The results of the primary election are in and, for the first time, all Democratic statewide nominees are endorsed by Clean Virginia because of their principled commitment to refusing contributions from regulated utility monopolies like Dominion Energy. With this historic moment has come a wave of curiosity about Clean Virginia’s mission, our funding and how we operate. So, executive director Brennan Gilmore sat down with journalist Brandon Jarvis to answer some of the most commonly asked questions.
Monday, June 23, 2025
Brandon: Alright, I’m with Brennan Gilmore. He’s the executive director of Clean Virginia. Thanks for talking to me this morning.
Brennan: Good morning. I’m happy to be here.
Brandon: So first off, congrats on getting three statewide races being candidates that you back. This is the first time that’s ever happened right?
Brennan: That’s correct. I think it’s probably the first time, at least in modern history, where none of the statewide candidates took contributions from regulated utilities, so we think this is a very good thing for Virginia.
Brandon: So yeah, tell me about that. What does Clean Virginia do? What is your purpose and your mission?
Brennan: Sure. Clean Virginia is an advocacy organization, a nonprofit advocacy organization, that works on political issues and we have an associated political action committee. And our mission is to advance clean government and clean energy by fighting, what we call, utility monopoly corruption in Virginia. We want to ensure every Virginian has access to clean, affordable energy and we want to make sure that the system of Virginia’s government is representative of the public interest and not just the interest – the profit interest – of large monopoly corporations like Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power. There’s a long history about why we felt it necessary to start Clean Virginia and conduct this work, and I’m happy to jump into that or we could just take it one question at a time.
Brandon: Let’s jump into that. Why the mission to get influence from Dominion out of Virginia politics?
Brennan: Sure. So a lot of it revolves around what we call regulatory capture. Regulatory capture is when a monopoly organization – monopoly utility like Dominion – has an arrangement that they do not have competition. They have a captive consumer base, and that captive consumer funds their operations. That’s a very dangerous thing in an economy, when you have one company that has a lot of power, that has a captive consumer base and gets sort of automatically funded. And so, there is an arrangement where that company will be regulated. They will be given a profit, on top of what the cost of electricity is, but only if they have strict regulations, so they can’t charge too much for electricity.
So, a lot of times a monopoly will use that power, that economic power and political power, to essentially regulate itself. They pursue what’s called regulatory capture through political influence, economic influence, and they begin to regulate themselves. This is an incredibly dangerous thing that happens a lot of times when there are monopolies. So, by the end of the last decade, Virginia suffered, I’d say, one of the worst forms of regulatory capture that we saw in the United States through financial contribution, political influence.
Dominion was essentially able to hijack its regulatory oversight, write its own laws, which led to some severe consequences for Virginia. Dominion overcharged customers by over two billion dollars during that decade. We had some of the worst environmental records for a utility in terms of energy efficiency, in terms of deployed renewable energy and we had some of the highest bills in the country. And this was because Dominion had gained so much influence in the General Assembly that their lobbyists were essentially able to write laws that govern how much they could charge, how much profit they could keep and how much they would have to return to customers if they overcharged them.
So, this was the motivation that motivated our founder, Michael Bills, to invest in this work. It motivated me and my staff of 13 people to continue this work because this is a very dangerous thing. And we’ve seen the consolidation of corporate power, the interference of corporate power in politics across the country in a number of different sectors – healthcare, prisons, housing. A lot of areas where private profit influence has overtaken the public interest. The worst example of that in Virginia is Dominion Energy. And that’s why we started this project – to confront the influence, to make sure our energy policy was dictated by what’s in the public interest, and not just Dominion Energy’s profit interest.
Brandon: So you mentioned Dominion overcharged customers in the last decade by two billion dollars. Was there some sort of fine for that? Didn’t they get in a little bit of trouble but it only ended up being like they had to pay a fine of $300 million?
Brennan: That’s correct. That kind of reveals the absurdity of the laws. They had written, or influenced the development of laws that constrained the SCC’s (the State Corporation Commission) – their regulators – ability to refund people all the money they were owed. So I think in that specific case the overcharge amount was found to be $1.7 billion, $1.5 billion – somewhere in there. Normally if you go to a car dealership and they accidentally charge your credit card three times as much as you owe them, they’re gonna refund 100% of that. For some reason, Dominion only had to refund $300 million of that. So it just really indicative of the absurdity of how much of this system they were driving.
