School board urges SCC to reject Dominion/NextEra merger
The Fairfax County School Board urges Virginia’s State Corporation Commission to deny NextEra Energy’s proposed acquisition of Dominion Energy.
NextEra, a Florida-based energy company, is proposing to acquire Dominion in an all-stock deal worth approximately $67 billion. The acquisition is expected to lead to higher electric bills for residents and businesses.
If the acquisition is approved, it would create the world’s largest energy company.
Northern Virginia members of the General Assembly, Fairfax County Supervisor Walter Alcorn (Hunter Mill), and consumer and clean energy organizations have spoken out against the deal.
Rising costs
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger filed testimony with the SCC in October calling on NextEra and Dominion to freeze residential electricity rates for six years and triple customers’ bill credits as a condition for the merger.
The SCC’s evidentiary hearing on the proposal is scheduled to begin on Nov. 17 at the SCC building in Richmond. The hearing, which will last several days, can be viewed on the agency’s livestream.
“Nearly all the families of our 172,000 students are Dominion customers, and many are already struggling with rising electric bills,” states a letter sent to the SCC commissioners on Nov. 11 by school board chair Robin Lady (Dranesville). “When a household spends more to keep the lights on, it has less for food, rent, and the basics children need to come to school ready to learn.”
“Fairfax County Public Schools has recently learned from the Virginia Energy Purchasing Governmental Association that Dominion will soon increase the school division’s own electricity costs by 24.9 percent, an astonishing spike that will compete directly with funding for student needs and ultimately fall on Fairfax County taxpayers,” the letter says.
Related story: The Dominion/NextEra merger called a ‘bad deal’ for Virginians
While the utility companies are promising temporary bill credits, Lady writes, “they also plan years of new infrastructure spending to serve data center demand, and residential customers could carry much of that cost long after the credits end.”
In addition, the school board is concerned about the impact of the merger on the air students breathe. Virginia’s Clean Economy Act calls for the state to end carbon-emitting energy generation by 2045. That goal won’t be met if a large new buildout of gas generation to serve data centers would lock in pollution and fossil fuel costs for decades.
“Consolidating monopoly utilities has a poor record for the families who pay the bills.” Research on electric utility mergers has found little evidence that they deliver the cost savings promised to customers, the school board states. “Promises made to win approval are temporary; the rates families pay to a larger monopoly are not.”
In 2022, shortly after the school board approved a pilot solar project at Annandale High School, Dominion imposed new interconnection requirements on mid-sized solar projects that FCPS staff estimated could add more than $1 million, or up to $2 million at larger facilities, to the cost of a single school installation.
Those requirements stalled a planned county solar program that would have covered nearly 90 schools [including Annandale], along with other county facilities, and saved an estimated $60 million over 25 years.
Power outages
Another concern cited in the letter is the reliability of electricity. FCPS facilities have averaged more than 100 power interruptions a month over the past year. Generators can keep the lights on, but they cannot run heating and air conditioning systems or the refrigerators that store student meals.
FCPS spends roughly $100,000 a year in overtime for electricians who respond to outages. Dominion has said it has not found a connection between these outages and data centers. But the strain that large-load growth places on the Northern Virginia grid is well documented, raising the possibility of cascading outages across the region.
“Control of the utility should not change hands without enforceable commitments that protect service to schools and other critical public facilities,” the school board letter says.
If the SCC approves the acquisition, despite widespread opposition to it, the school board urges the SCC to require the utility companies to commit $100 million for electric school buses, report school outages to the SCC, and reduce the cost of solar and battery storage at schools
“Our students and their families did not ask to underwrite the data center boom. The companies building those facilities are among the wealthiest in the world, and they can afford to pay for the power and the grid they demand,” the school board tells the SCC. “Fairfax County families already squeezed by rising bills, and schools already coping with frequent outages, should not be asked to subsidize them.”