By Steve Haner
Yet another effort will be made in 2025 to get Virginia’s two major electric utilities deeper into the business of building and maintaining charging stations for electric vehicles, with their ratepayers – even those who have no interest in such vehicles – having to pay the tab. Given they are supposed to be the no-brainer wave of the future, electric vehicles sure need a whole lot of expensive subsidies and legislative boosting.
This version of the idea comes in a bill from Delegate Irene Shin, D-Fairfax, who is a member of the House Labor and Commerce Committee, which is likely to first hear the bill.
It would repeal a 2021 statute that prohibited the utilities from building out such a network and creating a rate adjustment clause, or RAC, to raise the capital from their customers. Such rate “adders” hitting all customers have become the go-to method for funding most other utility investments, from new power plants and transmission lines to a subsidy program for low-income customers.
If the utilities seek to develop their own charging network, the bill requires they be barred from building the stations too close to existing private chargers. The State Corporation Commission would be tasked with developing the exclusion zone. But even if utilities build none of their own stations, other elements of the bill guarantee higher costs for their customers to subsidize electrified transportation.
Shin’s bill, complicated enough that somebody with a utility law background must have drafted it, does not seem to mandate that either utility build out its own charging network. The operative word is “may.” But both utilities would be required to develop and then implement plans “to accelerate widespread transportation electrification across the Commonwealth.” The first such plan would be due in November 2025 with updates to follow on a two-year schedule.
The details included in those plans are enumerated and include meeting the charging needs of all kinds of vehicles, including heavy-duty vehicles, and then further boost their popularity with:
Rate designs and programs that encourage transportation electrification, support the efficient operation of the electric grid, facilitate fuel cost savings, and support various categories of vehicles and charging use cases, including public level 2 and direct-current fast-charging, workplace charging, residential charging for single-family and multifamily dwellings, fleet and depot charging, non-road industrial areas including ports, and charging for medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicles…
Such rate designs usually entail shifting the basic costs of service away from those users you are trying to encourage and onto the other customers. The utilities are not going to allow themselves to lose money with incentives, trust me, so the subsidy dollars will come from somebody else.
The bill requires a focus on increasing charging infrastructure for “rural communities and historically economically disadvantaged communities.” There is, however, no mention of imposing any mandate on Virginia’s many rural electric cooperatives or the municipal electric companies serving several small cities. Somebody should offer that amendment.
Come 2026, the utilities would file another application with the SCC to detail how they need to upgrade their distribution and transmission networks to serve all charging infrastructure, whether utility-owned or not. Those costs will then produce a new rate adjustment clause imposed on all customers, those seeking electrification of vehicles and those not.
Then in 2027 the SCC would have to take up the question of just how far away from private facilities any utility-owned charging station would need to be. In dictating what things must be considered, in effect the bill is making the SCC repeat and update a 2022 report demanded by a previous General Assembly. Shin’s bill closely tracks the executive summary of that report, which discussed rate-design incentives and expanding the focus beyond passenger vehicles.
The road to electric vehicle Nirvana is proving winding and bumpy. The tax incentives for purchasing an EV and other inducements are not producing the expected rapid transition. Many customers still don’t see them as a good choice even if they can afford them. Government, which always knows best, must force things a bit, and if the customer cost can be buried deep in the fine print of our electric bills, all the better.
A no vote is strongly encouraged.
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