Not a great time to roll out Dominion’s pricey solar tariff

Well, that didn’t take long.

A few weeks after I wrote about rising natural gas prices, Dominion Energy Virginia asked the SCC for permission to raise the price of electricity by about $9 per month for the average residential customers, citing higher fuel costs. Virginia law allows utilities to pass through its fuel costs to customers, without a profit margin, making it unlikely the SCC will turn down the request. Natural gas is Dominion’s largest fuel source, so its electricity rates are highly vulnerable to price swings in the market for fracked gas.

That makes this a really peculiar time for Dominion to launch a new solar energy purchase option that will add about $20 per month on average for customers who elect to meet their entire electricity demand with solar, without exempting them from the coming bill increase due to higher gas prices. If the company were trying to discourage people from signing up for its solar product, it could hardly have chosen a better time. The fact that the company delayed the launch of this program for more than three years, only to offer it now, makes it all the more suspect.

Dominion’s solar option, confusingly called “Community Solar,” is the product of legislation passed in 2017, three years before the General Assembly authorized private solar developers to sell to Virginia customers. The 2020 legislation dubbed the private program “shared solar,” and it remains mired in SCC rulemaking.

But Dominion Community Solar is different. As I wrote back in 2018, when the SCC approved the program (and its launch seemed imminent), this program is really a solar tariff. Dominion generates electricity from solar and puts it on the grid, and customers who want to run their homes and businesses on solar pay extra on their bill.

As part of the deal, participants also get the renewable energy certificates (RECs) associated with the solar energy. That prevents Dominion from selling the RECs to anyone else or using them to show compliance with Virginia’s new renewable portfolio standard (RPS). This is important to avoid double-counting and ensure that solar paid for by the voluntary market is in addition to the solar developed to serve customers under the RPS.

The $20 premium for the program will sound unreasonably high to people who have experience with community solar in other states, where it is typically offered at a discount to regular grid power. In many states, private developers build the solar facilities and sell the output to participants. The rate is typically fixed for many years, because solar has low O&M costs and uses no fuel. Customers still pay their utility for transmission and distribution, but the community solar fee replaces utility-delivered generation rates. Accordingly, participating customers are insulated from price increases due to higher natural gas (or coal) costs.

That is not Dominion Community Solar. Dominion’s program requires customers to pay for all the utility’s costs of running its generating plants and purchasing fuel and paying for rate adjustment clauses (RACs), including those for new renewable energy facilities that serve the entire rate base and RECs bought for the RPS. These solar-only customers will also have to pay Dominion’s costs for buying carbon allowances in the RGGI market, which the company incurs as a result of generating power from fossil fuels. (Dominion is hoping Governor Youngkin will succeed in pulling Virginia out of RGGI and has suggested shifting compliance costs from riders to base rates in the meantime, clearly as a way to mitigate the rate increase due to high gas prices.)

Dominion asks to halt ratepayer charge for carbon market

Dominion Community Solar customers will pay for all these costs of fossil fuel generation, and the cost of Dominion building renewable energy facilities for all its other customers. And then on top of all that, they will pay an extra $20 per month.

Let’s leave aside the question of whether $20 is even a fair premium for a solar tariff. Ultra-high gas prices, RPS riders and RGGI compliance costs are all new since the SCC authorized Dominion’s program in 2018. It’s hard to imagine the SCC agreeing today that program participants should pay all these costs in addition to the cost of developing community-sized solar arrays.

But something else has changed too: The shared solar legislation passed in 2020 promised customers the alternative of being able to buy solar from a third-party provider, unhooking participants from the roller-coaster ride of fossil fuel prices. As I noted before, though, shared solar is mired in proceedings at the SCC, where Dominion is seeking to impose such high fixed costs on participants as to make the program impossible to offer.

Right now, Dominion has an SCC hearing examiner mostly on its side.

If the SCC commissioners accept the hearing examiner’s recommendations, that could spell the end of shared solar—or at any rate, make Dominion’s $20 look good by comparison.