Dominion Energy's recent plan to meet increased load growth ignores Virginia's 2045 mandate—established under the Virginia Clean Economy Act—to deliver 100% carbon-free electricity. United's Shawn Kelly spoke with Canary Media about the plan, noting that it limits the usage of proven, cost-effective advanced energy technologies (including wind, solar, demand response, and virtual power plants) to meet growing demand within the state.
Dominion Energy’s latest plan to meet power demand in the coming years ignores Virginia’s carbon-free electricity deadline and should be rejected by state regulators, say clean energy advocates.
A 2020 state law requires Dominion Energy to achieve 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045. Yet the utility’s latest long-range forecast and generation plan looks only at the next 15 years, when it still envisions burning fossil fuels.
“In terms of utility planning, this 2045 legal requirement is one of the most important resource planning requirements — if not the most important,” the Southern Environmental Law Center wrote in a May legal brief. “Dominion, however, failed to account for this legal requirement in its modeling in any way.”
A ruling from the State Corporation Commission, which regulates Virginia’s utilities, is due July 15, and it has denied the company’s plans before. Though its decision won’t lock Dominion into building specific power plants, it will set the stage for another action that could: The panel is currently weighing whether to permit the utility’s controversial “resource request” to build a 944-megawatt gas complex in Chesterfield County, just southwest of Richmond.
“What the Commission accepts in a [long-range plan] has a direct bearing on subsequent resource requests,” the law center said in its filing on behalf of environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices. “If the Commission accepts poor modeling … the Company will recycle that poor modeling for its next resource request.”
Dominion Energy “didn’t take the assignment seriously”
Like most of its peers around the country, Dominion Energy is required to regularly file long-range plans with state regulators, laying out how it intends to meet anticipated demand over the period. But more than once in recent years, it’s faced rejection from Virginia’s State Corporation Commission, which must review and approve the blueprints.
The commission denied the company’s plan for the first time in 2018, noting among other problems that Dominion hadn’t analyzed the most cost-effective ways to meet demand.
Then, in 2020, lawmakers adopted the Virginia Clean Economy Act, raising the stakes for the long-range plan. The law requires Dominion, the commonwealth’s largest investor-owned utility, to produce 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045, leading to two more denials of Dominion’s plans in 2021 and again in 2024.
“It’s not unreasonable to ask a monopoly utility to produce a plan that complies with state law and upholds simple principles of justice and fairness,” Connor Kish, director of the Sierra Club’s Virginia chapter, said in a statement after the 2024 ruling. “Dominion didn’t take that assignment seriously.”
The utility’s previous plan encompassed a 15-year “planning” period as well as a 25-year “study” period that extended past 2045, when the Virginia Clean Economy Act kicks into full gear. The pending Dominion plan is more egregious, critics argue, because it includes only the planning period that ends in 2039. There is no study period.
“You have to let the model see that there’s a 2045 carbon-free requirement in Virginia,” said Peter Anderson, Charlottesville-based director of state energy policy with Appalachian Voices. “That’s takeaway No. 1.”
The limited time horizon scrambles the economics underlying the utility’s modeling. Though state law requires a combined-cycle gas plant built in 2037 to shutter eight years later, Dominion assumes such a facility will be paid off over 36 years. Such assumptions distort the cost-effectiveness of new gas infrastructure and produce a false picture of what’s best for consumers, advocates say.
In all, Dominion plans nearly 6 gigawatts of new gas-burning infrastructure by 2036. The law would allow some of these plants to run past 2045, but only if regulators determine they’re critical for reliability.
“The reliability exemption or exception hasn’t been tested yet,” noted Anderson, “so the presumption under the law today is [that Dominion is] going to close [its] carbon-emitting units by 2045 at the latest.”
On the horizon: Data centers and a new gas plant
Though Dominion serves the largest data center market in the world, advocates also caution that its projected 5.5% annual growth in demand may well be inflated.
“The Company relies on a speculative and highly uncertain load forecast driven almost entirely by one industry, and in large part by just a few companies,” the Southern Environmental Law Center said in its filing.
At the same time, Dominion is falling far behind the law’s requirement that it shave demand with energy-efficiency programs, says Advanced Energy United, a national clean-energy industry association. The Clean Economy Act obligates the utility to trim 5% off demand by this year, compared to 2019 levels. It hasn’t and doesn’t plan to, according to the association.
“Dominion overlooked a lot of clean energy solutions in their modeling — meaning energy efficiency, demand response, and virtual power plants,” said Shawn Kelly, regulatory director for Advanced Energy United. “That resulted in them exaggerating a need for supply-side resources” that generate electricity for the grid.
Given the track record of the State Corporation Commission, advocates have some cause for hope that it will once again reject Dominion’s plan. If it does, the decision won’t bind the utility to build a particular solar or wind farm or abandon plans for a gas facility. But it could force the company to look past 2039 and incorporate what it sees into permit applications.
No matter what the panel does in July, the reality remains that its previous rebuffs didn’t stop Dominion from proposing the massive new gas facility in Chesterfield County.
Kelly doesn’t discount the importance of the long-range plan, and he and his organization, like other advocates, believe the commission should deny it. But he also pointed to the gas plant proposal on the table as an urgent concern.
“If somebody were to ask me, ‘Should I read [this whole plan]?,’” he said, “I would actually recommend somebody get more involved and focus on the [permit application] filing that Dominion made in March.”
Read the full article here.