure Futures LLC, the company that financed the system.

Smith, who also represents the solar industry trade group MDV-SEIA in Virginia, spoke at both the Alexandria and Richmond workshops. In Richmond he was joined by Jeff Ryan of Abakus Solar and Dave Stets of Richmond BySolar for a panel discussion about how PPAs can benefit nonprofits. A number of other solar and wind providers, as well as leaders from government and academia, also attended and contributed to the discussion.

Attendance at both workshops far exceeded organizers’ expectations. The audiences included a broad cross-section of faiths as well as representatives from eight universities and community colleges. Some attendees have already begun discussions with solar providers as a result of the workshops, leading many to hope that Virginia’s solar industry is at last poised to take off.

Additional workshops will likely be held in September; contact Corrina Beall at Corrina.Beall@sierraclub.org for more information.

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Non-profits can go solar, save money under new Virginia law

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photo credit Dietrich Krieger

A church in Germany displays both its faith and its solar panels. Photo credit Dietrich Krieger.

Faith communities, colleges, schools, local governments and non-profits will find it easier to “go solar” under a law that takes effect in Virginia on July 1. Eligible customers will be able to install solar panels or wind turbines with little or no upfront cost, paying only for the electricity the systems provide. This arrangement, known as a third-party power purchase agreement (PPA), has been the driver for most of the solar projects in the U.S. in recent years, but prior to this year utilities had blocked its use in most of Virginia.

The new law creates a two-year pilot program allowing customers of Dominion Virginia Power to install projects as large as 1 megawatt (1,000 kilowatts) using PPAs financed by private companies. Projects must have a minimum size of 50 kilowatts, so the program can be used by many commercial customers but excludes homeowners, whose solar PV systems more typically fall in the 4-to-8 kilowatt size.

Importantly, however, the 50-kilowatt minimum does not apply to tax-exempt entities. PPAs are one of the only ways available for tax-exempt entities to benefit from the federal 30% tax credit for renewable energy systems; a tax-paying investor actually owns the system and uses the credits, passing along the savings to the customer. Thus the program could open up a new solar market in Virginia focused on what might be considered a natural vanguard for renewable energy: houses of worship, colleges, schools and nonprofits.

PPAs also offer an advantage over buying solar panels outright: even though the solar system is on the customer’s roof, someone else actually installs, owns and maintains it. That means less hassle for the customer and no upfront capital cost. The customer only has to pay for the solar power that’s produced. With prices for solar systems having fallen dramatically in recent years, customers will generally be able to buy solar energy under a PPA for no more than they now pay for power from non-renewable sources.

In states with incentive programs, including Maryland and DC, customers actually save money on their utility bills with solar PPAs. Virginia customers may not save money at first. Depending on the contract terms, however, customers may save money in future years, and can end up owning the solar system outright eventually, which will allow them to save quite a bit of money on electricity in the long run.

PPAs are the most common financing method for rooftop solar systems across the country. Companies like Solar City and Sungevity have created a profitable business model around financing and owning solar systems on customers’ property. Given the lack of state incentives in Virginia, Solar City isn’t expected to enter the market here. Financing PPAs in Virginia can still be profitable, but it presents challenges. Still, for people with cash sitting in CDs and bank accounts earning less than 1% interest, financing a solar project at their neighborhood church or school can be rewarding financially as well as spiritually.

One of the few companies with experience in Virginia PPAs is Secure Futures, LLC of Staunton, Virginia. CEO Tony Smith says his company’s business model is to “work with tax exempt entities to met their environmental, educational and thought leadership goals through solar installations that we own and operate in ways that deliver immediate operational savings and solid long term returns.”

The new law will involve rulemaking by Virginia’s regulatory body, the State Corporation Commission, to settle the details–including how the pilot program is tracked and how a qualifying customer applies for the limited kilowatts available over the two-year period. The SCC should be issuing a docket for a public hearing in the near future.  Since many customers need months of lead-time, it’s not too soon to start the planning process.