Brandon: Well yeah, that brings into the whole debate. So, the SCC is in charge of overseeing Dominion and handling stuff like that, but who appoints the people that are on the SCC? Isn’t it the General Assembly?
Brennan: It is the General Assembly. So, we focus a lot on the General Assembly when we talk about the way that Dominion pursues regulatory capture in Virginia. There’s two main ways, that’s one of them. Certainly influencing the selection of SCC judges is one avenue to pursue it. I wouldn’t say that’s the one that’s most problematic in Virginia.
In Virginia it was really about the laws that the General Assembly was writing that constrained the SCC’s ability to fairly arbitrate matters involving Dominion Energy. So you could have, and we have had, very good, independent judges focused on consumer protection, but their hands are tied when it comes to Dominion’s rate cases – which are the legal processes every couple years where Dominion’s profit level is determined and the judges look at what they earned and how much customers are owed.
Brandon: So, you talked about Michael Bills. There’s a lot of conspiracies out there about, where does Clean Virginia get all of this money? You guys have given a lot of money to candidates since you started in 2017. Is Bills the chief funder? Does the money come from him?
Brennan: Yes he is the only funder for Clean Virginia’s activities. Michael has worked in finance his entire career. He’s actually in the process of closing down his wealth management fund and moving into retirement. He made a lot of money working in New York in the 80s, working for Goldman Sachs and Tiger Fund, and in the 90s, moved down to Virginia. And so he started this small firm, and he started using his wealth for mainly environmental giving and philanthropic giving. So, he has served on the board of numerous environmental organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund and Nature Conservancy and others. As he managed this wealth management fund called Blue Stem, he also founded the Sorrenson Institute, which a lot of Virginia politicians know that focuses on bipartisanship. And he’s lived in Virginia since the 90s.
He saw Virginia’s environmental record becoming poorer and poorer, and Virginia not adopting a transition to a clean energy future, and started looking into, why is this? And his takeaway was, Dominion was putting millions of dollars into the political system and in return they were writing favorable laws that let them keep millions, I’m sorry billions. And so, from his investor perspective this was a huge return on the dollar.
I think between 2010 and – no, sorry – 2007 and 2017, Dominion had put $11 million into the political system, and during that time they overcharged something like $2 billion. That’s a massive investment. So, he started looking at this around 2017. At the same time, during that election wave in the first post-Trump year, you had a lot of candidates that were running on no Dominion money. There was Activate Virginia, led by Josh Stanfield, that was asking people to take a pledge not to take Dominion money, and there were 15 or 16 candidates that cycle who made this a major issue. They said, Virginia’s government should not be beholden to these corporate monopolies, I’m not going to take Dominion money. So Michael looked at this and said, look they shouldn’t have to unilaterally disarm. They need money to get elected. If they don’t want to go to the traditional gatekeeper in Virginia politics, Dominion Energy, they should have access to campaign finance. So, that was his motivation.
We met in the Fall of 2017. My background is as a foreign service officer in the U.S. state department, but I had worked one cycle with Tom Periello when he ran for governor in the Democratic primary in 2017. And I saw first hand the type of corruption that Dominion was playing in Virginia. That was the time when the Atlantic Coast Pipeline was very prominent, and there was a big fight about that. And I just saw first hand how this utility operated. So I had, with Michael, a very shocking realization that this utility was playing a hugely problematic role. Like, in a healthy political society, the power company doesn’t control politics, but that was the case in Virginia, and we saw some very problematic effects to it.
We recognized that it was an extremely complex and complicated phenomenon, but as a starting point we said, look, let’s just say if candidates don’t take money from Dominion Energy they have access to a “clean” source of funds. And Michael was willing to put some of his money up to do that, in the same way that he was investing in other environmental and social causes elsewhere. It was a cause that I think a lot of people weren’t used to seeing, fighting concentrated corporate power in this way, so there was a pretty significant reaction when we started, and of course Dominion was very entrenched in the political system, but that was the motivation.
