Tag Archives: Virginia

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Tiny Virginia subcommittee tasked with deciding future of bills related to EPA’s Clean Power Plan; meeting set for December 17

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Photo credit: Sierra Club

Photo credit: Sierra Club

The EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan could reshape Virginia’s energy future for the next fifteen years, and possibly permanently. If the state takes advantage of this opportunity, it will reduce carbon pollution, improve human health, save money for consumers, drive job creation in the fast-growing technology sector, and make our grid stronger and more secure.

If the state doesn’t act, EPA will design its own plan for Virginia, ensuring reduced carbon emissions but without the flexibility the state would have by doing it for itself.

This presents a conundrum for Virginia’s General Assembly, which is not known for embracing federal environmental regulations. The usual skepticism was on display on November 19, when the Senate and House Commerce and Labor Committees met in a joint session to take up the Clean Power Plan—or more precisely, to give utilities and the State Corporation Commission staff the chance to attack it.

At the conclusion of that meeting, the two Republican committee chairs, Senator John Watkins and Delegate Terry Kilgore, named three members of each committee—two Republicans and one Democrat from each chamber—to a special subcommittee tasked with deciding what kind of legislative action the General Assembly should take in response to the Clean Power Plan. Kilgore also put himself on the subcommittee, which will now take up any bills that Virginia legislators introduce related to the Plan.

This subcommittee has scheduled its first meeting for December 17 at 1:00 p.m. in Senate Room A of the General Assembly building in Richmond. By law, all committee meetings are open to the public.

According to General Assembly procedure, before anyone else in the entire legislature can consider a bill, it will have to pass muster with these seven men. So who are these hugely important people, and what is the likelihood that they will seize this historic opportunity to make Virginia a leader in clean energy?

The Senate members consist of Republicans Frank Wagner and Benton Chafin and Democrat Dick Saslaw. Wagner and Saslaw were obvious choices given their seniority on the committee and active role on energy issues. Chafin—well, we’ll get to him in a moment.

Frank Wagner is from Virginia Beach and is known for his interest in energy generally, and especially in promoting new projects. He sponsored the legislation that led to the Virginia Energy Plan in 2006 and has been an important supporter of offshore wind development, perhaps reflecting his undergraduate degree in Ocean Engineering and his Tidewater residence.

The General Assembly website says Wagner is the president of Davis Boatworks, a vessel repair facility whose principal customer is the Defense Department. Living in the Hampton Roads area, Wagner is aware of how real sea level rise is; presumably he understands the connection to climate change.

In spite of his interest in offshore wind, coal rules when it comes to funding Wagner’s political campaigns. The Virginia Public Access Project shows coal giant Alpha Natural Resources was Wagner’s second-best donor over the years, with a total of $43,643 in campaign money since 2003, ahead of Dominion Power’s $37,350. Energy and mining interests combined gave gifts totaling $188,152. Of this, $350 came from Highland New Wind Development LLC back in 2008 and $250 came from the offshore wind company Seawind in 2010.

Of course, who gives money to an elected official does not necessarily dictate how that official votes. But it probably should be mentioned that for the 2014 session, Wagner earned an F on the Sierra Club’s Climate and Energy Scorecard, disappointing clean energy advocates who have sometimes had reason to see him as an ally.

Also a low performer on the energy scorecard is Dick Saslaw, scraping by with a D. Saslaw is a career politician who was first elected to the GA in 1976, when he was 36. (He is now 74.) His biography lists his background as an owner and operator of gas stations.

Saslaw is the Senate Democratic Leader and used to be Chair of the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee, until his party lost the Senate. In theory, his leadership position in the Democratic Party should make him a defender of President Obama’s climate initiative. In practice, not so much.

Although he is a Fairfax County Democrat, Saslaw does not share his constituents’ enthusiasm for wind and solar, nor in general, their concern for the environment. Somebody once told him that renewable energy costs a lot; that’s been his story ever since, and he’s sticking with it, facts be damned.

Saslaw is proud of his close ties to Dominion Virginia Power, whose interests reliably predict his votes on any given bill. The Virginia Public Access Project reports that Dominion has given more money to Saslaw than to any other legislator. In 2014 alone, Dominion gave Saslaw $25,000. Over the years, Dominion’s contributions to Saslaw have totaled $240,508, making the utility Saslaw’s top donor.

Saslaw has also received more money from Appalachian Power than any other Democrat–$44,000–even though that utility does not provide service anywhere in his district. In addition, coal interests gave him $90,250, natural gas companies ponied up $50,250, and the nuclear industry chipped in $28,000.

A single contribution of $250 makes up the only entry under “alternative energy.”

This brings us to new Senator Ben Chafin, the Republican delegate from Southwest Virginia who replaced Democratic Senator Phil Puckett (he of the Tobacco Commission scandal). Chafin is a lawyer and farmer, and as his website informs us, “Ben Chafin has a proven record fighting for the coal industry. Ben sponsored successful legislation (House Bill 1261) to fight against Obama EPA’s effort to kill the industry through over-regulation. Ben will continue to work in Richmond to protect coal and grow other Southwest industries like natural gas.”

Not surprisingly, coal interests led all other industry donors to Chafin’s 2013 campaign for Delegate and his 2014 campaign for Senate ($59,000 altogether), though he did pretty well by natural gas, too ($14,150). As a delegate, Chafin earned a gentleman’s C on the Sierra Club scorecard, but it would probably be a mistake to pin our hopes on his becoming a clean energy champion. His role on the subcommittee is surely to give Coal a voice.

On the other hand, Chafin must recognize that the economics of fracked gas and ever-more competitive wind and solar means Virginia coal has no chance of ever regaining its former glory. Southwest Virginia now needs to craft a strategic retreat from mining and work on economic diversification. That’s not inconsistent with the Clean Power Plan.