Free workshops will offer information about solar PPAs beginning in June

On June 23 at 7 p.m., Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light (GWIPL) and the Sierra Club will hold a free workshop for faith congregations at Mount Vernon Unitarian Church in Alexandria, one of the first Virginia churches to install solar panels. Representatives of solar companies including Secure Futures and Abakus Solar of Richmond, Virginia will be on hand to answer questions.

GWIPL has worked extensively with DC and Maryland congregations on similar solar projects and has compiled an informative booklet that can be downloaded from the gwipl.org website.

The Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club supported the solar industry in its quest to open up the Virginia market for solar PPAs and believes churches and other faith communities can play a big role in making the benefits of renewable energy available to everyone.

Sierra Club and Virginia Interfaith Power and Light are also planning a June workshop for Richmond-area congregations. Similarly, Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation, which has been working with community colleges on “green campus” projects, are planning a workshop designed especially for colleges and universities.

In addition to their target audiences, all workshops will be open to anyone who wants to learn more about the solar opportunity. For information, contact corrinabeall@sierraclub.org.

New law an imperfect compromise

The PPA legislation was a compromise between the solar industry and Dominion Power, which had sparred over the question of whether PPAs are legal in Virginia. When Secure Futures tried to install a system at Washington & Lee University in 2011 under a PPA, Dominion sent cease and desist letters claiming the arrangement was illegal. Eventually Secure Futures and the university used a different financing approach so the project could move forward.

Dominion also blocked a 2012 bill in the General Assembly that would have expressly allowed PPAs; that bill would have included private homes and smaller commercial systems. The issue was popular with legislators and the public and became a priority for many local governments during the 2013 legislative session.

Eventually this year Dominion agreed to a narrower bill as a temporary pilot project. In exchange, the bill gives Dominion legal certainty by prohibiting PPAs in its territory that fall outside the pilot project.

Other Virginia utilities refused to participate in the pilot program. As a result, the program and its rules apply only in Dominion Virginia Power’s service territory.

The pilot project will run for two years, after which Virginia regulators will evaluate it to determine whether it should be continued and expanded. The total size of all the systems installed under the legislation is capped at 50 megawatts. Although this is a tiny amount compared to states like New Jersey, which already has more than 1,000 megawatts of solar installed, it would mark a significant step forward for Virginia, which to date has installed less than 10 megawatts.

In addition to the 50 megawatts that can be installed under PPAs, another 30 megawatts of solar will be installed by Dominion itself under a program it refers to, somewhat confusingly, as “community solar.” Under that program, the utility plans to install and own solar systems on leased rooftops in select locations. The program includes no provision for selling the solar output to the building owners.

Wind systems also covered

The pilot project includes wind turbines as well as solar systems. Dominion’s service territory includes relatively few areas with wind resources good enough to make wind power economically attractive, but the Virginia Wind Center at James Madison University has been evaluating the possibilities under the pilot program and believes it may be useful for some customers interested in installing wind turbines.

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Virginia doesn’t need another gas plant

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On April 24, Virginia’s State Corporation Commission (SCC) will consider a proposal from Dominion Virginia Power to build a new natural gas-fueled generating plant, the second of three it wants to add to its holdings. Its first plant, now under construction in Warren County, generated little opposition because it will replace old coal boilers that Dominion needs to retire.

But the latest proposal for a plant in Brunswick has come in for fierce criticism, and for good reason: we don’t need another gas plant. Dominion has exaggerated the growth in demand that it says justifies the plant, and the company could more cheaply meet its actual needs with energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Moreover, the world is changing, and the energy model of big utilities running big baseload power plants is becoming outdated. If Dominion builds another of these, Virginia could end up stuck with a giant concrete paperweight.  The SCC owes it to customers not to let this happen.

