It was good to see last week that the Supreme Court uphold California’s right to redistrict, following its ruling a couple of months ago to allow Texas to redistrict. As much as I personally dislike gerrymandering (redistricting to favor one political party), at least the Court is allowing this to happen equally. Virginia is just one of the states now doing this, and Virgina’s redistricting legislation will come to our ballots this spring. Please remember that the reason we are doing this at all is simply to level the playing field. Texas was a bully in starting this maneuver, and now other states are forced to do the same thing to keep things fair. Texans should be embarrassed and ashamed to have started this – it’s good to see Virginians and folks in other states stand up to this bully.
Changing topics – some good energy news is that Dominion Energy is being allowed to complete its facility of 176 offshore wind energy turbines. This windfarm will provide about 2.6-gigawatts, enough to power about 660,000 homes. Construction is almost complete, but the federal government told it to stop in December for unclear reasons. That decision was taken to court, with Dominion Energy prevailing and allowed to continue. Stoppage was costing about $5 million each day! That is real money and ultimately paid by all of us.
Virginians continue to face the problem of greatly increasing energy demand (driven in large part by new data centers) and not enough action to increase supply. Virginia could decide to not allow new data centers – but that would severely hurt our economy. Yet new energy installations are largely opposed by everyone living near one. For example, most people in our region strongly objected to the construction of the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline running through our community. Currently there is considerable local opposition to the compressor plant being added to this pipeline in Elliston. And even if we tried to add new natural gas-fired electrical plants, there is about a seven-year backlog in getting any of the new gas turbines needed to produce electricity. Similarly, no one wants a new nuclear plant nearby, and they take many years to be permitted. Offshore wind farms may bother the fewest people, as the only really local issue is the distant view. Globally, new electrical generation is dominated by solar, although some people object to solar fields potentially replacing agricultural fields. I wonder why people would object to landowners deciding for themselves that they want to increase their income by putting solar on their fields – seems to me that would be big government out of control.
The legislature developed some very promising legislation last month (HB 434) that might help without raising major objections from anyone (except power companies and their investors). It puts the burden on Dominion and Appalachian Power to determine how to better use the existing electrical grid to meet peak demand. Most of the time, much of the capacity to send power over the grid is not used. The grid is sized based on its ability to carry all the electricity needed at its peak (or maximum) demand. Think of an extremely hot summer day with industry humming. One way to decrease the peak demand for energy over the grid is to store energy locally that was produced during non-peak times – something the power companies or data centers could do. Reducing the need to upgrade our power lines could meaningfully reduce our electrical costs. Other than the power companies, I wonder who might oppose such legislation. I guess time will tell. A number of other energy related bills also will be coming from our legislators – hopefully they will move us forward after so many years of stagnation dealing with our energy problems.
