NLPC presented a shareholder proposal today at Dominion Energy, Inc.‘s 2025 annual meeting of shareholders that asked the company to drop “non-carbon emitting generation” goals from its executive pay incentives.
The company’s board of directors opposed our proposal, as explained on page 81 of its proxy statement.
NLPC’s response to the board’s opposition statement, published in the proxy statement, was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month. Presenting the proposal at the meeting was Paul Chesser, director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project. An audio recording of his presentation can be found here, and a transcript of his three-minute remarks follows:
Good morning.
Before I begin, by way of disclosure, my organization is a co-plaintiff in a lawsuit against Dominion Energy and the federal government with regard to the Company’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, pertaining to protections for the habitat of the North Atlantic right whale.
You may find out more about that lawsuit at NLPC.org/whales.
Our shareholder proposal calls upon the Board of Directors to consider eliminating compensation incentives for Dominion’s top executives, that depend on so-called “non-carbon emitting generation capacity” goals.
These goals disincentivize Dominion to generate electricity for its customers in the most economical and efficient manner possible.
When CEO Robert Blue (pictured above) and other top Dominion executives have a big “non-carbon” money bonus waved in front of them, it makes them want to chase whatever “renewable” boondoggle they can get their hands on – namely wind and solar.
Unfortunately the wind doesn’t blow all the time, and the sun doesn’t shine all the time, so Dominion still has to have large amounts of baseload power from natural gas, nuclear and coal at the ready to keep the electricity flowing.
When you run more dependable fossil-fueled sources up-and-down to counterbalance when wind and solar fluctuate, they run more inefficiently and produce more emissions, than if you just ran natural gas and coal-fired turbines more consistently on their own.
Then there is the intermittency problem from wind and solar.
Exhibit A is the massive, hours-long blackout that happened last week in Spain, where wind and solar account for 69 percent of power generation.
Dominion has similar goals as Europe does.
Negative consequences like these are the dirty secrets that utilities keep from their customers and shareholders.
But this matters little to utility executives like Dominion’s.
You see regulated monopolies like Dominion, with whom utility customers have no other option to do business with, are guaranteed a certain percentage of profit, no matter how expensive generation is.
So when the Biden administration dangled massive subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act, and the previous state government piled on subsidies and mandates in the Virginia Clean Economy Act, Mr. Blue said, no problem!
Virginia’s government utility regulators will make sure Dominion’s electricity customers pay exorbitantly to run all those power cables a couple dozen miles out into the Atlantic to the scores of spinning wind turbines anchored to the ocean floor.
Right now Dominion says it will cost $10-billion dollars, but trust me, it will be more than that.
And the global climate won’t change one bit because of it.
What a scam.
Please vote FOR Item 4.
Read NLPC’s shareholder proposal for the Dominion Energy annual meeting here.
Listen to Paul Chesser’s presentation of the proposal at the meeting here.
Read NLPC’s response, filed with the SEC, to the company’s opposition to our shareholder proposal, here.
Watch a short video about NLPC’s lawsuit against Dominion Energy regarding protections for the North Atlantic right whale below.
NLPC, @CFACT and @HeartlandInst are suing the #BidenAdministration and @DominionEnergy for failing to protect Right #Whales with their #windenergy development scheme — WATCH #renewables #wildlife #oceans pic.twitter.com/40Bp7i0PYy
— NLPC (@NLPC) March 22, 2024