Every year Dominion tells regulators it expects demand to increase by 1.5% to 2% per year indefinitely, but its actual energy sales have been essentially flat since 2006. Sure, the recent recession threw everyone a curveball, but Dominion’s tendency to overstate future demand goes back decades. The company seems not to have anticipated widespread changes like more efficient appliances and better building codes that let consumers use less electricity even while we’re buying more gadgets.

With a little effort, we could save even more energy. Virginia ranks in the bottom half of states for energy efficiency, and Dominion is not on track to meet even the modest efficiency goals of the Virginia Energy Plan. Some of the fault for this lies with the SCC itself, which has often rejected energy efficiency programs. But nor has Dominion tried very hard. Even their rate structure is designed to encourage energy use. Greater efficiency would mean lower electricity sales, and who wants that? Not a company that makes its money building plants and selling electricity.

And this is a shame, because the cheapest energy is the energy that isn’t used. Virginians use 20% more electricity per person as our neighbors in Maryland, so we have a lot of low-hanging fruit we should pick before we build another power plant.

Even if we needed more power, though, building another baseload natural gas plant is a bad plan. A “baseload” plant is one designed to run continuously, unlike a “peaker” plant that fills in when needed. The price of natural gas fluctuates wildly, so building a baseload plant means committing customers to paying whatever the going rate happens to be, all day, every day, for the 30-year life of a gas plant. With about a third of Dominion’s power mix already coming from natural gas, surely adding more baseload gas is a reckless gamble when alternatives are available. Even Dominion CEO Tom Farrell has warned against an over-reliance on natural gas for this very reason.

It used to be that alternatives to fossil fuels weren’t much available, so a 30-year gamble was normal, and regulators didn’t trouble themselves by asking what the world would be like in 20 years. Wind and solar have changed that. When you build a wind farm or a solar facility, you know exactly what you will be paying for energy 20 years down the road, because your “fuel” is free. Building wind or solar is like locking in a fixed-rate mortgage instead of gambling on an adjustable rate mortgage with a low teaser rate. With that as an option, why should Virginians commit themselves to 30 years of buying gas at whatever the market decides is the price?

With prices dropping rapidly, wind and solar are today’s fastest growing energy technologies, and wind is second only to gas as a source of new electric generation. Of course, Virginia can’t boast a single wind farm today, and the smattering of solar across the state totals less than 1% of what New Jersey has. But even here, time and economics are on the side of renewable energy. Citigroup recently issued a report projecting that renewable energy will reach grid parity across the U.S. within the next few years and will gradually relegate all other fuels to back-up status.

This makes it an even worse idea for Dominion to invest in a plant that cannot easily adjust its output when the wind picks up or the sun comes out. Other options exist. Gas turbines are now being designed to integrate with renewable energy, combining high efficiency with the ability to ramp up and down quickly. Companies like General Electric are making big bets that this is the future of gas turbines.

Dominion, meanwhile, seems to be looking at the future as if we were back in the 20th century, and without even taking advantage of hindsight. Its plan is a bad deal for its customers, and the State Corporation Commission should reject it.

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The Keystone XL Pipeline: Game over?

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NASA scientist James Hansen famously warned that if the Keystone XL pipeline gets built, it’s “game over” for the climate. That dire warning lit a fire under the feet of activists, who rightly argue that Canada shouldn’t be producing the dirty, carbon-intensive tar sands oil, and the U.S. shouldn’t enable the climate destruction by building a pipeline to get the oil out of North America. But stopping Keystone won’t stop global warming, and building it won’t make environmentalists throw in the towel. If this is a game, we are pawns as well as players, so we can never walk away.

Frankly, it’s hard to understand right-wing enthusiasm in the U.S. for a pipeline benefiting a Canadian company extracting Canadian oil intended for the world market. In spite of all the talk about jobs, it will employ only a few thousand workers temporarily, and not in the areas of the country where unemployed construction workers live. Moreover, building it requires the government to seize private property from unwilling landowners to benefit a private interest—usually the sort of thing that makes Republicans go ballistic.

