Saving Seafood

Dominion Energy takes a second swing at costly plan to upgrade Virginia power grid

October 1, 2019 — Dominion Energy has filed a plan with the state to spend $594 million over the next three years modernizing Virginia’s electrical grid, which it says would cost customers an average of a little more than $1 per month.

The State Corporation Commission (SCC) denied a similar plan earlier this year, saying the utility had not demonstrated that the costs were “reasonable and prudent.”

Dominion spent several months refining the plan, creating cost-benefit estimates and interviewing stakeholders about priorities. It submitted the new version, which is slightly less costly than the original, on Monday.

“We believe that these investments are very important for our customers and our commonwealth,” Ed Baine, Dominion senior vice president for electric distribution, said Monday in an interview.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

VIRGINIA: Decision to continue striped bass tournament is “huge.” The fish won’t be.

September 27, 2019 — Despite regulations that will take big fish out of the equation, the founder of the Mid-Atlantic Rockfish Shootout has decided to press on.

The 17th annual event will take place Dec. 5-7. Teams can depart from any Virginia port, but weigh-ins are held at King’s Creek Marina in Cape Charles on the lower Eastern Shore.

This week the Virginia Marine Resources Commission lowered the recreational take of striper from two fish to one. And instead of allowing trophy-sized fish to be caught, rockfish will now have to measure between 20 and 36 inches length.

That means all the top catches will be nearly the same size. The tournament will have to rely on scales that measure to one-hundreth of a pound to judge the winning fish.

Mike Standing, who started the shootout in Virginia Beach but moved it to Cape Charles a few years ago, said continuing his event is about more than competitive fishing.

Read the full story at The Virginian-Pilot

VIRGINIA: Four things to know about Dominion’s massive wind farm proposal

September 24, 2019 — Dominion Energy announced last week it filed plans to build what would be the United States’ largest offshore wind farm, capable of producing 2,600 megawatts of energy, or enough to power 650,000 homes.

The news was heralded by environmentalists as an important step in the state’s transition away from fossil fuels, one in line with Gov. Ralph Northam’s recent executive order pledging that Virginia’s electric grid would be carbon free by 2050.

But many question marks remain around the three-phase project, which Dominion says will be complete by 2026 and will cost an estimated $7.8 billion. Here’s four key things to know about the current state of wind energy in Virginia, what and how offshore wind is being developed elsewhere and what comes next.

1. Virginia has pledged to make its electric grid carbon free by 2050. But the state currently has no wind energy in its portfolio.

When it comes to words, Virginia has made a strong commitment to wind energy. The sweeping 2018 Grid Transformation and Security Act declared the development of 5,000 megawatts of solar and wind energy to be “in the public interest,” and Virginia’s 2018 Energy Plan recommended that Northam set a goal of developing 2,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2028. Northam’s Executive Order 43, which committed the state to a carbon-free grid by 2050, increased that goal to 2,500 megawatts of offshore resources and set a new deadline for its development of 2026.

Read the full story at The Virginia Mercury

An $8 Billion Wind Farm Will Test Virginia’s Resolve to Be Green

September 23, 2019 — Dominion Energy Inc.’s customers have been pressing the Virginia utility giant for years to source more clean energy. On Thursday, the company heeded their call — with a $7.8 billion, ratepayer-backed plan to build the largest offshore wind farm in America.

The proposal is unprecedented. Never has a utility pitched an offshore wind project of this size — big enough to power 650,000 homes — and in such a way that would have its customers shouldering the costs. It still needs the approval of state regulators, and the blessing of others including the region’s grid operator. But the Richmond-based company is already promoting the plan as a major means of curbing its global-warming emissions 55% by 2030.

In proposing the wind project, Dominion Vice President Mark Mitchell said, the utility is “giving our customers what they have asked for — more renewable energy.”

Already, though, some of its big ratepayers are choosing to take another route. Customers including Costco Wholesale Corp. and Kroger Co. applied for the right to bypass Dominion and negotiate directly with independent electricity suppliers for renewable energy. On Wednesday, less than 24 hours before Dominion announced is massive wind project, the Virginia State Corporation Commission gave them what they wanted, ruling that the utility must allow them to seek other options.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

Local News Consortium earns funding to enhance oyster breeding

September 23, 2019 — A consortium of 14 shellfish geneticists from 12 East Coast universities and government agencies has won a 5-year, $4.4 million grant from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to develop new tools to accelerate and localize selective breeding in support of oyster aquaculture.

The project team was assembled by Stan Allen, professor and director of the Aquaculture Genetics and Breeding Technology Center at William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science; Ximing Guo, distinguished professor and shellfish geneticist at Rutgers Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory; and Dina Proestou, a scientist with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. Guo will serve as the consortium’s principal investigator.

