Flush with success after the SCC ignored legal deficiencies and approved the company’s plan for a large gas peaker plant in Chesterfield, Dominion Energy is pushing its luck with a proposal for a massively bigger gas combined-cycle plant.

The 3,000 MW facility slated for Cumberland County would be Dominion’s biggest fossil fuel plant ever, the size of three nuclear reactors. And unlike the Chesterfield plant, which is designed to run only intermittently, Dominion expects the new one to run most of the time. 

With Chesterfield, Dominion argued that a peaker plant was needed for reliability. You know the refrain: the sun doesn’t always shine, the offshore wind won’t always blow, batteries might run out of juice. That argument doesn’t fly for a combined-cycle plant, but the company still waves the banner of reliability. For Cumberland, though, it just says growing demand means it needs the power.  

The demand part is true. Every time Dominion revises its projections for future demand, the number goes higher. The obvious reason is the data center boom, though Dominion generally avoids saying so. It cites electric vehicles, building electrification and new manufacturing, trying to create a “we’re all in this together” vibe. 

But energy efficiency has largely kept pace with those kinds of higher usage. When the SCC pushed Dominion to separate data center demand from total demand, it became clear that residents and non-data center businesses aren’t the drivers. We are just the ones paying the consequences.

Why should we residents be stuck with 30 years of paying for a honking-big, fracked-gas-burning, climate-change-driving monstrosity whose sole purpose is to feed the tech companies’ competitive drive for the most advanced chatbots?  

Indeed, there are all kinds of reasons why the SCC should say no, including the unfairness, high cost, illegality and – to use a technical term – stupidity of building another plant to burn fossil fuels.

 The new plant proposal uses different technology from the Chesterfield project but comes with similar problems. 

Both carry the weight of environmental injustice. Just last year Cumberland County approved construction of a mega-landfill over strong opposition from the rural, historically Black community. Residents had hoped the county would instead lean into its rich history to promote “tourism not trash.”Layering on a massive gas plant in an area that is already about to be burdened with one of the largest landfill projects in the state surely raises issues of equity and fairness.

The SCC showed little interest in those problems in the Chesterfield case, and may well ignore them in Cumberland. If so, maybe it will be more persuaded by the economic argument.

Only a couple of years ago, developers had mostly stopped investing in new gas generation for the simple reason that combined-cycle plants are expensive to build and can’t compete against cheaper renewables on a dollars-per-megawatt-hour basis. 

(By contrast, peaker plants are cheap to build but inefficient and much more expensive to run, so they only get fired up for short periods when demand peaks and power prices are at their highest. That’s a role batteries increasingly fill at less cost.)

As recently as 2024, only 4% of new electric generation in the U.S. came from fossil fuels; almost all the rest came from solar, batteries and wind. This was partly because federal tax incentives made wind and solar more attractive in the Biden era, but the data shows that even without subsidies, renewable energy remains the most cost-competitive form of generation.   

A couple of things have changed since then. The onslaught of power-hungry data centers overwhelmed the ability of electric grids to keep generation in balance with demand. At the same time, the Trump administration erected one barrier after another to the wind and solar projects that would most quickly and cheaply bring the balance back. Instead, it is aggressively supporting fossil fuels and weakening pollution limits. 

For a utility needing more power at any cost, suddenly gas plants are back on the table. But for the people who have to live with them and pay for them, a gas plant will be an ongoing liability.

Wind and solar exploded in popularity not just because they don’t pollute the air, but also because they have no fuel cost. You build them once, and you know your power price for the next 25-30 years. Fossil gas, on the other hand, carries a price beyond the capital cost of building the plant, but you don’t know what that price will be. Even with a robust domestic supply, gas prices gyrate wildly.

When Dominion proposes building a gas plant, it makes a guess about what the price will be in the future. There is no penalty for the company in guessing too low. If prices go up unexpectedly, it’s the ratepayers who foot the bill. The SCC can’t tell Dominion to eat the extra cost; by law, fuel costs are passed directly through to consumers. 

Indeed, this spring, for the second time just this decade, Dominion told the SCC it needs to raise bills to cover past fuel costs that were higher than it planned. In this case, it wants collect from us more than a billion dollars. Paying off the full amount over one year would add $22 to the monthly electricity bill of the average residential customer. 

This “average” customer is said to use 1,000 kWh per month. Those of us with heat pumps use much more than that in the winter months, so $22 can become a multiple of that. This amount will appear on top of the fuel charges that already make up about 25% of generation charges on residential bills.

But given the pain a hike of this magnitude would cause to residents, not to mention the outrage that would result, Dominion proposes instead to spread the cost out over several years. This is what it did in 2023 to recoup $1.2 billion in excess fuel costs racked up in 2021-22. According to the “deferred fuel charge” on my bill, we are still paying off that debt. 

Fool us once, fool us twice, and are you really willing to go along with Dominion’s claim that fossil gas will be an inexpensive, reliable and desirable fuel source over the next 30 years while we pay off this project, with interest?

And then there’s the fact that building a gigantic new plant to burn fracked gas is politically stupid. Global warming doesn’t factor into the Trump administration’s energy “planning,” such as it is, but climate action was a priority for the previous administration and is going to be one for future administrations. Global warming isn’t going away; it’s getting worse, and wishing away reality is not a long-term strategy. 

Moreover, future leaders will have to deal with the fact that clinging to an extraction economy has left the U.S. behind our geopolitical rivals on implementing advanced technologies like solar (where China dominates), offshore wind (China again), electric vehicles (there again, China) and storage (do I even need to say China?). 

I’d rather bet the U.S. won’t continue down this path of self-destruction. If and when our leaders course-correct, attention will revert back to building out our supply of clean energy, with greater urgency to make up for lost time. That’s where Virginia’s focus should be. 

The General Assembly meant for the Virginia Clean Economy Act and our participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to future-proof our power supply and deter Dominion from sinking its customers’ money into ill-conceived fossil fuel plants. 

“Reliability” isn’t supposed to be a get-out-of-jail-free card. Dominion has to meet energy efficiency targets, satisfy environmental justice requirements and prove that there aren’t cost-effective clean energy options available. It can’t do it.

Of course, Dominion didn’t meet those conditions when it proposed the Chesterfield peaker plant, and the SCC approved it anyway. But we have to stop digging our carbon hole sometime. Let it be now.

A version of this article appeared in the Virginia Mercury on May 20. 2026.