Governor Spanberger just made every Virginian’s household more expensive.

by Jeff Reynolds

Virginia has jumped back into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), and residential ratepayers will feel the pain—again. 

The last time the state was in the program, under the last Democratic governor, it cost Virginians more than $600 million over three years. Every penny landed on electric bills. Now, Democratic leadership in the Assembly, Senate, and governor’s mansion has reenrolled the state in the “cap-and-invest” scheme, and the latest estimates put the annual hit at more than $500 million going forward. That figure doesn’t even account for rising credit prices now that Virginia’s demand has re-entered the market and driven up costs. 

Analyses have pegged the household impact north of $1,500 a year. 

Glenn Davis, who helped shape Virginia’s energy policy as director of the state Department of Energy, doesn’t mince words about what this means for families. 

“We know everyone’s bill is going to go up,” he told Restoration News. 

Power bills will necessarily skyrocket

Former President Barack Obama set the blueprint in his 2008 campaign, when he said, “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” These schemes have well-known consequences for everyone who uses electricity, with no actual benefit for the climate. 

Democrats have pushed them anyway.

Other RGGI states at least admit the obvious: the program drives up power costs, so they rebate a chunk of the revenue back to ratepayers to soften the blow. Virginia’s leaders refuse to concede even the premise. They deny the cost increase even exists, while every neighboring Democrat-run state quietly acknowledges it and cuts checks. 

The environmental irony is brutal. RGGI only regulates in-state generation. It does not touch coal plants outside Virginia’s borders that still serve Virginia customers. During the last stint in the program, Virginia’s two largest power providers, Dominion and AEP, simply dialed back gas-fired plants inside the state—subject to penalties—and ramped up coal-fired generation at facilities like Mount Storm in West Virginia. 

The math Davis pulled while at the Department of Energy is damning: Virginia’s participation added roughly two billion pounds of extra carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere compared with staying out. “Emissions are like a 10x [increase] between gas and coal,” he noted. 

Responsible parties escape the consequences

The program—sold as a climate win—actually made the air dirtier by forcing utilities to chase cheaper, dirtier out-of-state power. And who pays the penalties? Not the utilities. 

“It’s just like if I told you I want to go lose weight, but if every calorie of cake I ate went to you, how much less cake am I going to eat?” Davis asked. “You’re paying the bill. And you’re not penalizing the utility because every dollar in that penalty goes to the ratepayer.” The money flows straight from your meter to the state’s carbon credit auction proceeds, with no meaningful offset for Virginia households. 

The same ideological overreach that revived RGGI has started strangling future supply. The 2020 Clean Economy Act demands that Virginia shutter all “fossil fuel” generation—45 percent of the state’s current capacity—by 2045, less than 20 years away. Utilities have already started building new gas plants in West Virginia whose entire output will head straight to Virginia customers, because building inside the state now risks regulatory suicide. 

The result is predictable: higher costs, less reliability, and a regulatory regime that treats molecules burned across the border as magically cleaner. A co-op just cut the ribbon on a large gas plant in West Virginia that will send 100 percent of its power into Virginia. The electrons cross the state line, but the regulatory headache conveniently stays outside the border. 

A single paragraph on offshore wind captures the futility perfectly. Virginia’s only active lease, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW), had reached 70 percent completion when the Trump administration paused East Coast projects. “It was allowed to continue,” Davis says, “and that is the right thing to do at that point because it was 70% complete. Every dollar was being put on the ratepayers. You might as well just finish the damn thing at that point.”

Davis is blunt: “It is the most expensive electron I will ever use in my house. We should never have done it to begin with.” 

Gaming the system

Virginia Democrats didn’t have the authority to impose offshore wind over more reliable and affordable power options, so in 2020 they simply changed the law. They declared offshore wind “in the public interest” and stripped the State Corporation Commission (SCC) of its duty to pick the cheapest, most reliable option for ratepayers. 

“The Democrats in the General Assembly declared wind in the public interest and required by law that our utilities build a certain amount of wind by a certain date,” Davis explained. “At that point, the SCC was taken out of the ability to value it based on the best alternative for power generation.” 

More wind leases loom in the 2030s. The pattern is the same: political fiat overrides economics, and Virginians pay the premium for intermittent power that still needs fossil backup the Clean Economy Act seeks to ban. This will force ratepayers to subsidize the least practical form of generation available. The wind doesn’t blow on demand, so the grid still needs the very fossil plants the law wants to eliminate. 

It’s all cost, no real reliability gain. Davis has seen this movie before. “When we were in RGGI before, Dominion used significantly less of its gas power facilities in Virginia and used more of its coal power facilities in West Virginia.” 

The program didn’t clean the air. It just shifted the emissions and the expense onto the people least able to absorb them. 

New estimates are already trickling in, and they’re more than four times higher than the previous stint in RGGI:

The first time around cost ratepayers about $2.39 per month.

Ratepayers across the commonwealth are about to watch their bills climb while the state pretends the increase is imaginary. Virginia’s energy policy has turned into a master class in good intentions producing the opposite of their stated goals—higher emissions, higher costs, and less control over our own grid. 

The facts are not in dispute. The only question left: how long will families be forced to subsidize the experiment before they revolt?

Jeff Reynolds is Senior Editor for Restoration News, specializing in energy and science policy, as well as dark money. This column has been republished with permission from Restoration News.