Who Should Pay for Haymarket Transmission Project, Amazon or Ratepayers?

transmission_linesby James A. Bacon

Dominion Virginia Power wants to upgrade its electric grid to serve a new data center campus in the Haymarket area of Prince William County. Residents are up in arms about the potential loss to property values, and the cost of the project could range between $51 million for the least expensive alternative to $166.7 million for the lowest-impact alternative.

The Haymarket project is re-playing familiar controversies bubbling up around the state as Dominion undertakes a wave of improvements to its transmission and distribution system in response to the shift from coal toward natural gas and renewable sources. But this project has a twist. The justification for the project is to serve a single customer, widely believed to be Amazon Web Services (AWS). (Dominion is constrained by a confidentiality agreement not to identify the customer.)

The State Corporation Commission faces two big decisions: (a) Which alternative should it approve, and (b) who should pay for it — Amazon or Dominion rate payers?

Dominion has applied to the SCC for approval to construct a new substation in Haymarket, upgrade an existing distribution line from 115 kV to 230 kV, and construct a new 5.1-mile overhead line. The purpose is to deliver service to a proposed campus expected to house three data center buildings

According to testimony submitted by SCC utilities engineer Neil Joshipura last week, the data centers cannot be served reliably by the existing distribution system and connecting them to the grid would not comply with federal grid reliability standards. While Dominion has demonstrated a need for the project, noted Joshipura, “the Project is needed to serve a new customer, rather than to enhance overall system reliability, and the Staff notes that without the request for service to the Haymarket Campus, the Project would not be needed.”

The SCC has received dozens of letters from Haymarket residents opposed to the project. The area is part of Prince William County’s “rural crescent” slated for lower density development, and residents have famously fought off efforts to develop land near the Manassas National Battlefield Park and, more recently, build the Bi-County Parkway through the area. Most letters express the fear that the power lines would be visually intrusive in a quiet, rural area and would impact property values.

“We did not move to Gainesville 13 years ago to have an eyesore in our back yard,” wrote Peter Menard in a typical statement filed with the SCC.

If a line must be built, citizens tend to favor the “hybrid” above ground/buried cable alternative, although it costs three times as much as Dominion’s preferred alternative.

Citizens also object to the idea of making Dominion ratepayers pay for AWS’s business decision to locate its data center campus in Haymarket rather than Prince William’s Innovation business park. Joseph Knight put it this way in a letter to the SCC:

Amazon chose to buy cheaper land elsewhere in the Haymarket area, knowing that data center expansion is a key factor in Amazon’s overall long-term growth plans and knowing full well that the power at the Haymarket site was totally inadequate to support such an expansion and would require a major power substation upgrade. … Amazon must have intended from the very beginning to lay the entire cost of the upgrade, the property destruction, and the immense loss of value in private property on a wide swath of Western Prince William County.

Dominion classifies the Haymarket improvements as transmission facilities, not distribution facilities, which would make the project subject to the control of PJM Inter-connection, which operates wholesale electricity markets in a 12-state region. As a transmission facility, the improvements would be paid for by ratepayers in the Dominion Transmission Zone, which extends into North Carolina. A residential customer using 1,000 kWh would see a bill increase of $0.09 under Dominion’s preferred proposal and $0.37 under the hybrid proposal, said Joshipura.

Dominion had no comment on Joshipura’s testimony. “We are aware of the SCC staff report, and it’s under internal review,” said Chuck Penn, Dominion spokesman. “We’ll address it in our rebuttal” to be filed tomorrow.