Allen says, “Our respective breeding programs at Rutgers and VIMS are at the core of the new consortium approach. The project is a terrific opportunity to develop further ground-breaking approaches with Ximing’s team and our other East Coast collaborators, and will hopefully deliver all the more results for industry.” Guo and Allen previously partnered to create the world’s first tetraploid oysters at Rutgers in 1994.

Read the full story at the Williamsburg Yorktown Daily

Dominion planning large wind farm off Virginia coast

September 20, 2019 — Dominion Energy announced plans Thursday to seek approval to build what it says would be the largest offshore wind project in the United States off the Virginia coast.

The company told The Associated Press ahead of a public announcement that the project would include about 220 wind turbines in federal waters it has already leased 27 miles (43 kilometers) off Virginia Beach.

If approved as proposed, Dominion says, the approximately $7.8 billion project could produce more than 2,600 megawatts of energy during peak wind by 2026, enough to power 650,000 homes.

“This is, to us, big news. It’s a big step for us to accomplish our carbon reduction goals,” Mark Mitchell, vice president of generation construction for Richmond-based Dominion, said in an interview.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Senate Appropriations Committee Approves Oyster Restoration Funding In Chesapeake Bay

September 17, 2019 — The Senate Appropriations Committee has approved legislation for the Chesapeake Bay’s oyster restoration funding.

“A thriving oyster population is crucial to the health of the Chesapeake Bay, and in turn, to the health of Maryland’s Bay economy,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Appropriations and Budget Committees. “These funds will ultimately support critical efforts to sustain our oyster population and preserve the Bay. I will keep working in Congress to fight for the investments necessary to protect the Bay, its wildlife, and the businesses Marylanders have built around it.”

Officials said the funding will aim toward rebuilding a healthy oyster population in Maryland.

Included within the legislation were provisions to provide $20 million to the Army Corps of Engineers for multistate ecosystem restoration programs for projects involving oysters in the Bay, provide an additional $70 million to the Army Corps Work Plan for project construction.

Read the full story at WJZ

VIRGINIA: A trip with the lone company chasing menhaden in a 140-year tradition on the Chesapeake Bay

September 16, 2019 — The second set went fast — the 150,000 menhaden in the net not as “heavy” — that is, as frisky swimmers — as the fish in the Cockrells Creek’s first haul, farther down along the York Spit Channel a half hour earlier.

As the boat’s giant vacuum hose gathered in the last flopping menhaden, the spotter plane pilot circling overhead said they should drop everything and move off to port where another 150,000 fish were schooling. So the men on the Cockrells Creek’s two 40-foot “purse boats” hastened away — still tied together with ropes and a giant 1,500-foot-long purse seine net, half on one boat, half on the other.

It didn’t go as fast the rest of the day in Virginia’s 140-year old menhaden fishery, these days shrunken to one company with eight vessels operating out of a tiny port in one of the most rural corners of the state.

It’s an industry that once made the village of Reedville one of the most prosperous in the state — big, brightly-painted three-story Victorian mansions, bedecked with gingerbread woodwork under their generous shade trees line Main Street in testimony to those long gone days.

These days, menhaden are at the center of an obscure, if fiercely fought, political battle over who should catch them where, and whether the Omega Proteins fleet that still sails from Reedville is harvesting too many from the Bay. Among the reasons for that concern: Menhaden are an important food source for striped bass.

Read the full story at the Daily Press

ONE ROCKFISH PER DAY: VIRGINIA LOWERS STRIPED BASS LIMITS

September 3, 2019 — The Virginia Marine Resources Commission approved a set of emergency measures August 27 to help protect the struggling striped bass population in the Chesapeake Bay and along the Atlantic coast. That includes lowering the number of “keepers” for recreational anglers from two to one fish per day.

The action will reduce the amount of striped bass lost to recreational fishing in Virginia by 24%, said Alex Aspinwall, a data analyst with the state commission.

Charter boat industry leaders said the change will devastate their business for striped bass, also known as rockfish. But the move’s backers said it and the other new measures are needed to keep fishery managers from having to enact the state’s first fishing moratorium on the species since 1990.

“No one wants their ox gored,” said Steven Bowman, head of the commission. But “this ox is not just gored. This ox is lying on its side in need of treatment.”

Read the full story at the Chesapeake Bay Magazine

Ned Lamont, other East Coast governors push feds on wind power

August 30, 2019 — Gov. Ned Lamont and the governors of four other East Coast states are urging federal regulators not to put any additional roadblocks in the way of the country’s nascent offshore wind industry.

The governors of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Virginia joined Lamont in a letter Tuesday to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross that said offshore wind power will help strengthen America’s energy independence while creating thousands of jobs.

The group, including Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, said they’re disappointed by a recent decision to delay final permitting of the planned 84-turbine Vineyard Wind project.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Hartford Courant