Dominion Energy outlines rising demand, project pipeline and local work to supervisors

Dominion Energy representatives told the Mecklenburg County Board of Supervisors on July 14 that the utility is seeing record growth in electricity demand and is pursuing a mix of resources — solar, battery storage, offshore wind, natural gas and nuclear — to meet that demand while preserving reliability. "It's not a scare tactic…it's really just…a reality," Justin Pope, a Dominion Energy representative, said of demand forecasts produced by PJM and the company. Dominion cited PJM forecasts showing rising peak demand in its service area and said the system saw new record peaks during January’s cold spell. Company officials highlighted several program and project items relevant to Mecklenburg County: the County falls inside Dominion’s service territory (with a local South Hill office of roughly 20 staff); two local solar projects are in the queue (Finney Wood is listed as in the pipeline); Dominion’s rural broadband "middle mile" work in the county is nearly complete and is intended to support data‑center buildout; and transmission upgrades to support data centers remain under state review (the Nebula Range project is pending). Officials said Dominion has petitioned the State Corporation Commission (SCC) for a base rate increase — the company’s first base‑rate request since 1992 — and that the SCC is expected to rule in the fall after public hearings. Dominion said its offshore wind project off Virginia Beach is about 60% complete and should be online in 2026, and that the company is studying small modular reactors at North Anna and continuing natural‑gas development where reliability requires it. Dominion officials described steps to improve solar output and operations and said their operations and maintenance team is actively troubleshooting underperforming arrays; they also described a proposed new high‑energy user rate class that would more clearly allocate infrastructure costs for large data‑center customers. The board asked about outage‑prone lines, customer assistance programs and brownfield solar siting; Dominion said it is upgrading equipment, undergrounding lines in outage‑prone areas and pursuing landfill and reclaimed‑mine sites for solar projects. Dominion said its Energy Share program provided over $105,000 in two years to roughly 260 families in Mecklenburg for billing assistance.