Tag Archives: SCC

Shared solar launches in Virginia but still faces an uphill battle

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Wildflowers in front of solar panels illustrate pollinator plantings around solar panels
Photo credit Center for Pollinators in Energy, fresh-energy.org

After years of wrangling, Virginia finally allows certain customers of Dominion Energy Virginia to buy solar energy from independent providers of shared solar, also known as community solar.

Don’t applaud yet, though. Dominion has used the rulemaking process and its control over project interconnection to create hurdles for shared solar that lawmakers never anticipated. High minimum bills, prolonged interconnection study requirements and expensive equipment demands are stalling projects and could drive away all but the most tenacious developers.

The blow that received the most attention came during the rulemaking process. The State Corporation Commission decided Dominion could impose a minimum bill averaging $55 per month on most customers. The minimum bill is added to the cost of the electricity itself, making shared solar so expensive that the program simply won’t be offered to the general public.

However, lawmakers had included a provision exempting low- to moderate-income (LMI) participants from the minimum bill requirement. In effect, then, the SCC’s order turned the shared solar program into a program just for LMI residents.

Indeed, the first shared solar project for LMI Virginians launched on Nov. 9 in Dumfries as a partnership between community solar developer Dimension Renewable Energy and low-income housing provider Community Housing Partners. Subscribers are told to expect savings of 10% on their electricity bills. The partners are signing up participants now but have not broken ground on a solar facility to serve them.

Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, the author of the law creating the shared solar program, attended the launch of Dimension’s project to share in the celebration. But he still believes the program should be available to everyone. He confirmed to me he is working with the community solar industry to develop legislation addressing the minimum bill problem.

Surovell says he continues to think a minimum bill is necessary; the question is what fee is “commercially feasible to community solar programs” while still capturing “a fair amount of system costs and legacy expenses” borne by Dominion in providing service to participants when the solar facility isn’t generating electricity.

Interconnection woes: delays, high costs and ‘dark fiber’

Even if Surovell can thread that needle, the minimum bill is only the most visible problem facing shared solar in Dominion’s territory. The solar facilities have to connect to the grid, which puts Dominion in charge of the interconnection process. Developers say they are encountering long delays, high costs and unreasonable equipment requirements.

Earlier this year, the State Corporation Commission opened a docket to solicit feedback on the interconnection process — and the result was an outpouring of complaints.

As described in comments from the solar industry, Dominion requires cost-prohibitive “dark fiber” for grid protection in place of a much less expensive industry-standard approach. Dominion also lags in conducting the studies that every new project proposal must undergo at the developer’s cost, resulting in timelines that stretch 16 months or more. Additional facilities that would use the same substation aren’t considered until the study process for the first one is complete, creating further delays.

Developers also aren’t told until the final stage how much Dominion expects to charge them to interconnect their array — and even then, Dominion adds a disclaimer that its estimate is not binding. That uncertainty, says the industry, makes projects hard to finance and risky for developers.

These inefficiencies and unnecessary expenses drive up project costs and make distributed solar more expensive for customers, when it is possible at all. Tony Smith, president of solar developer Secure Futures, told me his company wanted to build a 1 megawatt shared solar facility to serve LMI customers in Augusta County. They secured the site and permits before learning that Dominion would require dark fiber and planned to charge them $1 million for the interconnection, an amount so high as to scuttle the project.

(For context, solar industry estimates put the entire cost of developing community-scale solar at an average of $1.4 million per megawatt.)

Smith says larger projects may be able to absorb exorbitant interconnection fees, but smaller projects cannot. In any case, high interconnection costs inevitably mean higher costs for customers.

Industry comments note areas where Dominion has tried to resolve issues, in particular to speed up the study timelines. But regarding other requirements, particularly those that impose the highest costs, the utility shows little willingness to budge. In some instances, the company even seems to be using its interconnection power to make private developers shoulder its own grid upgrade costs. It’s hard not to suspect that Dominion is perfectly happy making other people’s solar projects more expensive.

The solar industry’s brief describes steps taken in other states to make the process fairer, faster and less expensive. But if the staff report of the Division of Public Utility Regulation is any indication, the SCC is more likely to take a slower approach involving working groups, pilot studies and a multistep process. Smith says all this will take many years, by which time shared solar developers will have given up on Virginia and taken their business to friendlier states. He’d like to see the General Assembly address the worst problems.

Surovell says he has “heard about” the interconnection issues but “ha(s)n’t focused on it yet.” Charlie Coggeshall, mid-Atlantic director of the Coalition for Community Solar Access, told me that “interconnection is a hurdle for shared solar in Virginia and absolutely in need of improvements,” but said his organization is focused on the SCC process and for now has no plans to pursue a legislative fix.

Dominion serves about two-thirds of Virginia customers, so solving the minimum bill and interconnection problems would open shared solar to a broad swath of residents across the state. That still leaves out the other third. Advocates hope to expand the availability of shared solar into Appalachian Power territory and that of Virginia’s electric cooperatives.

A few co-ops launched their own community solar programs pre-pandemic, but most don’t offer one and apparently don’t want to. As for Appalachian Power, it has consistently opposed community solar, saying it can’t afford to lose customers. (On the other hand, Appalachian Power does not require installation of dark fiber as a condition of interconnection, in that respect making it friendlier to distributed generation — just not shared solar projects.)

Multifamily shared solar scores a win, regardless of income level

Apartment building with solar panels on the roof.
An apartment building in the Bronx. Under the multifamily shared solar program, apartment buildings in Virginia could host solar arrays for the benefit of tenants. Photo by Bright Power Inc. via Wikimedia.

While shared solar faces an uphill battle, some good news came in a second case implementing a related program, this one authorized by 2020’s Solar Freedom legislation and designed for onsite solar at apartment buildings and condominiums. The multifamily shared solar (MFSS) program makes it possible for a landlord or condo association to install a solar facility to serve just its own residents. This program occupies a middle ground between community solar and net metering, and the enabling legislation allows Dominion to impose an administrative fee but not a minimum bill or any other charges.

Early on, the SCC had indicated a willingness to allow Dominion to shoehorn the components of the shared solar law’s minimum bill into the MFSS administrative fee. That would have certainly been the end of the program right there. In its final order, however, a common-sense definition of “administrative fee” prevailed, and the SCC ruled that Dominion could not stuff its costs of doing business into the fee.