I might add that the environmental damage being done to thousands of square miles of Canadian arboreal forests and lakes is staggering—but Republicans have long since made it clear that they do not consider despoiling nature a drawback when there is energy to be had and profit to be made. (If you are a Republican and you bristle at this, see if you can name a recent oil, gas, or coal mining project your party has opposed for environmental reasons. I can only name one, and that doesn’t get beyond “sort of.” See the Tennessee Conservative Union’s ad opposing mountaintop removal coal mining, now that a Chinese company wants to do it.)

Some would argue that the climate case against Keystone is overstated. Tar sands oil is “only” 14-24% more carbon intensive than conventional oil, if you ignore a nasty byproduct called petroleum coke that adds to the total carbon footprint. Yet surely if the reverse were true, and the carbon footprint of tar sands oil were less than that of conventional oil, it would be hailed as some kind of a planet-saving fuel. Incremental changes are what got us into this mess in the first place.

If Keystone represents evil, though, it has plenty of company, and there is blame enough to go around. Canadians are developing tar sands oil because the worldwide demand for petroleum is high and growing, there is money to be made meeting the demand, and there is no one who will make them stop. The harm done exceeds the profit to be made, but most of the harm is borne by people in other countries.

That makes the case against the pipeline mostly a moral one, and moral arguments don’t get much respect these days. Yet when the State Department or the Washington Post urges that if we don’t build the pipeline, the Canadians will just find other ways to get the oil to market, the proper response should be outrage. Their position is the moral equivalent of justifying buying stolen goods on the theory that if you don’t do it, the thieves will just find a fence somewhere else.

Admittedly, lots of people would buy stolen goods if there weren’t a law against it; for such people, morality is most successful when immorality gets you arrested. And there isn’t a law against tar sands oil; Canada is the only country with jurisdiction, and it prefers to look away.

Americans also have a little problem that we do, indeed, buy a lot of stolen goods. As the world’s biggest oil consumers, we have a credibility problem. On the other hand, if we don’t set the standards, who will? And if we don’t start here, then where?

Keystone or no Keystone, the fight against climate change will go on, because our lives and our children’s lives depend on it. It’s not a game we can stop playing—but we sure shouldn’t make it even harder for ourselves to win.

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Tom Farrell’s nuclear fantasy

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Tom Farrell doesn’t get it. Dominion Power, the utility of which he is CEO, has been all about building natural gas plants for the past couple of years, as it rushes to take advantage of cheap fracked gas. Out with the aging coal plants that had been its first love, in with the next cheap thing, and never mind the pollution! Then suddenly two weeks ago, faced with a question about climate change, Farrell told reporters the answer is more nuclear plants.

Mother Earth to Tom Farrell: The correct answer is “renewable energy.”

Most of the rest of the country gets this. Wind supplied more new electric generation than natural gas did in 2012. More people work in solar energy than in coal mining. Renewable energy has overtaken nuclear worldwide. Almost no one is building nuclear plants, partly because—here’s an inconvenient truth for you, Tom—they cost too much. Almost three years ago a Duke University study found that power from new nuclear plants is more expensive than solar energy, and the cost of solar has only gone down since then.

But Farrell is convinced wind and solar can’t provide reliable electricity to power the whole grid. You’d think he’d been reading propaganda from the Koch Brothers and had come to believe that if there are solar panels somewhere and a cloud crosses the sun, the whole grid crashes.

Can I just point out here that Dominion’s own North Anna nuclear reactors shut down suddenly in 2011 following an earthquake in Virginia, and the grid did not crash? Even though nuclear is one-third of Dominion’s Virginia portfolio, and North Anna represents more than half of that? And even though, while weather forecasters are pretty good at predicting regional cloud cover, no one can yet predict an earthquake?

