Dominion Energy says renewables alone won’t meet a projected increase in demand for electricity in the coming decades.
In a filing this week, the utility said it will continue building new fossil fuel and nuclear generation to supply electricity to its Virginia customers over the next 15 years, closely aligning itself with Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s energy policy.
“The priorities of the Company have not changed — to provide reliable, affordable, and increasingly clean power to its customers,” the utility wrote in its 2023 Integrated Resource Plan.
The plan is a nonbinding 15- to 25-year roadmap required by state law every three years and based on forecasts from regional grid operator PJM Interconnection. “However, this year the long-term projected amount of power needed in the [Dominion] Zone materially increased.”
Basically, this means that Dominion will likely keep most of its existing power stations online while seeking to build additional small natural gas plants and modular nuclear reactors in the next few decades.
“This ‘all of the above’ approach ensures we can reliably serve our customers ‘around-the-clock’, especially on the hottest and coldest days of the year,” Ed Baine, the utility’s president, said in a news release, according to the Associated Press.
“Our plan balances the benefits of renewables with the reliability of ‘on-demand’ power so we can meet the growing needs of our customers.”
The Virginia Mercury writes that Dominion says the steep rises in demand are linked to accelerating data center growth and, “to a lesser extent,” electrification, including the transition to electric vehicles. The findings are in line with 2021 predictions from the University of Virginia’s Energy Transition Initiative.
In Dominion’s Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), filed with the State Corporation Commission, the utility laid out five possible scenarios for meeting its customers’ needs. All call for new solar, wind, and energy storage development.
All but one, a least-cost plan the company was required to model but said it doesn’t consider a true “path forward,” includes the development of small modular nuclear reactors.
Dominion Energy Virginia, which serves about 2.7 million customers in Virginia and a small portion of North Carolina, also faces a deadline to meet the standards of the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act, which requires Dominion to generate 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by the end of 2045.
Governor Youngkin was delighted with Dominion’s plan, saying “I applaud Dominion Energy for taking a serious look at the anticipated demand and providing commonsense pathways to proactively delay the retirement of critical baseload capacity in this IRP.”
However, Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups were not pleased with Dominion’s plan, arguing it was a diversion from proven, less costly renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind, and battery storage.
The harshest negative response came from Nate Benforado, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “This appears to be more of a political document. It’s not a plan that takes renewable energy, including the Clean Economy Act requirements, and climate change seriously.”
He added that the IRP is nothing more than Dominion’s “attempt to get back into Youngkin’s good graces” following two months of debate over utility profits and the state’s regulatory system during the 2023 legislative session.