The SCC still set the MFSS administrative fee at a curiously high $13.40 per month, accepting Dominion’s argument that it would have to do all this billing manually. The SCC also decided customers should pay certain “non-bypassable charges” amounting to an average of about $3 per month. The law doesn’t authorize these charges, but the SCC reasoned that it doesn’t prohibit them, either.

Even with Dominion taking $16 or so, the economics would not seem prohibitive. Developers caution, however, that the limited subscriber base for any MFSS project makes this program difficult to work with, even if the building is large and the property can accommodate a fair-sized solar facility. And even onsite solar arrays aren’t necessarily immune to interconnection woes.

Still, there is plenty of customer interest in the multifamily program, especially from condominium associations that may be able to finance the projects themselves. With any luck, they will pave the way for others to follow.

This article first appeared in the Virginia Mercury on November 29, 2022.

Dominion’s proposed charge for solar program is absurdly high

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Solar panels are well suited to the flat roofs of apartment buildings like this one in the Bronx, but they remain a rarity in Virginia despite a new law designed to open the market. Photo by Bright Power, Inc. – U.S. Department of Energy from United States, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A Dominion Energy customer wrote me recently to ask what her condo association could do to go solar. The building’s roof can hold many more solar panels than needed to power the needs of the common area. Is it possible to sell the excess electricity to individual residents to power their units?

I get this question a lot, and in 2020, the Virginia General Assembly tried to change the answer from “no” to “yes.” As part of the Solar Freedom legislation, the State Corporation Commission was tasked with creating a shared solar program for residents of multifamily buildings like condominiums and apartment buildings, with orders to make the program available beginning in January 1, 2021. In other words, it ought to be available today.

And yet I still have to tell people they can’t do it now, and may not be able to ever, unless the SCC changes course. Would-be customers will have just one final chance this month to try to save the program. On March 25, the SCC will take public testimony at an evidentiary hearing to address the seemingly simple question threatening the viability of the Multifamily Shared Solar Program. The law allows Dominion to collect an administrative fee from customers who participate in the program. How much should that be? 

An administrative fee doesn’t sound like it could be enough to stall a program for more than a year, let alone deep-six it altogether. Dominion’s role in the Multifamily Shared Solar Program is limited to doing the accounting to make sure every unit gets credit for the share of the electricity the resident buys. That shouldn’t cost very much—perhaps a buck or two per month per customer. 

Yet Dominion proposes to impose an administrative fee of more than $87 per month—a charge so absurdly high that it would result in participants paying far more for electricity generated on the roof of their building than for the electricity Dominion delivers to them from elsewhere in the state. The SCC temporarily stopped the utility from implementing that fee, but it also stacked the deck to make a high fee almost inevitable. 

And that’s a program killer. Rooftop solar is still a lot more expensive than large, offsite solar facilities, so keeping fees low is critical to making the economics work. It’s also a matter of equity. Owners of single-family homes with rooftop solar benefit from Virginia’s net metering program, which guarantees them a one-for-one credit for any surplus electricity generated. Multifamily residents deserve something similar.

Indeed, the entire point of putting the Multifamily Shared Solar Program in Solar Freedom—a law otherwise focused on removing barriers to net metering—is to benefit Virginians who’ve been shut out of the solar market because they don’t own their own roofs. Renters in particular are more likely to have lower incomes than owners of single-family homes, so making the program available to them is important to the goal of reducing the energy burden on low- and moderate-income residents and ensuring that the transition to clean energy benefits people at all income levels.

I’m not just guessing about the intent behind Solar Freedom. I know the point is to offer residents of multifamily buildings an analog to net metering because I wrote most of the legislation as it was introduced, in collaboration with allies in local government and the legislators who introduced it. We wanted building owners and occupants to be able to work together to install onsite solar, free of SCC meddling and without the utility demanding a cut of the action. 

But as so often happens with legislative sausage-making, the bill changed as it went through negotiations and emerged from committees. The SCC was charged with developing a formal program, and Dominion was given a role in administering it. Yet the new language made clear that the original purpose remained. The SCC is to write regulations that “reasonably allow for the creation and financing of shared solar facilities” and “allow all customer classes to participate in the program, and ensure participation opportunities for all customer classes.” 

The legislation provides for participants to be credited on their utility bills with their share of the electricity generated by the solar panels. The SCC is to make an annual calculation of the bill credit rate “as the effective retail rate of the customer’s rate class, which shall be inclusive of all supply charges, delivery charges, demand charges, fixed charges and any applicable riders or other charges to the customer.” To the definition of “bill credit rate” is added the admonition that the rate “shall be set such that the shared solar program results in robust project development and shared solar program access for all customer classes.” 

This language is consistent with a goal of putting multifamily buildings on par with single-family homes in making rooftop solar affordable. But, unlike the original legislative language, and unlike the rules of net metering, the final version of Solar Freedom instructs the SCC to “allow the investor-owned utilities to recover reasonable costs of administering the program.” 

And that’s the opportunity Dominion wants to exploit. As soon as the SCC began the process of writing rules for the Multifamily Shared Solar Program, Dominion advanced the claim that the administrative fee should be based on essentially all of the costs of operating an electric utility. Instead of the multifamily program mirroring net metering, Dominion took as its model a larger program under a very different law. The Shared Solar legislation, also passed in 2020, creates a program for community solar facilities that can be onsite or offsite, can serve many more customers anywhere in Dominion’s territory, and can even be carved out of a utility-scale solar facility. The shared solar law specifically allows Dominion to charge most customers a “minimum bill” with a list of components, and also an “administrative fee.” 

Things aren’t going well for the Shared Solar program at the SCC. A hearing examiner recently recommended the commission adopt a minimum bill of more than $55, based on an SCC staff recommendation. It did not trouble the hearing examiner or the staff that the number puts the cost of shared solar above the cost of Dominion’s own electricity, a program killer according to community solar developers.

But cramming the minimum bill elements into the multifamily program’s administrative fee would be an even greater blow to a program whose economics are already constrained by the smaller size of onsite projects. It also seems obvious from a plain reading of the two laws that the General Assembly did not intend to burden multifamily residents with the fees it authorized for the Shared Solar participants.