The reason the grid didn’t crash is that grid operators make sure there is enough surplus generation available to keep supplying power even at times of catastrophic failure. And note that the nuclear plants didn’t come back online when the clouds cleared off, either. They were down for four months.

If nuclear power is more expensive than renewables, and it has to be backed up 100% with other forms of energy, for much longer time periods, where is the place for new nuclear?

As the CEO of a utility, Tom Farrell should know better. He should also know about the new study demonstrating that renewable energy alone—onshore wind, offshore wind, and solar energy—can power the entire grid 99.9% of the time. The study authors show that doing this would actually cost less than conventional sources of electricity, assuming you include in the price the “external” cost society pays for the use of fossil fuels. That is, if you factor in the cost of climate change, it’s cheaper to build renewable energy than new fossil fuel plants.

Climate aside, there’s other evidence for the superior value of renewable energy in providing price stability for customers and a whole range of benefits for the grid. And of course, for meeting demand at the cheapest possible cost, you can’t beat energy efficiency.

It’s time to face reality, Tom Farrell. If all you care about is making money for Dominion today, your natural gas strategy probably makes sense. But if you care about tomorrow—or even about the big picture today—it doesn’t. Either way, there’s no room in the picture for expensive new nuclear plants.

And if you’re sincerely concerned about climate change, now would be a good time for Dominion to invest in energy efficiency, wind and solar.

*    *    *

Note to readers: Willett Kempton, one of the authors of the study cited above on powering the grid with renewable energy, will be speaking at a townhall meeting sponsored by Sierra Club and Environment America this Wednesday, March 13, at the MetroStage Theatre, 1201 North Royal St., Alexandria, VA. The meeting is open to the public (Tom Farrell is especially invited). To RSVP, contact Phillip Ellis at phillip.ellis@sierraclub.org or 571-970-0275.

 

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Dominion takes the wrong way on solar

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On February 12, Virginia’s State Corporation Commission held a public hearing to decide whether to approve Dominion Virginia Power’s plan to buy 3 megawatts of solar power from Virginia residents and businesses to sell to the company’s voluntary Green Power Program. Sound like a good idea? It’s not.

Yes, Virginians want solar power. Investing in solar means stably priced electricity, cleaner air and lower greenhouse gas emissions. Solar power is now cost-effective in Virginia even in the absence of state incentives, thanks to federal tax credits and a steep decline in the price of solar panels. But a high upfront cost still limits who can afford to install it.

Utilities and the SCC have a role to play in bringing new solar power onto the grid. Dominion’s program to install 30 megawatts of solar on leased rooftops, which the SCC approved this fall, provides an example of how utilities can strengthen the grid, diversify their power sources, supply valuable peak-demand electricity, and contribute to their own learning curve on integrating renewable energy, all while meeting a portion of their customers’ demand for clean power.

The 3-megawatt program, on the other hand, gets nothing right. Under the program, customers who have solar panels would sell all their solar power to Dominion for 15 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), and buy regular fossil-fuel electricity (known as “brown power”) from Dominion at the normal retail rate of about 11 cents. Cost to Dominion: 4 cents/kWh.

Dominion would then resell the solar power to the participants in its Green Power Program, not for the 4 cents it costs the company, but for 11 cents. Dominion would keep 7 cents/kWh.

Dominion tells us that the 7 cents would go to its rate base, not its own bottom line. But it’s clear who loses. The do-gooders who pay extra on their utility bills for the Green Power Program would pay 11 cents for something Dominion bought for 4 cents. They are being played for chumps.

Last year the Green Power Program bought Virginia solar power directly for 4 cents/kWh through the purchase of renewable energy certificates. So why should the program pay 11 cents for something it can get for 4?

Since Dominion administers the program, it will be up to the SCC to prevent this misuse of its funds.

