CompanyGraph
Dominion Energy, Inc.
D · NYSE Arca · United States
Sells electricity to 2.7 million Virginia customers it is legally required to serve — and no competitor is allowed to serve instead.
Dominion Energy supplies electricity to 2.7 million customers across Virginia through a franchise granted by the Virginia State Corporation Commission, which legally bars any competing supplier from entering that territory — so every kilowatt-hour those customers use must flow through Dominion's wires and power stations, including the North Anna and Surry nuclear plants and more than 90,000 miles of transmission lines. Rather than earning more by selling more electricity, Dominion earns its returns by spending on infrastructure, because each capital project approved by the Virginia SCC enters a regulated rate base that earns an allowed return for the life of the asset, sometimes 30 to 40 years. The biggest single bet in that rate base is the $9.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, which Dominion was able to win regulatory approval for partly because it already operates the only constructed commercial-scale offshore wind turbines on the U.S. East Coast — a 12-megawatt pilot that generated the performance data and precedent the SCC needed before authorizing the full build. If construction costs on that project climb past what the SCC considers reasonable to charge ratepayers, the commission can refuse to let Dominion recover the excess, turning the largest item in the rate base from a decades-long return stream into a stranded cost.
How does this company make money?
The Virginia SCC sets the rates Dominion can charge customers, calculated to cover all costs the commission approves plus a set return on equity applied to the rate base. When natural gas or coal prices move up or down, automatic fuel adjustment clauses let Dominion pass those costs directly to customers without waiting for a full rate case. Dominion also receives capacity payments from PJM — money paid for simply having generation available to the regional grid, whether or not that power is actually used on a given day.
What makes this company hard to replace?
Customers inside Dominion's territory cannot legally buy electricity from a competing supplier — the Virginia SCC franchise makes that prohibited, not just difficult. Their homes and buildings are physically connected to Dominion's grid through customer-specific transformers and service lines that belong to Dominion's infrastructure. If someone wanted to move to a different utility, that handoff would require approval from regulators across multiple states through PJM Interconnection — a process that does not exist as a practical option for an individual customer.
What limits this company?
Every major project has to be approved individually by the Virginia SCC, and that commission runs on its own schedule. There is no way to automate, speed up, or skip that review. The $9.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is sitting inside that same bottleneck right now — until the SCC signs off on costs as reasonable, that capital does not become earnings.
What does this company depend on?
Dominion cannot operate without five things it does not fully control: the Virginia SCC franchise rights that give it exclusive territory, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses that keep the North Anna and Surry nuclear stations running, natural gas supply contracts that fuel its combined-cycle power plants, PJM Interconnection membership that coordinates how power moves across the regional grid, and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management lease areas in the Atlantic where the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project sits.
Who depends on this company?
Amazon Web Services runs data centers inside Dominion's territory that need uninterrupted power to keep cloud computing running — any outage affects services used by people and businesses far beyond Virginia. Norfolk Naval Station and other military bases in the region depend on Dominion for power tied directly to national security operations. Smithfield Foods and other industrial customers have production lines that stop the moment power goes out.
How does this company scale?
Each time the Virginia SCC approves a new capital project — a transmission line, a wind turbine, a grid upgrade — that investment enters the rate base and earns a regulated return for the life of the asset, sometimes 30 to 40 years. So approved spending compounds into returns over time without Dominion having to win new customers. The hard ceiling is the SCC itself: no matter how much capital Dominion is ready to deploy, each project needs its own case-by-case review, and that process cannot be outsourced or rushed.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
Virginia's Clean Economy Act requires Dominion to reach 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045, which means transforming a generation fleet that still includes gas and coal plants — a massive, expensive, years-long undertaking. Federal permitting through the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management can delay the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind timeline regardless of what Virginia regulators approve. Rising sea levels are a physical threat: Norfolk sits on the coast, and higher water puts Dominion's distribution infrastructure in that area at risk, as do the cooling systems at the Surry Power Station.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
If construction costs on the 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project climb higher than the Virginia SCC is willing to pass on to customers, the commission can refuse to let Dominion recover the full amount. That would turn the $9.8 billion already committed to the project from a decades-long stream of guaranteed returns into a loss — and would undercut the entire logic that the offshore wind pilot precedent was worth building.
Supply Chain
Electricity Grid Supply Chain
The electricity grid is shaped by three structural constraints that no other supply chain faces simultaneously: electricity cannot be stored at scale and must be consumed the instant it is generated, power degrades over distance with capacity set by the weakest link in the transmission path, and grid topology was built over a century and cannot be quickly reconfigured.
Nuclear Energy Supply Chain
The nuclear energy supply chain is shaped by three structural constraints that most industries never encounter: regulatory and licensing timelines that stretch beyond a decade before a reactor generates a single watt, a fuel cycle where each step — mining, conversion, enrichment, fabrication — is restricted by both physics and international treaty, and a decommissioning obligation embedded from the moment a plant is approved, binding operators to costs that extend decades beyond the last kilowatt-hour sold.