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The pushback started with Virginia. Earlier this month, in a first, Gov. Abigail Spanberger filed to formally intervene in the NextEra-Dominion Energy merger announced in May: a $67-million deal that would create the largest regulated utility in the world.
“As a Virginian, I am deeply skeptical about whether selling our primary state-regulated utility to an out-of-state company is good for the commonwealth,” the governor wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, a few weeks earlier. Spanberger, a Democrat, went on to emphasize that the size and impact of the deal would be “unprecedented.”
Now New England has joined the fray, propelled by concerns about the regional energy impact of concentrating so much control in a single company — and reviving the spectre of a five-year-old fight over a major transmission line that Next Era tried and failed to block.
In Virginia, Spanberger said her priorities are protecting ratepayers from bill increases, preserving the state’s power sector jobs, and maintaining the state’s renewable energy transition. Now that she’s a formal party to the case, she has the power to serve discovery on NextEra and Dominion as the Virginia State Corporation Commission considers the case. If regulators approve it, she could hypothetically appeal to the state’s Supreme Court.
