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Dominion Virginia Power is pursuing paths forward that will worsen the Commonwealth’s pollution profile, which isn’t anything to brag about at this time. 

And, they are wrapping their polluting path in an advertising campaign “Sometimes at least part of the answer actually is blowing in the wind.”

This ad campaign is emphasizing that the high-voltage power line (and here) that Dominion seeks to carve through northern Virginia is critical for transporting power from the “planned 8,000 acre wind farm near our Mount Storm Power station.” 

Now the challenge of stranded wind (good wind resources that might be developed except there are not good transmission options to viable markets) is a real one.  With better transmission structures through the country, the Midwest’s magnificent wind resources might be quickly developed for powering much of the nation.  Thus, Dominion is touching on a very real, very serious issue …

However, nowhere in Dominion’s advertising will a reader (rate payer, in my case) pick up that the wind power would use up only a very small share of the proposed transmission line’s capacity. That, in fact, the vast majority of that capacity is designed to bring “cheap” coal electricity from Ohio into the Northern Virginia market.

The problem is, of course, that “cheap” doesn’t count costs “external” to the contract: like mercury pollution, particulate polluion, CO2 pollution.  The “cost” to the nation and the globe is not “cheap”.

The Daily Press today called on Governor Tim Kaine to put the brakes on Dirty Dominion. I hope that this is a call that he hears and heeds.