Virginia’s State Corporation Commission (SCC) has rejected Dominion Energy Virginia’s application for approval of a new rate schedule “CRG” under which it would offer renewable energy to large users of energy.

The SCC concluded Dominion had failed to show the tariff would result in “just and reasonable rates.” The Commission focused especially on two issues. First, the tariff relied on a formula made up of a long list of unknown variables including half a dozen different cost and price forecasts, producing “simply too much uncertainty and subjectivity.”

Second, Dominion proposed to collect a profit on the renewable energy it purchased for customers, equivalent to the return on equity it is allowed to charge on projects it builds. This would be unusual (typically the costs of purchased power are simply passed through to customers), and the Commission wasn’t having it.

This puts Dominion back at square one in developing a renewable energy tariff it can offer to large customers other than the Amazons and Facebooks of the world, who negotiate their own terms.

On the one hand, that’s good for customer choice and free market competition; as long as the utility does not have an approved tariff for 100% renewable energy, customers are allowed to buy renewable energy from other providers.

On the other hand, the SCC opinion also seems to suggest that when Dominion comes back with a new proposal, it might have to be one that, while cheaper, could be even less appealing to customers than the already-questionable CRG tariff. Pointing to the very broad definition of renewable energy in § 56-576 of the Code, the SCC makes the peculiar assertion that “The Commission must find that the energy provided by the proposed tariffs meets the General Assembly’s definition of renewable energy, not an individual customer’s preferred definition of such.”

This language concerns Cale Jaffe, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Virginia and the Director of the Environmental and Regulatory Law Clinic. He says:

I take that as a not-so-thinly veiled criticism of Tier 1 renewables like wind and solar by the Commissioners.  I.e., Va. Code 56-576 defines “renewable energy” to include, “biomass, sustainable or otherwise, (the definitions of which shall be liberally construed), energy from waste, landfill gas, municipal solid waste….” I read the Commission as advising Dominion that if it comes back with another 100% Renewable Energy tariff, it needs to include “cheaper” options (if externalities are excluded), which the Commission would define to include unsustainable biomass along with other Tier 3 resources (e.g., waste to energy).

For customers, the result could be the worst of both worlds if a tariff with a mix of cheap, crummy stuff won SCC approval. It would close off the market to competition, yet probably not attract many takers.

Taking the optimistic view, though, there’s little out there in the renewable energy world that can compete with today’s wind and solar prices, with the exception of hydropower in places that have a lot of it. If Dominion’s prices are high, that’s because it insists on mixing in high-cost biomass to satisfy its own insistence that a renewable energy tariff consist of renewable energy 100% of the time.

The SCC’s focus on cost to customers has implications for Dominion’s proposed Schedule CRG-S, which would offer residential and smaller non-residential customers a mix of renewable sources at a fixed price that would increase the bills of participating residential customers by nearly 18%, or more than $20 per month for someone using 1,000 kWh. (Again, it’s that insistence on “100% of the time” that appears to be driving up the price.) This is a greater increase than the similar tariff Appalachian Power proposed, and the SCC rejected as too high, just a year ago.