By Steve Haner

The subsidy program to help low-income customers of Dominion Energy Virginia with their bills, funded by involuntary contributions from all the other customers, is beginning to show signs of growth. It is called the Percentage of Income Payment Program, or PIPP.

In its most recent filing on the program with the State Corporation Commission, the utility reported that it had provided bill subsidy payments to almost 23,000 eligible customer households as of this past March. PIPP began helping people with bills in February 2024, almost four years after this new entitlement was included in the omnibus Virginia Clean Economy Act of 2020.

The slow start was the subject of an earlier report on Bacon’s Rebellion. Having reached 22,822 enrollees by March 31 of this year, the program had provided about $14.5 million in benefits. The launch has been so slow the money being spent was already being held, because the utility began assessing the mandatory “universal service fee” on its customers in 2021, long before the first beneficiary enrollments and payouts.   

Because of the accumulated balance, the universal service fee on all customer bills moved back down to zero for this year and Dominion has proposed to keep it at zero for the next phase of the program, which kicks off November 1. That request is now subject to the SCC’s review. Dominion projects that during the 12 months beginning November 1, annual bill subsidies will reach $20 million, with another $6 million in overhead costs split between the Department of Social Services and the utility itself. 

Appalachian Power Company in the western part of Virginia is running the same program but has not filed a fresh report or application with the SCC. Last summer the SCC allowed it to charge its customers $1.32 per 1,000 kilowatt hours of electric usage. Appalachian’s underlying bills are higher and perhaps its customer base is more economically stressed.

PIPP is designed to cap the amount of money low-income households must pay for electricity out of their monthly income. The cap is 10% in households using electricity to heat, and 6% in households using another heat source. About 3,300 of the Dominion customers who are being subsidized by PIPP heat with another source.

Another interesting tidbit in the report is that a fair chunk of the money being transferred from non-PIPP participants to PIPP participants (after the healthy overhead cut) is going to pay off their overdue bills. One way or another, the money all flows into Dominion’s coffers — for current billing, for overdue billing or for the administrative task of paying itself.  The house always wins.