On the House side—but here I have to digress for a moment to comment on the seemingly random composition of the House Commerce and Labor Committee. The Senate side is bad enough; any Democrat who has evinced environmental sympathies over the years has been dumped from the Senate Commerce and Labor, and when he was in power, Saslaw did a lot of the dumping.

But it’s worse over at the House. The leadership keeps reshuffling its energy committee, as if in a frantic effort to make sure nobody learns anything, while the delegates who actually came to the job with an interest and knowledge of energy never seem to get a turn. Energy law is a hard area to learn. It’s complicated, and if you don’t have time to master it, you are even more likely to accept guidance from either the party leader who tells you how he wants you to vote, or the glib industry lobbyists who assure you they have the public’s welfare at heart just as much as you do. (Plus they give you money!)

So Chairman Terry Kilgore had little enough to work with on his committee. The three delegates he named to this incredibly important subcommittee, though they are undoubtedly smart and hardworking people, bring no discernable expertise on either climate or energy to the General Assembly’s review of the Clean Power Plan.

Well, digression over.

Terry Kilgore himself is a lawyer and a 20-year member of the House from the coalfields region of southwest Virginia. Dominion is his top individual donor, at $122,000, but coal interests together make up the single biggest category of givers to his campaigns, at $243,188, with electric utilities at $218,680, natural gas at $97,830, the oil industry at $16,400, and nuclear energy at $8,500. Just since 2013, he’s taken in over $136,000 from energy and mining interests.

That’s awfully good money for a safe seat, and his votes have reflected it. His energy votes earned him a D on the Sierra Club scorecard. It’s unlikely that he will abandon his coal friends, but like Senator Chafin, he will serve his constituents best if he works to attract new business to his struggling region. Home weatherization and energy efficiency programs would be popular there, and solar energy is one of the fastest-growing industries in America.

The other House subcommittee members Kilgore appointed are Republicans Jackson Miller and Ron Villanueva and Democrat Mathew James. Jackson Miller is a Manassas Realtor and former police officer who has been in the House since 2006. The bills he has introduced primarily reflect his interests in real estate and criminal law, although he also introduced legislation supporting uranium mining. He has received a total of $79,252 from energy and mining companies since 2010, primarily electric utilities, natural gas, coal, nuclear, and uranium. He earned a D on the Climate and Energy Scorecard. Why he is on this subcommittee is anyone’s guess, but certainly Northern Virginia stands to gain a lot of technology jobs if the state develops its clean energy industries as it should.

Virginia Beach Republican Ron Villanueva has not been as popular with the energy and mining companies, whose donations to his campaigns have totaled $20,550. Villanueva’s website says he was the first Filipino-American elected to state office in Virginia when he became a delegate in 2009. Villanueva has been friendly to the solar industry, and while he received a D on the scorecard, he also received an award from the Sierra Club for his work on a bill to provide a tax credit for renewable energy projects. (The bill was converted to a grant in the Senate but not funded.)

Like Delegate James and Senator Wagner, Villanueva lives in an area that is feeling the effects of climate change sooner than any other part of Virginia, so his constituents know how much the Clean Power Plan matters. For that matter, his day job as a partner with SEK Solutions, a military contractor, should mean he’s aware of the Pentagon’s focus on climate change as a national security issue, as well as a threat to its coastal assets.

Portsmouth Democrat Matthew James also hasn’t been especially popular in the energy industry. Since 2009, when he first ran for delegate, he has accepted a mere $5,000 from Dominion, $3,500 from coal interests, and $3,350 from the natural gas companies—token amounts by Virginia standards, but they may be due for a sudden increase.

James does not seem to have introduced any energy-related bills. However, his votes earned him an A on the Sierra Club scorecard. James is listed as the President and CEO of the Peninsula Council for Workforce Development. Maybe he will see an opportunity in the Clean Power Plan to develop jobs in the solar, wind, and energy efficiency industries, which have outperformed the economy generally.

So there you have the five Republicans and two Democrats who get first crack at any bill either facilitating Virginia’s compliance with the Clean Power Plan, or hostile to it. If they like a bill, it moves to the full Commerce and Labor committees. If they scuttle a bill, no one else in the entire legislature will get to vote on it.

That’s how it works, or doesn’t, in the Old Dominion.

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Virginia regulators approve Appalachian Power’s “solar tax”

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Virginia homeowners had better tell their solar installers to keep it under 10 kW. Photo credit Gray Watson

Virginia homeowners had better tell their solar installers to keep it under 10 kW. Photo credit Gray Watson

The State Corporation Commission has granted Appalachian Power Company’s request to be allowed to impose “standby” charges on residential customers with solar systems over 10 kilowatts. The charges can range up to more than $100 per month, regardless of how much electricity the homeowner actually draws from the grid.

In its Final Order in case number PUE-2014-00026, dated November 26, the SCC ruled that APCo’s standby charge complies with § 56-594 F of the Virginia Code, which provides for standby charges for net-metered residential systems between 10 and 20 kW. (The law does not allow for net metering of residential systems over 20 kW.)

Environmental groups intervened in the case and ran a grassroots campaign that generated over 1500 comments to the SCC, opposing what has been dubbed a “tax on the sun.” The result, however, was never in much doubt. The SCC has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to accept without scrutiny utility assertions that solar customers impose costs on other customers.

