Summary

  • Dominion Energy Virginia's 2025 Form 10-K, filed 23 February 2026, says that from January 2027 high-load connections "would require" 14-year contracts, collateral and demand minimums, to minimise cross-class subsidies and stranded costs. That is a date, and it is conditional.
  • The same filing publishes a data-centre share of electricity sales — 28% in 2025 against 26% in 2024 — and no split between contracted and merely requested megawatts was obtained from the record read here. A share of sales is not a signed pipeline.

If you own a house in Loudoun County, or sit on a board that votes on a campus substation, the number that decides your bill is not the size of the data-centre queue. It is the size of the queue that has signed something, plus the share of the wires built for the rest that lands on you anyway.

Dominion Energy Virginia has now put a date on the second part of that sentence. In its 2025 Form 10-K, EDGAR filing index, accession 0001193125-26-063120, filed 23 February 2026 for a reporting period ended 31 December 2025, the registrant — Dominion Energy, Inc. of CIK 0000715957, with Virginia Electric & Power Co. of CIK 0000103682 as co-filer — states that beginning January 2027, high-load connections "would require" 14-year contracts, collateral and demand minimums. The stated purpose is to minimise cross-class subsidies and stranded costs.

Read that sentence twice, because two of its three features are load-bearing. The term is 14 years, longer than most equipment cycles inside the building it serves. And the wording is "would require": the filing describes a regime coming, not a set of contracts already executed. Anyone who writes this as an approved tariff has outrun the document.

What the record does count

The demand evidence in the same filing is concrete and narrower than the headlines usually built on it. In Item 1, printed pages 9 and 10, the registrant attributes demand growth primarily to new and larger data centres, concentrated in Loudoun County, Virginia, and notes that Dominion Energy Virginia's operations also include North Carolina. Then the number: data centres represented 28% of Virginia Power's electricity sales in 2025 and 26% in 2024, as stated in the registrant's posted PDF of the 2025 Form 10-K.

Twenty-eight per cent of electricity sales is a real and startling share of a regulated utility's throughput. It is also a share of sales, not revenue, not capacity, and not described as a Virginia-only measure. Two percentage points is the whole of the year-on-year move, and that is my subtraction of the two figures the registrant prints, not a company statement.

Nor does the filing's forecast belong to data centres alone. It cites PJM's projection of 5.4% average annual peak-load growth over the next ten years for the PJM DOM Zone — the whole zone, which is a bigger and blunter object than one customer class, and which will absorb electric heating, electrified transport and ordinary household growth alongside the campuses.

So the public record gives you a share of sales and a zone-wide growth rate. Neither is a megawatt of contracted data-centre load. Between them sits the question every county supervisor and every competitor utility actually asks.

The money that already moves

What does exist, in explicit dollars, is the recovery machinery — and its numbers are large enough that nobody should be allowed to multiply them by 28% and call the result a data-centre subsidy.

In the Regulatory Matters note to the same filing, Note 13 as rendered by the SEC, the registrant describes stand-alone rate adjustment clauses that authorise recovery of eligible generation, transmission, undergrounding, environmental, efficiency, renewable and nuclear-renewal costs, with fuel recovered through annual proceedings and Commission decisions governing what is recoverable. It records that 2023 legislation established biennial base-rate reviews and required riders totalling at least US$350 million annually to be combined with base rates effective July 2023. It records the outcome of Virginia Power's March 2025 case: November 2025 approval allowing US$566 million from January 2026 plus US$210 million from January 2027, with an authorised return on equity of 9.80% that also applies prospectively to riders. Those two steps add to US$776 million — my addition of two stated figures, not a figure the filing totals.

Then the transmission line item, which is where the arithmetic gets interesting. For the rate year beginning September 2025, the US$1.343 billion transmission requirement comprised US$561 million in base rates and US$782 million in Rider T1; approved Rider OSW recovery was US$639 million. By my division, the rider carries about 58.2% of that transmission requirement and base rates about 41.8%.

Here is what those numbers are not. They are not data-centre cost allocations. They are total-utility recovery figures for a rate year, and the fact that data centres are 28% of sales does not make 28% of any of them attributable to data centres. The filing does not publish that split either, and the note's own caution applies: these requirements are not isolated data-centre costs.

The one allocative decision the note does record runs the other way from the story people expect. The Commission rejected transferring purchased-capacity expenses from base rates into fuel expenses. That is a boundary drawn around which pot pays, not a levy on the campus next door.

What the 2027 date actually changes

Until January 2027, the record's answer to "who pays for wires sized for load that may never draw" is: the same riders everyone pays, with the Commission deciding recoverability case by case. From January 2027, the registrant's own forward description adds a contract, collateral and a demand minimum to the connection itself.

That is a genuine shift in who holds the option. A 14-year contract with a demand minimum moves the cost of an empty hall from the general body of ratepayers toward the customer that reserved the capacity — if the terms are approved and if the collateral is sized to bite. The registrant says the intent is exactly that: minimise cross-class subsidies and stranded costs. Intentions in a filing are not tariffs. The instrument that would make it bite was not obtained here.

For a company choosing a site, the practical consequence is a deadline with a price attached. For a household, it is the difference between underwriting somebody else's optionality and not.

Where this reading stops

One boundary belongs beside the claims above rather than at the end of the article, so here it is in the place it matters. No first-party split between contracted and merely requested data-centre megawatts was obtained for this piece. Dominion Energy Virginia's integrated resource plan and its load-forecast tables were not read; the research request aimed at them ended in a provider capacity failure. No Virginia State Corporation Commission order on high-load service was obtained either — the rate-schedule repository and the Commission's case portal both blocked automated retrieval.

That is a limit on this reading, not a finding about the company. It would be comfortable and wrong to write that Dominion publishes no such split; the honest sentence is that this reading did not obtain one. It is equally wrong to fill the gap with a queue figure from someone else's press release. The primary 10-K HTML document is 18,147,230 bytes and exceeded the retrieval tool's 16,777,216-byte limit, so nothing here is quoted from that file; the regulatory text comes from the SEC-rendered note and the demand text from the registrant's posted PDF.

And this is a snapshot filed 23 February 2026: later 2026 orders and any subsequent plan were not inspected.

The date is the disclosure

Strip the commentary and a single fact remains standing. A regulated utility with data centres at 28% of its electricity sales has told the SEC, in a document signed under liability, that the contractual regime for very large new load begins in January 2027 and runs 14 years. It has not, in the documents read here, published how much load has already signed on those terms, because the terms do not yet apply.

So the number to watch is not next year's queue. It is the first filed tariff sheet or Commission order that converts "would require" into "requires" — and the first disclosure that separates the megawatts that signed from the megawatts that asked. Until one of those appears, the data-centre share of Virginia's electricity sales is a measurement of the past, and the 2027 contract is a promissory note. The Dominion Virginia Power directory entry records the operator behind AS6231, which is where the wires and the filings meet.