What the Record Does Not Say: Interstate gas supply for Virginia generation, and a question no forum wrote down
FERC certificates interstate gas capacity on a precedent agreement, declines to weigh what the gas is for, and treats a shipper's decision to subscribe as beyond the scope of its review — a matter for state regulators. Virginia's SCC approved a 944-megawatt gas plant without writing down what the fuel costs or what capacity factor was assumed. The question no forum wrote down.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission certificates interstate gas capacity on a precedent agreement, declines to weigh what the gas is for, and holds that a shipper's decision to subscribe is beyond the scope of its review and a matter for state regulators. Virginia's State Corporation Commission approved a 944 megawatt gas plant without writing down what the fuel costs, what capacity factor it assumed, or which pipeline delivers, and on reconsideration answered a challenge to that silence by holding that it need not write down what it weighed. Each forum is right about its own mandate. Between them sits a number nobody has stated.
The paper traces what each forum wrote down. Two intervenor experts put the fuel arrangement in issue and one attached a figure, roughly $300 million on an out-of-state proxy, against a project the Commission priced at $1.47 billion. The Company answered that no new pipeline transportation contract is required at all, because its planning convention for combustion turbines is interruptible service, a capacity factor below twenty percent, and oil through the winter. That answer is coherent and was its stated convention eleven months earlier. It also moves the weight onto an assumption the record never settles: the public record carries at least four capacity factors for the same plant, between 2.7 and 20 percent, an intervenor told the Commission the figure kept changing between analyses, a witness fixed it at 16 percent under examination, and the twenty-seven page final order does not use the phrase.
Twenty days after the hearing closed, an indirect subsidiary of the applicant signed a twenty-year precedent agreement for 200,000 dekatherms a day of new interstate capacity and filed it with FERC. Virginia's one statutory test of whether a gas capacity contract is the lowest-cost available option, Va. Code s 56-249.6 D 2, has a term trigger and a volume trigger. The contract clears the term trigger and sits fifty thousand dekatherms a day below the volume trigger. Nothing in the record suggests the threshold was in anyone's contemplation, and the paper says so.
Corpus. Nineteen filings from State Corporation Commission Case No. PUR-2025-00037, including all four hearing transcripts and the whole reconsideration phase; three FERC certificate and rehearing orders, quoted from issuance-format documents and cited by the Commission's own paragraph numbering, with the applications and precedent agreements behind them; an integrated resource plan appendix; the Utility Facilities Act and two orders construing it; and the fuel cost recovery statute. Evidence snapshot 14 September 2026.
Apparatus. The claim-and-source table for section 2 is appended, forty-eight rows carrying each claim as the section asserts it, its pin cite, its evidence grade, and for every negative the search that established it and its bound. Sections 1 and 3 to 8 carry citation at the point of claim in seventy-seven footnotes and no separate apparatus. Open items are stated rather than smoothed: the appeal to the Supreme Court of Virginia was live at the snapshot date, the enrolled text of 2020 c. 661 was not retrieved, six of seven post-hearing briefs were not read, the Colorado filing behind the proxy was not retrieved, and the witness who fixed the capacity factor at 16 percent is not identified on the pages retrieved.