Monthly Archives: February 2018

After losing a vote on the double dip, is Dominion losing Power?

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An earthquake shook Richmond, Virginia on the afternoon of Monday, February 12, rocking the House of Delegates just as it was supposed to be passing HB 1558, Dominion Energy’s Ratepayer Rip-Off Act of 2018. The bill was intended to help the utility lock in stupendous unearned profits for its parent company, courtesy of the monopoly’s captive customers, under the guise of supporting clean energy and grid investments.

And the bill did pass the House, but only after delegates adopted an amendment offered by Minority Leader David Toscano stripping away a lucrative provision that Dominion both desperately wanted and swore didn’t exist: the infamous “double dip” that the SCC has said would allow Dominion to charge customers more than twice over for a large portfolio of infrastructure projects. With billions of dollars worth of projects on the drawing board, the double dip meant serious money.

Anyone who didn’t believe the double dip was real only needed to listen to Dominion lobbyist Jack Rust respond to repeated questions about it during a Senate Commerce and Labor Committee hearing two weeks earlier. It was a “yes or no” question that Rust wouldn’t answer with a yes or a no.

Obfuscation, however, was good enough for the Senate, which passed SB 966 last week by a bi-partisan vote of 26-13. It was good enough for Governor Northam, too, who had already pledged to sign the bill. A few environmental groups broke ranks to support the bill, too, cheering the provisions for energy efficiency and the promise of more renewables.

Admittedly, the Attorney General’s Office of Consumer Counsel remained opposed. So did other environmental and consumer groups, complaining not just about the double dip, but about ceding control over the future of Virginia’s electric grid to a profit-driven monopoly. But when has the General Assembly ever cared what environmental and consumer groups thought? So passing the bill through the House should have been easy.

And then Toscano called Dominion’s bluff. If the double dip is real, said Toscano, his amendment would fix it. If the bill doesn’t already allow for double-dipping, then making doubly sure of that does no harm.

The logic was unassailable, though bill patron and Friend of Dominion Terry Kilgore assailed it anyway. As the Associated Press reported, Kilgore tried to persuade legislators to reject Toscano’s amendment. Yet even some fellow Republicans deserted him on the vote, helping Democrats pass it 55-41. A quick-thinking Delegate Habeeb, apparently recognizing bad optics for the Republicans, called for a second vote, and this time the amendment passed 96-1, with even Kilgore supporting it.

By all accounts, the vote was unprecedented. Dominion does not lose floor votes. The vote rocked the House.

In hindsight, perhaps Dominion should have known a fault line had formed. Grassroots groups were agitating against the power of monopoly. A new group called Clean Virginia was agitating against the bill. Almost all the freshmen Democrats had pledged not to accept Dominion money—and there were a lot of them, thanks to last fall’s “blue wave” election. But the Republicans had already scuttled most of their bills; surely they had learned humility? They had not. They all supported Toscano’s amendment, and all but one followed him in opposing final passage of the bill, which passed 63-35.

The earthquake could be felt over at Dominion headquarters, where reporters could be seen inspecting the foundation for damage. CEO Tom Farrell called in his damage control specialists, heavy-hitting lobbyists Eva Teig Hardy and Bill Thomas, to persuade legislators to support the Senate version of the bill over the House version—or failing that, to lard it up with new favors to the utilities.

According to the AP, Kilgore continued to maintain after the vote that the double dip was “more perception than reality.” But he also said, “Toscano’s amendment takes ‘a lot of stuff out that needs to stay in’ the legislation. ‘I’m going to have to fix it.’”

One might think Dominion and its allies would be embarrassed to defend a provision they say doesn’t exist. Reportedly they have pivoted to a different argument, that the company would have no incentive to invest in renewable energy if it isn’t allowed to rip off ratepayers in the process. Accordingly, they are holding solar investments hostage, knowing how much Democrats want them.

Dominion’s new argument is simply posturing. Its 2017 Integrated Resource Plan declared solar to be the cheapest form of energy in Virginia, and it had signaled via the Rubin Group its plan to build at least 3,000 MW of solar in the coming years. Saying now that it might take its ball and go home is a sign its lobbyists are out of good arguments.

In the past, good arguments were not a requirement for Dominion to get what it wants; political power has always been enough. It will be interesting to see now whether Dominion emerges with some semblance of its omnipotence intact, or whether this earthquake presages new shocks that could crack the fortress.

 

General Assembly chews on, spits out healthy legislation, while still trying to digest a huge hunk of pork

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They just keep getting fatter.

If you were bewildered by the sheer volume of bills addressing solar, efficiency, storage, and other energy topics that I outlined last month, take heart: clean energy advocates don’t have nearly as many bills to keep track of now. So few bills survived the Finance and Commerce and Labor Committees that it will be easier to talk about what is left than what got killed.