This is only part of the problem. The reason Dominion wants to shift the cost of the solar purchase onto the Green Power Program is its insistence that the value of solar energy isn’t the retail rate of electricity, but is the utility’s “avoided cost”—roughly, the price at which it can buy brown power on the wholesale market, which is around 4 cents/kWh.

Of course, if the current wholesale price were the only thing that mattered, you’d have to question why Dominion ever builds its own electric generation, including its new coal-fired plant that delivers power at 9.3 cents/kWh.

The SCC allows Dominion to build its own generation in Virginia for a host of other reasons, all of which apply equally to Virginia solar. Rooftop solar also provides significant additional benefits to the utility and the electric grid that utility-supplied brown power does not. A number of recent studies have quantified these benefits to prove that net-metered solar (where customers sell solar power to the grid at the retail rate) lowers costs for everyone.

Yet Dominion wants to shift costs onto a voluntary program, while keeping the benefits. This is bad for the Green Power Program, and it sets a terrible precedent for valuing solar that could retard its growth in Virginia. And that would be bad for all of us.

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Renewable energy makes small gains in Virginia’s 2013 legislative session

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The Virginia General Assembly will soon wrap up its work on the 2013 legislative session. Renewable energy advocates began the session with high hopes for a series of bills that promised to reform our renewable energy law, expand net-metering, and open up new opportunities for financing solar systems and small wind turbines.

So how did we do? Well, this is Virginia. Progress is slow, the utilities are powerful, and half the legislature doesn’t believe in climate change. On the other hand, they do believe in business. Under the circumstances, we did okay.

Renewable Portfolio Standards: bye-bye, bonuses

Readers of this blog already know the long, miserable tale of Virginia’s weak and ineffective, voluntary renewable portfolio standard (RPS), which has enriched utilities with tens of millions of dollars in incentives without bringing any new renewable energy projects to Virginia. This year the legislature went halfway to fixing the problem. Legislation negotiated between the office of the Attorney General and the utilities will deprive utilities of future ill-gotten gains for meeting the RPS law, but won’t change the pathetic nature of the law itself.

Stripping out the RPS incentives was only part of a bigger, more complex bill that sweetens the deal for utilities in other ways, so it’s hard to judge whether the legislation as a whole marks a victory for consumers. Skeptics will note that Dominion’s stock price has actually gone up several percentage points since the deal was announced, which you wouldn’t expect if the AG were correct that the bill will save consumers close to a billion dollars over time.

What is clear is that the RPS remains as voluntary and as crummy as it ever was, but the utilities can no longer use it to rip off ratepayers while pretending to be good citizens. Some environmental groups consider stripping out the incentives a bad thing, on the theory that only by giving utilities a bonus can we expect them to meet the goals. Other groups (including the Sierra Club) believe Dominion, at least, will want to maintain its greenwashed public image by continuing to meet the RPS goals, and that ending the consumer rip-off is worth celebrating.

Sure, if the goals had brought wind and solar to Virginia, the Sierra Club would have considered the incentives a tolerable price to pay. As it happened, Dominion and the other utilities continuously rebuffed efforts over the years to improve the RPS. Had Dominion approached the RPS as an opportunity to bring real renewable energy to Virginia rather than as a cash cow to be milked for its own advantage, the company would have saved itself a public relations fiasco and likely kept its bonuses, too. Surely, someone at HQ should be out of a job right now.

Taking the long view, it is also worth noting that getting rid of the free money is a necessary first step towards a mandatory RPS in Virginia, which would unleash market forces for renewable energy that don’t emerge with a voluntary law. Utilities would oppose such a move more vigorously if they still had incentives to protect that were available only under the voluntary program.

. . . but reform efforts fail again

These views all assume the legislature will someday pass a bill to improve the goals and bring wind and solar projects to Virginia, without which the RPS is meaningless anyway. Surely legislators must recognize how pointless it is to have an RPS that can be met with out-of-state, pre-World War II hydro, plus some trash and wood-burning and a few assorted projects that put no power on the grid. (Even without the performance incentives, utilities remain entitled to pass along to customers the cost of meeting the RPS goals.)

