The settlement filed May 8 is the story. Not the commission order.

On January 2, 2026, Dominion Energy South Carolina filed for a 12.73% rate increase — $322 million in additional annual revenue. On May 8, a comprehensive settlement landed at 7.62%. The original ask dropped by $207 million. PSC hearings ran May 12. Commission decision due before July 1.

Most coverage will call this a win for ratepayers and move on. That reading is not wrong. It is just incomplete.

The practitioners who understand what actually happened will spend their time on the intervenor list, not the percentage. Because the intervenor list for a utility rate case is the documentary record of what each powerful party needed, what they were willing to accept, and what it cost Dominion to buy their neutrality or support. The commission order ratifies all of that. It does not create it.

If you know anything about how utility proceedings work, you appreciate how genuinely difficult that list is to assemble. These parties do not naturally sit on the same side of anything. State consumer advocates and industrial energy users disagree on almost every question in utility regulation. Environmental groups and large commercial customers share almost no common interest in rate design. The Department of Defense does not typically show up as a party in state utility proceedings at all.

When a coalition of that breadth signs a settlement or formally declines to oppose it, the commission review is largely a formality. The adversarial proceeding is over. The order confirms what the parties negotiated months earlier in rooms that produced no public record.

The DoD position is the detail most practitioners will miss entirely. The Department of Defense is a very large electricity customer in South Carolina — Joint Base Charleston, Fort Jackson, Shaw Air Force Base. When DoD signs onto a utility rate settlement or formally declines to oppose it, that posture was purchased. There were terms in this settlement that addressed large federal customer concerns sufficiently to secure DoD's neutrality. Those terms — whatever they are — define the floor for what large load customers in this service territory can expect from the commission going forward. They are also directly relevant to how Dominion will approach the data center cost allocation proceedings building in its Virginia jurisdiction, where DoD's presence is even larger and the political stakes considerably higher.

The practitioners who know what DoD needed and got in this settlement understand the commission's appetite for large-customer protection better than anyone who only reads the order. That understanding does not come from reading the order.

Two separate but connected Pennsylvania actions landed in the same window. Together they constitute the most significant regulatory framework for data center cost allocation established anywhere in the country through an actual utility proceeding. Not a policy paper. Not a working group recommendation. An actual contested rate case settlement ratified by a commission vote.

Action One: The PPL Settlement. Filed March 13. PPL Electric and more than a dozen intervenors agreed on $275 million in additional revenue — down from the original $356 million request. First distribution rate hike for PPL since 2016. Rates effective July 1, pending PUC final approval due that same day.

The settlement does something that has not been done before in Pennsylvania: it creates an entirely new customer rate class for large load data centers. The legal creativity required to negotiate this through a standard rate case proceeding is significant and worth understanding.

The 10-year commitment requirement is the provision that the data center industry will be litigating for the next several years everywhere this framework gets proposed. A hyperscale operator cannot commit to a 10-year operating contract in a jurisdiction where the regulatory environment, the power pricing, and the interconnection queue could change materially within 24 months. The stranded cost penalty provision compounds the problem. These are not unreasonable protections for ratepayers — they are genuinely difficult operational constraints for data center developers, and the GR teams that negotiated them on both sides understand exactly what they traded.

Action Two: The PUC Model Tariff. On May 12, the Pennsylvania PUC voted 5-0, adopting a model large load interconnection tariff applicable statewide. The model tariff sets guidelines for customers over 50 MW individually or 100 MW or more in the aggregate. It follows an en banc hearing, multiple public comment rounds, and input from every stakeholder category in the state.

What practitioners in Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and every other state in the PJM footprint need to understand is the sequencing. The PPL settlement established the terms in one utility's territory through a contested proceeding. The model tariff codified a statewide framework through a separate rulemaking. Both actions reinforce each other and together they represent something more durable than either would be alone.

PPL's territory borders Virginia. The same data center development pressure building in Northern Virginia moves through PJM corridors that connect directly to PPL's service area. The specific terms negotiated in Pennsylvania — 50 MW thresholds, 10-year commitments, stranded cost penalties, the $11 million low-income contribution — will be cited by intervenors at the Virginia SCC, the Maryland PSC, and the New Jersey BPU before the end of this year. The teams tracking those proceedings should understand the Pennsylvania precedent before it arrives at their commission with someone else's fingerprints on it.

The Brookfield Asset Management feasibility deadline for the VC Summer nuclear restart is this Thursday. About 30 Westinghouse employees have been on site reviewing construction documents. Roughly 80% of the components for one reactor are already in place. This is a significant amount of dormant infrastructure waiting on a business decision.

What June 26 determines is not whether VC Summer gets built. It determines whether Brookfield commits to the next phase of evaluation — an 18 to 24 month process to reach a Final Investment Decision. If Brookfield confirms feasibility, Santee Cooper receives a $2.7 billion cash payment and the process moves into detailed construction planning. If Brookfield declines, the project returns to the category of things South Carolina is still thinking about.

This distinction matters more than most coverage has acknowledged.

A feasibility confirmation is not a construction announcement. It is the opening of a 24-month engagement window during which every stakeholder relationship, every legislative question, every community concern, and every commission proceeding related to VC Summer gets managed in real time with active capital behind it. The organizations with interests in this outcome — Santee Cooper's industrial customers, South Carolina's economic development community, the state's congressional delegation, the nuclear workforce pipeline institutions — are not waiting for Thursday's announcement to determine their engagement strategy. They already have one. Thursday tells them which path the strategy operates on for the next two years.

If Brookfield proceeds, the GR and external affairs work on VC Summer does not begin Thursday. It began the day the MOU was signed. Thursday just tells everyone how long the runway is.