Powerstack: Gas and flexibility play big in Dominion’s IRP

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What happened

It flew under the radar last week, but Dominion filed its 2026 Integrated Resources Plan. It’s the full IRP for its North Carolina territory, under the North Carolina Utilities Commission that reviews it every two years, and just the IRP update for its Virginia territory, which only needs a full, litigated IRP every three years now under a law passed this spring, with the next official one due in 2027.

An IRP is a 20-year roadmap utilities file with regulators, modeling how they’ll meet demand (not necessarily a guarantee that anything gets built). Dominion modeled seven different portfolios this cycle, from one that meets Virginia’s 2045 clean energy deadline on schedule to one that meets Virginia’s separate 16,000MW storage mandate to one that assumes no new data centers beyond those already under contract, to one that follows North Carolina’s build limits. One of those is Dominion’s preferred plan, which splits the difference, and it’s got:

This runs up against the state of Virginia’s plans. Virginia’s Clean Economy Act, passed in 2020, requires Dominion to hit 100% renewable electricity by 2045, with a rising renewable mandate each year, 29% for Dominion in 2026, enforced by a $45/MWh penalty for falling short. Every carbon-emitting plant has to retire on that same timeline unless the utility wins a reliability exception from the state’s utility regulator, the SCC. A new 2026 law rewrote the storage half, pushing Dominion’s short-duration storage target to 4,000MW by 2030 and 16,000MW by 2045, and adding a new 4,000MW long-duration category on the same deadline, on top of resuming the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative participation and moving Virginia’s own IRP filing cadence to the three-year schedule that makes this year’s Dominion filing just an update.

Dominion’s preferred plan builds 3,525MW of short-duration storage, but it modeled the Forced Full Storage Portfolio, which builds 14,525MW toward the 16,000MW the law requires, costs $6.3bn more over 20 years, $21bn more in construction capital, and $15 to $16 more on a monthly bill. That portfolio also carries 682MW less nuclear and 1,866MW less gas than the preferred plan, and still ends up with higher 2046 emissions.

Dominion’s preferred plan also puts 2046 emissions at 47.0 million tons, against a 2045 deadline it’s not close to meeting. Its other modeling, Forced Retirements by 2045 Portfolio, which actually hits that deadline, gets emissions down to 14.1 million tons, but costs $224bn in construction capital, more than double the preferred plan. Dominion cheekily adds, “if it could be accomplished.”

In the backdrop is Virginia’s data center alley demand and rising affordability backlash. And the even bigger shoe to drop, Dominion’s $66.8bn sale to NextEra, is still pending, on track to close late 2027. VA Gov. Spanberger has called herself ‘deeply skeptical’ and this week called for a 6-year freeze on residential base rates, $29/month bill credits for 4 years (the companies offered $10), and Dominion’s debt share raised from 48% to 60%. The SCC is set to rule by January, but its staff already recommended rejecting the deal unless the companies add an independent board and keep in-state staffing levels for a decade.

Mark’s take

It’s okay, we can talk about emissions.

I know talking CO2 (or CH4) is a bit out of fashion right now – it’s all about the megawatt, baby! – but I keep hearing rumblings that clean is working its way back into the conversation. Maybe that’s bias, since we at Currence focus mainly on the cleaner pathways to power that can beat waiting in the queue for a turbine. But clients keep asking us who’s winning, who’s doing it responsibly, and what about emissions. So I’m going with rumblings.

Let’s look at the plan itself. Dominion is barely pretending at this point. Its preferred plan retires no fossil units before 2045, adds 9GW of new gas, and budgets for REC penalties starting in 2038. The scenario that meets Virginia’s clean energy law gets a smirk: “if it could be accomplished.” Dominion is effectively saying “not it,” or even “try and stop us.”

My first reaction was that this is on the governor to step in. But I don’t think this is the fight Governor Spanberger picks. She has real leverage through the NextEra merger, and she’s spending it on rate freezes and bill credits – not carbon. So the lever is somewhere else.

When Virginia and so many other states and countries passed clean energy targets, 2045 sounded far away. But now, it’s not. It’s 19 years out, well inside the financial life of a gas plant that comes online in 2032. The decisions made now are the ones that decide whether those targets get hit.

