The Virginia State Corporation Commission review of the proposed NextEra-Dominion merger should begin with the basic commonwealth premise that public authority exists to serve the common good.
As one of four commonwealth states, Virginia has traditions that reflect the conviction that government is not merely an umpire between private parties but charged with protecting shared interests when private decisions carry public consequences.
That tradition matters – and as a former Virginia resident, George Mason University alumnus, and now a public policy professor, I have an interest.
The Dominion-NextEra proposal should be evaluated as more than a utility merger because this deal sits at the intersection of two forces reshaping Virginia’s future: electric utility consolidation and data-center demand.
Dominion is already central to Northern Virginia’s data-center economy, the largest such market in the world. Electric utilities such as Dominion occupy a distinct place in American economic life. They are private companies, but they operate under public privileges. Their customers often have no practical market substitute. Their rates, infrastructure plans, and service decisions affect households, employers, hospitals, schools, military installations, and local governments.
In exchange for monopoly characteristics and regulated returns, utilities accept obligations that go beyond shareholder value.
Data centers support cloud computing, artificial intelligence, national competitiveness, and the digital economy. They are important assets. But they also require vast amounts of electricity, new transmission capacity, land-use approvals, tax policy accommodations, and long-term infrastructure planning. Their growth is forcing states to confront difficult questions about cost allocation, reliability, permitting, and who ultimately pays for grid expansion.
If approved, the transaction would create the world’s largest regulated electric utility business with substantial influence over generation, transmission, reliability planning, rate proceedings, clean-energy compliance, and the infrastructure needed to serve large new loads. In Virginia, that influence would be exercised in a market where data centers already shape electricity demand and public policy.
Florida-based NextEra arrives with a record of legal controversies, including allegations involving political consulting firms, so-called ghost candidates, media influence campaigns, and other tactics designed to shape public debate. While NextEra has denied these claims and deserves a fair review on the merits, the question becomes whether democratic institutions can protect the public interest when essential infrastructure, monopoly power, and politically sophisticated actors converge.
The combination of political power centers represented by this proposed merger is a test of whether public-interest obligations can prevail on private infrastructure giants where big power and big data are converging.
The core governance questions are unavoidable: who benefits, who pays, and who decides? The NextEra-Dominion merger should be reviewed in that context.
Regulators need not treat denied allegations as established fact to recognize their relevance. A public utility regulator is not conducting a trial. It is assessing fitness, risk, public benefit, and the long-term interests of customers. Serious allegations about political influence, hidden attribution, media operations, and consultant-directed pressure campaigns are relevant to an assessment of whether such a company should be granted greater control over essential infrastructure.
Virginia does not need a less than transparent or rushed review. It needs a serious one.
Data centers will remain central to the state’s economy. Utilities will remain essential to growth, reliability, and decarbonization. But when big power and big data converge, public institutions must be capable of protecting the people who cannot negotiate their own terms: families, small businesses, workers, and communities.
Virginia’s current process appears poorly matched to the scale of the decision. The SCC has only 180 days to conduct its review and Virginia’s legal standard does not require the companies to prove the merger is good for Virginians or that rates will not rise. A passive standard is unequal to the SCC mission and the test that the proposed merger represents.
In a commonwealth, the public interest is not a secondary consideration. It is the standard by which a merger of this type should be evaluated.
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