Auditing Dominion Energy Virginia commercial bills

Dominion Energy Virginia serves most of Virginia's commercial load, including the Northern Virginia data center corridor. Commercial accounts are billed under the GS schedules, sorted by demand: GS-1 for small accounts, GS-2 for intermediate accounts with a time-of-use variant, GS-2T, and GS-3 and GS-4 for large accounts at secondary and primary voltage. Virginia allows limited retail choice, and some commercial customers buy supply from a competitive service provider while taking delivery from Dominion under the same GS schedules. Rate adjustment clauses, or riders, for fuel, transmission, generation and environmental costs appear on every bill and change several times a year, which makes proration around rider changes a frequent source of small errors. For multi-site operators, the most common Dominion findings are accounts in the wrong GS class after load changes, demand values that do not match interval data, and taxes and fees applied to exempt accounts. Accounts at closed sites also tend to stay open.

Practice notes

Apply the GS-1 demand history test carefully. A store with two short demand spikes stays eligible for GS-1, but a third month at 30 kW or more moves it to GS-2. Accounts sometimes move after a single event and never move back, even when the following eleven months show they qualify. We rebuild the test month by month and request the return.

Rider changes happen several times a year. When a rider rate changes partway through a billing period, Dominion prorates the period between the old and new rates. We recompute each prorated bill around rider effective dates, because small proration errors repeat across every account in a portfolio and add up over the full adjustment window.

For customers buying supply from a competitive service provider, the GS schedule still governs delivery charges, while the supplier contract governs the energy price. We audit Dominion's delivery charges against the tariff and the supplier's charges against the contract, and file each claim with the party that issued the charge.