How Virginia Took on Dominion Energy
This 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. That story alone is rare enough to be worth telling. It might also have hopeful implications for our perpetually stuck politics.
Dominion Energy is a utility corporation that provides power to two-thirds of Virginians. 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. 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. 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. The main authors of these bills are Dominion’s lawyers and lobbyists.
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 ) by about $2 billion—by one reckoning, $3 billion—on their electric bills. 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. As for Dominion’s customers, their refunds amounted to less than a third of the company’s
