Energy Rate comparison
Dominion Energy Virginia was ranked as the electric utility with the 11th-lowest rates in a recent peer group comparison of 20 Southern energy companies. The chart below lists some of those peers.
Monthly usage of 1000 kWh: Alabama Power
Appalachian Power Co. (VA)
Dominion Energy Virginia
DUKE Energy Carolinas (NC)
Entergy Mississippi Inc. FP&L Company Georgia Power
Gulf Power Mississippi Power
Duke Energy Progress Inc. (NC)
SCE&G
Louisville Gas & Electric
U.S. average
July 2007
January 2017
Change %
July 2007 Rank
January 2017 Rank
Rank Change $104.94 $132.10 25.88% 14 19 -5 66.72 114.29 71.30 2 14 12 90.59 111.76 23.37 6 11 -5 86.33 103.98 20.44 4 5 -1
98.00 92.28 -5.84 10 1 9 103.46 95.43 -7.76 13 2 11 90.23 112.36 24.53 5 12 -7
101.87 131.43 29.02 12 18 -6 114.76 124.42
8.42 17 17 0 95.56 104.70 9.56 8 7 1 101.10 147.53 45.92 11 20 -9 105.28 3
111.68 133.99 19.98 Source: Virginia State Corporation Commission
money to consumers, invest in a clean energy future and modernize our electri- cal grid.” Proponents say SB 966 positions
Virginia for the future. It allows Domin- ion and Appalachian Power (APCO) to expand their use of renewable sources, including 5,000 new megawatts of solar and wind energy. It also requires utilities to make $1.1 billion in investments for energy efficiency and low-income energy assistance over the next 10 years. “We’re accelerating renewables,
hardening the grid for environmental and cyber threats and modernizing our grid … When you look at the type of businesses that we are trying to attract in Virginia — the high-tech companies and companies like Mars and Nestlé — they’re looking for exactly what you see in Senate Bill 966,” says state Sen. Frank W. Wagner
46 APRIL 2018
(R-Virginia Beach), the chief patron on the bill.
Customer refunds The law requires Dominion to issue $200 million in refunds to customers who were overcharged during the rate freeze, while APCO would have to issue $10 million. According to the SCC, customers should see a one-time credit when Dominion issues $133 million in refunds in bills that will be sent in July and August, with the remaining $67 mil- lion credited in the January and February 2019 billing cycle. APCO probably will spread out its refund over a longer period of time, ending in October 2018. The utilities also would pass along
annual tax savings from the federal cor- porate tax cut recently approved by Con- gress. This comes to $125 million for
Dominion and $50 million for APCO. The Virginia law also restores over-
sight of utilities’ earnings and base rates to the State Corporation Commission (SCC). That oversight was eliminated in a 2015 Wagner-sponsored bill designed to freeze electric rates until 2022. The premise of the legislation was that a freeze would help utilities stabilize rates while meeting new and unpredictable costs expected from tougher environ- mental regulations under the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. Under President Donald Trump, that plan has been dismantled. According to the SCC, Dominion,
which serves about 2.5 million custom- ers, overearned $426 million in 2016 under the freeze. Now that the freeze is about to be
lifted, opponents question whether the SCC’s oversight will be fully restored. SB 966 includes many projects deemed in “the public interest,” including ones the SCC said in the past either were not needed or would incur an unreasonable cost, such as a bid by Dominion to put some distribution lines underground. In that case, Ken
Schrad, the SCC’s director of information resources, says that evidence in a hearing showed Dominion wanted to invest $2 billion in underground investments over 10 years at a cost to ratepayers of $6 billion. The improve- ments would be limited to troubled lines, “typically the ones that are last to come back online when you’ve got a major storm outage,” Schrad explains. While the ultimate cost to all
Schrad
Dominion ratepayers was $6 billion, only 6 percent of its customers would directly benefit from the project, Schrad says. “The commission in its order [in 2015] said no other utility in the United States has proposed such an aggressive program. So the commission told the company to come back with something a little bit smaller in scale and let’s see how it works, and the company did. We approved it for the first year, and they came back for a second year and they spent more than the commission was willing to allow them to recover.”
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