Updated Valley Link Timeline
The president of Preserve Rural Virginia passed along the latest briefing Goochland County Administrator Dr. Raley received from Dominion on the Valley Link Joshua Falls-to-Yeat line. Apparently Dr. Raley has regular check-ins with Dominion about the four transmission projects the utility intends to carve through the county. This week’s call produced the following schedule:
End of September: residents get a postcard announcing a virtual public meeting
Mid-October: routes appear on GeoVoice and letters go to affected landowners
Early November: virtual meetings on the routes and the SCC process
Mid-November: SCC filing
The mid-November SCC filing is harder to swallow. Citizen advocate Mike Regan already punctured the timeline at an earlier PJM TEAC meeting by politely asking how Valley Link can be in service in 2029 when the relocated Joshua Falls substation is slated for 2030. It took a resident to pose the obvious question. That was enough to wake up a developer planning to hook a new power plant into Valley Link in 2029, who then asked the same thing. The result: another round of TEAC “readings” and approvals for this particular monument to transmission planning.
Those approvals would normally come before an SCC filing. Bureaucracies do not suddenly discover haste. So the mid-November date looks less like a deadline and more like a hope.
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