Bills to improve the goals should have passed the legislature this year as part of the reform package. HB 1946 (Lopez) and SB 1269  (McEachin) even received the support of Dominion Power for provisions that would limit most future purchases for the RPS to high-quality projects like wind and solar. What killed the bills seems to have been a combination of opposition from vested interests and sheer cussedness on the part of some Republicans, who were engaged in partisan maneuvers that had nothing at all to do with renewable energy.

As usual, we are left hoping for better luck next year.  Meanwhile, however, a couple of other RPS bills made incremental progress. Most notably, HB 1917 (Surovell) adds solar thermal energy to the definition of renewable energy; as of this writing it has passed the House and is on the Senate floor.

A loss for more honest competition among fuels

There are more ways to support renewable energy than through an RPS, of course. One of my favorite bills would have required utilities and the State Corporation Commission to consider the long-term price stability of fuels used in electric power generation. HB 1943 (Lopez) would have helped price-stable wind and solar compete against notoriously price-volatile natural gas. It’s an idea that should appeal to fair-minded conservatives, so it’s a shame it hasn’t gained traction since first being introduced in 2012. However, it died in committee in the face of opposition from Dominion Power, which doesn’t want any interference with its plans for new natural gas plants.

Power Purchase Agreements get a “pilot”

Two bills passed the legislature to allow some third-party power purchase agreements (PPAs) for wind and solar within Dominion’s territory. Under a PPA, an installer retains ownership of the solar equipment, with the customer buying the electricity that is generated. This arrangement has two primary advantages: the customer can “go solar” with no money down and no responsibility for the equipment; and in the case of a tax-exempt entity like a church or a university, it provides a way to access federal tax credits worth 30% of the system cost.

The bills were designed to prevent a recurrence of a dispute that erupted in 2011 when a Staunton-based solar company, Secure Futures, installed a large solar system at Washington & Lee University under a PPA. Dominion issued “cease and desist” letters insisting that only it could sell electricity in its assigned territory. Although Virginia law is unclear on this point, the university and the solar company capitulated in the face of massive litigation costs. Since then Dominion’s army of lawyers has proven as effective as any statute in stopping further efforts to use PPAs in Virginia.

This year’s bills, SB 1023 (Edwards) and HB 2334 (Yancey), were originally written to allow third-party PPAs wherever customers can currently install renewable energy systems that they own themselves. They were significantly scaled back to win acceptance from Dominion Power. (AEP and the coops wouldn’t play at all, so legal ambiguity remains the rule in their territories.)

The bills allow up to 50 megawatts’ worth of solar and wind installations using PPAs, in Dominion territory only, as a pilot program.  Whether net-metered or not, they will be counted against the current net-metering cap of 1% of the utility’s generation. Tax-exempt entities can have a facility of any size up to 1 megawatt (500 kW if they net meter); taxable entities must have a minimum size of at least 50 kW (so no homeowner need apply). PPAs that do not meet the requirements are expressly prohibited in Dominion territory.

Agricultural net metering, yes; community net metering, no

A bill to allow agricultural net metering also passed this year. HB 1695 (Minchew) allows the electricity from a single solar, wind, or digester gas facility to be attributed to two or more electricity meters as long as they are all on the same property and have the same owner. Thus, for example, a farmhouse, barn and other out-buildings can all share in the benefits of solar panels on one of the buildings, even if each building is separately metered.

Originally the bill would also have enabled community net metering, sometimes known as solar gardens, but the utilities opposed it. Bowing to political reality, Delegate Minchew scaled it back. The bill is notable, however, for making progress without including any provisions that seem capable of doing mischief.

A note about all the bills: In Virginia, the governor can sign a bill, veto it, or send it back to the legislature with amendments of his own, so none of these bills are final as of this writing.

