Bylined Utility Puffery in Richmond Times-Dominion
I was working on a Dominion Power post for today - on the ridiculous 176-turbine offshore wind farm proposed for 27 miles off the Virginia Beach coast - when I saw this scathing piece by Steven Haner at baconsrebellion.com. Steve’s forgotten more about energy issues than I’ll ever know, so I defer to him to tell you how lazy and unquestioning the press has been when it comes to covering our power company, which seems to own Virginia politicians.
In the piece I was writing, I was going to point out that a Monday story in The Virginian-Pilot “Economic Costs Of Wind Farm Off Virginia Beach Coast Might Negate ‘Speculative’ Benefits, State Regulators Say” made a startling point in the 17th paragraph. The Pilot writer mentioned that “nothing in the (clean energy law, passed in 2020 by the then-all Democrat General Assembly) requires the company to perform its own analysis of ‘economic development costs” or requires the State Corporation Commission to consider such an analysis.”
Lucky us, huh?
Our only hope now is that the State Corporation Commission will give a big thumbs down to this $10 billion boondoggle when it votes in August.
We certainly can’t count on the editorial pages of Virginia’s newspapers to call for the project to be scrapped.
by Steve Haner
I guess what shows up in the driveway every morning is now called the Richmond Times-Dominion.
On yesterday’s front page, and today picked up and spread across the state by the Virginia Public Access Project, was a long, puffy public relations piece about Dominion’s proposed Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. It was written by the paper’s climate-alarmism correspondent Sean Sublette. It was a byline on a company news release, not something real newspapers do.
What the casual observer will miss is that it also represents a trend. The same writer, who came to the paper from a climate alarmism non-profit, about a week earlier wrote a similarly one-sided report based on Dominion’s claims of coming success in its rollout of utility-scale battery projects. Back on April 1, he quoted the company’s own cheery take on a recent State Corporation Commission approval of various solar and storage projects.
All three articles quoted only company spokesmen and provided only the company spin. Readers who stopped there would know nothing about any disputes during the SCC proceedings, long-term costs to consumers, or any of the widespread doubts about the reliability of the underlying technology.
One such story earns a yawn. Three in three weeks, and now with the longest one getting picked up and treated as actual journalism by VPAP, requires the throwing of a flag. This is the same VPAP which continues to refuse to share any of my extensive reporting on the wind project application or the recent solar projects. Re-writes of pure company PR pass muster instead.
And for an example of quality work, look in the same VPAP string for Laurence Hammack’s very balanced report on the similar renewable projects application pending from Appalachian Power Company, which serves The Roanoke Times territory. It is possible that two recent posts of mine on Bacon’s Rebellion alerted that paper to the fight down at the SCC, but the reporting is all his, including, apparently, some time monitoring the (very dry) hearing last week.
Hammack also picks up on the debate over secrecy in the company filing (and also in Dominion’s), which may soon draw a ruling from the SCC hearing officer. The other “real” newspapers in the state, perhaps also under Dominion’s thumb, so far show no concerns about the widespread hiding of data on consumer costs and ratepayer risk. When the company press releases arrive, they will rearrange a few paragraphs and slap on bylines.
