Story by Erik Curren

Civil War battlefields and horse farms, or Tysons Corner and subdivisions - which comes to mind when you think of Northern Virginia?

Your answer will most likely determine your attitude to a controversial plan by Dominion Virginia Power to build a $243 million high-voltage power line over a 65-mile stretch of half-a-dozen counties ending at a substation in Southern Loudoun County.

If you live in the area and worry about property values, historic sites or the environment, then you’ll probably hate the power line. You may even want to join the coalition of local residents fighting against it, led by the well-financed Piedmont Environmental Council. It’s a formidable group, including old-money families like DuPont and Mars and new-money power-brokers like John T. “Til” Hazel Jr. - ironically, the developer of Tysons Corner and the man who arguably did more than anyone else to transform Northern Virginia from horse country to suburban sprawl.

But if you enjoy today’s consumer good life, with a Sony 60-inch rear-projection HDTV, a Nintendo Wii or a deep freeze packed with all those Omaha Steaks you ordered online last year - or if you happen to work at a hospital, data center or military base - then the power line might sound like a pretty good idea, as it does to the Arlington Chamber of Commerce or the City of Manassas Utility Commission.

“We need to bring electricity to Northern Virginia,” says Le-Ha Anderson of Dominion, which has sought approval from the State Corporation Commission to finish the 500-kilovolt power by 2011. “Electricity demand in the area has increased by 35.8 percent from 2000 to 2006, which is more than double the area’s population growth.”

Anderson says that unless the power line is built, the area could suffer rolling blackouts, or even a major outage like the one that hit New York City in 2003. An independent study predicts that the transmission line that currently provides most of the area’s power, the Mount Storm-Doubs line, will have a 226-megawatt overload by 2011.

Without another power line, Northern Virginia would have to cut its power usage by 2,850 megawatts, or nearly 40 percent. “To assume that such a program could be designed, approved, implemented and accepted by Dominion Virginia Power customers in less than four years is clearly not reasonable,” says the report compiled by KEMA Inc., an internationally recognized power engineering firm in Burlington, Mass.

Anderson says the area is overdue for a new transmission line, especially given that eight of the top hundred fastest-growing counties in the nation are in Northern Virginia.

“The increase in demand over the next five years will be like adding 5 million houses,” Anderson says. “New buildings today are all larger than what was typically built 10 years ago. These require more energy to heat and cool. And most homes today have multiple TVs, computers and in many cases at least one refrigerator and then a freezer in another part of the house.”

Nationwide, the number of appliances per household has doubled since 1997, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

Anderson also says that the high-tech business and government offices that dominate the area, such as a new computer data center planned for Loudoun County (requiring constant air conditioning for its numerous computers) and Fort Belvoir, where the Army is planning to double its staff by adding 22,000 new employees, will also up the demand for power in Northern Virginia.

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“Dominion has never proven the need for a new power line,” says Robert Lazaro, director of communications for the 4,200-member Piedmont Environmental Council, which is based in Warrenton. “There are other steps that should be taken before taking other people’s private property. Virginia is one of the worst states in the country for energy conservation.

Lazaro wields his own independent study to argue for energy efficiency. If residential and commercial power customers implement energy-saving programs in the next 10 years, the state could save up to 10 percent of all the power it is projected to use during 2007, according to efficiency consultants Summit Blue Consulting, based in Boulder, Colo.

Utilities must lead the way in helping their customers save energy, says Lazaro. As an example of a good player, he cites the Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative based in Manassas, which has installed special meters on customers’ air-conditioning units as part of its voluntary residential load-management program.

“At peak times, they can cycle down your home air conditioning for seven minutes. NOVEC made a deal with developer Toll Brothers so that every home built in their service area has one of these meters, and so far they’re installed 40,000 of them. NOVEC sees the value of energy efficiency,” Lazaro says.

Dominion, on the other hand, has done little to help its customers use electricity more efficiently, charge Lazaro and other environmental advocates.

“The Dominion proposal for this power line is just another example of their outdated plans to promote dirty and dangerous sources like coal-fired power plants instead of looking at energy efficiency and conservation,” says Michael Town, the director of the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club.

Virginia ranks near the bottom of states that have invested in technology to manage the energy use of consumers, and Town lays the blame at the feet of Dominion, the largest single contributor to candidates for the Virginia General Assembly.

The company says that they’ve tried to get customers to save energy for two decades, but to little or no avail.

“Dominion worked very hard to get our customers to support demand-side management programs as long as 20 years ago. We resurrected these programs over and over again, but we found that we just couldn’t get customers interested,” says Dominion’s Le-Ha Anderson.

Michael Town of the Sierra Club takes issue with this charge.

“It’s insulting to Virginians to say that we’re unlike the rest of the nation when it comes to conservation and efficiency,” says Town. “Dominion may have put together some ineffective programs, but that’s their fault, not the fault of the citizens. The company should be looking at their peers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina and in other states for proven ways to reduce energy demand and create cheaper, cleaner electricity for their consumers.”

For example, Town says that Dominion should support a state public-benefit fund to help customers pay for investments in energy savings such as installing better insulation or double-glazed windows in their homes along with state-level energy efficiency standards for appliance-makers and green building standards for new construction.

Le-Ha Anderson concedes that the company could do more to encourage energy efficiency, but cites the KEMA report to argue that there’s just not enough time for power-hungry Northern Virginia to cut its energy usage enough to avoid blackouts by 2011.