Attorneys at the Southern Environmental Law Center, who argued against the standby charges on behalf of the Sierra Club and other groups, say the SCC’s reasoning is flawed. According to Cale Jaffe, Director of the SELC’s Virginia office, “Appalachian Power actually conceded during the hearing that it was ‘not in a position’ to determine whether solar customers had ‘a positive or negative impact to the distribution cost of service.’  In other words, Appalachian Power said that solar customers might be having a positive impact in helping to reduce APCo’s distribution costs, but that the power company didn’t have the data and didn’t know one way or the other.”

Jaffe added, “We saw that piece of evidence as a fatal concession, at least with respect to the distribution portion of the charge.” Yet a reading of the Final Order suggests the Commission never even considered the point.

The SCC allowed APCo, like Dominion before it, to consider only transmission and distribution costs, ignoring generation costs for now. Advocates urge that solar systems produce power at times of peak demand, reducing the need for utilities to buy expensive peak power, and therefore actually saving them money. The utilities dispute this, but it is worth noting that APCo’s most recent Integrated Resource Plan from March of this year projects that solar power will be cheaper than its avoided cost of energy by 2019. But of course, the point of standby charges isn’t about the cost of solar, but about preventing customers from generating their own power.

In spite of all the time and money APCo has spent to get approval for the standby charges, the utility has said that only five existing customers will be affected. The real impact will be to limit the number of homeowners who choose to install large solar systems going forward. The prospect of paying high standby fees will likely discourage APCo customers from buying systems over 10 kW, as has happened in Dominion’s territory after the SCC allowed Dominion Virginia Power to impose similar standby fees a year ago.

Although a 10 kW system is bigger than the average Virginia home needs by itself, people with electric cars can find their demand exceeds that limit. Moreover, Dominion Virginia Power has signaled that it would like to impose standby charges on all of its solar customers, regardless of system size.

The actions of Virginia utilities and the SCC put the commonwealth in the thick of a nationwide battle over customer-owned, “distributed” solar. While most studies analyzing the value of solar have concluded that distributed solar benefits the public and the grid, utilities fear it will eat into their profit margins. They see Virginia as a good place to establish a precedent friendly to the utility viewpoint, due to the commonwealth’s history of allowing its utilities to dictate energy policy. So far, this episode proves them right.

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Virginia’s SCC staff attacks EPA over the Clean Power Plan

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Virginians rally in front of U.S. EPA Headquarters in Washington, DC in support of the Clean Power Plan

Virginians rally in front of U.S. EPA Headquarters in Washington, DC in support of the Clean Power Plan

In recent years paleontologists have come to believe that the dinosaurs did not go extinct; they evolved into today’s chickens and other birds. It turns out, however, that some of them did not evolve. Instead, they took jobs at Virginia’s State Corporation Commission.

Now they’ve put their DNA on full display with comments they filed on the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. The proposed EPA rules, under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act, would require states to reduce the power plant CO2 emissions driving climate change. The staffers assert primly that they “take no position on the broad policy issues,” but that they feel “compelled” to point out all the ways the plan is “arbitrary, capricious, unsupported, and unlawful.” These mostly boil down to their claims that the plan will force coal plant closures, raise rates significantly and threaten service reliability—claims experts say are badly off-base.

Note that the commissioners themselves didn’t sign onto these comments. They come from the career staff at the Energy Regulatory Division, led by Bill Stevens, the Director, and Bill Chambliss, the General Counsel. This is pretty peculiar. I can’t think of a single other agency of government where the staff would file comments on a federal rulemaking without the oversight of their bosses.

Bill and Bill acknowledge in a footnote that the staff comments represent only their own views and not those of the commissioners. But that distinction has already been lost on at least one lawmaker. Today Speaker of the House William J. Howell released a statement declaring, “The independent, nonpartisan analysis of the State Corporation Commission confirms that President Obama’s environmental policies could devastate Virginia’s economy.”

And really, “devastate”? But that’s the kind of hysteria you hear from opponents of the Clean Power Plan. While the rest of us see healthier air, huge opportunities for job growth in the clean energy sector, and the chance to avoid the worst effects of climate disruption, the Friends of Coal see only devastation. And no wonder: Howell accepted $14,000 from the coal industry just this year alone.

But back to what the Bills over at the SCC think about the Clean Power Plan. How did they arrive at their conclusion that it would raise rates? According to Cale Jaffe, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center who practices extensively before the SCC, “Staff never did an analysis of an actual plan to comply with the Clean Power Plan, which has a lot of flexibility built into it. Instead, the Staff simply took Dominion Virginia Power’s last Integrated Resource Plan from 2013 and used it as a proxy for a compliance plan. That’s a significant flaw that skews the Staff’s analysis.  The Dominion plan, after all, was released nearly a year before the EPA even announced its rule.”

Compounding the error, says Jaffe, the staff “artificially inflated the cost by assuming that the only compliance strategy would be for Dominion to build a new nuclear reactor: the most expensive resource, which is not a required compliance option.”

We can all agree with the staff that nuclear plants are appallingly expensive. That may be why the EPA doesn’t assume most states will build them as part of their compliance strategy. To the contrary, the expectation is that states will respond with energy efficiency, wind and solar—all resources that are plentiful in Virginia but largely untapped so far.

As Jaffe notes, “an independent analysis of the actual Clean Power Plan itself shows that Virginia can achieve its goals at a fraction of the cost while lowering Virginians’ bills by 8%.”

We have seen time and again that the SCC staff has never been friendly to either renewable energy or energy efficiency, so it’s no surprise that their comments dismiss them as unworkable. Indeed, it is clear from the comments they filed that their real interest is promoting an anti-EPA, pro-coal agenda. Otherwise it would be hard to understand why they would stray so far from their own area of practice to attack the very legality of the Clean Power Plan.

Jaffe lists a number of other ways the SCC staff screwed up, but you get the picture: careful, reasoned analysis wasn’t the point. Still, you’d think that if agency staffers decide to go rogue like this, they would be careful to get the facts right.

