Category: Regulations, Gov’t Oversight
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The Bill Promising “Lower Power Bills” Got Changed on Final Day
by Steve Haner Remember the highly hyped bill at the General Assembly that was going to lower most electric bills by shafting Virginia’s data center industry? It underwent a late transformation, and the promise of big financial relief is fading. It was always unrealistic. Under a rewritten version of Senate Bill 253, approved as a…
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Pray for Sun; Solar Is the Only New Power We Get
by Steve Haner The 2026 General Assembly has decided Virginia’s future energy eggs will come from a basket made of sunbeams. A series of approved bills are intended to accelerate the proliferation of solar panels on rural fields, rooftops, urban parking decks and apartment balconies, even if local objections need to be disregarded. Giving the…
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Cost of Undergrounding Program is Mostly Profit to Lenders, Stockholders
by Steve Haner Dominion Energy Virginia’s ongoing program to place selected neighborhood service lines underground, spreading the bill for the upgrades onto all its 2.7 million customers, will cost another $3.8 billion if the General Assembly blesses its extension for another ten years. Of that, about $1.6 billion is the cost of the construction work…
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The Data Center Scapegoat Led to Two Different Sacrificial Altars
by Steve Haner Virginia’s world-leading data center industry, once a source of economic pride to our Commonwealth, has become the scapegoat of the 2026 General Assembly. The State Senate and House of Delegates have built different altars for its sacrifice. The Senate is about to vote to strip away the major sales and use tax…
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It’s Just a Box!
Virginia is one of three states that require businesses that sell caskets to get a funeral director’s license.
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Tariff Ruling Correct, Good for Virginia
by Derrick A. Max The Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources v. Trump is a landmark reaffirmation of one of the Constitution’s most fundamental principles: the power to tax belongs to Congress alone. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution explicitly vests in the legislative branch the authority “to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” Tariffs…
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No, RTD, That Bill Does Not Cut Future Electric Rates
by Steve Haner The nonsense that the General Assembly is passing a bill to shift huge energy costs onto data centers and off all the other utility customers is going to be a bipartisan meme. A bill that merely punts that issue to the regulatory State Corporation Commission passed on a unanimous State Senate vote. …
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They Think Your Electric Bill is Just a Piggy Bank to Raid
by Steve Haner Key energy legislation poised to pass the 2026 General Assembly will increase your future electricity bills, not lower them. The bills will worsen price increases already caused by the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which passed the last time Virginia was under one-party control. As the Assembly crosses its first deadline, with…
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SCC Rejects Effort to Reverse Its Gas Plant Approval
by Steve Haner The Virginia State Corporation Commission has rejected a petition for reconsideration pushed by opponents of Dominion Energy’s planned Chesterfield natural gas generators. The environmental activist groups could now appeal the SCC’s approval of the plant to the Virginia Supreme Court. The SCC is a court, after all, so its decisions can be…
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Big Batteries Lose Big Energy Every Charging Cycle
by Steve Haner An inconvenient truth of utility-scale battery operations is that they take in more power than they later put out. From an energy grid operations point of view they are considered “net load” and certainly not a generation asset. In a previous post about the battery mandate legislation now poised for passage in…
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Several Senate GOP Bills Seek to Amend or Repeal Clean Economy Act
By Steve Haner, Several legislative attempts to either repeal outright or reduce the cost impact of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) will have their fifteen seconds in the sun later today. Their chances of surviving until sundown are slim. The various bills, all with Republican sponsors, are set to be discussed in the Virginia…
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Small Business Suffers More from Bad Policies
by Chris Saxman Small business costs and Virginia’s competitiveness in CNBC’s Top States for Business Small businesses are central to Virginia’s economic dynamism, job creation, and regional resilience. However, higher taxes, expanding labor mandates, regulatory complexity, and litigation exposure impose disproportionate costs on small firms compared to large employers. These pressures directly affect Virginia’s performance…
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Assembly, Dominion Seek to Bill Data Centers for Rising Energy Costs
by Steve Haner Virginia’s major data centers could pay more for electricity and other customers less under a surprise legislative substitute that appeared in email inboxes Sunday and was rapidly approved Monday by a major Virginia Senate committee. The proposal is politically attractive, already being touted a major consumer rate cut, but the detailed accounting…
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Dominion Opposes Battery Mandate on Fire Safety Concerns
by Steve Haner Today a Senate committee is scheduled to take up the bill directing Virginia’s two investor-owned utilities to propose huge battery installations which will cover square miles of ground, cost ratepayers billions of dollars and which will produce zero energy to power our homes and businesses. The bill has Governor Abigail Spanberger’s endorsement. So far, legislators have been in a “see, hear and…
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SCC Staff Offers Grim Predictions on Virginia Clean Energy Law
by Steve Haner Dominion Energy is likely to miss its Virginia Clean Economy Act targets, and in a decade, the financial penalties of that law will begin to pile up on the company’s ratepayers, a State Corporation Commission (SCC) staff assessment has concluded. “…despite building 17.5 gigawatts (“GW”) of solar and 3.4 GW of wind,…