Dominion Energy’s utility business saw strong growth in electricity demand last year. The larger of its two regulated utilities, Dominion Energy Virginia, led the way with 5.4% weather-normalized sales growth.
That trend is likely to continue, according to Dominion and PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator. Though PJM dialed back its near-term load growth forecast earlier this year, it boosted its longer-term outlook from 3.1% annual growth to 3.6% annual growth through 2036. Growth will be even stronger in Dominion’s territory: It expects 5.4% annual growth over the next 10 years and 4.9% over the next 15 years, it said.
Thanks to its position as the electricity provider to “Data Center Alley,” as Northern Virginia’s massive computing cluster is known, Dominion Energy Virginia was one of the first major U.S. utilities to see sustained growth in electric demand from data centers. It has seen 20% annual growth in data center demand over the past 10 years and projects similar expansion well into the future. Dominion Energy Virginia has about 48.5 GW of future data center capacity in various stages of contracting as of December, it said.
To serve new data center demand, Dominion Energy Virginia and Dominion Energy South Carolina plan to spend roughly $65 billion through 2030 on a combined rate base projected to grow 10.2% annually.
Forty-five percent of that spending will involve transmission and distribution infrastructure. New gas generation will account for another 18%; Dominion assured investors that it has secured the turbines it needs for planned simple-cycle and combined-cycle gas plants into the early 2030s. Solar and energy storage spending, supported by Virginia’s clean energy framework, represents another 13%.
On Dominion’s Monday earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Steven Ridge hinted that the company’s ambitious spending plans may expand further after 2030.
“We continue to see [the need] for additional investment across the value chain, biased towards the early 2030s and beyond,” Ridge said. Dominion will provide public updates on those potential projects “as warranted by their development status,” he added.
Construction on Dominion’s 2.6-GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, the largest U.S. offshore wind facility in active development, is progressing well, Dominion Energy Chairman, President and CEO Robert Blue said. Dominion installed the project’s 176 monopiles ahead of schedule, it has already placed 70% of the facility’s transition pieces at sea, and it installed its third and final offshore substation last weekend, he said.
“We continue to be on track for the delivery of first power to the grid by March. That will represent a remarkable project milestone,” he said. The project will be fully commissioned in early 2027.
However, Dominion and Stonepeak, its joint venture partner, incurred a $228 million charge due to the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s stop-work order in December, the company said. The stop-work order, which was later lifted by a federal judge, halted construction on the project for several weeks this winter.
“Incremental tariff recognition” added another $137 million to the final project cost, Dominion said. The remaining project cost is about $2.2 billion, of which Dominion is responsible for about $1.2 billion — less than 2% of its five-year capital budget and about 7% of its estimated 2026 rate base, it said.
