Dominion to Erect Unnecessary Power Lines

[NoPowerTowers]

I do some consulting work with Virginians for Sensible Energy Policies and wanted to draw your attention to Dominion Power's plan to erect 15-story industrial high-voltage transmission lines across a 40-mile swath of the Blue Ridge and Virginia Piedmont. Dominion has yet to prove that the region needs the additional energy these lines will provide, but they plan to build them anyway and stick Virginians with the bill through higher energy costs, not to mention the health concerns and environmental impact. Sunday's Washington Post had an great article on the subject that I'd encourage everyone to read.

[NoPowerTowers]

1. New Washington Post Article on Dominion Power

An excerpt from the new Washington Post article on Dominion Power:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/04/AR2007030401432_pf.html">High Voltage, High Tension: In Virginia's Piedmont, Electric Company and Critics Both Draw a Line

Smatlak says he is not familiar with most of the previous Piedmont dramas, such as the "Third Battle of Manassas" over the proposed mall on the battlefield. He has heard of the Disney debacle but doesn't see any connection to the uprising over his power line.

Yet striking similarities exist. Each corporation starts with the conviction that it has achieved the kind of strategic dominance that will lead to quick victory. Resistance is futile, they believe, and for excellent reason. Every legal base that matters is covered. All economics have been analyzed. The politicians have been attended to. The utility, for example, is one of the state's most generous political contributors, donating more than $3.75 million to Virginia's politicians since 1996, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Dominion employed 18 registered lobbyists this year, and their track record is formidable even by the standards of the tobacco industry. For example, the raft of bills introduced in the current legislature to slow or stop Smatlak's baby have all been efficiently short-circuited.

This is why Smatlak doesn't see Dominion as yet another corporation caught in the threshing machine of Piedmont farmers, zillionaires, people who define themselves by what trucks and guns they own, equestrians, the cranky people whose families have been cranky in the Piedmont for centuries, and the well-funded and well-organized Piedmont Environmental Council.

In fact, he says, Dominion conducted no prior demographic or political research to assess the scope, sophistication or financial backing of any opposition it might face in the Piedmont. Dominion is not the kind of place where it would occur to them to think like that, Smatlak says. There was no place for it in their spreadsheet.

He says he had no idea the humming, buzzing wires were slated to march down the driveway and across the pond of John T. "Til" Hazel Jr., the attorney and developer who not only proposed to build that mall on the Manassas battlefield but who, in the second half of the 20th century, did more to shape the future of Northern Virginia with its office towers than any man since Robert E. Lee. He didn't know the first proposed alignment would put the enormous towers across the front yard of John B. "Jay" Adams, a former member of Dominion's board of directors.