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Update: I have heard from some sources that the SCC staff had the blessing of at least one commissioner in putting forth their comments, and that all three commissioners may have known. If so, that’s even worse.

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McAuliffe’s Energy Plan has a little something for (almost) everyone

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On October 1, the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy released the McAuliffe administration’s rewrite of the Virginia Energy Plan. Tomorrow, on October 14, Governor McAuliffe is scheduled to speak about the plan at an “executive briefing” to be held at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond. Will he talk most about fossil fuels, or clean energy? Chances are, we’ll hear a lot about both.

Like the versions written by previous governors, McAuliffe’s plan boasts of an “all of the above” approach. But don’t let that put you off. In spite of major lapses of the drill-baby-drill variety, this plan has more about solar energy, offshore wind, and energy efficiency, and less about coal, than we are used to seeing from a Virginia governor.

Keep in mind that although the Virginia Code requires an energy plan rewrite every four years, the plan does not have the force of law. It is intended to lay out principles, to be the governor’s platform and a basis for action, not the action itself. This is why they tend to look like such a hodge-podge: it’s just so easy to promise every constituency what it wants. The fights come in the General Assembly, when the various interests look for follow-through.

Here’s my take on some of the major recommendations: IMG_3954

Renewable energy. Advocates and energy libertarians will like the barrier-busting approach called for in the Energy Plan, including raising the cap on customer-owned solar and other renewables from the current 1% of a utility’s peak load to 3%; allowing neighborhoods and office parks to develop and share renewable energy projects; allowing third-party power purchase agreements (PPAs) statewide and doubling both the size of projects allowed and the overall program limit; and increasing the size limits on both residential (to 40 kW) and commercial (to 1 MW) net metered projects, with standby charges allowed only for projects over 20 kW (up from the current 10 kW for residential, but seemingly now to be applied to all systems).

It also proposes a program that would allow utilities to build off-site solar facilities on behalf of subscribers and provide on-bill financing to pay for it. This sounds rather like a true green power program, but here the customers would pay to build and own the project instead of simply buying electricity from renewable energy projects.

Elsewhere in the recommendations, the plan calls for “flexible financing mechanisms” that would support both energy projects and energy efficiency.

In case unleashing the power of customers doesn’t do enough for solar, the plan also calls for the establishment of a Virginia Solar Energy Development Authority tasked with the development of 15 megawatts (MW) of solar energy at state and local government facilities by June 30, 2017, and another 15 MW of private sector solar by the same date. Though extremely modest by the standards of Maryland and North Carolina, these goals, if met, would about triple Virginia’s current total. I do like the fact that these are near-term goals designed to boost the industry quickly. But let’s face it: these drops don’t even wet the bucket. We need gigawatts of solar over the next few decades, so let’s set some serious long-term goals for this Authority, and give it the tools to achieve them.

Finally, the plan reiterates the governor’s enthusiasm for building offshore wind, using lots of exciting words (“full,” “swift,” “with vigor”), but neglecting how to make it happen. Offshore wind is this governor’s Big Idea. I’d have expected more of a plan.

And while we’re in “I’d have expected more” territory, you have to wonder whatever happened to the mandatory Renewable Portfolio Standard that McAuliffe championed when running for office. Maybe our RPS is too hopeless even for a hopeless optimist.

Energy Efficiency. Reducing energy consumption and saving money for consumers and government are no-brainer concepts that have led to ratepayers in many other states paying lower electricity bills than we do, even in the face of higher rates. Everyone can get behind energy efficiency, with the exception of utilities that make money selling more electricity. (Oh, wait—those would be our utilities.) The Energy Plan calls for establishing a Virginia Board on Energy Efficiency, tasked with getting us to the state’s goal of 10% savings two years ahead of schedule. But glaringly absent is any mention of the role of building codes. Recall that Governor McDonnell bowed to the home builders and allowed a weakened version of the residential building code to take effect. So far Governor McAuliffe hasn’t reversed that decision. If he is serious about energy efficiency, this is an obvious, easy step. Where is it?

Fracking_Site_in_Warren_Center,_PA_04

Natural Gas. Did I say offshore wind was the governor’s Big Idea? Well, now he’s got a bigger one: that 500-mile long natural gas pipeline Dominion wants to build from West Virginia through the middle of Virginia and down to North Carolina. Governor McAuliffe gets starry-eyed talking about fracked gas powering a new industrial age in Virginia. So it’s not surprising that the Energy Plan includes support for gas pipelines among other infrastructure projects. As for fracking itself, though, the recommendations have nothing to say. A curious omission, surely? And while we are on the subject of natural gas, this plan is a real testament to the lobbying prowess of the folks pushing for natural gas vehicles. Given how little appetite the public has shown for this niche market, it’s remarkable to see more than a page of recommendations for subsidies and mandates. Some of these would apply to electric vehicles as well. But if we really want to reduce energy use in transportation, shouldn’t we give people more alternatives to vehicles? It’s too bad sidewalks, bicycles and mass transit (however fueled) get no mention in the plan.

Photo credit Ed Brown, Wikimedia Commons.

Coal. Coal has fallen on hard times, indeed, when even Virginia’s energy plan makes no recommendations involving it. Oh, there’s a whole section about creating export markets for coal technology, as in, helping people who currently sell equipment to American coal companies find a living in other ways. These might be Chinese coal mining companies; but then again, they might be companies that mine metals in Eastern Europe, or build tunnels, or do something totally different. The Energy Plan seems to be saying that coal may be on its way out, but there’s no reason it should drag the whole supply chain down with it. Good thinking.

