Meeting With Delegate Yancey

I don't often post in the blog, but every once in awhile I have something I think worthy of sharing.

I am not sure how it happened, but delegate David Yancey (my actual delegate in the Virginia legislature)  contacted me to get my opinion on what he was trying to do for solar. My guess is either they got around to finally reading the emails I sent him last year or more likely I had mentioned to someone when I was doing poll watching this last Tuesday that I had received no replies to my emails and person had said they knew him and Yancey had a new staff, so maybe that triggered it. In either case...

We met at Panera Bread on Warwick (across from CNU) and had a good discussion. The delegate and his aide were there for about 30 minutes. The delegate had some stuff come up mid-way through, but came back to finish up the 30 minutes before taking off for his next appointment.

Topics discussed included
1. He is working on a proposal to get private enterprises (such as Bay Electric and Dominion) to invest in solar for schools. He is hoping to arrange it to ultimately save the schools money so they can use it to better pay teachers and get the students more modern books and equipment. He didn't have a lot of details at this time, but the overall goal sounded like it was a good one. As a side note, since education is one of Yancey's things I suspect the effort is more towards the schools and less towards the solar, but I am good with it either way. So if you have some reasonable suggestions on how this might be set up, feel free to send to me or if one of his constituents send directly to him or his staff.

2. We discussed some of the issues with residential and small business arrays and especially my support for roof-top distributed solar PV. Also a couple minutes on mandatory RPS and SRECs. One thing of note, the delegate recently flew into Philadelphia and he commented on how many solar arrays he saw on roof-tops there, so it tied in nicely with my SREC discussion.

3. I mentioned my personal number one goal for the legislature, which is make it mandatory that power companies have to buy their renewable credits to qualify for the RPS bonus from Virginia. I also mentioned a 20 year limit, although only to the aide.

4. Also covered the Dominion rate tariff plan a little bit pointing out that it really is not a benefit to residential home owners and since I could pointing out I get the equivalent of 40-41 cents per kWh, while Dominion's plan would only net be 4 cents per kWh if I were to accept it.  BTW: You all might want to check out the latest on the PUE-2012-00064 proposal. at least I finally see something in writing that existing customers can keep net metering. Although the SCC bought into Dominions aggregate numbers for the offset of solar on the grid, which is false math.

 5. Finally a touch of unrelated discussion on toll roads (hate them, but am okay if they are new roads that add capacity and not on old ones); on privatizing Virginia Ports (my concern is that Virginia should not give up the revenue stream for a one time bonus) ; and on taxes for transportation (the lockbox concept)

That about covers all I can remember, but if you have some ideas sent them in