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From the Blog of Ivy Main, Power to the People VA, March 11, 2021

Before the start of the 2021 legislative session, I highlighted three areas where Virginia needed to make significant progress to support its climate agenda: transportation electrification, improving the energy efficiency of buildings and giving consumers greater access to renewable energy.

The General Assembly delivered on one-and-a-half out of three. If we add bonus points for smaller successes, maybe we can call it a total of two. The transportation category truly outperformed expectations, but building efficiency underperformed and renewable energy access didn’t perform at all.

In the transportation sector, the General Assembly passed the Clean Car Standards requiring manufacturers to deliver more electric vehicles to Virginia dealers (HB1965); approved a statewide study of transit equity (HJ542); approved (but so far has not funded) an electric vehicle rebate program (HB1979); directed the SCC to report on ways to electrify transportation (HB2282); and established a school bus electrification fund (also empty for now)(HB2118).

Together these bills address two of the most significant ways we can reduce emissions from the transportation sector: supporting the move away from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles and improving mass transit options.

The House rejected a second school bus electrification bill that, as originally drafted, would have allowed Dominion Energy Virginia to own, control and profit handsomely from the batteries in as many as 1,250 new electric school buses. Adding non-polluting school buses across Virginia and testing the value of vehicle-to-grid technology would have been exciting, but Dominion couldn’t help taking a good idea and trying to make it into another bloated profit center. Given the odor of Dominion boondoggle, the question isn’t why the House rejected the bill, but why the Senate was willing to swallow it.

Still, it’s clear electric school buses are an idea whose time has come, and vehicle-to-grid technology could have real benefits for ratepayers. Dominion is already testing the technology with school bus batteries in a smaller pilot program, so we can expect to see more on this topic next year. Meanwhile, advocates hope to see funding emerge to implement HB2118, possibly from the federal stimulus bill now under consideration in Congress.

Improving the energy efficiency of new homes should have been an equally popular idea with legislators. Virginia will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars retrofitting existing homes in the years to come, so it makes sense to ensure that new houses don’t immediately join the queue of homes needing upgrades to be climate-ready. Unfortunately, beefing up the energy efficiency provisions of Virginia’s residential building code (HB2227) proved a hard sell in the face of entrenched opposition from the homebuilders’ lobby and surprising resistance from even some Democratic legislators.

The legislation originally would have mandated adoption of the latest national energy efficiency code provisions, but it was amended to leave it up to the discretion of the code-writing board whether to require new homes to achieve this higher level of efficiency. They already had that authority; however, the board will now have to consider factors that favor stricter standards, like the long-term cost of ownership. For that reason I’m counting this bill as half a win. Whether or not the board decides to take the hint, improving efficiency in new homes is a topic we will see a lot more of in the future — and next time it is likely to come with more urgency and added features.

Energy efficiency bills did better when they addressed only government bodies. Legislation that passed now favors energy-efficient and water-efficient products in public procurement, and requires EV charging and energy/carbon tracking capability for new public buildings.

Unfortunately, 2021 was another bad year for my third priority, giving consumers the right to buy renewable energy from competitive suppliers. The House supported the “right to shop” bill (HB2048), but Senate Commerce and Labor once again proved itself a bulwark of defense for the monopoly utility model against the interests of residents and corporate customers alike. Killing the bill does nothing to lessen the demand from consumers. If Dominion does not move soon to offer better renewable energy options itself, we can expect to see this legislation return.

Senate Commerce and Labor further cemented its reputation as Dominion’s best friend by dispatching the full suite of utility reform bills that had won bipartisan support in the House. Only three senators on the 15-member committee consistently voted in favor of the reforms, ensuring that none of them got to the Senate floor.

https://www.virginiamercury.com/2021/02/15/electric-utility-rate-reform-efforts-quashed-by-senate-committee/embed/#?secret=PtRlKZ6GtJ

Various other bills advanced the energy transition in smaller, focused bites. But perhaps the best news is that nothing this year marked a retreat from the commitment the General Assembly and the governor made last year to move Virginia toward a cleaner and more equitable energy supply.

In the Blog is a brief round-up of the climate and energy bills that passed this year, including the ones mentioned above. The governor will still have to sign the bills before they become law, but we are not expecting any surprises.

>>> Further details on individual bills are given in the Blog itself.

https://powerforthepeopleva.com/2021/03/11/the-general-assembly-made-progress-on-climate-in-2021-but-our-work-here-is-hardly-done/

By Steve MacLaughlin • NBC News 6 Miami, Updated on March 18, 2021

Since his first day in office when he signed an executive order getting the United States back into the Paris Agreement, President Joe Biden had laid out the most aggressive climate plan in the country’s history.

This includes having “net zero” greenhouse emissions by 2050, stopping oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and beginning the transition to electric vehicles.

“They’re not just bringing this into science and environment and energy, but they’re also bringing this into transportation, they’re bringing this into the economy,” said Bernadette Woods Placky, Climate Central’s chief meteorologist. “They’re bringing this into the justice department and environmental justice issues.”

While Placky is optimistic about Biden’s plans, she is cautious because time is running out.

“A lot of the basics were understood in 1980, and we’ve waited so long to do anything about them, and the longer we wait, the harder it is to solve these issues, the more expensive it is, the more people die, the more health that’s affected.” She said. “I don’t think people fully understand the longer we wait, the worse it’s going to be because our greenhouse gases that we put into the atmosphere now stay there for hundreds to thousands of years, and that’s why you hear such urgency in our voices when we talk about the subject matter. It’s not one specific avenue or one specific policy, it’s more the timelines. We need to get things moving and we need to get them moving fast.”

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/changing-climate-south-florida/we-need-to-get-things-moving-meteorologist-on-bidens-climate-plan/2409120/

A rise in sea level of even one meter during the next century could influence the outcomes of many decisions now being made. In the United States, thousands of square miles of land could be lost, particularly in low-lying areas such as the Mississippi Delta, where the land is also subsiding at approximately one meter per century. Storm damage, already estimated at over three billion dollars per year nationwide, could also increase, particularly along the well-developed and low-lying Atlantic coast. Finally, a rising sea will increase the salinity of marshes, estuaries, and aquifers, disrupting marine life and possibly threatening some drinking water supplies. Fortunately, the most adverse effects can be avoided if timely actions are taken in anticipation of sea level rise.

http://www.papers.risingsea.net/downloads/Challenge_for_this_generation_Barth_and_Titus.pdf