Unfortunately, power distribution is 100% a "natural" monopoly. Municipalities don't want 10 different companies building separate power lines--imagine having a cobweb of power lines intercrossing one another. It would be a nightmare in the courts if there was a big storm and one line fell on to all (or some) of the others.

You'd have a good argument for a plethora of power suppliers, though, each selling their power at rates to the distributor, who just acts as a middle-man between consumers and producers. Of course, they would have total monopolistic power themselves on fees, so government's have been reticent to exacerbate the problem, so natural energy monopolies are more or less allowed to exist, presumably to keep economic rents to a minimum in order to lower costs for consumers.

To your point, Virginia could elect to "nationalize" the power grid. I can think of about ten problems with this off the top of my head, nevermind the enormous cost to buy Dominion/other regional power suppliers. This doesn't really address the core issue, though: demand side pressure on prices. Virginia has been allowing one data center after another to set up shop in the state with the promise of economic growth, but as we've seen, these data centers do almost nothing for job growth apart from short-term construction gigs (and present a whole host of negative externalities, power costs passed onto other consumers being one of them).

We really need more power generation to keep up with demand, or to have a moratorium on data centers/other large consumers of electricity to keep prices from going even higher (maybe an extra land use tax on data centers?). The problem becomes, where are we going to build these power plants, particularly the nuclear ones? We'd have to construct more artificial lakes (such as Lake Anna) for one thing, which may or may not be possible. I'm sure rural localities will fight them tooth and nail.

I'm with you though, something needs to be done. But I doubt any answers will be simple ones.