The bigger story, of course, is the Dominion Ratepayer Rip-Off Act of 2018, which the utility would dearly love you to think of as the “grid modernization bill,” but which might be better imagined as an oozing pork barrel. Recent amendments do make it less obnoxious than it was last week (begging the question of why it wasn’t introduced that way in the first place). The Governor now says he supports the bill, the Attorney General continues to oppose it, and the SCC keeps issuing poisonous analyses.

But right now let’s just run down the fate of the other bills we’ve been following. For explanations of these bills, see previous posts on solar; efficiency, storage and EVs; and energy choice, carbon and coal.

Of the bills affecting customer-sited solar, only a handful remain:

  • HB 1252 (Kilgore), expanding the pilot program for third-party PPAs in APCo territory to cover all nonprofits and local government: amendment ensures current Dominion pilot is unchanged, passes the House, goes to the Senate
  • HB 1451 (Sullivan), allowing a school district to attribute surplus electricity from a solar array on one school to other schools in the district: amendment turns it into a pilot program, passes House C&L
  • SB 191 (Favola), allowing customers to install solar arrays large enough to meet 125% of previous demand (up from 100% today): amended to exclude customers in coop territory*, passes Senate C&L

Delegate Toscano’s bills promoting energy storage remain alive. HB 1018, offering a tax credit for energy storage devices, passed a House Finance subcommittee last week with an amendment to delay its start date to 2020. HJ 101, calling for a study, passed Rules but then was sent to Appropriations, where it was to be heard yesterday. (The Legislative Information Service does not yet show its fate.)

HB 922 (Bulova), allowing localities to install EV charging stations, has been reported from General Laws with amendments. The companion bill, SB 908 (McClellan) passed the Senate.

The Rubin Group’s land use bills passed their respective houses with amendments. The bills are SB 429 (Stanley), its companion bill HB 508 (Hodges), SB 179 (Stanley) and companion bill HB 509 (Hodges).

All other customer-focused solar bills died. So did energy efficiency goals, the mandatory renewable portfolio standard, LED light bulb requirements, and tax credits for EVs and renewable energy. Direct Energy’s energy choice legislation died in both House and Senate in the face of Dominion’s opposition, in spite of an astonishingly diverse array of business supporters; even the support of Conservatives for Clean Energy was not enough to garner any Republican votes in the House C&L subcommittee.

Republicans also killed the Governor’s RGGI bills while passing Delegate Poindexter’s anti-RGGI bill, HB 1270, in the House. Delegate Yancey’s anti-regulation HB 1082, appears to be alive in a subcommittee, though Delegate Freitas’ anti-regulation bill died, and Senator Vogel’s effort to change the constitution to allow legislative vetoes of regulations died in committee.

Delegate Kilgore’s HB 665, restoring tax subsidies to coal companies to facilitate destroying Virginia mountains, passed House Finance on a party-line vote. Shockingly, Senator Chafin’s similar bill, SB 378, passed the Senate with support from Democrats Marsden, Petersen, Edwards, Dance, Lewis, Mason and Saslaw.

So once again, in spite of a remarkable election that swept progressive Democrats into the House and nearly upended Republican rule, clean energy advocates have done poorly this year. Some of their priorities are now part of the Dominion pork barrel legislation, to be sure. But that legislation enables utility solar and utility spending; it does nothing for customer-owned renewable energy, market competition, climate action, or consumer choice.

Dominion still rules the General Assembly, though the legislators who voted in line with the utility’s wishes won’t admit it—or give any other explanation. The Republican members of the House Commerce and Labor subcommittee slashed their way through the pro-consumer bills with ruthless efficiency, and did not bother explaining their votes. (A special shout-out goes to Democratic delegates Kory, Ward, Heretick and Bourne for just as stubbornly voting in support of the good bills.)

But over in Senate C&L, chairman Frank Wagner tried to maintain the pretense that he was merely “referring” his colleagues’ bills to the Rubin Group instead of actually killing them.

The closed-door, private, invitation-only, utility-centric Rubin Group has no legislators among its members and proposes only changes to the law that all its members like, so “sending” a bill there that the utilities oppose is pure farce. Yet that was the fate of Senator Edwards’ bills on third party PPAs, agricultural net metering, and community solar, and Senator Wexton’s community solar bill. Wagner instructed these Senators to “work with” the Rubin Group on their bills. None of the other committee members objected.

But it’s not like the Rubin Group achieved much, either. Its hallmark legislation putting 4,000 MW of utility solar in the public interest got thrown into the Dominion pork barrel (and was later upped to 5,000 MW), along with energy efficiency bills designed to eliminate the SCC’s over-reliance on the RIM test, requirements for utility spending on energy efficiency, and Delegate Habeeb’s nice battery storage pilot program. They all became tasty morsels designed to offset legislators’ queasiness over the ratepayer rip-off and, not incidentally, to maneuver advocates and bill patrons into supporting Dominion’s bill as the only way to get their own legislation passed into law.