Unfortunately for customers, the SCC approved the cramming in concept last July, ignoring this plain legislative intent. Based on that, SCC staff proposed options for the administrative fee of either $16.78 or $57.26, with the higher fee using the same reasoning that just led to the hearing examiner’s $55 recommendation in the shared solar program. 

The SCC ought to reject these numbers and instead adopt the dollar or two that running the multifamily shared solar program will actually cost Dominion. But to do so, commissioners will have to reverse their earlier, egregious decision and embrace what seems to be (for them) the novel concept that the General Assembly intended the plain meaning of its words. Only then will residents of multifamily buildings gain their solar freedom. 

Note: those wishing to testify at the SCC hearing must sign up by March 22.

This article originally appeared in the Virginia Mercury on March 10, 2022.

Increasing fixed charges on electricity bills hurts customers–and society 

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solar panels on a house
SVEC’s fixed charges would discourage customers from pursuing net zero homes like this one. Photo by Ivy Main

Okay, folks, the kids are back in school, so in their honor we are all going to do a word problem! 

Bob Rich lives in a sprawling subdivision of large, single-family homes. Bob has a pool and a hot tub and outdoor lights he keeps on all night. Bob’s four children have loads of electronic gadgetry, plus a habit of leaving windows open when the air conditioner is blasting. Needless to say, the Rich family uses a lot of electricity. But Bob doesn’t worry too much about his utility bill. It’s really not that much compared to all the other bills he pays; and fortunately, his wife is a hedge fund lawyer so he can afford it. 

John Poore, on the other hand, lives in a small apartment and uses as little electricity as possible to save money. He works a low-wage job, and his best efforts to attract a wealthy spouse have not yet panned out. John uses air conditioning only on the hottest summer days. He switched out his incandescent lightbulbs for LEDs, caulked the cracks around his windows where air leaked in, and when his old refrigerator broke, he replaced it with an EnergyStar model. 

Bob and John are both customers of Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative, in western Virginia. SVEC says its costs are going up, so it has been “adjusting” its rates. What would you expect the effects to be?

A) Bob’s bills go up more than John’s. 

B) Both Bob and John’s bills go up by the same amount. 

C) John’s bills go up more than Bob’s (and Bob’s might even go down).

You probably already figured out it’s a trick question. We’re dealing with a Virginia utility, so the answer can’t be (A) regardless of that being the obvious and rational answer. 

Indeed, answer (A) is how most utilities operate: Every customer pays a small fixed fee, typically under $10, and the rest of the bill is determined by how much electricity the customer uses. People who use a lot of electricity pay the most. They are usually better able to afford it, but if they don’t like the size of their bills, they can turn off the lights in empty rooms, change their thermostat setting, invest in energy efficiency, or put solar panels on the roof. Conserving energy and adding renewable energy happen to be public policy priorities, so the incentives are aligned with the behavior society wants to encourage. 

But SVEC notes that a lot of its costs aren’t dependent on how much electricity customers use; it has wires to maintain and so forth, plus it recently “invested” in a beautiful and spacious new headquarters that it swore wouldn’t mean rate increases (but, well, you know how that goes). SVEC says Bob and John benefit equally from all these investments, and wants their bills to reflect that. Early last year SVEC “adjusted” its rate structure to increase the fixed customer fee from $13 to $25 and decrease the rate per kilowatt-hour of electricity used. If you chose answer (C), you were correct!

This year, to raise more revenue, SVEC proposes to increase everybody’s fixed fee again, this time to $30. For customers who don’t use much electricity, that fixed fee could become the biggest charge on the bill, and one that can’t ever be reduced by any amount of energy conservation, efficiency or solar panels. They may also wonder whether $30 is just a stop on the way to even higher fixed fees that will further undercut their energy-saving investments.

SVEC didn’t need anyone’s approval when it almost doubled the fixed fee last year. But this year, the State Corporation Commission has to approve the additional changes, so customers finally have a chance to challenge them. Utilities around the state are watching what the SCC does. If SVEC gets approval to shift more of its costs away from customers who use a lot of electricity and onto those who use the least, other utilities will see that as a green light to do the same. 

Utilities prefer fixed charges because they provide revenue certainty; left to their own devices, they will move as much of their revenue into the fixed-cost category and increase fixed charges as high as they can. Unfortunately, doing so creates an incentive for utilities to spend as much as possible on infrastructure costs that can be recovered through fixed rates. That will raise costs for everyone and produce a further perverse incentive for the utility to encourage energy consumption (and waste) in order to make maximum use of the infrastructure.

This isn’t the result anyone should want, and especially a nonprofit electric cooperative. More affluent, high-use customers will benefit from lower rates per kilowatt-hour, while low-income customers will be less able to control their bills, an inequity that flies in the face of Virginia’s efforts to limit the energy burden on low-income residents. And customers who are considering investing in energy efficiency or solar will find they are looking at a longer payback time, discouraging the energy-saving measures that Virginia strives to promote.

The SCC is holding a hearing today to consider SVEC’s proposed rate increase. The commission should reject SVEC’s efforts to raise fixed charges for customers and send the utility back to the rate-drawing board. 

This article originally appeared in the Virginia Mercury on October 5, 2021.

Legislators built a solar program for apartment dwellers. The SCC gutted it.

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The State Corporation Commission recently finalized regulations for the Multifamily Shared Solar Program, created by the General Assembly to give residents of apartment buildings and condominiums the ability to use solar energy from panels installed on their buildings. But in implementing the program, the SCC also made sure it can never be used.  

Dominion Energy is largely to blame here, as it so often is whenever customer-sited solar encounters barriers. The utility proposed to lard up the program with fees, none of them allowed by the law. But it’s the SCC’s agreement with Dominion that’s the problem—and not just for people in apartment buildings who want solar, but for the future of any solar in Virginia that isn’t utility-owned. 

2020’s Solar Freedom law set out to make it easier for residents and businesses to install solar onsite. At the heart of the law is net metering, the program that credits solar owners for excess electricity fed back into the grid. Net metering makes solar affordable for customers, so giving more people access to net metering means more private investment dollars, more jobs and a more resilient power grid. 