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For electric power generation, the end of fossil fuels is in sight

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The rap on renewable energy is that it’s too variable to meet society’s demand for a constant supply of electricity. The answer to the problem turns out to be: More renewables.

111022-N-OH262-322Climate change is acting like an ever-tightening vise on our energy options. Each year that passes without dramatic decreases in our use of carbon-emitting fuels means the cuts we have to make simply get more drastic. By 2030, say experts, we must entirely replace coal with efficiency and renewable energy, or fry. Even the most intrepid environmentalists wonder if it can be done without huge price hikes and wholesale changes in how we live and use energy–changes that society may not accept.

A new study out of the University of Delaware shows it is possible to power the grid 99.9% of the time with only solar and wind energy, at a cost comparable to what we are paying today. This counters the conventional wisdom that we will always need large amounts of fossil fuel as a backup when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. It also means the goal of getting largely beyond fossil fuels by 2030 is not just achievable, but practical.

The study focused on a regional transmission grid known as PJM, which encompasses parts or all of fourteen states, mostly in the Mid-Atlantic. Researchers ran 28 billion computer simulations to find the most cost-effective combinations of wind and solar that could power the entire grid, at the least possible cost and with minimal amounts of energy storage. The winning combination relied on natural gas turbines for backup on only five days out of the four years modeled.

The study authors looked for the least cost taking account of carbon and other external costs of fossil fuels, which are not being accounted for today, but they also assumed no technology improvements over time, making their cost estimates conservative overall. All the least-cost combinations used much more storage than we have today, but needed it for only 9 to 72 hours to get through the entire four years modeled.

The secret to dealing with the inherent variability of wind and solar, it turns out, is to build even more wind and solar. One wind turbine is unreliable, but tens of thousands spread across a dozen states greatly reduces the variability problem, and tens of thousands of wind turbines balanced with millions of solar panels is better still. To get to 99.9% renewables, you keep adding wind turbines and solar panels until you are producing three times the electricity that you actually need to meet demand. To power the grid with renewables just 90% of the time, you would have to produce “only” 1.8 times the electricity needed. (And yes, we have the windy sites and the sunny places to support all those projects.)

While it may sound strange to build more generation than you need, that is already the way grid operators ensure reliability. To take one example, if you were in Virginia when the “Big One” struck in 2011, you will recall that the earthquake caused the North Anna nuclear plant to shut down for four months. Nuclear energy provides a third of the electricity in Dominion Virginia Power’s service territory, and yet the lights stayed on. That’s because the grid wizards at PJM simply called on other power sources that had been idle or that had spare capacity.

The other component of reliability is the ability to match demand for power, which rises and falls with the time of day, weather, and other factors. So-called “baseload” plants like nuclear, coal, and some natural gas turbines don’t offer that flexibility and must be supplemented with other sources or stored energy. PJM currently uses more than 1,300 different generating sources, as well as about 4% storage in the form of pumped hydro. The right combination of other sources can replace baseload plants entirely.

wind turbine-wikimedia

Pairing wind and solar improves their ability to meet demand reliably. Onshore wind tends to blow most strongly at night, while solar energy provides power during the peak demand times of the day. Offshore wind power is also expected to match demand well. Combining them all reduces the need for back-up power.

But until now policy makers have assumed that solar and wind won’t be able to power the grid reliably, even when combined and spread out over PJM’s more than 200,000 square miles, and with the addition of wind farms off the coast. Critics have insisted that renewable energy requires lots of back-up generating capacity, especially from some natural gas turbines that can ramp up and down quickly. New gas turbines have even been designed specifically to integrate with renewables in anticipation of increasing amounts of wind and solar coming onto the grid.

This makes the work of the U. Delaware researchers a game-changer by showing that wind and solar can be backed up primarily by more wind and solar. And so we can begin planning for a future entirely without fossil fuels, knowing that when we get there, the lights will still be on.