Until October of last year, customers of Dominion Energy Virginia could see at least some of the higher costs created by the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) detailed on their electric bills. Look at the recent bill and all that transparency is gone and the VCEA costs are now hidden.

Compliance with the Democrats’ signature law to retire hydrocarbon generation and attempt to replace it with wind, solar and battery projects is starting to get noticeably expensive. Maybe that is why the utility stopped being so open about the costs. 

During the recent General Assembly session, House Republicans offered an amendment to the state budget that would have mandated a return of those details to energy bills, with backup information provided on the utility’s public websites. It also would have applied to Appalachian Power Company which serves about 540,000 customer accounts in Western Virginia. 

The language (rejected of course) should be revived and attached as an amendment to some germane bill Governor Glenn Youngkin might otherwise be willing to sign. There is absolutely no valid reason for a nay vote on this idea. Why would anybody oppose providing more information on cost to a utility’s captive ratepayers? 

The Thomas Jefferson Institute has tagged several 2025 energy bills as needing a veto, but here is something positive and very easy the Governor could do to help consumers at least understand what they are paying and why.

Most of the cost imposed by the 2020 legislation is being collected in individual rate adjustment clauses. These are stand-alone charges, separate from base rates or fuel costs, with collection based on usage. They are easy to track.

For example, Dominion’s Costal Virginia Offshore Wind project is being paid for through Rider OSW, which was one of those delineated on the bills Dominion sent its customers until November 2024. Each customer could see what they had been billed toward the construction costs that month.

Also detailed on the bills were Rider CE, which provides the money for all of Dominions solar and battery projects. Rider RPS pays for the renewable energy certificates (RECs) Dominion must buy to comply with VCEA when they need to offset some of their use of hydrocarbon fuel. And finally, Rider PIPP funds the energy bill subsidies for low-income customers which was also created by the VCEA years ago. 

Nothing on the bill sent to customers identified those costs as needed for compliance with the VCEA, and Dominion also detailed the cost of the coal ash clean-up it is undertaking at its legacy coal plants. Those are not VCEA-related but were mandated by the General Assembly.  More information on the various RACs is provided on the company website, but your typical residential consumer would have no idea how to decipher all of that. 

The current charge for the offshore wind, for example, is 0.8631 cents per kilowatt-hour. You must multiply by 1,000 to get a number most can understand, $8.63 per 1000 kilowatt-hours.  Rider CE is .2884 cents per kWh, and thus $2.88 per 1,000 kWh.

Dominion is a model of clarity compared to Appalachian Power, which is being besieged now by angry customers looking at huge winter bills. On its website, deciphering the existing rate adjustment charges involves plowing through a 139-page document. They do not want you to figure this out, or they wouldn’t make it this hard.  The VCEA-related charges are not significant for APCo customers at this point but they will be in the future.

Dominion’s future VCEA compliance costs will also grow from here, as reported previously.

According to a chart (above) included in another Dominion regulatory filing, the combined cost of compliance with several combined VCEA mandates is $17.89 per 1,000 kwh in 2025, or $215 per year. Dominion estimates that cost will rise to $282 annually by 2030 and $626 annually by 2035 (over $50 per month). That is using Dominion’s preferred projection method. 

Under another projection using assumptions the State Corporation Commission staff believes are more accurate, it will be $314 annually by 2030 and $826 annually by 2035 (almost $69 per month).  Don’t ignore the costs this is imposing on business users, who seek to pass it on to their customers. 

For that money, if it includes what it seems to, the customer will get a bunch of solar farms producing electricity less than 25% of the time, a wind farm producing electricity perhaps 40% of the time, and a pile of renewable energy certificates that include no actual energy production. RECs merely subsidize somebody else’s wind or solar or hydro energy. 

And that does not include the impact of pending 2025 legislation to change VCEA, like the massive increase in required battery storage. 

Here is the language we need in the Code of Virginia somewhere:

A Phase I or Phase II Electric Utility as that term is defined in §56-585.1 of the Code of Virginia shall list on all its monthly bills to customers served under its residential tariffs all the rate adjustment clauses authorized under Section A.6. of §56-585.1 and the amounts due under those clauses on that bill. The utility will provide additional information on its website which clearly identifies which of its list of all approved rate adjustment clauses is currently applied to residential customers, which are not, and which are optional to those customers. The specific purposes of the rate adjustment clauses shall be explained on the website, and whether they do or do not include an authorized rate of return. Rate adjustment clauses which have been combined with the approval of the State Corporation Commission shall be listed in their combined form. 

Keeping you in the dark about the cost of the misguided Virginia Clean Economy Act helps it survive.

Steve Haner is a Senior Fellow for Environment and Energy Policy. He can be reached at Steve@thomasjeffersoninst.org.