And since then, we’ve grown the organization as we’ve tried to confront the ways that Dominion has consolidated its influence, through things like lobbying or advertising, and they have developed this very unhealthy role in Virginia government and politics.
Brandon: So there’s this debate, okay so Clean Virginia comes in to get influence out of Dominion’s hands, but then that gives a lot of influence to Clean Virginia. What is the difference there? What is the response? And do you expect your candidates to do anything besides push and advocate for a cleaner economy and pulling Dominion out of the influence? What would you say to these people?
Brennan: Yeah. To be clear, the only criteria we have when we look at candidates is, do they take money from regulated utilities? There’s a little bit of nuance on that, but we give to Republicans, we give to Democrats, we give to all different stripes of politicians and we don’t have expectations in return. But, let me first say, yes. This is often the debate. Is Clean Virginia any different that Dominion? Is it just two sides fighting for different things?
First, let me say that we firmly believe regulated utility money does not belong in politics. There’s over 20 states where this is banned in recognition that these companies, these monopoly utilities, are fundamentally different than other corporations. And Dominion likes to advertise, and when they’re asked about their political giving they like to say: like all companies we participate politically.
But they are wholly different than other corporations in terms of their lack of competition, the essential nature of their service, the vertical integration – the fact that they own every aspect of the energy chain and of course their millions of captive consumers who don’t have a choice. Every time they flip on a light, they are subsidizing Dominion Energy’s political speech without a choice. So all of those attributes of the company lend to the very high potential for abuse and the regulatory capture that we talked about.
In that sense, there is a significant difference between Dominion Energy and then Clean Virginia, which is a non-profit advocacy organization, that every year we have to demonstrate our social welfare mission before the IRS. So, we’re different in that regard, but let me say that none of us think that this is a good system. Where you have a very wealthy individual funding a political counterweight to a large utility.
We all want to work towards a better more sensical campaign finance system where there are commonsense caps and limitations where the utilities are not allowed to give because, fundamentally, the system that we’re in now does not put the interests of average Virginians first. It privileges the interests of these large corporations that can fund at these levels.
Brandon: So would Clean Virginia support caps on all donations, kind of like at the federal level?
Brennan: We do. We firmly support comprehensive campaign finance reform, including caps. And we are essentially developing what that package would look like, what we think is the best package. Good policy is built on good intelligence and the first step of this process for us is working with an academic consortium to get a study done: a comparative study in other states who have enacted campaign finance laws – either bans, limits, even public financing – and seeing what the downstream consequences of the introduction of those laws was. So, a lot of times when we talk to political leaders in the state and say, we’ve got to get this money out of politics, we’ve got to at least limit it – I hear, well that will just drive everything dark or, there’s potential unintended consequences that can make it worse. We are looking into that from an empirical perspective to try and determine what’s the best thing Virginia can do, but we very much support contribution caps and strong campaign finance reform that creates a better system.
Brandon: So y’all are backing the Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger. She’s never taken corporation money or Dominion money in her time, but she hasn’t come out and directly said that she would support or sign legislation banning utility companies from donating to political candidates. Do you have any thoughts on that? Do you think it’s just political gamesmanship, or what?
Brennan: I think it’s remarkable that we have a governor’s candidate who’s not taking utility money. It’s the first time, certainly in my memory, that’s the case, and I think that’s indicative of her stance and her background on the need to increase integrity in government and politics. She certainly, as a congresswoman, led on these issues – stock trading and things like that in Congress. I think she is probably where we are too: trying to figure out what’s the best way we can do this so there aren’t unintended consequences. How can we have the strongest laws? And we very much look forward to working with her and her administration, should she be elected, and how we can do this.
Brandon: Okay, so a lot of your focus during this primary cycle was on the attorney general’s race. I think I’m ballparking here, but ya’ll put about $800k in for Jay Jones, counting the attack ads on Shannon Taylor and the money given directly to Jay Jones. You ended up winning, or Jay ended up winning. And Dominion on the other side, gave Shannon Taylor $800,000 in total. Why was this attorney general race so important in your battle against Dominion?