The multifamily shared solar provision is meant to extend net metering-like benefits to residents of apartment buildings and condominiums, who don’t own their building and its roof themselves. The law allows the building owner—a landlord or condo association—to have solar panels installed on the property, and let residents buy the electricity produced.  Residents who sign up for solar are to be credited for the solar electricity at the utility’s retail rate, giving the residents a benefit equivalent to net metering. The only added cost the utility is allowed to impose is an administrative fee.

“Administrative fee.” You probably think you know what that term means: a fee to cover the cost of administering the program because, duh, what else could it mean? It would pay for someone to do paperwork, or to tweak the billing software. It couldn’t amount to more than a buck or two for a customer in the program.

You think that way because you are not a Dominion lawyer. With no definition of “administrative fee” in the law, and no dollar limit, Dominion’s lawyers went to work shoveling every conceivable expense they could come up with into the humble little fee until it resembles one of those memes of a kitten the size of Godzilla. Now the administrative fee includes the utility’s transmission and distribution costs; standby generation; balancing costs; “nonbypassable charges”; even “banking, balancing and storing fees related to the utility’s processing and handling of the excess bill credits.” 

Then the SCC, faced with this long list of fees that have nothing to do with program administration and aren’t authorized in the law, closed its eyes and signed on. 

However, the regulations don’t tell us what all the kitten-stuffing charges add up to. To determine the dollar amounts, the SCC references “parallel rate proceedings,” by which it means regulations being written to implement a different law, also passed in 2020, creating a much larger program under the name of Shared Solar. And right now, in those parallel rate proceedings, Dominion is insisting that those various fees should add up to nearly $75 per customer per month. Mind you, that amount does not include the cost of the electricity from the solar panels. Adding $75 to the price of electricity makes the cost of buying solar energy through the program far more than the cost of buying electricity from Dominion. 

Carrying those charges over to the multifamily program instantly kills it. No landlord would install solar expecting residents to pay an extra $75 per month for their electricity. The result makes a mockery of Solar Freedom’s intent for “robust project development and shared solar program access for all customer classes.” Indeed, the law expressly requires the utility to credit customers at the retail rate, which is to be “inclusive of all supply charges, delivery charges, demand charges, fixed charges, and any applicable riders or other charges to the customer.” The whole point is to block the utility from piling on costs, excepting only that little kitten of an administrative fee

At this point the only way to salvage the multifamily program is for the General Assembly to amend the law. With the SCC refusing to understand the meaning of “administrative,” the only thing legislators can do is put a dollar limit on the kitten. Indeed, a dollar seems like the right amount. 

That would resurrect the multifamily solar program. As for the shared solar program, where Dominion first came up with the idea of penalizing customers $75 a month for buying solar energy from someone else, the SCC is still working on regulations. 

The two programs are based on very different laws. Where Solar Freedom’s multifamily solar provision mimics net metering, and therefore allows the utility to charge only an administrative fee, the shared solar law explicitly contemplates customers paying a “minimum bill” that will include transmission and distribution, standby charges, and so on, in addition to a (presumably for-real) administrative fee. All those bloated charges that Dominion shoehorned into the administrative fee for apartments and condos in clear violation of the legislative mandate, are expressly allowed by the shared solar law.

Except, of course, no one said anything about $75.  If customers have to pay Dominion $75 in addition to whatever they have to pay to the solar provider, no one will sign up, and there will not be a program. 

The implications are not confined to shared solar laws. Dominion is laying a foundation to set a high floor for customer billings that will be independent of how much electricity residents use, where it comes from, whether their use of renewable energy provides a public benefit, or even whether customer-generated solar reduces other utility costs.  

The solar industry and other parties have strenuously objected to Dominion’s calculations. They have also asked the SCC to hold an evidentiary hearing on the amount of the minimum bill to be charged to shared solar customers (and by extension, to multifamily solar customers via kitten-stuffing). The request gives the SCC a chance to weigh benefits as well as costs, and produce an outcome that will ensure a future for shared solar in Virginia. 

This column originally appeared in the Virginia Mercury on July 15, 2021.

The SCC’s vanishing trick: turning shared solar into no solar

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Photo courtesy of Department of Energy, via Wikimedia Commons.

With Virginia fully committed to the clean energy transition, you would think that by now, residents would be able to check a box on their utility bill to buy solar energy, or at least be able to call up a third-party solar provider to sell them electricity from solar.

Not so. Sure, if you’re fortunate enough to own your own house or commercial building, and it’s in a sunny location and the roof is sound, you can install solar panels for your own use. Renters, though, are completely out of luck, which means almost all lower and moderate-income people are shut out of the solar market.

Actually, we were all supposed to be able to buy solar by now. A 2017 law required utilities to offer a “community solar” program. Utilities would buy electricity from solar facilities and sell it to customers. At least one electric cooperative followed through, but although Dominion Energy, Virginia’s biggest utility, created a program and had it approved by the SCC in 2018, the company has never offered it.

So this year the General Assembly passed two bills that would finally bring the benefits of solar energy to a broader range of customers. One would be community solar but under a different name. It would let anyone buy electricity from a “shared solar” facility, with at least 30 percent of the output reserved for low-income customers.

The other, the leadoff section of the Solar Freedom legislation, would let residents of apartment buildings and condominiums share the output of a solar array located on the premises or next door.

The bills were narrowed in committee to apply only in Dominion Energy territory (and for the multifamily program, to a part of Southwest Virginia served by Kentucky Utilities). Dominion also lobbied successfully for changes to the shared solar bill that raised red flags with solar industry members and advocates. Dominion has a long history of putting barriers in the way of customers who want solar, and the final language of the shared solar legislation pretty much invited that sort of mischief.

Still, it was left to the State Corporation Commission to write rules implementing the programs, so customers had reason to hope Dominion would not be allowed to make the programs unwieldy and expensive.

Ha. What has emerged from the SCC in the form of proposed rules manages to be both incoherent and everything Dominion wants. The reason for that is clear: most of the rules are copied and pasted from proposals Dominion submitted in August.

Adopting the recommendations of a company that failed to follow through on its own program seems like a bad idea. Hasn’t Dominion abdicated its right to tell other companies how to execute community solar?

