Fuel Price Spike Hits Your Dominion Bill Next. Pow!
By Steve Haner,
The typical Dominion Energy Virginia electric bill could rise another $22 this summer to cover the rising cost of the fuel it uses and the cost of its purchased power, according to the company’s latest filing on its fuel chargewith the State Corporation Commission.
The utility’s costs of fuel and purchased power are collected in a direct pass-through charge designated Rider A on bills, and for residential consumers it is one of the charges still visible on their monthly invoice. Right now, a consumer using 1,000 kilowatt hours per month is paying $29.68 for the current fuel charge and another $2.91 to slowly pay off the fuel cost spike that resulted from the war in Ukraine.
Dominion’s application projects its fuel costs for the 12 months beginning July 1 as $2.7 billion and seeks recovery of over $1 billion for the costs it did not anticipate during this current 12-month period. If collected all at once starting July 1 the charge for 1,000 kwh would reach $51.47 month, plus the $3 bucks in deferred costs.
It wasn’t that long ago that $50 a month would cover the whole electric bill in many households. At the beginning of 2026 here in Henrico a 1,000-kwh residential bill totaled $171.51, including the local taxes. The full fuel cost would be almost a 13 percent increase.
It has been a busy time over at the SCC with Dominion filings. The only newspaper that even pretends to cover the SCC, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, chose to ignore the fuel filing and instead wrote this week about an SCC decision on solar customers who use net metering. That’s about 65,000 customers. All 2.7 million Dominion customers care about the fuel charge, which is often an even larger portion of an industrial customer bill.
The media in Virginia is also still ignoring the flashing red warning light about the coming costs of compliance with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. The futures market price that was the basis of this Bacon’s Rebellion post, $41 per ton, started this morning instead at $52 per ton.
As it did with the fuel cost surge coming out of the Russia-Ukraine War, Dominion is also seeking to spread out some of the cost surge that has resulted from the U.S. war on Iran. It wants to take a large portion of the arrearage and spread that out over several years in a process called “securitization.”
Legislation to allow that was appended to that 2026 hodgepodge “affordable energy” bill (you have to just laugh) that Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) sought to amend. Several of her amendments were rejected so she might veto it. This will give the utility another argument to use with her to get her final approval on the whole package.
Dominion’s proposal is that it raise the fuel charge Rider A only $7.97 as of July 1, to about $37.65 per 1,000 kwh. The deferred charge it proposes, which would live on the bill for multiple years, would add another $1.80. The monthly all-in fuel costs would still reach $42.65, almost $5 of that for delayed payments.
As was established the last time Dominion did this, putting the fuel bill on this long payback schedule (think “credit card”) doesn’t save ratepayers money. And it is a moneymaker for whatever entity issues the bonds and earns a nice market interest rate. But in this age of pretend affordability, appearances are more important that economic truth.
Republished with permission from Bacon’s Rebellion.
