Ghazala Hashmi takes leadership role on state review of proposed NextEra-Dominion merger

Have to be honest: I didn’t know much, or think much, about Ghazala Hashmi until recently, which is par for the course, I guess, when it comes to somebody who is our lieutenant governor.

The main thing I wanted to see out of Hashmi last year was just to get more votes than the absolute mess of the MAGA candidate running for lieutenant governor on the Republican side, John Reid, the guy who was so toxic even the people on his side didn’t want him to win.

Now that we’ve seen the true colors of Abigail Spanberger shining through – our Democratic governor hasn’t come across a center-right position on an issue that she can’t resist putting a bear hug on – Hashmi is getting more of my attention.

And, turns out, she’s the center-left Democrat that we need right now.

And by right now, I mean, Hashmi, a former college professor and administrator who served as a state senator from the Richmond area before running for lieutenant governor, has made a clean break from Spanberger on the proposed $67 billion merger of NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy.

I’m probably overstating things there, from the surface view on that one – Hashmi, in an interview with the “New Rural Virginia Podcast” last week, played her position on the proposed merger down the middle, emphasizing that, at this point, she’s just asking questions.

But that said, the questions she’s asking make it clear: we can’t just do business as usual.

Her focus: getting the state to update its process for reviewing proposed mergers of the enormous size and complexity that we’re dealing with here.

“Our current standard, which was written almost 100 years ago, is basically that it should do no harm,” Hashmi said on the podcast. “Well, that’s a little vague and a little broad. And our standard ought to be, what is the benefit?”

This is in line with the one-woman full-court press that Hashmi has led on this over the past few weeks, beginning But with an op-ed in The Times-Dispatch published last month, in which she straight up told NextEra Energy, Pump the brakes.

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ICYMI

• Hashmi calls for detailed review of Next Era Energy-Dominion Energy merger

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“Virginia’s regulatory process should protect families already struggling to pay their electric bills,” Hashmi wrote in the op-ed. “Six months is simply not enough time to evaluate a $67 billion merger that would reshape Virginia’s electric utility landscape, affect millions of families, and impact the thousands of Virginians employed by Dominion Energy. Additionally, Virginia’s current legal standard for the merger’s approval is insufficient.”

Hashmi taking the lead here, on the heels of Spanberger doing everything in her power to continue giving Big Data continued access to billions in state tax breaks to run their environmentally unfriendly data centers in our backyards, it’s a stark contrast in styles, is what it is.