Virginia Builds Gas Reliability Exception Into Dominion's 2045 Clean Power Mandate
Surging data center demand and a RGGI-linked carbon cost are pressuring Virginia's reliability exception to Dominion's 2045 clean power deadline.
State regulators were still writing EPA carbon limits into new gas plant permits in late June (2026-06-26), E&E News reported, even as the federal agency moved to repeal those rules. The approach varied state by state. In Virginia, that permitting divergence sits inside the state's clean energy statute: Dominion Energy is required to reach 100% clean power by 2045, but the same law permits the utility to keep gas plants running past that date, case by case, if grid reliability demands it.6,4
The reliability exception attracted new commercial attention in May (2026-05-22), when Power magazine and Canary Media reported that NextEra Energy had entered acquisition talks for Dominion. Power magazine described NextEra as "the world's biggest clean energy operator." Canary Media reported the deal's logic plainly. NextEra wants to buy into Data Center Alley, the Northern Virginia corridor that has become one of the country's densest concentrations of hyperscale computing load.4,2
Virginia's electricity consumption has risen roughly 15% as the AI build-out has accelerated, Canary Media reported. EIA's Annual Energy Outlook 2026 projects that data center server electricity use nationally could reach between 446 billion and 818 billion kilowatthours by 2050. Servers already accounted for an estimated 7% of commercial sector electricity in 2025, a share EIA projects rising to between 22% and 33% by 2050.3,1
Fast-rising load is the condition that makes reliability carve-outs expand in practice. If data center additions in Northern Virginia continue at recent rates, the pressure on Dominion (or whoever eventually owns it) to maintain dispatchable generation will be persistent, not occasional. The case-by-case language in Virginia's statute provides the mechanism. Demand growth supplies the argument.3,1
Virginia's re-entry into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative puts a cost on that mechanism. RGGI pollution permits doubled over the past five years to $16 per ton of CO₂, Canary Media reported. Each additional year of post-2045 gas generation operating under the reliability carve-out means ongoing RGGI compliance costs, which will flow to ratepayers or shareholders depending on how Virginia regulators treat them.3
Power magazine cited analysis describing Dominion as "what may be the worst-run utility in America," with Virginia's legislature having grown frustrated with the company's track record. Better operations under new ownership could theoretically reduce the frequency of reliability invocations. But the carve-out's trigger is load adequacy, not management quality — and Northern Virginia's data center demand is not contingent on who runs the utility.4
New gas supply infrastructure is expanding in parallel. EIA's natural gas pipeline tracker shows approximately 31.6 billion cubic feet per day of new capacity already under construction in the US, representing roughly 70% of total new pipeline additions due online in 2026 and 2027. More than two-thirds of those additions originate in Texas. Whether any of that supply eventually reaches Mid-Atlantic interconnection points, and at what delivered cost, will partly shape the economics of gas generation kept running under Virginia's reliability exception.5
Canary Media noted the proposed deal raised questions about benefits to residential customers. Virginia's RGGI participation and evolving state permitting practices will shape how aggressively any new owner pursues the 2045 deadline against the exception built into the same statute. Regulators have not specified what load conditions constitute a reliability determination under Virginia law. Until that threshold is defined, the carve-out's practical scope is set by each future grid stress event rather than by any standard written in advance.2,6