Dominion Energy Virginia is taking advantage of its annual, and usually boring, fuel cost review to move the cost of any future carbon tax or emissions allowances out of its fixed base rates and into its variable fuel charge. If the State Corporation Commission agrees it could either lower or raise your bill someday but place your bets on the latter.
The case (here) has also drawn testimony that Dominion has so much natural gas capacity under contract in existing pipelines that it is selling the excess capacity to others – about 25 percent of it, in the case of the Transco pipeline. It needs no more capacity, according to a witness hired by environmental groups.
UPDATE: Through a Twitter response I’m told that Dominion has notified other parties it will withdraw the request to place any future CO2 costs into the fuel charge, and the document I missed has been flagged. So the “is” in the lede paragraph is now a “was.” I’ll leave the story up because it remains something to watch.
The utility is allowed a dollar-for-dollar recovery of its fuel costs, with no added profit. Every year it makes a forward estimate of what it will spend on coal, natural gas, uranium fuel, purchased power and related inputs (including contracts for transportation). That amount is then adjusted up and down based on the results from the prior year. The result is costing you 2.7 cents per kWh this year and a projected 2.42 cents per kWh next year.
