NextEra/Dominion Say Yes to 101 Va. Conditions, No to Rate Freeze
If you were waiting for NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy to back up a bigger truck of cash to Virginia’s door (we were), you’ll have to keep waiting. On Tuesday, Nov. 3, the two companies filed rebuttal testimony with Virginia’s State Corporation Commission (SCC), the agency reviewing their $67 billion merger. They said “yes” to 101 of the 117 conditions that SCC staff and the Attorney General’s consumer counsel asked for, and “yes, with changes” to 13 more. But there’s no new money this time. The bill credit is the same $10 a month for four years they offered in September. What’s new is fine print: a conditional financial firewall around Dominion’s Virginia utility and two independent board members. And the companies flatly said “no” to Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s six-year rate freeze, plus a three-year freeze on rate increases pushed by the Attorney General’s consumer counsel. The pot didn’t get sweeter. It got more lawyerly. Read More “NextEra/Dominion Say Yes to 101 Va. Conditions, No to Rate Freeze”
Dominion Energy, Virginia’s biggest electric utility, reported third-quarter results on Friday. On the earnings call, CEO Bob Blue talked up offshore wind, solar, and batteries. He said almost nothing about natural gas. The gas news is in the fine print instead. Dominion’s new long-range plan, filed with Virginia regulators on Oct. 15, calls for nearly 9 gigawatts (GW) of new gas-fired power plants. That’s more than the company’s entire Virginia gas fleet today! Dominion is also pushing ahead with gas plants in Chesterfield County, VA, and South Carolina. Meanwhile, the planned $67 billion merger with NextEra Energy faces its make-or-break Virginia hearing, which starts Nov. 17. 
So much for the charm offensive. Five weeks after NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy sweetened their $67 billion merger with bigger bill credits, 1,000 new jobs and a shiny new Richmond office tower (see 
Back on Sept. 1, we told you Dominion Energy’s monster 3,000-megawatt (3 gigawatt) gas-fired power plant in Cumberland County, Virginia, had cleared its first hurdle when the county planning commission voted 5-1 to recommend approval (see 
Big Green’s second legal attack against Transco’s Southeast Supply Enhancement Project (SESE) just fired its opening shot. On September 18, Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, and 7 Directions of Service filed their 142-page opening brief in the D.C. Circuit (Case No. 26-1100), arguing FERC’s approval of the pipeline was “arbitrary and capricious” because the agency allegedly ignored evidence that SESE and a second, co-located pipeline would combine to inflict “severe and potentially permanent” damage on streams across Virginia and North Carolina. Construction on SESE has continued the entire time — including through a failed bid by the same groups to freeze it back in June. 
NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy, which want to combine into the country’s biggest electric utility in a $67 billion deal, launched a full-blown charm offensive (i.e., piles of money) aimed at Virginia yesterday. The two companies unveiled what they call a “transformational” benefits package that doubles bill credits for homeowners (from two years to four), promises 1,000 new direct jobs, and throws in a brand-new office tower in downtown Richmond, paid for by NextEra shareholders. Why all the sweeteners? Because Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger says she is “deeply skeptical” the deal is good for her state, and she has formally inserted herself into the regulatory review. Here’s what’s in the new package, how it’s being received, and why it matters to Marcellus/Utica drillers. 
Last week we told you Dominion Energy cleared its first hurdle for the monster 3,000-megawatt (3 gigawatt) Cumberland Energy Center in Cumberland County, Virginia (see 
Virginia Democrats have spent the summer hammering the proposed $67 billion NextEra-Dominion merger — letters to regulators, a 64-question interrogation, a statewide listening tour, a demand for a special session. Last week the pile-on reached the very top when House Speaker Don Scott (D-Portsmouth) filed his own letter with the State Corporation Commission (SCC). Here’s the twist: the same Democrat leaders doing the loudest complaining just refused to do the one thing that would actually slow this deal down. 
Virginia’s environmental cops have hit Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Company (Transco) with a $179,068.50 civil charge over erosion and sediment control violations on the Pittsylvania County stretch of the Southeast Supply Enhancement (SSE) Project — the single most important new outlet for Marcellus/Utica gas heading south. 
Yesterday, EQT Corporation, the largest Marcellus/Utica-only producer by far, issued its second-quarter 2026 update. We’re pulling out what we consider to be the biggest news from that update for this separate post. During an earnings call with analysts, EQT CEO Toby Rice said that since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the company’s 31-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) Southgate project from southern Virginia into northern North Carolina in June (see 
In May, Dominion Energy announced plans to construct a multibillion-dollar, 3-gigwatt (GW) combined-cycle natural gas power plant in Cumberland County to address the state’s rapidly increasing electricity demand, particularly from data centers (see