Nuclear. If you think the coal industry has taken a beating these past few years, consider nuclear. Nationwide, the few new projects that haven’t been canceled are behind schedule and over budget, going forward at all only thanks to the liberality of Uncle Sam and the gullibility of state lawmakers. But there it is in the Energy Plan: we’re going to be “a national and global leader in nuclear energy.” Watch your wallets, people. Dominion already raided them for $300 million worth of development costs for a third plant at North Anna. That was just a down payment.

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

Offshore drilling. As with nuclear, favoring offshore oil drilling seems to be some kind of perverse obsession for many Virginia politicians. Sure enough, the energy plan says we should “fully support” it. As for the downside potential for a massive spill of crude oil fouling beaches, ruining fishing grounds, destroying the coastal tourism economy, and killing vast numbers of marine animals, the plan says we must be prepared “to provide a timely and comprehensive response.” I bet Louisiana was at least equally prepared.

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Utilities’ pullout won’t affect “value of solar” study

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When Virginia’s utilities made a surprise announcement on September 5th that they would no longer participate in the state’s Solar Stakeholder Group (SSG), they may have hoped that doing so would stop the group’s Value of Solar study in its tracks. Not so: on Friday, at its first meeting since the utilities withdrew, the group agreed it would issue the report on schedule, although with no further input from members—thus guaranteeing that the report reflects only input submitted while the utilities participated.

This decision was essentially a moot point, because the group had actually wrapped up its work by that September 5th date in order to give the study authors time to incorporate comments, including those from the utilities. The resulting third draft of the report was provided to the remaining group members on September 29. It reflects the work of the full 49-member committee up to September 4.

Lead authors Damian Pitt and Gilbert Michaud of Virginia Commonwealth University will do some clean-up editing and draft a cover letter. Then, in accordance with the work plan established last summer, it will be submitted to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for review. The study is due in to the Senate Rules Committee by November 1. But as noted previously by Jim Pierobon, it’s not clear how much weight the study will have in the General Assembly now that the utilities have disavowed it.

The utilities have not said why they decided to withdraw from participation. They wrote no memos, offered no analysis, and sent no polite email to other members expressing regret or anything else.

The SSG grew out of an informal “Small Solar Working Group” that formed in 2013 as a way to bring together those with an interest in non-utility-scale solar.* Like the SSG, the Working Group included representatives from the solar industry, environmental groups, local government, academia, trade associations and the electric utilities. But while the Working Group set its own broad agenda, the SSG was formed in response to a specific letter request from the Clerk of the Virginia Senate to DEQ and DMME. The letter asked for a study of “the costs and benefits of distributed solar generation and net metering.”

From that description, and knowing that the utilities hastily decamped, you might think that the SSG actually calculated costs and benefits and came up with a value of solar, and that the result was good for solar advocates but bad for utilities. But in fact, the study reaches no conclusions at all. It could more accurately be described as a study about how you would conduct a study, were you so inclined. Which no one was, because then the utilities might have left. As they did, but only after ensuring the study incorporates their views.

Thus the study wraps up with statements like, “The SSG recognizes that the short- and long-term value of solar will be dependent on a wide range of conditions and perspectives.” And this: “With greater time, resource, and data access, future studies could produce actual values for the net VOS under each methodology.”

There is nothing wrong with such a limited approach, so far as it goes. Professors Pitt and Michaud did an excellent and comprehensive job in surveying the literature, comparing previous studies, and discussing the factors relevant to the issue of solar’s value to the grid, utilities, customers, and society at large. But given that this Value of Solar study came nowhere near assigning a value of solar, it’s hard to understand what the utilities might have objected to.

Nor had there been any hints the utilities were unhappy with the process or with the first two drafts of the report. At Friday’s SSG meeting, many of the other members expressed their surprise and frustration with the utilities’ pull-out. They noted that the utilities participated fully every step of the way and provided copious comments, which were reflected in the drafts. Indeed, three utility representatives served on the twelve-member steering committee that created the work plan and oversaw the study, making it as much their work as anyone else’s. (The other steering committee members were Professor Pitt, three representatives of local government, two conservation group reps., two solar industry members, and one citizen representative.)

So why did the utilities pull out? In retrospect, it may have been their plan all along. By pulling out, they could signal to their allies their disapproval of the study and try to prevent a follow-on study that would actually calculate a value for solar. And by waiting until the last moment to pull out, they maximized their influence over the study’s content, lest it have credence outside their sphere of influence.

But what the utilities lost by this clever maneuver is the trust of the rest of the group. The SSG, like the Small Solar Working Group before it, provided a forum for discussion among the many different parties with an interest in distributed solar. It is incredibly important in a forum like the SSG that people trust each other to act in good faith. Otherwise, 49 people are wasting their time.

The utilities’ decision to sacrifice this trust strikes me as both stupid and unnecessary. Many of us expected that the utilities’ lobbyists would quietly tell their friends in the legislature to ignore the Value of Solar study, that they participated just to be nice guys. Openly thumbing their noses at the study did nothing except prove they aren’t nice guys and cannot be trusted.

The rural electric cooperatives will have to answer to their members, who admittedly don’t seem to pay much attention. But Dominion Virginia Power and Appalachian Power are public utilities. They hold their monopolies by the grace of the people of Virginia, and are expected to act in the interest of the people they serve. In this case, they have manifestly failed to do so.

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* I was one of the founding members of the Small Solar Working Group and was responsible for asking the Department of Environmental Quality’s Carol Wampler to facilitate the meetings. Ms. Wampler had led other successful stakeholder groups and had a gift for guiding people with disparate interests towards consensus. (Unfortunately for the people of Virginia, she retired from DEQ this summer.) She brought in the equally-dedicated Ken Jurman from the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy as a co-facilitator. The divide between the utility monopolies and everyone else proved too great to produce any consensus bills that could spur the flourishing of solar in Virginia, but it did develop a level of trust, unfortunately now compromised.

