![]() ![]() “If it just took me 20 minutes to explain it to you, nobody’s going to get it.” The general assembly meets for only six or eight weeks every winter, and each session is flooded with at least 1,000 bills. “Dominion realized that legislators didn’t really know anything about utility regulation,” Pollard told me. It would take too much space to quote the second half of the sentence. In any triennial review proceeding conducted after December 31, 2017, upon the request of the utility, the Commission shall determine, prior to directing that 70 percent of earnings that are more than 70 basis points above the utility’s fair combined rate of return on its generation and distribution services for the test period or periods under review be credited to customer bills pursuant to subdivision 8 b, the aggregate level of prior capital investment that the Commission has approved other than those capital investments that the Commission has approved for recovery pursuant to a rate adjustment clause pursuant to subdivision 6 made by the utility during the test period or periods under review … “Dominion’s game was always to make sure that the base rates never went down,” he told me, “and for a decade or longer, they never went down.”ĭominion’s lobbyists smothered the relevant section of the Virginia code with the kind of language that tells you that someone not in the room is going to get screwed: Stephen Haner, a former lobbyist with the Newport News shipyard, was in the room in Richmond where these bills were negotiated. With each new legislative session, Dominion introduced a bill with new accounting tricks (for example, accelerating the depreciation of storm-damage costs) that artificially lowered its earnings, thereby reducing refunds and preventing lower rates. But Dominion lobbyists wrote provisions that locked in profits well above what the SCC authorized, and that prevented the SCC from lowering electric rates unless Dominion overcharged in two consecutive reviews. ![]() If, in a biennial review, the SCC found that Dominion earned more than was legally allowed, customers would receive a partial refund. In 2007, the legislature passed a sweeping law to regulate energy. I recently sat on a park bench outside Richmond’s 18th-century neoclassical capitol while Albert Pollard, a former Democratic House delegate, now a lobbyist with the Virginia Poverty Law Center, explained how Dominion had managed this feat. It’s a glaring version of the corruption that underlies so much of American politics. This arrangement was entirely legal and scarcely noticed for years. As for Dominion’s customers, their refunds amounted to less than a third of the company’s excess earnings. Overrearnings were supposed to trigger refunds to customers, but instead big profits went to corporate executives (Thomas Farrell, who led Dominion for 15 years and died the day after he stepped down in 2021, averaged $14 million a year in compensation), to shareholders, and to the purchase of other companies. ![]() In the past decade and a half, the general assembly passed a series of Dominion bills that gradually neutered the SCC, freed the utility’s rates from regulation, and allowed Dominion to overcharge Virginians (the term of art is overearn) by about $2 billion-by one reckoning, $3 billion-on their electric bills. The main authors of these bills are Dominion’s lawyers and lobbyists. Dominion also provides more than $1 million a year in campaign gifts to Virginia politicians (the state places no limits on political contributions), including members of the general assembly, who pass the legislation that determines how the company is regulated. Dominion is regulated as a monopoly by the State Corporation Commission, or SCC, whose task is to set fair rates for the customer and a fair return for the utility. The Dominion name and logo are inescapable: on monthly bills, utility trucks, and regional offices on the glass headquarters that towers over Richmond and the nearby Dominion Energy Center for performing arts at the Charity Classic golf tournament and all the other sports events and philanthropies that the utility sponsors. It might also have hopeful implications for our perpetually stuck politics.ĭominion Energy is a utility corporation that provides power to two-thirds of Virginians. ![]() That story alone is rare enough to be worth telling. T his is an old-fashioned story about monopoly power, dirty money, bipartisan corruption, consumer exploitation, and what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called “the curse of bigness.” It’s also the story of a recent victory over all those things-one that united the Sierra Club, Americans for Prosperity, Amazon, Google, and progressive and conservative members of the Virginia legislature. ![]()
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