What does planned Dominion merger mean for its SC customers? We asked the experts
South Carolina Dominion customers are suddenly confronting a new question: What happens to their power bills – and their influence – if the utility keeping their lights on becomes part of one of the largest energy companies in the country?
The State spoke with experts and industry analysts to determine what a proposed merger, announced Monday, between Dominion Energy and NextEra means.
Will my electric bill go up?
In the near term, it’s not clear anything is going to change for Dominion’s South Carolina customers. The merger will still need approval from the S.C. Public Service Commission, as well as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and state-level regulators in North Carolina and Virginia.
“The standard regulators are supposed to uphold is that it should not harm customers,” said Conor Harrison, a professor at the University of South Carolina who studies energy and utility policy. “And it doesn’t necessarily have to benefit customers, but it shouldn’t harm them.”
A spokesman for the S.C. Office of Regulatory Staff told The State newspaper that the Public Service Commission has been told Dominion Energy S.C. will continue to operate in the state under its current name as “an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of NextEra.” The commission expects by July 15 to receive a joint application “detailing the business transaction along with the customer benefits that it states will result from the business transaction.”
Could the merger change Dominion’s push for a rate hike?
The news about a possible merger broke as S.C. regulators are considering a proposed rate hike requested by Dominion. The company initially wanted a 13% increase in what its S.C. customers would pay, but later lowered the request to 7.6% after reaching a settlement with various stakeholders. That request, still pending before the Public Service Commission, would go into effect in July.
The timing seems suspicious to Scott Elliott, an attorney for the S.C. Energy Users Committee, which represents larger industrial power users in the state.
“Either Dominion would not have brought a rate increase that large if they were not already in talks with NextEra, and was looking to fatten itself up and make its balance sheet look better for a potential sale, or NextEra said, ‘We’ll buy you, but you have to get this huge rate increase so we don’t have to,’” Elliott said.
John Brooker with Conservation Voters of South Carolina, an advocacy group focused on environmental policy, says a larger corporate merger could even undermine Dominion’s claims that it needs a rate increase in South Carolina to make itself more attractive to investors.
“They’ve said, ‘We need better financing ability’ .... and we gave them that and now it seems like that problem doesn’t exist anymore,” Brooker said. “It feels like fattening up the hogs for slaughter.”
Will South Carolina customers get less attention inside a bigger company?
For a long time, local customers were used to dealing with SCANA, a South Carolina-based company headquartered in Cayce. That changed when the parent company behind South Carolina Electric and Gas was acquired by Virginia-based Dominion Energy after SCANA was sold following the 2017 failure of the V.C. Summer nuclear plant.
Now that Dominion could become part of an even larger company combined with NextEra, South Carolina would be one, relatively small, component of a $249 billion company serving 10 million customers across four states.
“We were sort of an outpost of Dominion, and we would still be kind of an outpost for NextEra,” Elliott said. “I don’t know if I see the leadership in Florida being more charitable [to South Carolina] than the leadership in Richmond.”
A merger between Dominion and NextEra would include $2 billion in bill credits for Dominion customers over the two years after a sale closes, the company said. Brooker with Conservation Voters of South Carolina said he’s still looking at what that might mean for S.C. Dominion customers.
“Dominion offered thousand dollar checks” when it first bought out SCANA, Brooker said. “And it didn’t show up in that manner.”
Will data centers and growth elsewhere affect South Carolina customers?
The proposed $67 billion merger announced Monday would combine the company keeping the lights on in parts of South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia with the utility giant behind Florida Power and Light, the country’s largest electric utility.
Harrison, the USC professor, feels there are potential stumbling blocks before the planned merger goes through. State regulators might want to place conditions on any new data centers in the Palmetto State — the technological complexes that run major projects like artificial intelligence applications, while placing a similarly major demand on the available power production.
“Something the PSC could try to push on is, there’s probably a need to be careful about cross-subsidization between states, so that costs in Virginia don’t get passed on to South Carolina customers,” he said.
This isn’t the first time NextEra has sought to break into the South Carolina market. The company expressed interest in acquiring Santee Cooper when lawmakers considered selling the state-owned utility after V.C. Summer. But Dominion’s entire portfolio may be even more attractive to the Florida company.
“I think in their eyes the real prize is the Virginia subsidiary” of Dominion, Harrison said. “Northern Virginia is the data center capital of the world.”
Could South Carolina jobs or customer service change?
Harrison also thinks the combination of two large utilities could create redundancies in some functions now performed by Dominion’s S.C. employees. “What does that mean in terms of backroom functions and jobs, with customer service across multiple utilities?” Harrison asked.
Elliott, the attorney, said he’d been told NextEra was likely to keep in place Dominion’s current South Carolina executives, who have existing relationships with the state’s leadership. He noted Dominion had originally brought in people from its Richmond office to take over the former SCANA in 2019, and “that did not work out well,” Elliott said.
If South Carolina isn’t the main prize, Harrison worries how much attention Palmetto State customers might receive inside a larger company.
“I’ve heard Dominion executives say they not just have to compete in external capital markets, they have to compete against other Dominion subsidiaries,” the USC professor said. “That doesn’t mean we will be ignored or underinvested in, but the amount of focus that will be paid to the smaller market may get lost.”
NextEra has historically been more invested in renewable energy options, and Brooker is interested to see how that might play out in South Carolina.
“They have been more open-minded on clean energy, renewables and storage,” he said. “I’m curious if they plan to move forward with cheaper, cleaner options than Dominion has as of late.”
This story was reported in collaboration with SC Investigates, a nonprofit newsroom that partners with local journalists to produce accountability reporting in South Carolina.
This story was originally published May 21, 2026 at 12:49 PM with the headline "What does planned Dominion merger mean for its SC customers? We asked the experts."
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