And of course, with Dominion writing the rules, the programs won’t work. The shared solar option doesn’t kick in until at least 2023, and customers won’t be told what it will cost them. The SCC proposes to hold an “annual proceeding” to decide each year how much subscribers will have to pay in the form of a minimum bill, an amount that can then change from year to year.

This minimum bill is not the eight or nine dollar fixed charge that all customers pay today; it’s a whole new charge representing various of Dominion’s real or imagined costs of doing business, which Dominion says it needs to recover from the subscribers to compensate it for the fact that some other company is now selling them electricity.

How much might this be? No one knows. And because no one knows, it’s also impossible for solar companies or other third-party providers to offer the program. They can’t sell a product whose price is unknown, and banks aren’t going to loan them money to build a solar facility with no assurance that there will be customers.

There are really only two ways to save this program. The SCC could hold an evidentiary hearing upfront to examine the costs Dominion claims it needs to recover and then decide what the minimum bill ought to be. If that number is so high that the program can’t work, the SCC gets the privilege of telling the General Assembly there won’t be a shared solar program after all.

Alternatively, the SCC can follow the lead of states that already have successful programs and set the minimum bill (upfront) at a level that still saves customers money, so projects have a fighting chance of getting off the ground. If Dominion thinks it is losing money on the deal, that’s a claim it can pursue in its next rate case — which is where the dispute belongs.

Either way, the industry needs clarity, and it needs it now.

Multifamily solar: from straightforward to hopeless

The drafters of Solar Freedom thought they’d avoided the mess that threatens to tank the shared solar program. The multifamily provision of Solar Freedom is simply a way to let residents of apartment buildings and other multifamily units enjoy the same benefits available to homeowners who install solar under the net metering program. Instead of putting solar on a roof they own, they can buy the output of solar panels on the roof of the building where they live. It’s not net metering, but that’s the model.

Since the solar is onsite, none of these projects will be big. Keeping it simple and inexpensive is important. The law provides that utilities will credit participating customers for their share of solar at a rate “set such that the shared solar program results in robust project development and shared solar program access for all customer classes.” More specifically, the commission “shall annually calculate the applicable bill credit rate as the effective retail rate of the customer’s rate class, which shall be inclusive of all supply charges, delivery charges, demand charges, fixed charges and any applicable riders or other charges to the customer.”

The law couldn’t be clearer: there is to be no minimum bill, and the utility cannot load up a customer’s bill with lots of miscellaneous extra charges. All those charges that the SCC loads into the shared solar program’s minimum bill are, for the multifamily program, already included in the retail rate.

End of discussion? Not hardly. The SCC’s implementing rules — which are Dominion’s rules — get around this problem by dumping all the minimum bill elements from the shared solar rules onto the program provider instead (that is, the company that owns the solar panels).

Solar Freedom doesn’t actually allow that, either, so the SCC has decided these costs should be part of the one fee the utility is allowed to collect, for “reasonable costs of administering the program.” Never mind that items like “standby generation and balancing costs” have nothing to do with administering the program.

Oh, and the SCC won’t decide what the administrative charge will be until it holds an annual proceeding. And the amount can change every year. So once again, the SCC has designed a program that no solar company will be able to offer.

The SCC rules are so blatantly contrary to the program mandate set out in Solar Freedom that one can’t help but wonder whose side the SCC is on.

It is certainly not the customers’. We want solar.

The SCC is accepting comments on the proposed rules for both the shared solar and multifamily programs through Monday.

This article originally appeared in the Virginia Mercury on October 30, 2020.

Green Power for Suckers program wins regulatory approval

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Trees clearcut.

Don’t think of biomass as destroying forests, think of it as a way to feel good about subsidizing pollution. Photo by Calibas, Creative Commons.

Virginia’s State Corporation Commission (SCC) has approved Dominion Energy Virginia’s request to offer a new product to electric utility customers who want to buy renewable energy at a discount but lack the knowledge to understand when they are being taken for chumps.

“Rider REC” is an ultra-cheap version of the company’s Green Power Program (itself of questionable value). For less than a buck a month on their electric bills, customers will be able to buy renewable energy certificates that cost Dominion next to nothing because no one else wants them. And for good reason: these are the dregs of the renewable energy category.

You won’t find any wind or solar in Rider REC, but you might find paper mill waste, trees burned after clear-cutting, or century-old hydro dams—all officially “renewable” under the generous provisions of Virginia law. Dominion will scrounge up these old and dirty leftovers, package them up, and put a green bow on them.

“Caveat emptor,” says the SCC with a shrug. The SCC seems to think anyone dumb enough to pay extra voluntarily deserves whatever they get.

This is not the first time the SCC has shown disregard for eco-conscious consumers. Four years ago it gave Dominion the nod for a program the company was calling “community solar,” which wasn’t actually selling any solar and had nothing to do with communities. Dominion never did roll out that program, perhaps because there was no way to market it without courting accusations of consumer fraud. But it had the SCC’s blessing for it!

(In case you are confused: this was before the company’s most recent iteration of community solar, also approved, also not actually community solar, and which we are still waiting for. Dominion executives could probably do with a thesaurus.)

In response to concerns that customers wouldn’t know what they are getting, the SCC order did impose one labeling requirement. Dominion’s marketing materials must “clearly identify the source of the RECs available for purchase under Rider REC (i.e., the less expensive of PJM Tier II RECs or national Green-e eligible RECs).”

Perhaps Dominion will even tell buyers what those things mean, though the SCC doesn’t seem to be saying it has to. In the interests of clarity, Dominion could explain that “PJM Tier II RECs” translates to “some stuff we found behind the refrigerator and think might still be edible.” But it probably won’t.

That’s because, just as with the old community solar thing, the problem is that if buyers understand what’s in it, they won’t be buyers.

 

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on November 8, 2019. 

At long last, Dominion decides it’s game on for offshore wind

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Offshore wind turbines

The Block Island wind farm in Rhode Island. Photo by Ionna22 via Wikimedia Commons.

When utility regulators gave Dominion Energy Virginia the go-ahead to build two offshore wind turbines last November, it was still unclear whether the pilot project might be the end as well as the beginning of offshore wind in Virginia.

Now, however, Dominion seems to have decided it’s game on. Although the company hasn’t issued any public statements about its intentions, its presentation to investors in March included $880 million in spending on offshore wind through 2023, over and above the cost of the pilot project.

