I enjoyed the common sense of Froma Harrop’s guest column on clean energy (“Don’t want clean energy jobs? We’ll take them,” roanoke.com, Dec. 5). Yes, true story. If Virginia does not want clean energy jobs, North Carolina and Maryland will take them, and if the incoming administration chokes off all clean energy efforts in the USA, then China will smugly rule the clean energy economy of the entire planet and sell products to the rest of us.
Virginia needs a tremendous amount of clean energy, because data centers with tremendous electricity demands are growing like mushrooms across our state. We can talk about a new generation of nuclear power to meet that demand, but that technology is several years away. We can put in a lot more wind turbines off Virginia Beach, and a lot more solar farms across our state, or we can build a lot of methane peaker plants , or we can run out of electricity. Climate change is a good argument against the methane plants — because those plants would need to run for decades to pay off their investment, and we cannot put that much carbon into our sky.
The bottom line is that clean energy supplies a lot of good paying jobs at a time when Virginians need bigger paychecks to deal with higher costs. I don’t have a problem with good paying jobs.