With Dem Control Of VA Legislature, One Hell Of A Fight Shaping Up W. Dominion Energy
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The raw power and influence of Dominion is hard to overstate. President Donald Trump’s current attorney general, William Barr, is a former member of the Dominion board, and was paid $1.2 million in cash and stock for his time with the firm. Dominion paid over $1 million to SKDKnickerbocker, the Democratic consultancy led by Anita Dunn, Obama’s former communications director, to help advertise its controversial Atlantic Coast gas pipeline. In every year that the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonprofit campaign finance disclosure watchdog, has kept records, Dominion has been the largest or second largest corporate donor in state politics.
The company also strategically hands out cash to nonprofit groups and civic leaders to curry favor with policymakers. One local leader of a Virginia Boys & Girls Club who testified in favor of Dominion’s Atlantic Coast pipeline, for example, received a $10,000 grant from the company in 2018. This year, in its capacity as a corporate donor, Dominion, along with its executives and lobbyists, handed out over $2.6 million in Virginia elections, largely benefitting the GOP. They also gave significant donations to some Virginia Democrats, including current Minority Leader state Sen. Dick Saslaw, D-Alexandria, a close ally of Dominion.
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After deregulation passed in 1999, Dominion continued to push for a variety of laws to boost shareholder profits at the expense of ratepayers and taxpayers. In 2007, the company proposed a partial re-regulation, with a special clause that allowed the utility to charge consumers for new power plants with much larger guaranteed profits for Dominion. The company also won special legislation in 2013 to write off $400 million in storm-related costs and $300 million the following year to cut its own taxes using the partially completed North Anna power plant. Dominion has flexed its muscle on the federal level and in other states in which it operates, as well. In 2005, Dominion spent over $500,000 to help push through President George W. Bush’s Energy Policy Act, which repealed the New Deal limitations on utility holding company consolidation. Last year, Dominion hired former Gov. Jim Hodges to help secure regulatory approval to purchase of SCANA, the largest utility in South Carolina — a deal that finalized in January. Over the last decade, the company has lobbied regulators to win a series of mergers and acquisitions across the country, with utility and energy assets in half a dozen states.
In anticipation of the Democratic sweep, Dominion has released a series of press statements touting its commitment to climate change policies and renewable energy. Last year, the firm agreed to a deal to invest some excess profits into clean energy, but with the caveat of further limiting the power of state regulatory agencies to review its conduct. “Legislators who want to make fast progress on climate change by adopting a renewable energy standard, challenging Dominion’s unnecessary gas pipeline, or reforming its ironclad monopoly, will face severe resistance,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility energy watchdog group. “Now that reformers have real power,” said Pomerantz, “the question is: will they stand up to Dominion and its allies, or buckle and take the path of least resistance?”
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https://theintercept.com/2019/11/06/virginia-democrats-dominion-energy-lobbying/
