The Dominion Energy Hype Train: What's Really Going On With Their Stock and 'Green' Energy Push

So, Dominion Energy just got a shiny new plaque for a dam they built a hundred years ago. Let’s all slow clap for that. They wheeled out the executives and the engineering society bigwigs in South Carolina to dedicate the Dreher Shoals Dam as a "National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark." I can just picture it: crisp autumn air, a freshly polished brass plaque, and a whole lot of self-congratulatory back-patting.

Dominion’s South Carolina President, Keller Kissam, said in the official announcement, Lake Murray Dam Dedicated as National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, that they were "honored to celebrate this now historically acclaimed civil engineering project." You know what this feels like? It’s like getting an award for something your great-grandfather did, then using it to sell your new, vaguely-defined crypto project. The dam is a marvel, sure. It was the largest earthen dam in the world in 1930. It electrified a huge chunk of the state. Great. But why are we talking about this now, in 2025?

Could it be that celebrating a century-old achievement is a fantastic way to distract from the messy, high-stakes, multi-billion-dollar game you’re playing right now? It’s a classic PR move. Wave a shiny object from the past to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy about the future you’re building—a future you’re going to charge them a premium for.

A Monument to… What Exactly?

Let’s be real. This whole ceremony is window dressing. It’s a beautifully choreographed piece of corporate theater designed to reinforce the idea that Dominion is a steady, reliable, nation-building institution. The president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Marsha Anderson Bomar, even chimed in, saying the dam is a "shining example" of how civil engineering helps communities thrive. No offense to Marsha, but that’s the kind of canned quote you could generate with a bad AI.

What does it really mean? It means Dominion gets to wrap itself in the flag of American ingenuity while it’s busy trying to convince Wall Street that its stock is a screaming buy. While they were unveiling that plaque, their stock (ticker: D) was hovering around $61 a share, and analysts at Morgan Stanley and Barclays were busy hiking their price targets to $66 and $63. Coincidence? Offcourse not.

This isn't about history; it's about narrative control. Dominion is in the middle of a massive, $50 billion capital spending spree through 2029. They’re not spending that money to build more historic earthen dams. They’re spending it to feed the insatiable hunger of hyperscale data centers in Virginia. These server farms, the backbone of our terminally-online existence, are sucking down power like nothing else on earth. Dominion has 40 GW of data-center capacity already contracted and plans to double it.

So, when Dominion talks about "serving the energy needs of the great state of South Carolina," what they’re really talking about is ensuring the data-center gold rush in Virginia doesn’t slow down. The green energy push isn’t some noble quest. No, that's a bad take. 'Bad' doesn't even cover it—it's a laughably naive take. This is a cold, hard business calculation. Dominion is like a landlord who ignored a leaky roof for years, but is now installing gold-plated faucets because a tech billionaire just signed a lease for the penthouse. The rest of us are just living in the building.

Follow the Money, Not the Plaque

If you want to understand the real Dominion Energy, ignore the press releases about historic landmarks and look at their investor relations page. That’s where the truth lives. They’re promising Wall Street 5–7% annual earnings-per-share growth, driven almost entirely by this data-center boom and their pivot to regulated renewables.

Their crown jewel is the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project, a 2.6-gigawatt monster that’s now more than 50% complete. They’ve even got a brand-new, US-built, Jones Act-compliant installation vessel named Charybdis to put the turbines up, which was detailed in a VESSEL REVIEW | Charybdis – Dominion Energy's new jackup to support wind turbine installation on US East Coast. This thing is supposed to start generating power in early 2026 and light up 660,000 homes. It’s a massive undertaking, and it’s the cornerstone of their "clean energy" narrative.

But here’s the part that gets buried in the footnotes: they’re doing it because they have to. State clean-energy laws in Virginia and the Carolinas are mandating this shift. They’ve issued requests for proposals for massive solar farms and battery storage projects because the law requires it. This ain't some act of corporate altruism. It’s a company responding to regulatory pressure and a massive new customer base (data centers) that wants to slap a "powered by renewables" sticker on their marketing materials.

And what about the risks? The company line is that they "reaffirmed this timeline despite political headwinds." What does that even mean? What are these headwinds? Permitting delays? Supply chain nightmares? A sudden shift in political winds that kills the subsidies propping this all up? They’re being deliberately vague, because admitting the whole fifty-billion-dollar plan rests on a knife’s edge isn’t good for the stock price. And right now, the stock price is everything.

I keep getting emails about how to save the planet by turning off my lights or whatever, and then I read about a single company planning to double the energy capacity for data centers... it just feels like we’re all rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The Big Offshore Gamble

So what’s the play here for the average person? Dominion is a utility stock. It pays a decent 4.4% dividend, something your grandpa would have loved. For 43 straight years, they’ve paid out. It’s supposed to be safe, stable, and boring. But it’s not boring anymore.

It’s a bet. It’s a bet that the data centers will keep growing, that the CVOW project will come online on time and on budget, and that regulators will let them pass the costs of this massive buildout onto you and me through higher electricity rates. Analysts seem to think they can pull it off, with consensus price targets creeping into the mid-$60s. The stock is already trading near its 52-week high.

But I have to ask: at what point does a "utility" stop being a utility and start being a high-growth tech-adjacent infrastructure play? They’re trading at a forward P/E of around 19x, which is a little rich for a company that just runs power lines. The market is pricing in the growth, which means any slip-up—a delay on the wind farm, a nasty rate case in Virginia—could send the stock tumbling.

They’re walking a tightrope. On one side is the steady, dividend-paying utility of the past, symbolized by that historic dam. On the other is a future as the primary energy dealer for the cloud, powered by gigantic, expensive, and politically sensitive green energy projects. They want you to believe they can be both. Maybe they can. Then again, maybe I'm just a cynic who's seen this movie before.

Same Old Game, Just Greener Paint

Look, let’s drop the pretense. Dominion Energy isn’t saving the world. It’s a publicly traded company with a legal duty to maximize shareholder value. Right now, the most profitable way to do that is to build a metric ton of solar and wind infrastructure to power data centers and get paid a guaranteed rate of return for it. The historic plaque, the talk of "serving communities," the green branding—it’s all just marketing. It’s the same old game of turning capital into profit, just with a fresh coat of green paint slapped on top. And we’re the ones who will be paying for that paint job for decades to come.