Brennan: That’s a great question. I don’t know why Dominion thought that it was necessary to spend nearly a million dollars of ratepayer money on this race, but I have a guess. That guess is that Jay’s track record has been to protect consumers against Dominion Energy and against the kind of abuses that we talked about. And there are two specific things that I remember in Jay’s background. One was, along with Senator Lashrecse Aird, he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post. I think it was in 2019, that talked about the need to move to a system where the utility doesn’t control our energy policy.
And I think this is absolutely critical. That’s fundamentally what we want – a system where public interest and public policy is the determination of what we do on the energy front, and not the profit motivation of the utility.
Jay saw that very clearly from early in his career. He saw the way it affected his constituents, and he took a strong stand against that. The following year he carried a bill, the Fair Energy Bills Act, which would have essentially ended – or certainly put a big dent in – Dominion’s system of regulatory capture by resetting those rules that the State Corporation Commission used to govern Dominion’s rate cases. And this was a drawn out, big fight that went down.
It passed the House with overwhelming numbers, went to the Senate and died by one vote. Dominion spent a lot of money and a lot of lobbyist time trying to kill that attempt to have a fair system for its customers, and Jay Jones led that fight. So I think when Jay said, you know what, I’m going to continue my career by going into the attorney general’s race and doing that in a position, the attorney general’s position, that is absolutely critical to consumer protection, and specifically consumer protection against utility abuse -that’s what was the motivation for Dominion.
We see Jay as a prime example of the kind of candidate that we like to see, and that is a candidate who is focused first and foremost on their constituents, who is not swayed by these large companies and their lobbying dollars, and Jay is a great candidate for attorney general. And I think he’ll make a great attorney general. For us, it made a lot of sense – I don’t think we would have funded him at the level we did if Dominion had not come in and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I think the Virginia people won in this race. Because the attorney general position is absolutely critical to consumer protection and it’s a fundamental conflict of interest to take money from a utility that you’re litigating against as the attorney general.
Brandon: Alright, so we’ll wrap it up here. I want to talk about Republicans because, to get these bills passed that Clean Virginia pushes, to put a ban on public utilities and stuff, you need 51 votes in the House and 21 votes in the Senate. And while you have a lot of influence, or a lot of Clean Virginia backed candidates on the Democratic side, you do have a few Republicans. But you probably need a few more, or you need all of the Democrats. Because Democratic leadership still takes money from Dominion, in both chambers of the General Assembly, and that’s where this legislation has to pass. I mean you’ve got the statewide ticket, but that doesn’t matter if it doesn’t get out of the General Assembly. So are you looking to expand your reach more into the Republican party where Dominion still has a strong influence? They’ve pretty much given evenly over the years to both parties, where ya’ll are like 95-97 percent Democrats. So are you looking to reach to the Republicans to get some more support for these initiatives?
Brennan: Absolutely. From day one we realized the approach to confronting Dominion’s political influence had to be bipartisan. And from day one, it was bipartisan. We’ve always funded candidates on both sides of the aisle. I think we have funded a lot more Democrats, in part because our money comes from a traditional Democratic donor, and there is a large part of our mission that is pushing for clean energy, which traditionally has been a dividing line. I don’t think it is as much anymore, I think that those dividing lines have shifted significantly.
But outreach to Republicans has been critical, and our partnership with Republicans has been critical. The bill I mentioned that Jay Jones carried, the Fair Energy Bills Act, in 2020 – his co-patron on that was Republican Lee Ware, who has been an extremely clear voice on this issue on utility influence for years and years. And then in 2023, when a bill that actually succeeded at what the Fair Energy Bills Act tried to do passed, it was passed by a large bipartisan coalition. And the Affordable Energy Act was carried by Senator Jennifer McLellan, as well as Republican Lee Ware in the House. So, bipartisanship is a critical component of it, and it’s honestly been refreshing to work on both sides of the aisle at a time when politics on almost every other issue seems hopelessly divided. This is one area where we hear around the state from Republicans and Democrats alike that there’s a strong sense the system is not working for their constituents, and it is working for these large corporations. And we see this again in a number of different sectors. So, it’s going to continue to be a big part of the push, and like you said, I don’t think we get to a better system unless we have support on both sides of the aisle.
Brandon: Alright. Again, this was Brennan Gilmore, the executive director of Clean Virginia. I appreciate your time this morning.
Brennan: Thanks Brandon, I appreciate your coverage of all these issues.