 

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Why can’t I buy solar?

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photoEvery year, on the first weekend in October, homeowners and businesses across the U.S. open their doors to a special kind of tourist: the solar wannabe. The American Solar Energy Society’s annual Solar Tour features homes with solar PV and hot water, along with an assortment of “green living” features that inspire envy and emulation.

Envy especially, I’m here to tell you. My home in the Northern Virginia suburbs is surrounded by beautiful mature trees that provide shade for my house, cooling for the neighborhood, carbon sequestration for the planet, and food for an abundance of insects, birds and other wildlife. What it doesn’t provide is a sunny place on the roof for solar panels. So when I go to houses on the DC Metro area tour, it’s a teeth-gritting experience.

I’m hardly alone. Less than a quarter of residents can install solar panels at their homes. The rest either have shade or other siting issues, or they are renters, or they live in condominiums where they don’t control the roof and common areas. That leaves the vast majority of us solar wannabes with nowhere to turn.

Some states let customers choose their electricity suppliers, which means they can select one that will supply them with renewable energy. But Virginia upholds the rights of monopolists to control our electricity supply. And my local monopolist, Dominion Virginia Power, sells only one electricity product: a mix of coal, nuclear, and natural gas, with barely a smidgen of stuff the legislature considers renewable (mainly wood trucked in from forests and burned).

I could subscribe to Dominion’s Green Power Program, but I’d still get the exact same dirty power. I’d just be paying extra for renewable energy certificates (RECs), mostly from wind farms in other states.

RECs don’t do it for me. Adding money to my utility bill for RECs is about as satisfying as buying a gallon of ordinary milk and adding a dollar extra to know that a buyer in Indiana paid for ordinary milk but got organic. Maybe both milks taste the same, but that’s not the point.

No, if I’m buying RECs, I want them to come attached to actual, Virginia-made wind or solar power. I know I’m not alone; the 20,000 people who have signed up for the Green Power Program, plus those who buy from other REC sellers like Pear and Arcadia, are proof that if Dominion cared to build wind or solar, it would find a ready market.

But it hasn’t. And Dominion also refuses to let the private market do the job. I’ve been approached by would-be solar developers who ask why they can’t put a solar array on unproductive farmland and sell the power to people like me. When that happens I swoon with delight for a moment, then glumly point them to the experience of Washington and Lee University three years ago. The university wanted to buy solar from a project on its campus but owned by a developer. Dominion came down on them like a ton of bricks, claiming a violation of its monopoly.

Dominion also opposes allowing customers to pool their money for a shared solar project, like an array on one house that could provide electricity for two or more. Sometimes called community net metering or solar gardens, and a growing trend in other states, shared solar unleashes the power of private investment by freeing up customers to build and own solar together and get credit on their utility bills for their percentage of the electricity the project puts on the grid. Imagine how much new economic activity we could create this way, and how much clean generation we could build, without state government mandates or subsidies.

There are thousands of Virginians like me who want renewable energy and are willing to pay for it. If our utilities don’t want to build it, they should step aside and let customers do it.

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Dominion’s ties to ALEC, McDonnell’s conviction, all part of one corrupt package

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Group Dominion quit ALEc image 2

Protesters gather outside the Crystal City headquarters of ALEC

A crowd of protesters gathered at the Arlington headquarters of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) on September 4 to demand that Dominion Resources, the parent of public utility monopoly Dominion Virginia Power, drop its membership in the right wing “bill mill.”

On the very same day, a jury convicted ex-Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife on federal corruption charges, setting off a new round of debate about Virginia’s lax ethics laws.

The two news items sound like different topics, but in fact they are both about the corruption undermining our democratic system. The McDonnell trial, with its focus on swank vacations, golf clubs, designer clothes and other neat stuff, actually missed the bigger breach of public trust that goes on every day. This takes the form of unlimited corporate campaign contributions and gifts to members of both parties, and the influence over legislation purchased by this largesse.

Dominion Power has spent decades and many millions of dollars building its influence in Richmond this way, to the point where most legislators don’t bother pursuing a bill if the utility signals its opposition. That’s why Virginia has not followed so many other states in requiring its utilities to invest in energy efficiency, wind and solar. Economic arguments, jobs, electricity rates—all these are talked about in committee, and all are irrelevant to the fate of a bill. The only relevant question for legislators is, “What does Dominion think?”

What Dominion thinks, though, is not about what’s good for its customers, but what’s good for its own bottom line. And this is where ALEC comes in. Dominion Virginia Power’s president, Bob Blue, sits on an ALEC committee with representatives from the climate-denial group Heartland Institute, the Koch-funded anti-environment group Americans for Prosperity, and that most oxymoronic of lobby shops, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Their purpose is to craft model state bills that protect fossil fuel profits and attack all efforts to regulate carbon emissions.

Dominion provides a straight shot from ALEC’s back-room bill-brokering to Virginia’s statute books, trampling environmental protections along the way and giving the lie to Dominion’s façade of environmental responsibility. No wonder so many of last week’s protesters were Dominion customers who objected to the utility using the money it charges them for electricity to pay its ALEC dues.

We see the result every year in the General Assembly, as bills drafted by ALEC pop up all over the place without attribution. In addition to attacking clean energy, ALEC bills oppose worker protections and minimum wage initiatives, promote stand-your-ground bills like the one at issue in the Trayvon Martin case, and of course, undermine the kinds of clean-government efforts that would reduce the influence of corporations—like campaign finance reform.

