Dominion asks for $9 increase to customer bills

The request is a significant increase in a state that already has high electric bills, according to federal data.

Virginia’s largest electric utility cited dramatic increases in fuel prices stemming from the pandemic, inflation and the war in Ukraine as reasons it needs to charge more to cover what’s known as the “fuel factor” component of its electric rates.

Regulated utilities are allowed to recover every dollar of money they spend on fuel such as natural gas and coal to run their power plants and create electricity.

Dominion’s three-year proposal along with other proposed rate revisions would increase the typical residential customer bill by about 7% — or $9 a month — if approved, wrote Ed Baine, president of Dominion Energy Virginia, to the SCC in Thursday’s filing.

The company estimated that without its proposal to mitigate rising fuel prices, the bill increase could be as much as 20%, Baine wrote.

“The Company is taking significant action to reduce customers’ exposure to future fuel cost fluctuations,” he wrote. The addition of solar and offshore wind to the company’s fleet of power plants, which have no fuel costs, “will mitigate the risk of commodity price upheavals.”

Dominion is planning the largest offshore wind farm in the country off the coast of Virginia Beach but that, too, will increase customer bills.

Walton Shepherd, a senior staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Virginia, said Dominion’s Virginia customers should be prepared for even higher rates than what the company requested Thursday.

His group has tried to push state lawmakers to require Dominion to spend more on investments that reduce energy use in order to lower customer costs.

Instead, “Dominion binged on building costly natural gas plants, and now the chickens have come home to roost,” Shepherd said.