This came as a surprise to everyone, including Virginia regulators at the State Corporation Commission. Commissioners were not pleased that Wall Street heard the utility’s plans before they did. Dominion’s 2018 Integrated Resource Plan did not propose building a full-sized offshore wind farm any time in the next 15 years.

Nor had the 2016 and 2017 IRPs, even though the company has been sitting on a lease for an area of ocean that could provide at least 2,000 megawatts of offshore wind power, enough for 500,000 homes.

At a hearing on the IRP this month, the company promised regulators it would submit detailed information in its future filings, and confirmed that it currently has its sights set on 2024 for the first commercial wind farm.

For now, however, Dominion remains focused on getting the two test turbines up and running in a state-held lease area 24 miles out to sea from Virginia Beach. If all goes according to plan, the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project will be up and running by late summer 2020.

The two, 6-MW turbines will contribute only enough electricity to the grid for about 3,000 homes, but they will be the first turbines in federal waters anywhere in the U.S.  (The nation’s first wind farm, off Block Island in Rhode Island, is closer to shore in state waters.)

With that finish line in sight, state officials, developers, business people and offshore wind researchers were at Old Dominion University in Norfolk Tuesday night to share their vision of how Virginia will leverage its baby steps into a multi-billion-dollar industry that could “reinvent” Hampton Roads.

The town hall forum, organized by the Sierra Club, emphasized the workforce, supply chain and port opportunities if Virginia succeeds in becoming a commercial hub for offshore wind farms all along the East Coast. Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration hopes to find success with this plan even if Virginia lags other states in building wind farms.

Thomas Brostrøm, president of Ørsted North America, the Danish developer that is partnering with Dominion to build its pilot, described the size of the opportunity. The “pipeline” for projects in the U.S. has now reached 20,000 MW, mostly in New England, New York, New Jersey and Maryland. A buildout of 1,000 to 1,500 MW per year is enough to support a U.S.-based supply chain, he said. This is important not just for American businesses but also for customers, since local manufacturing means lower costs.

Brostrøm also agreed with elected leaders and port officials at the forum that Virginia’s deep-water port and unobstructed access to open ocean makes it a particularly attractive base of operations for an industry that has to transport turbine blades the length of football fields.

According to Jennifer Palestrant, director of the SMART Center for Maritime and Transportation at Tidewater Community College, the area’s ability to provide a workforce and job training needed for the new industry is also a given.

“Virginia has been building ships for 300 years,” she told the audience. “We’ve got this.” Workforce training “is in the bag.”

No doubt Virginia’s port and workforce advantages merit this home-state boosterism, but leaders in other states make similar claims. Those states also aren’t leaving anything to chance; while dangling subsidies for offshore wind energy, they are requiring developers to work with local communities and businesses.

Dominion’s decision on whether and when to move forward with a commercial wind farm will thus have a huge impact on how much of the industry Hampton Roads can attract. Mark Mitchell, the company’s director of generation projects, told the town hall audience that one of the most important pieces of information the company wants to gain from CVOW is the capacity factor of the turbines — that is, how much electricity they produce as a percentage of their full “nameplate” capacity.

Currently Dominion expects the test turbines to perform at a capacity factor of 42%. If the turbines do better than that, it means they can produce electricity at lower cost. If they perform less well, costs will be higher. Virginia is at a disadvantage compared to states further north, where stronger winds drive higher capacity factors. And with lower energy prices overall than northeastern states and no subsidies to offer, getting offshore wind to pencil out here is harder.

But Mitchell sounded confident about the future of the industry in Virginia.  As Dominion sees it, he said, offshore wind is important for achieving carbon reductions, and it complements solar “without solar’s land-use issues.” By 2024, he projects costs will fall enough to make an offshore wind farm attractive. “We see the economics coming in to support that,” he said.

This is wonderful news, and also a sudden and remarkable about face for a company that has worked at a snail’s pace since winning the development rights to the Virginia lease six years ago. Other states started later and are on track to finish earlier.

From this we draw two conclusions, one surprising and the other, not so much. First, IRPs are meaningless. Far from revealing the utility’s plans for 15 years, they don’t even tell the SCC what Dominion is thinking at that very moment.  Eat your hearts out, commissioners; to this company, you are irrelevant.

And, more obviously, Dominion follows the money. None of the reasons Virginians want offshore wind — clean energy, jobs, business development, climate mitigation — mattered until a pathway to profit opened up.

No doubt Dominion needs a new profit center. For years the company expected wealth to flow from a planned $19 billion nuclear reactor at North Anna, until the economics grew from challenging to impossible. Currently it’s gambling on the $7 billion-plus Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which is facing a similar cost spiral amid a morass of lawsuits and unresolved questions of whether it has any real customers.

Offshore wind offers an entirely new business opportunity with almost unlimited potential, and one with the added benefit of working with, not against, public opinion and advances in clean energy technology.

Building a commercial wind farm in Virginia may be just the beginning for Dominion. An industry source told me the utility’s parent company, Dominion Energy, is negotiating to buy a $400 million, offshore wind turbine installation vessel.

If true, investing in one of these specialized ships could be a canny business move, since the offshore wind industry is facing a severe shortage of them worldwide, and the U.S. currently has none at all. The purchase would indicate Dominion sees an opportunity to make money on the booming offshore wind market in the Northeast, regardless of what happens in Virginia.

Before the town hall, I asked Dominion for confirmation of its plans and received this response:

“Onshore construction activities associated with CVOW are slated to begin soon.  Additionally, the company is in the early phases of developing a construction operations plan for the larger commercial lease area and expects to have a high-level timeline soon.

“As the first approved offshore wind project in federal waters, CVOW has already provided many valuable lessons learned which will ultimately benefit our customers and the environment as we move through the dozens of required surveys, reports and assessments as part of the construction operation plan for larger scale development. Mark [Mitchell] will provide remarks next week [i.e., at the Sierra Club town hall] and we will share additional information as it becomes available.”

If this seems like disappointingly little information, take heart: you now know at least as much about Dominion’s offshore wind plans as the SCC does.

This article first appeared in the Virginia Mercury on May 30, 2019. 

 

In a last-ditch effort to stop climate regulations, Virginia Republicans try legislating by budget amendment

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Dominion Energy Virginia's Chesterfield Coal Plant

Dominion’s coal-burning power plant in Chesterfield County.