And because the voters are the only people who could prove more powerful than corporations—and the only ones who might ultimately cut off the corporate cash flow—ALEC works to undermine voting rights as well.

In the wake of the McDonnells’ convictions, Virginia legislators are once again mumbling about tightening up the rules on gifts. The discussion is half-hearted; the pay for their work is paltry and the hours are long, so they aren’t anxious to give up the perks.

But it’s too late for half-measures. Elected officials are going to have to subject themselves to a ban on gifts, and the prohibition should extend to ballgame tickets, golf getaways and sit-down dinners. The loophole that currently allows campaign funds to be used for personal use must also be closed to avoid an end-run around the gift ban.

But until we turn off the corporate cash spigot, our democracy will still have special interests, not voters, calling too many shots.

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Children need the EPA’s carbon pollution standard

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This post, from guest blogger Samantha Ahdoot, originally appeared in the August 21 edition of the Fairfax County Times. I’ve written about the threat that increasing summer temperatures poses for people who have to work outdoors in ; here, Dr. Ahdoot tells us what carbon pollution means for children.

The end of summer fun? Higher temperatures resulting from carbon pollution could limit children's outdoor time.

The end of summer fun? Higher temperatures resulting from carbon pollution could limit children’s outdoor time.

Every day, parents protect their children from a myriad of risks. By strapping them in car seats, placing them on their backs to sleep and cutting their grapes into quarters, parents do everything in their power to insure their children against harm. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan will be called many things in the upcoming months, but it is ultimately an insurance plan. It is insurance for our children against the dangers of carbon pollution and resulting climate change.

Carbon pollution presents a major risk to the health, safety and security of current and future children. Rising atmospheric carbon is making our planet hotter. While skeptics may say this remains uncertain, our major scientific organizations (NASA, NOAA, IPCC) tell us it is at least very, very likely. With this increased heat, many other climactic changes are already occurring, including melting glaciers, rising sea levels and worsening storms. These fundamental changes ultimately impact human health, and children are amongst the most vulnerable to these changes. Some impacts are already affecting children today and are being seen by pediatricians like myself.

Allergic rhinitis, for example, affects about 10 percent of American children. With later first frost and earlier spring thaw due to rising global temperature, the allergy season has become longer. In the Northern Virginia region, where I practice, it has lengthened by about two weeks. More northern regions of the country have experienced greater lengthening. Higher carbon dioxide in the atmosphere also causes ragweed plants today to produce more pollen than in preindustrial times. Allergy season is therefore both longer and more severe.

Some infectious disease patterns have already been impacted by climactic changes. As global temperatures rise, many plants and animals are migrating poleward. They are bringing diseases, like Lyme disease, with them. There is now Lyme disease in Canada, and large increases in reported cases of Lyme have occurred in the northern U.S. Maine had 175 cases in 2003 and 1300 cases in 2013, while New Hampshire had 262 cases in 2002 and greater than 1300 cases in 2013. Children under five years old, who spend the most time outside playing in high-risk areas, have the highest incidence of Lyme disease.

Increasingly long and severe heat waves also place children at risk of heat-related illness. While the elderly are at highest risk from extreme heat, some groups of children also appear to be vulnerable. Infants less than one year, for example, have immature thermoregulation, and infant mortality has been found to increase due to extreme heat. A study from MIT found that by the end of the 21st century, under a “business as usual” scenario, infant mortality rates would increase by 5.5 percent in females and 7.8 percent in males due to heat-related deaths. U.S. student athletes are a high-risk group for heat injury. Teenage boys, most commonly football players, made up 35 percent of the roughly 5,900 people treated yearly in emergency rooms for exertional heat illness between 2001 and 2009. According to the CDC, heat illness is a leading cause of disability in high school athletes, with a national estimate of 9,237 illnesses annually.

Health impacts on individuals and communities will grow significantly if we allow carbon emissions, and global temperatures, to rise unchecked. Power plants contribute approximately one-third of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution. Reducing emissions from existing fossil fuel-fired power plants represents a major step towards altering our emissions, and climate, trajectory. Obama’s Clean Power Plan is, ultimately, like a car seat- an insurance plan for our children against a significant risk of harm. The road of climate change will be long and hazardous. Our children deserve to be strapped in.

Dr. Samantha Ahdoot is pediatrician in Alexandria. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and a member of the Executive Committee of the AAP’s Council on Environmental Health.

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Finally, utility-scale solar for Virginia?

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111022-N-OH262-322After a solar buying spree in other states, Dominion Power is at last taking a look at the possibility of building utility-scale solar in Virginia.

As reported in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Dominion Resources, the parent company of Dominion Virginia Power, is considering building 220 megawatts of solar projects in Virginia, starting in 2017. The plan would involve five 40-megawatt “greenfield” projects, plus 20 megawatts located at existing power stations. (A greenfield is an area that is not already developed. So the large projects would be on former farmland, say, not closed landfills or old industrial sites.)

The company’s recent solar buys in California, Connecticut, Indiana, Georgia and Tennessee have all involved the unregulated, merchant side of Dominion Resources. But in this case, the plan is for Dominion Virginia Power to own the Virginia projects and sell the electricity to its customers here in the Commonwealth. This would require approval of the State Corporation Commission—which, as we know, is no friend to renewable energy.

A little more digging confirmed that Dominion plans to sell the solar energy to the whole rate base, rather than, say, to participants in the voluntary Green Power Program. How would they get that past the SCC? That remains unclear, but they know keeping the cost down will be key. Right now they’re looking at all the options to make it work. The company is still at the conceptual stage, is still looking for good sites of 100 acres and up, and hasn’t even made a decision to proceed.

