Goochland Resident's Dominion Bill Rises Despite Using Less Energy

Stephanie Marcus opened her February Dominion Energy bill expecting relief. She lives alone in her Goochland County home, had used less electricity than she did the same month a year earlier, and had already written off an unusually steep January bill as a product of cold weather and holiday lights. What she found instead left her stunned.

"I was floored. I thought something must be wrong," Marcus said. "I'm the only one living here, and I don't understand because the previous years, I don't remember it being that high."

The higher bill was not an error. Three line items on her statement tell the story. Her fuel charge climbed from $58 in February 2025 to $76 in February 2026, a $18 increase tied to a fuel factor adjustment Dominion Energy put in place in July 2025. Her distribution service charge rose roughly $5, from $94 to $99, and her generation charge jumped from $142 to $165, both reflecting a base-rate increase that took effect in January 2026. Together, those three line items added roughly $46 to her bill compared with the same month the prior year, even as her metered usage fell.

A Dominion representative identified as Carper attributed the rate hikes to the "increasing cost of fuel for power plants and grid equipment like utility poles, wires and cable, and transformers." The company requested the rate changes, and the State Corporation Commission partially approved them. Dominion provides a full breakdown of bill charges on its website.

Marcus is not satisfied with that explanation and is raising a question circulating among customers across the region: whether surging data center power demand in Virginia bears some responsibility for driving costs upward.

"I'd like to find out more about why they feel the need to increase the pricing. Is it the data centers? Is it something else?" she said.

Dominion, for its part, points to inflation and rising infrastructure costs rather than data center load growth. The competing explanations reflect a broader tension in Virginia's energy landscape as the state hosts one of the densest concentrations of data centers in the world, a sector that draws enormous amounts of electricity from the same grid serving residential customers like Marcus.

For now, Marcus is left parsing a bill that defies the basic assumption that using less energy means paying less.