Category Archives: Environment

Caroline Golin, Ph.D., witness for Appalachian Voices, SELC

Two witnesses told the State Corporation Commission Tuesday that Dominion Energy Virginia’s proposed grid transformation program will not bring the utility’s customers into the modern energy economy.

Both Scott Norwood of Texas, an expert witness often used by the Office of the Attorney General, and Caroline Golin, an expert from Georgia hired by environmental groups, paralleled their written testimony reported on in an earlier post.

The commission must agree that the company’s $917 million first phase of its plan, which includes a roll out of new automated metering technology, is reasonable and prudent before the company can proceed. Just how customers will pay for this – either through a rate adjustment clause or the use of excess profits retained by the company – is not yet before the commission. With financing costs and profits the long-term revenue requirement for all phases of the plan is estimated at $6 billion by the SCC staff.

“The company is not proposing to operate the grid in any new way,” Golin said Tuesday. If it were moving aggressively to distributed energy, to more customer-driven demand management, to time-of-day pricing, to use of storage, “then I would agree they need more control of the grid. But right now, they are not proposing any of those.”

Norwood noted that a major part of the plan’s cost will be spent to reduce average outages by a few minutes per year. “I’m skeptical most customers will notice. It’s like the break we took at midmorning.” Benefits of that kind of reliability flow to larger, commercial and industrial customers but will be paid for by the residential customers.

Golin picked up on the same point: “There is a difference between reliable and perfect” and the company is now shooting for perfect. “This is something the commission needs to be very critical of. The average customer does not require perfect power.”

Support from some of the environmental groups, and a neutral stance taken by others, was crucial to passage of the 2018 legislation. Dominion Energy packaged it to the public it as a grid modernization effort, but its final version also included major incentives and directives to build more renewable generation. Now the environmental groups are leading the charge against the grid-related element of the bill, claiming it is a lost opportunity to truly transform the utility for a renewable energy future.

Golin, who has joined Google since being retained in this case, has been involved in grid redevelopment cases around the country and has also been especially critical of Duke Energy’s North Carolina plan.  Her statement that Dominion had no plans to operate the grid differently was vigorously challenged by Dominion and even an SCC staff witness later in the hearing.

Since the first round of written testimony was filed, Dominion’s leaders have supplemented the record with rebuttal testimony, but it was picked apart at the hearing as more evidence that no real cost-benefit analysis had been done, much of the engineering work is preliminary, cost estimates have little valid basis, and some obvious grid-related issues were flat ignored.

Dorothy Jaffe of the Sierra Club used questions to a Dominion witness to point out no real plans were made for the growth of electric vehicles, and the initial $3 billion plan would have to be supplemented – perhaps at additional cost – to support that expected transformation.

The Office of the Attorney General and the SCC staff have not asked for a total rejection of the proposal, but acceptance with conditions or acceptance of only the early pieces that involve planning and engineering. 

As with most of the issues that have reached the commission growing out of that legislation, the key question is does the regulatory body have the power to say no. In some cases, such as the off-shore wind demonstration project, the legislative wording was a clear directive. In the case of the grid projects, however, the new language mandated a review for reasonableness and prudence. A separate hearing on the commission’s authority was held November 7.

“The new law does not require a single one of these projects to be implemented,” said Nate Benforado, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, who used his opening statement to dismiss the whole effort as “a plan to spend money” which “puts the customer last.”

“This is a huge issue for the coming decade,” Benforado said. Dominion really doesn’t need to build new generation. There is testimony in the current integrated resource plan case that demand is flat or dropping, with plenty of generation assets available through connection with other utilities. “Dominion is looking for ways to spend customer money and earn a rate of return.”

The decisions on this case and on the integrated resource plan will probably need to be viewed together to glimpse Virginia’s future. The IRP case appears ripe for a published opinion with no further hearings planned. The commission has until mid January to issue a decision on this matter.

