Richmond, VA — NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy today announced a new benefits package for their proposed $67 billion merger, telling Virginians the deal will now deliver lower bills, jobs, and clean energy development. But ratepayers and policymakers shouldn’t be swayed. This move is straight out of the merging party playbook: a package of tacit bribes intended to distract and smooth the path for an illegal merger.

“Let’s be clear about what this is. This isn’t a merger, it is an attempted sale of a state-granted monopoly franchise — the private monetization of a public privilege,” said Marissa Paslick Gillett, Senior Fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and former Chair of the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. “And what are Virginians being offered for it? Ten dollars a month off their utility bill. Not even forever. For four years. There is no guarantee in this package that service gets better or that rates go down. Just a temporary discount, set against a $67 billion transaction the companies themselves project will grow the capital base they earn guaranteed returns on by 11 percent a year. So, today’s ‘headline grabbing’ discount will one day expire. The monopoly doesn’t.” 

“Virginia law asks one question: will a deal impair or jeopardize adequate services at just and reasonable rates? A transaction like this one harms ratepayers and no gift basket changes that. It’s why these last-minute promises are exactly what they look like: paltry, tacit bribes stacked on top of a transaction that fails on its face,” Gillett continued. 

The rest of the expanded package includes a $100 million increase to Dominion’s low-income assistance program through 2038, 1,000 new jobs, accelerated renewables development, and a new “shareholder-funded” co-headquarters tower in downtown Richmond. But the package raises an obvious question: if NextEra and Dominion can afford all of this for Virginians, why aren’t they delivering it already? The answer is in the announcement’s own fine print. Every commitment is “contingent upon the approval and closing of the proposed combination.” These are not benefits. They are considerations offered in exchange for a merger approval, and structured to disappear if regulators say no. In short, they are a bribe. 

The pattern is also well documented. As Economic Liberties Research Director Matt Stoller detailed in a recent memo examining more than a decade of negotiated merger concessions — from Live Nation-Ticketmaster to Sprint-T-Mobile to Albertsons-Safeway — such promises are a Trojan horse. Companies offer divestitures and pledges of good behavior to make a merger palatable, regulators accept the “win-win,” and then once the deal is done commitments are ignored, circumvented or rendered meaningless. By that point the damage is far harder to undo than blocking the merger would have been. The companies are already integrated, and workers and consumers are already paying the price.

We have every reason to expect a $67 billion utility merger to follow this pattern. In fact,there is every reason to believe that a utility monopoly with captive ratepayers and guaranteed returns will exploit it more thoroughly than most. 

Dig deeper into the fine print of today’s announcement and this becomes clear. While the companies pledge that customers “will not pay one cent for this combination,” the same document acknowledges that this is also out of their control as the Virginia State Corporation Commission will set base rates every two years. Additionally, the affordability case made in the press release rests on NextEra Florida’s record (residential bills for Florida Power & Light, a NextEra subsidiary, are 37 percent below the national average). What isn’t stated: over 27 percent of a customer’s electric bill in Florida goes toward utility profits and shareholder returns, making it the second highest such rate in the country. And the company recently agreed to pay $150 million to settle political misconduct claims in a Florida class action case. 

Meanwhile, ratepayers in Virginia — where a hyperscaler data center cluster is already raising regional electricity bills — will bear the brunt of the combined company’s tried-and-tested tactic of pursuing endless capital expansion to justify rate increases. 

BACKGROUND

NextEra-Dominion would join a long history of utility mergers that shift value from customers to shareholders while increasing market concentration. The combined company would wield outsized power over entire regions, especially in the Mid-Atlantic, and New England, where it would control the entire nuclear energy sector, 12% of the region’s installed generating capacity.

The merger would further concentrate power into two companies that have each spent millions on lobbying and political candidates. NextEra’s record at its Florida utility is particularly troubling, marred by claims of political meddling, opaque funding networks, surveillance of journalists, and efforts to reshape regulation in the company’s favor. 

Read the full analysis of the $67 billion NextEra-Dominion merger here.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.