Dominion vs. Environment, Part Deux (or is it Trois? Quatre? Cinq?)

Starting Monday, the company and its opponents will square off at hearings in Richmond over a proposal to erect a 65-mile power line, carried atop 15-story steel towers, that would send electricity surging east across farms and forests in Northern Virginia.

Dominion Virginia Power says the line is needed to feed a voracious appetite for energy in the Washington area. Opponents say that the utility has exaggerated the need for the line and that the project would spoil a historic landscape and contribute to global warming.

This will likely be a knockdown-dragout fight, as Dominion's main opponent in this case, the Piedmont Environmental Council, "has raised more than $3 million to fight the project."  What do the damn treehuggers have against this lovely, 500-kV transmission line? How about this?

The 10-16 story-tall transmission line would cut through private land, public open space, neighborhoods, historic sites, historic districts, magnificent viewsheds and a high concentration of conservation easements. In Virginia alone the transmission line would impact Frederick, Warren, Rappahannock, Culpeper, Fauquier, Prince William and Loudoun Counties. In addition, approval of the transmission line would lead to increasing reliance on remote coal-fired power plants in the Ohio River Valley with continuing or increasing transmission congestion, transmission losses and environmental damage.

Dominion and Allegheny's proposal is unnecessary, expensive and would ultimately leave the grid more vulnerable. Furthermore, simple alternatives that have significantly less impact are available to the power companies to meet the electricity needs of Northern Virginia for today and into the future.

What's the alternative, you might ask?  Here's Dr. Daniel Violette, an expert in "Demand-Side Management" and energy efficiency programs, testifying late last year to the SCC (State Corporation Commission of Virginia):

The DSM Assessment develops a portfolio of five DSM programs that are based on successful programs implemented by other utilities. These programs incorporate both energy efficiency (permanent demand reductions) and demand response (targeted peak demand reductions). The DSM Assessment examined a 10-year horizon and concluded that a well designed portfolio of DSM programs could reduce the peak demand for the Commonwealth of Virginia by approximately 5,000 MW by 2017 and energy consumption by approximately 7,800 GWh. The ten-year horizon was selected as a reasonable planning scenario. Values that could be achieved in a 5 year period were not explicitly estimated but derived through interpolation, taking into account projected annual growth rates. DVP serves approximately 80% of the population of Virginia. Were DVP to implement these programs, the cumulative reductions in peak demand and energy consumption within five years would be in the range of 2,000 MW and 3,000 GWh respectively.

There's a lot more information on this issue, and I'm sure we'll be writing more about it in coming weeks and months.  For now, it's sufficient to say that if Dominion's for it, there must be something wrong with it.  That's how little I trust this company, "one of the state's largest business taxpayers and an influential player in Richmond, with 16 registered lobbyists" that last year "donated more than $775,000 to political campaigns, split about evenly between Democrats and Republicans."  What more do you need to know?

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