Bills Would Prevent Ratepayer Refunds for Six Years, SCC Says

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Proposals to overhaul Virginia’s system for regulating electric rates would provide no opportunity for the State Corporation Commission (SCC) to order refunds to rate payers until 2024 for Appalachian Power Company and 2025 for Dominion Energy Virginia, concludes a State Corporation Commission analysis of Senate Bills 966 and 967.

The SCC conducted the analysis at the request of Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, who has advocated a return to the regulatory system that prevailed before the 2015 enactment of a rate freeze that has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of excess profits for the two utilities. Dominion has worked with legislators to advance a proposal that would return $1 billion to ratepayers over 10 years and replace biennial rate reviews with triennial rate reviews.

Key impacts on rate payers can be summarized as follows, states the analysis submitted by John F. Dudley, counsel to the Commission (quoting verbatim):

  1. There will be no opportunity to consider base-rate reductions or refunds to customers for at least six years, and then only if the utility over-earns for two consecutive three-year periods, effectively extending the current base-rate freeze further into the future.
  2. There may be only a partial return of reduction in federal income taxes currently being collected in base rates.
  3. The provision in current law that allows utilities to keep more than 30% of their excess earnings is continued.
  4. The legislation allows the utilities to keep future excess earnings (i.e. customer overpayments) and, rather than return them to customers, use them for capital projects chosen by the utility. In addition the utilities can charge customers for these same projects in base rates.
  5. The legislation deems certain capital projects to be “in the public interest,” thus impacting the SCC’s authority to evaluate whether such projects are cost-effective or whether there are alternatives available at lower costs to customers. This provision could potentially result in billions of dollars of additional costs that will be charged to customers in higher rates.
  6. An amount that appears to represent the customers’ portion of prior period excess earnings is returned to customers, but the amount has not been examined in a formal proceeding to determine its accuracy.

Dominion Energy Virginia has issued the following response:

This report analyzes a work in progress [that is] subject to change. We continue to believe a reinvestment model that transforms our energy grid and significantly increases the amount of renewable energy we produce is sound policy for Virginia. We have always said all tax savings should return to customers effective Jan. 1, 2018 and be appropriately adjusted by the SCC when the final IRS rules are available. To the extent that is not clear, we would support an amendment making it so.