If you started the holiday weekend early, you may not have heard the news that Dominion Virginia Power lost about $40 million in federal funding for an offshore wind demonstration project. The utility was one of three enterprises to win more than $10 million for planning and design, but the Department of Energy now says other projects show more promise as Sandy Hausman reports.
Engineers say Virginia has near perfect conditions for generating offshore wind power – a shallow coastline and steady breezes, but the Department of Energy has decided not to provide further funding, since Dominion announced it could not break ground before 2020. The news upset environmentalists like Eileen Levandoski, assistant director of the Sierra Club.
“Dominion has been such a con artist – bringing us along, getting us invested as stake holders, and they sounded sincere," she said. "For them to represent to DOE that this thing would not break ground until 2020, I mean of course DOE is going to pull their funding. DOE wants to advance offshore wind.”
The Department of Energy said it would divert money that might have gone to Virginia and to a project in Oregon to enterprises in Ohio and Maine which had made greater progress. Dominion had expressed fears about the cost of installing two offshore turbines, and spokesman David Botkins says the company was disappointed to lose federal funds.
“We still believe that offshore wind has a great potential to deliver clean and renewable energy to Virginia, but we do recognize the unique regulatory and cost challenges involved in our project," he said. "We appreciate DOE’s desire to support the other projects that may actually have an earlier opportunity to come to fruition.”
Botkins say Dominion could, at some point, ask rate payers to fund the offshore wind demonstration project – a request that would boost the average utility bill by a dollar a month according to the Virginia Offshore Wind Development Authority.