All-in lifetime revenue requirement for two solar projects related to Facebook. Key data is hidden. Operating and maintenance costs are also kept secret, perhaps to prevent simple math from disclosing the RECs. ARO stands for “asset retirement obligations” and ITC is the federal tax credits. Source: SCC staff testimony.

“Facts are facts, and the SCC does a really good job of compiling them.”  Former State Senator John Watkins of Chesterfield.

After demonstrating that two solar energy facilities Dominion Energy Virginia has proposed in a deal with Facebook leave ratepayers holding all risks, reported already in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the State Corporation Commission staff suggested an interesting solution that shifts that burden.

“Should the Commission determine that the proposed US-3 Solar Projects are not prudent as filed, the Commission may want to condition approval on the implementation of cost recovery through a rate adjustment clause (“RAC”) based on the market index in lieu of the cost of service model proposed in this case,” wrote Gregory L. Abbott, deputy director of the utility division.  His and other documents are available online.

“This would reasonably protect the nonparticipating customers from performance risk as the customers would only pay for the actual MWhs that the proposed US-3 Solar Projects produce.  Implementing cost recovery through a RAC based on the beginning market index price of $31.82/MWh would also meet the Commission requirement in Case No. PUR-2017-00137 that Schedule RF should be implemented in a manner that holds nonparticipating customers harmless,” Abbott concluded.

So.  Instead of guaranteeing the utility a full return of its capital costs with profit, the SCC might instead charge ratepayers no more than the market value of the power produced.  On this deal, Dominion would be no better protected than an independent merchant power producer.

This little case, involving only 240 megawatts of production and $410 million of construction cost, is important because after Facebook come others with similar or larger appetites.  This is the first of many such arrangements the company expects under its experimental special rate for customers demanding the appearance of green energy virtue.  Any new plants need SCC certificates of public necessity and convenience.

The Commission last year approved the experimental “RF” tariff designed to serve the new Facebook facility and others like it, but included this in the order:  “As acknowledged by the Company, however, our approval herein does not represent a presumption or pre-approval of any subsequent proposals related to Schedule RF….We agree with Consumer Counsel that Schedule RF should be implemented in a manner that holds non-participating customers harmless.”

Here is how it appears to work:  Facebook will buy the same “tainted” power including from fossil fuels and nuclear from the grid as everybody else, but to keep its green cred intact also promises to buy 100 percent of the renewable energy credits and other “environmental attributes”  for a comparable amount of power from solar.  Those contracted payments are applied to the capital pay-off for 20 years and lower the cost of the project for other ratepayers, who will still see a rate adjustment clause (US-3) on their bills.

Dominion is not building solar to connect directly to Facebook, and should a third party try to do that in Dominion’s monopoly territory, heads would roll.  That monopoly is the most valuable asset its stockholders enjoy.  The only difference between this and any other solar project appears to be the sale of the RECs to Facebook instead of into some other market.  I’m open to correction on that point.

One point the SCC staff makes is it didn’t have to be a company-built project.  Staff witness Earnest J. White said Dominion could have met Facebook’s needs by purchasing an existing solar facility. “This option would have permitted the Company to know, rather than estimate, the benefits to customers before exposure to risk of performance,” he wrote.  (Unmentioned by him – that option does not produce 9.2 percent annual return on equity for the utility. )

Another instance of redactions rendering SCC data useless to the ratepayers and reporters.

The revenues from the renewable energy credits at the two plants, along with the tax credits, are applied to the 35-year payoff on the two new solar facilities, reducing costs to ratepayers.  But as the SCC testimony makes clear, two variables then become crucial.  The first is the capacity factor of the project (what percentage of the time power is produced) and the second is the market value of those renewable energy credits.  The two are interrelated because the RECS are based on actual output, not 100 percent capacity – less output, less REC revenue.

Complicating reporting on this case, as usual, are all the key data covered up with black ink or entire memos withheld from public scrutiny.  The projected REC revenue is kept confidential.

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