The moves Virginia is making right now won’t get it there. The state rejoined RGGI in July, but in Dominion’s own bill projections the RGGI charge is cancelled by an equal RGGI credit every year – $13.00 on and $13.00 off a typical monthly residential bill in 2027, and $8.87 on and off in 2046. Wild. On the bill, the carbon price nets to zero. Storage doesn’t get there either. Dominion has about 50MW of company-owned batteries in operation against a mandate of 4GW by 2030 and 16GW by 2045. Its preferred scenario stops at just over 3.5GW, and even the full-storage scenario barely moves emissions. Batteries don’t generate anything, and on this system they’ll often charge up on, you guessed it, gas.

What would move emissions is data center load. In a scenario with no new data center growth, Dominion’s 2046 emissions drop from 47 million tons to 25.9 million. Dominion still has to serve everyone else, but that marginal gas, and those 21 million tons, are linked to whatever happens with data center build.

How that load gets powered is a choice. The fastest MW doesn’t have to be gas. Gas has just been the default.

Our Fastest MW series mapped the time to power and market potential of clean pathways. In a couple weeks, we’ll publish the first Currence Speed to Power Index, putting a price on every pathway to power, and how fast each one actually delivers.

Who this helps 

Who should be nervous

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

960MW // AEP, Amazon, and X-energy are exploring an advanced nuclear project at the former coal plant site in Indiana. X-energy would site 12 of its small modular reactors, 80MW each, and Amazon signed a long-term contract to get the power and cover the facility’s full costs. It’s another hyperscaler reaching past PPAs into early-stage reactor siting, using a brownfield coal site to dodge some permitting friction, but no timeline’s been announced yet. The state is also studying Candu reactor capacity as it leans in on nuclear.

$3bn // LS Power’s COO says a 1GW combined-cycle plant now costs that much and takes four to six years to energize in PJM. LS Power closed a $6bn fund (50% above target) and Blackstone closed its fifth energy transition fund at $8.7bn (also 50% larger than its predecessor), so lots of capital to go around even as build costs and timelines stretch.

+82% // ABB’s US orders rose year-over-year in Q3, on demand for switchgear, circuit breakers, transfer switches, and low-voltage transformers. The company’s electrification segment booked a record $7.67bn in orders, with triple-digit order growth from data center customers, plus more demand from the utility grid build-out.

$4m // NextEra donated to Trump’s White House ballroom project, while its proposed merger with Dominion Energy sits before regulators. NextEra has a pattern of getting hands-on with politics, including past allegations of illegal political activity in Florida and a settlement over lying about involvement in Florida political interference schemes, so there’s some scrutiny in the merger debate.

Explore more Signals on Currence here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

The DOE turns to Defense Production Act money as SPARK runs dry. The agency is directing up to $50m toward reconductoring and dynamic line rating in Virginia and West Virginia. SPARK’s authorizing law only funds grid upgrades through fiscal 2026 and DOE already spent its full $1.9bn on 31 projects in September. Now the DOE is using Trump’s national-security determination on the grid to keep funding similar work through DPA instead.

Oregon’s de facto data center permitting pause. Gov. Tina Kotek directed the state Department of Environmental Quality to halt new air and water pollution permits for data center projects until July 1, 2027. Amazon says the pause threatens a pending air permit for its Boardman facility. Environmental review is a different tactic than formal moratorium vote, but same outcome.

Base Power’s first utility contract outside Texas. Central Georgia EMC will deploy up to 50MW of Base Power’s home batteries in 2027, partly to free up grid capacity for an Equinix campus. It’s a test of whether well-funded Base Power’s model -- using residential batteries to backstop utility capacity rather than building new generation -- translates outside ERCOT.

The latest research, features, and data drops on the Currence platform.

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Where the market is meeting, and where to find us

📅 RE+ // Las Vegas, Nov 16-19 // North America's largest clean energy event, covering solar, storage, hydrogen, and grid edge tech.

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Last night my son, born in the US but raised in London since he was two, was trying to remember “that corn state.” Nebraska, it turns out.

Nebraska instantly took me back to one of the best song listens I’ve ever had – you know, the perfect song for the moment. 2003, driving solo west across the US in my 1994 Mazda 626, windows down, sunset over Nebraska, and Either Way by Guster on the Discman. Awesome.

Full Powerstack B-Sides on Spotify.

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