Dominion’s five-year spending priority: upgrading the grid.
by James A. Bacon
Dominion Virginia Power plans $9.5 billion in capital expenditures through 2020, almost two-thirds of which will go to upgrading the company’s transmission lines, substations and distribution system. Other priorities include $700 million for new solar generation and, if approved by the State Corporation Commission, additional funds for undergrounding vulnerable distribution lines.
“We know our customers expect high reliability, clean energy and reasonable rates,” said Robert M. Blue, DVP president in a statement. “We focus on that in everything we do, from building new infrastructure to day-to-day maintenance and fast storm response.”
The capital spending, which will average nearly $2 billion a year, represents a major step-up from the past seven years in which Dominion spent $8 billion, much of it for environmental control equipment to reduce coal-fired power plant emissions of toxic chemicals.
Dominion has the fastest-growing demand for electricity of any utility in PJM Interconnection, which manages wholesale markets and the reliability of the regional electric grid for a 13-state region plus the District of Columbia. The company added 430,000 customers in the past decade, the press release states. Dominion also serves an increasing number of energy-intensive date centers in Northern Virginia.
“Our modern way of life requires lots of energy – and that means infrastructure,” Blue said. “To keep up with energy demand and meet new clean air requirements, Dominion Virginia Power and its parent company are constantly building everything from power stations to power lines, substations to natural gas pipelines.”
Of the $9.5 billion in planned expenditures, Dominion proposes to allocate $3.6 billion for transmission lines and substations, $2.4 billion for its distribution system, and $3.5 billion for new generation and environmental improvements.
While policy makers tend to focus mostly on electric rates and environmental impact, Dominion also emphasizes the reliability of the electric grid. Blue said that reliability, measured by minutes lost due to routine service disruptions, has improved 25% since 2008. “Our reliability in 2015 was 98.8%, which translates into approximately 2 hours of outage time per customer over the whole year.” (Reliability metrics do not take into account outages from major storms.)
Dominion’s proposal to run power lines underground would focus on the most outage-prone tap lines. The idea is to enable electric power to be restored more quickly to customers in the event of a hurricane, ice storm or other major weather-related disruption, which historically has hit the state on average every couple of years.