The Northam administration is finalizing regulations to reduce the carbon pollution from Virginia power plants by 30 percent between 2020 and 2030. The Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) estimates the move will cost consumers only about a dollar per month while accelerating the transition to clean energy.

Instead of celebrating this modest progress on climate action, Virginia Republicans have been fighting it every step of the way. Their latest effort takes the form of two amendments to the state budget that would effectively prevent Virginia from joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a nine-state platform for trading carbon emission allowances. It would also stop the Commonwealth from participating in a new compact focused on reducing carbon emissions in transportation.

Virginia law gives the governor a line-item veto in the budget, which requires a two-thirds majority in the legislature to override. But for reasons known only to himself, Governor Northam has instead chosen to remove the amendments by offering his own amendments, which the General Assembly can reject by a simple majority vote.

This cues up the issue for a battle on the House floor on Wednesday, when the legislature returns for the “veto session.” The governor needs the votes of all the Democrats and at least two Republicans to prevail in the House, and those of at least one Republican and the Lieutenant Governor to prevail in the Senate.

Earlier this year, Republicans voted almost unanimously for legislation that, like the budget amendment, would have stopped Virginia from participating in RGGI. Northam vetoed that bill, saying it was bad policy and violated the state constitution. His action probably didn’t persuade any Republicans that he was right and they were wrong.

Still, there are reasons why a Republican who voted for the anti-RGGI bill might support the governor in the budget vote.

One is that using the budget to achieve a policy outcome you couldn’t reach through the legislative process makes a lot of legislators uneasy; it feels like bad governance.

Another is that the anti-RGGI bill was for show; everyone knew the governor would veto it. Moderate Republicans who privately acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis were able to use their vote to demonstrate party loyalty without actually interfering with the DEQ program.

They bill vote also followed surprise testimony from State Corporation Commission staff members who claimed that trading with RGGI would cost Virginia households much more than DEQ modeling showed. The staff members provided no evidence, but hard-line Republicans saw the threat of rate increases as a gift horse they weren’t going to look in the mouth.

DEQ staff did look it in the mouth, however, and found a number of bad teeth.  DEQ Chief Deputy Chris Bast lambasted the SCC staff for coming into the discussion late, using incorrect assumptions, and failing to show their work.

The SCC staff members followed up after the end of the session with a letter stating their reasoning, though still without showing their math. The late release of the letter prompted Delegate David Toscano to write an editorial in the Washington Post decrying the staff members’ overtly political tactics as well as criticizing their analysis.

In its response to comments on the proposed carbon regulations, DEQ lists several flaws in the SCC staff’s analysis, ranging from significantly overestimating program costs to assuming that Virginia coal plants are immune to the economic stressors affecting coal plants across the U.S.

With time to reflect, many legislators will conclude the evidence supports DEQ. But more to the point, some Republicans may realize that holding Virginia back is bad economics and bad policy.

An analysisreleased this month shows wind and solar could replace 74 percent of coal plants nationwide at an immediate savings to customers; by 2025, that number will be 86 percent. Major utilities like Xcel and MidAmerican have targeted 100% renewable energy, saving money for customers in the process.

Meanwhile, voters across the country—and in Virginia—support renewable energy over fossil fuels by wide margins. Even polling by conservative groups shows strong support for clean energy.

It simply makes no sense for Virginia to opt out of the clean energy future. No doubt a lot of Republicans will vote to do it anyway in hopes of denying a win to a Democratic governor. But if they do, they run the risk of their constituents holding them accountable come November.

This article originally appeared in the Virginia Mercury on April 2. It has been updated to include DEQ’s response to the SCC staff’s letter.

Update April 4: Disappointingly but not surprisingly, the Governor’s amendments were defeated along party lines yesterday. If he wants to keep the carbon regulations moving towards implementation, he will have to exercise his veto authority. There have been questions raised about his authority to do that, so stay tuned. 

Does the SCC finally see the light on customer-owned solar?

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two men installing solar panels on a roof

Photo credit NREL.

Almost four years ago, Virginia’s State Corporation Commission (SCC) approved a request from Appalachian Power to impose “standby charges” on grid-connected homeowners who installed solar arrays between 10 and 20 kilowatts (kW). The approval came not long after the SCC had given the same authority to Dominion Power (now Dominion Energy Virginia).

The standby charges, dubbed a “tax on the sun,” effectively shut down the market for these larger home systems. Since then, Virginia utilities have made no bones about their desire to dismantle the rest of the Virginia law that has enabled the growth of the private solar market.

The law permits solar owners to “net meter,” giving them credit at the retail rate for the electricity they feed onto the grid on sunny days, and letting them use that credit when they draw electricity from the grid at other times.

Utilities say net metering customers don’t pay their fair share of grid costs. Solar advocates say the subsidy runs the other way: both the utility and society at large benefit when more customers install solar. Independent studies find the “value of solar” to be above the retail rate; utility-funded studies find much lower values. In Virginia, the debate continues to rage, but in 2014, at least, the SCC came down squarely on the utility’s side.

Fast forward to 2018. This year the General Assembly passed a law called the Grid Transformation and Security Act that, among other things, envisions an electric grid of the future that incorporates distributed generation like rooftop solar. And suddenly the staff of the SCC sees customer-owned solar in a new light.

Members of the Commission staff filed testimony last month in response to Dominion’s 2018 Integrated Resource Plan, which proposes large amounts of utility-built and owned solar. Associate Deputy Director Gregory Abbott devoted much of his testimony to bashing Dominion’s solar plans.

But just when a reader might have concluded that Abbott hates solar, he pivoted to the suggestion that Dominion should consider offering rebates for customers who install their own rooftop solar:

Given that the Company is developing a Grid Transformation Plan that is designed specifically to integrate customer-level DERs [distributed energy resources], and given the Company’s peak load forecast, Staff believes the Company should explore developing a rebate program to incent customer-owned rooftop solar systems. Staff believes that it is logical to incent these DERs particularly since the Company’s Grid Transformation Plan pursuant to the GTSA is designed specifically to handle these DERs. Staff also notes that such a program could be considered to be a peak shaving program and eligible for cost recovery through Rider CIA. To the extent that the program passed the economic tests, it may obviate the need for some of the more expensive capacity resources as described in the Company’s proposed build plan. Such a program would be more environmentally benign as it would take advantage of
existing brownfield sites rather than the greenfield sites required for utility-scale
 solar.

