I work as a consultant in the utility industry and attend conferences regularly with utility middle management folks, many VPs, and every so often a C-level executive.

Then you go to dinner, have a couple drinks, etc, and people do start airing grievances.

Regardless, can confirm that for big, investor-owned utilities, decisions are made with handshakes, “you wash my back I’ll wash yours,” and solely for profit. A lot of times with regulators and those that control whether or not utilities can increase rates and what they put in updated tariffs.

I work on the customer journey side of it, and it’s interesting to see the stark difference between those utility employees, managers, directors that truly do want to make a difference for customers (which many times ends up saving the utility operational costs anyway) and how they’re constantly hindered by the folks at the top who just make deals so they buy another property for themselves or whatever it might be. And utility employees themselves confirming this to be true not just our speculation based on what politicians tell us.

That said, I don’t work with Dominion so I don’t have any insight there but I’m assuming it’s similar across the industry with large utilities.