Today the business media highlight how the Internet enables employees to work from home. Land use planners predict that telecommuting will alter the transportation patterns for work, while investors buying Internet-related stocks still predict that "dot.com" companies will revamp the distribution of goods and services.
A century earlier, the same apocalyptic predictions could have been made about the impact of electricity on cities. Manufacturing was decentralized away from the urban core. Finance, government, and retail operations replaced manufacturing as downtowns became white-collar centers. At the same time, the automobile enabled workers to commute to jobs from much further distances, and to live far away from rail/trolley lines too. In Northern Virginia, the population boom from government workers filled up Alexandria, Arlington, and the Fairfax counties as Federal agencies swelled to deal with World War I, the Depression, World War II, and then the Cold War.
Getting electrical power to the homes of these new residents required not only new generating capabilities, but also new distribution systems. The state government ended up regulating power companies, eliminating competition along with unsightly duplication of power poles. The Federal government financed delivery of power to rural areas through the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), after "the 1930 Census showed that only one tenth of American farms had central station service" - but it was a controversial decision.
The political arguments in favor of the rural electrification movement highlighted the benefits of Federal support (i.e. tax dollars primarily from urban areas) for bringing electricity to barns for electrical lights and milking machines, and to rural homes for refrigerators and washing machines. However, of equal importance was the desire to stimulate economic development in the rural countryside, to support high-paying industrial jobs in the rural communities. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is a member of a group called the "National Endangered Species Act Reform Coalition," seeking to weaken the restrictions of the environmental protections provided by that legislation. (And would it surprise you to learn that the organization is located in Northern Virginia, near the national capital?)
Today, electricity in Virginia is sold to commercial, industrial, and residential consumers (plus the Federal government's military installations) by investor-owned companies, publicly owned utilities, and cooperatives.
Dominion (the company formerly known as "Virginia Power" - it keeps merging and subdividing into new corporate components, splitting and lumping the power generation and distribution units to adapt to changing objectives and circumstances) generated most of the electricity to supply its service area using power plants located within the region. According to the National Energy Information Administration, there is only enough transmission capacity to import 3-4,000 MW into a region with a peak demand of 15,000 MW. Nationwide, there is a surplus of electrical generation capacity, due in part to energy efficiency measures to reduce demand - but inadequate power lines to distribute the electricity from areas with a surplus to areas with a demand for lower-cost power.
For decades, the State Corporation Commission (SCC), the successor to the Board of Public Works and the state railroad commission, has controlled the utility rates charged to customers. As part of the approval process, the SCC required the utility companies to build enough generating plants to ensure customers would have a reliable supply of power. In exchange, the companies got exclusive rights to sell electricity in certain portions of Virginia, along with rates that were set high enough to ensure a steady dividend was paid to the company stockholders.
The investment decisions by the private-sector companies were also affected by the government. In the 1980's, the Federal Government and the SCC encouraged purchase of power from non-standard sources rather than construction of new power plants. The "avoided costs" of not having to borrow money and build new facilities were incorporated into the contracts. By 1999, 20% of the electricity available to Virginia Power (now Dominion Resources) was from contracts with non-utility generators such as solid waste incinerators and pulp mills.
This approach appeared to minimize waste ("why put wood chips in a landfill if you can burn them for power?") and reduce the costs to rate-payers. However, it locked the utility company into long-term contracts for high-cost electricity. Proposals for deregulation threaten to change the rules of the utilities game.
According to former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham in a March 19, 2001 speech:
Virginia will have to build its share, 1-2 new plants each year. Maybe Internet-related activities are not consuming 10% of the current supply, but obviously Virginia has a hefty percentage of the "new economy." Visit a data center, and you will see rows of diesel backup generators, each the size of a tractor trailer and able to generate 2MW apiece. In Gainesville, west of Manassas, a data center "farm" is being constructed with its own power plant fueled by natural gas.
There are few - or no - remaining sites suitable for generating electricity by hydropower. The enviromental tradeoffs are too great, at least as we view them today. Windpower is still marginally utilized in the state, compared to pre-Depression days when windmills were common on farms - but wind turbines are "bird Cuisinarts" and Virginia is on the Atlantic flyway. Co-generation associated with chip mills or paper mills is a source of power as well as way to reduce the wood waste, but there's far too little power available from that source to meet a 45% increase in demand.
Coal is plentiful in Virginia. If the Unites States signed the Kyoto Protocol, we'd have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions substantially to reduce global warming. However, the Bush Administration made clear in its second month that carbon dioxide is not likely to be added to the Clean Air Act restrictions on sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and mercury. So coal is a likely candidate for new power plants to supply energy in Virginia... but at the moment, natural gas is king.
It's cheap, though prices will rise after the California energy crisis of 2001. Natural gas is a domestic fuel - 85% is produced within the United States, and new drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico will provide more, so it's not as vulnerable to political pressures by OPEC. Transmission lines run from Texas and Louisiana through Virginia's Piedmont to New York, so new power plants east of the Blue Ridge can be supplied easily with natural gas.
The sleeper fuel is nuclear. The world is awash in cheap uranium while nuclear weapons are being decommissioned. New nuclear plants might be welcomed on the Eastern Shore, downwind (most of the time...) from population centers. The downsides are obvious: there's no designated area to store the radioactive waste, and public fears of nuclear power are intense. Nuclear energy is never going to be "too cheap to meter" as promised in the 1950's, but Virginia has two nuclear power plants and their four nuclear reactors supply some of the cheapest power in Virginia now.