Despite findings by KEMA, backed up estimates from the operator of the Mid-Atlantic electrical grid, PJM Interconnection of Valley Forge, Pa. - which initially directed Dominion to build the Virginia portion of a larger, 265-mile transmission line that will originate in Southwestern Pennsylvania and be constructed by Allegheny Power - power-line critics insist that Northern Virginia does not need more electricity.

Dan Scandling, spokesman for Republican Congressman Frank Wolf of the state’s 10th District, sees talk of rolling blackouts as an empty threat.

“Dominion talks about a rolling blackout one or two days in August maybe. They haven’t proved that we need the power line though. Where’s the beef? Show us the facts.”

Scandling’s boss was instrumental in getting the proposed route moved from the center of the Manassas Battlefield Park to the edge of the historic park, inside the right-of-way of an existing power line.

In response to resident complaints, the company revised its proposal for the transmission-line route three times. Its current plan follows is either within or adjacent to right-of-way for existing power lines. In places where the corridor must be widened, the company says that it will take no more than 125 feet of additional land.

“Dominion has done a lot of homework, and we wouldn’t build a transmission line just for the sake of building it,” says Le-Ha Anderson. “There are a lot of resources that go into it and it puts a lot of stress on Dominion’s relations with the community. This is the only way to bring reliable electricity into the area to prevent the possibility of power outages by 2011.”

Congressman Wolf has also cosponsored legislation in Congress that would limit the ability of the federal government to overrule state and local authorities that reject or delay power-line applications in areas where the Department of Energy has determined that there is a critical need for new infrastructure to prevent blackouts.

Dominion says it has no plans to go over the head of Virginia regulators because it is confident that its application will be approved, as all power-line applications except one have been in the past according to Anderson.

Yet the DOE designation of an area of the East Coast from New York south to Northern Virginia as an area critical for new electrical infrastructure has helped stoke existing fears that the power line is not needed to meet demand in Northern Virginia, but instead, to sell excess electricity to lucrative markets further north.

“The fear has always been that it’s just a pass-by to get to New York,” says Scandling.

Hogwash, says Phillip F. Schewe, senior science writer with the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Md. and author of a new book on the electrical production and delivery system, The Grid: A Journey through the Heart of our Electrified World.

“Electricity is not a local issue anymore and it hasn’t been since the 1920s. It’s not a state issue; it’s a national issue,” Schewe says.

Schewe says that in general the nation is overdue for an overhaul of its infrastructure to transmit electricity.

“The transmission lines which we do have, which were mostly built in the ’70s and ’80s, are more crowded than ever. And most of the power outages these days are the result not of plant failures but of overloaded transmission lines,” Schewe says.

Schewe explains that in a large grid electricity system, any consumer can get power from any producer, no matter where each one happens to be located, as long as both are connected to the same grid. This means that Virginia consumers can get power from as far away as Niagara Falls, for example.

“It’s not proper for people in Virginia to say that Dominion just wants to sell power to fat cats in New York, to out-of-staters. Some of that power may go to New York, but the flip side is that some power from New York may come down to Virginia, too,” Schewe says.

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Power-line critics, including Congressman Wolf, have said that Dominion should utilize smarter grid and transmission technology, including equipment that could raise the capacity of existing power lines.

Schewe agrees that utilities can probably “use some new technology to cram more power onto existing lines,” but he cautions that “you can see where that’s heading - after a few years, that extra efficiency will be used up, and you’ll need more lines anyway.”

Perhaps the only way Northern Virginia can avoid a new power line would be for its residents to adopt a radically different, low-energy lifestyle in the next four years. Some experts say that this is what the whole country will require in the future anyway, because burning coal, which provides half of America’s power, threatens to push levels of greenhouse gases beyond dangerous tipping points for global warming, such as the melting of the Greenland ice-sheet.

But this strategy, dubbed “power down” by energy theorist Richard Heinberg in his 2004 book of the same name, is not to be undertaken lightly. It “will require tremendous effort in order to reduce per-capita resource usage in wealthy countries, develop alternative energy sources, distribute resources more equitably, and humanely but systematically reduce the size of the human population,” as Heinberg writes.

In fast-growing counties like Loudoun or Culpepper, that would mean reversing all the trends towards energy consumption in the area, which are also the trends towards economic growth: more and bigger houses, more appliances and more high-tech businesses.

And while the few property owners who will still be directly impacted by the power line may still grumble, everyone else who wants to keep their the air conditioner running and enjoy the economic growth they’ve come to expect will probably have to be satisfied with the concessions Dominion has already made in changing its route to avoid environmentally sensitive and historically valuable land.

Then, residents will just have to swallow hard and learn to love the power line.

But to avoid more power lines in the future and the other goodies they’d entail, like new coal-fired and nuclear power plants, Northern Virginia and the state as a whole will have to conserve energy.

Dominion may indeed be a laggard when it comes to helping its customers save energy. A new directive by Gov. Tim Kaine requiring a 10 percent across-the-board reduction in electricity consumption by 2022 could help the company catch up with its peers in other states. Groups like the Sierra Club and Piedmont Environmental Council are sure to keep the pressure on for even higher levels of energy efficiency.

Meanwhile, Northern Virginians, and the rest of us, should begin to re-think our lifestyles at a fundamental level. Screwing in a few efficient light bulbs at home is a good start. But in the end, we may have to choose between a plasma TV or third home computer and a sustainable future.

For further reading

Dominion Virginia Power - www.dom.com

Piedmont Environmental Council - www.pecva.org

Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club - www.virginia.sierraclub.org

Richard Heinberg - www.richardheinberg.com

Filed under: 6-July 2007 Issue