These are, of course, precisely the arguments made by advocates for distributed solar.

The support from SCC staff comes at an opportune moment, as the Northam Administration considers making distributed solar a centerpiece of its new Energy Plan. It could also complicate Dominion’s efforts to limit and penalize customer investments in solar. Last year Dominion’s opposition doomed a raft of bills intended to make it easier for customers to use Virginia’s net metering law. When solar advocates try again in the 2019 session, having the support of the SCC could change the minds of legislators who, until now, have been happy to accept Dominion’s arguments.

All this assumes the SCC commissioners agree with their staff on the value of customer-owned solar to the grid. If they do, it could signal a new day in Virginia for customer-owned solar.

This article originally appeared in the Virginia Mercury, the new, non-profit on-line news source founded by Robert Zullo, formerly a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. 

If anyone will stand up to Dominion for its conflicts of interest on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, it won’t be Virginia’s high court

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Residents of areas being impacted by gas pipelines make their feelings clear. But is anyone in Virginia government listening?

This post originally appeared as commentary in the Virginia Mercury, Virginia’s new non-profit, online news source. 

Many Virginia leaders seem to have the notion that if our environment is being polluted and ordinary people are having their land destroyed, that must be good for business. And as a corollary, if a business wants to pollute the environment and destroy private land, that must be good for Virginia.

So maybe it shouldn’t surprise anyone that on August 9 the Virginia Supreme Court joined the Governor, the State Corporation Commission (SCC), the Department of Environmental Quality and most of the General Assembly in refusing to question the sweetheart deal under which Dominion Energy Virginia committed its captive ratepayers to purchasing billions of dollars of fracked gas shipping capacity on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, of which Dominion itself is the largest shareholder.

The Supreme Court had the opportunity to hold Dominion accountable courtesy of Section 56-77(A) of the Virginia Code, known as the Affiliates Act. The section requires public utilities to get prior approval from the SCC for any “contract or arrangement” with an affiliated company. The SCC had refused the Sierra Club’s petition to enforce the provision, saying it could review the deal when the pipeline is operational and Dominion tries to charge its customers for the use of it—i.e., afterthe damage is done. The Sierra Club took the SCC to court, arguing that the statute requires the SCC to examine whether the deal is in the public interest beforethe contract for pipeline capacity could be considered valid.

On its face, the Affiliates Act is clear. It requires public utilities to submit “contracts or arrangements” with affiliated companies to the SCC for approval before they take effect. You would think this would include any arrangement under which Dominion Energy Virginia buys capacity in its parent company’s pipeline. The Affiliates Act says the SCC should have held a hearing to examine whether the contract was in the public interest. Indeed, the SCC’s own staff of lawyers have taken this very position.

But the Court allowed a dodge. You see, Dominion Energy Virginia didn’t contract directly with the ACP. It has a very general ongoing contract with another Dominion affiliate called Virginia Power Services Energy Corporation (VPSE) that buys natural gas and pipeline capacity for the utility, acting as its purchasing agent. It was VPSE, not the utility itself, that signed the contract with the ACP.

The fact that a third affiliate acts an intermediary shouldn’t matter, logically or legally—affiliated companies are members of one big happy family—but the Court seized on this arrangement to create a clever loophole. It concluded that the SCC had approved the general inter-affiliate agreement between the utility and its sister company VPSE years ago—before the pipeline was proposed, before VPSE had signed purchasing contracts with the ACP, and before the Sierra Club or any other members of the public would have had a reason to object. No matter, said the Court; having approved the contract between the utility and its purchasing agent years ago, the SCC retained continuing oversight authority over any and all deals the purchasing agent might make on behalf of the utility in the future.

Let that sink in for a minute. According to the Court, the SCC effectively approved the contract with ACP before it even existed. What that means is,

the public, including all of us who buy electricity from Dominion and will be handed the bill for the pipeline capacity, have no ability to challenge the deal before the pipeline is up and running.

Recall that the only reason Dominion Energy and its partners got permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to build the pipeline was the fact that the companies showed they had contracts for almost all the pipeline capacity. According to FERC, this proved that there was public need for the ACP. The fact that the contracts happened to be with the partners’ own corporate affiliates didn’t faze FERC any more than it fazed the SCC.

Earlier this month FERC denied a request that it reconsider its approval. Ironically this was a favor to the ACP’s challengers because it finally allowed them to appeal the matter to federal court. One of the issues that will likely be raised in that appeal is the wrongheadedness of approving a pipeline when the need for it relies heavily on inter-affiliate contracts that may or may not demonstrate actual demand from customers.

This is a question not just for Virginia and Dominion, but for the many gas pipelines under development in the U.S. Affiliate contracts can make it appear there is more demand for pipelines than there really is. Approving unneeded pipelines, in turn, means unnecessary environmental destruction, wasted resources, and (what our leaders rarely appreciate) higher energy prices.

In the year since the Sierra Club first petitioned the SCC to take action under the Affiliates Act, the case for regulatory scrutiny has only grown stronger. Dominion Energy says it has abandoned plans to build new combined-cycle gas plants, recognizing the growing dominance of wind and solar. That throws into question the economic case for sinking billions of dollars into new gas transmission, even as construction on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline is underway.

As I’ve discussed before, there is a strange disconnect when a gas pipeline developer like Dominion recognizes the end of the road for baseload gas plants. Yet its subsidiary utility, Dominion Energy Virginia, just filed an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) that calls for a string of new gas combustion turbines, sometimes referred to as “peaker plants.”

This begs the question: Does the utility have a good reason to build more gas plants instead of joining the national trend towards using renewables-plus-battery storage to address peak demand? Or is it proposing the new gas plants because its parent company needs the utility to burn as much gas as possible to support an otherwise unneeded pipeline?

Even apart from its authority under the Affiliates Act, the SCC could investigate this question in the IRP proceeding this fall. At some point the commissioners will have to confront the fact that more natural gas, and more pipeline infrastructure, are a bad deal for Virginia consumers.