So we should probably hold our excitement in check for now. After all, Dominion has had wind farms in Virginia “under development” for the past several years, with nary a turbine in sight.

Solar does have a few advantages over wind, though, from a utility perspective. For one, it produces power during the day, when demand is higher, while onshore wind tends to blow more at night. (Offshore wind, on the other hand, picks up in the late afternoon and evening, right at peak demand time.) And unlike wind farms in the Midwest and Great Plains, where turbines coexist peacefully with cows and cornfields, turbines in the mountains of the east have generated opposition from people concerned about impacts on forests and viewsheds. You find some curmudgeons who think solar panels are ugly, but they aren’t trying to block them wholesale at the county level.

With the sharp drop in solar costs over the last few years, large-scale solar has been looking increasingly attractive to utilities that want to beef up their renewable energy portfolios. As we learned recently, Dominion’s got a long way to go before it competes with even an average utility elsewhere. That puts it in a poor position to respond to the rapid changes heading our way. These include not just growing public demand for wind and solar and new regulatory constraints on carbon emissions, but also the much-discussed upending of the traditional utility model that depends on a captive customer base and large centralized generating plants running baseload power. Distributed generation and batteries increasingly offer customers a way to untether themselves from the grid, while wind and solar together are pushing grid operators towards a more nimble approach to meeting demand—one in which baseload is no longer a virtue.

Dominion and its fossil fuel and nuclear allies are fighting hard against the tide, but in the end, Dominion will do whatever it takes to keep making money. And right now, the smart money is on solar.

None of this means we should expect Dominion to become more friendly to pro-solar legislation that will “let our customers compete with us,” as one Dominion Vice President put it. But it does suggest an opening for legislation that would promote utility-owned solar, perhaps through the RPS or stand-alone bills.

Legislators shouldn’t view utility-owned solar as an alternative to customer-owned solar; we need both. And if being grid-tied means being denied the right to affordable solar energy, we will see customers begin to abandon the grid. But those aren’t arguments against utility-scale solar, either. Big projects like the ones Dominion proposes are critical to helping us catch up to other states and reduce our carbon emissions.

So full speed ahead, Dominion! We’re all waiting.

 

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Energy Plan must prepare Virginia for hotter summers

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A version of this blogpost was previously published in theHampton Roads Virginian-Pilot on July 20, 2014

Virginians rally in front of U.S. EPA Headquarters in Washington, DC

Virginians rally in front of U.S. EPA Headquarters in Washington, DC

“Over the past 30 years, the average resident of [the Southeast] has experienced about 8 days per year at 95° or above. Looking forward, if we continue our current emissions path, the average Southeast resident will likely experience an additional 17 to 52 extremely hot days per year by mid-century and an additional 48 to 130 days per year by then end of the century.”

            —Risky Business: The Business Risks of Climate Change in the United States

This quote comes from a report issued in June by an all-star group of business and government leaders, laying out the costs involved in higher temperatures and sea level rise. The section on the Southeast is especially likely to make you want to move north and west.

Virginia has started to focus attention on rising sea levels because they are already taking a toll on Tidewater areas, regularly flooding neighborhoods in Norfolk and eating away at the Eastern Shore. In 2013, at the behest of the General Assembly, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science produced an in-depth report on sea level rise and our options for dealing with it. The report says southeast Virginia should expect another one to two feet of sea level rise by 2040, and up to 7.5 feet by the end of the century. We have our work cut out for us, but at least we’re facing up to it.

By contrast, we have not yet begun planning for higher summer temperatures. As the Risky Business report warns, these higher temperatures will make much of the humid Southeast literally uninhabitable without air conditioning. And that has profound implications for our energy planning, starting now.

More intense summer heatwaves will place additional stress on the electric grid and cause costly spikes in power demand. Power outages, today mostly an inconvenience, will become public health emergencies unless there are back-up sources of power readily available, such as solar PV systems with battery storage distributed throughout every community.

Better building construction will be critical to keeping homes and businesses cool reliably and affordably. Since buildings last for many decades, we shouldn’t wait for summers to become deadly before we start mandating better insulation. It is vastly cheaper and more effective to build energy efficiency into a building than to retrofit it later.

This makes it especially unfortunate that the McDonnell administration caved to the home builders’ association last year and did not adopt the updated residential building codes, which would have required these kinds of improvements in new additions to our housing stock. Governor McAuliffe’s failure to reverse the decision this year remains incomprehensible.

However, the McAuliffe administration is now engaged in three planning exercises that ultimately converge around Virginia’s future in a warming world. The Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy is currently writing an update to the Virginia Energy Plan as required by statue every four years, and which must be submitted to the General Assembly this October. On a slower track, a revived Climate Commission will begin conducting its work over the course of the next year. And most recently, the Department of Environmental Quality has announced listening sessions this summer focused on the U.S. EPA’s proposed climate rules.

This timeline puts the (energy) cart before the (climate) horse. The writers of the Energy Plan will not have the benefit of the climate commission’s deliberations, and won’t know what the final EPA rules will require. With pressure from utilities, fossil fuel interests and home builders, business-as-usual thinking might prevail. That would be a mistake.

We don’t know whether the worst extremes cited in the Risky Business report will become reality, or whether the U.S. and the rest of the world will manage to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to slow the rise of the oceans and check the worst of the heatwaves. But while we hope for the best, it makes sense to plan for the worst.

And in this case, planning for the worst will also reduce the likelihood of it happening. If we improve building efficiency starting now, we will cut down on the emissions driving a Risky Business future. If our disaster preparedness includes solar panels on businesses and government buildings, we cut emissions and make the grid more resilient.

Global warming has to be part of Virginia’s energy planning from now on. It’s just too risky to ignore it.