The following was presented by Michael Gerrard, Virginia's Commitment lead attorney, in his closing arguments before the State Corporation Commission on July 9, 2008.

1.The PJM and Dominion scenarios ignored the substantial amount of Demand Response that was bid into the Reliability Pricing Model (RPM) auction. Adding that in would greatly reduce the peak loads that cause the reliability problems.

2. The alleged violations of the reliability criteria are so low that they can be readily solved through redispatch, and at a much lower cost than building the Loudoun Line.

3. The PJM and Dominion runs selectively excluded key generation and demand response resources from their models while selectively including other generation and merchant transmission projects, including some that would take power out of the PJM region and export it to New York City. Accounting for these manipulations reveals a very different picture of 2011.

4. The May RPM auction required bidders to assume that the Loudoun line was built. That made a lot of generation uneconomical, and it is possible that some proposals never even bid at all. An RPM auction that assumed the Loudoun line was not built would no doubt bring out a great deal of additional generation. The Applicants’ runs made no attempt to quantify these additional resources.

5. A substantial amount of generation was bid into the RPM auction but didn’t clear. In other words it cost more than other generation. But if there is a real reliability problem, some or all of that generation will be available, and loads will be happy to buy their output.

6. The CPV Warren and the Possum Point Unit No. 7 projects are both controlled by Dominion, but were not bid into the May RPM auction. Those units had been all set to run by the summer of 2011. The only reason they’re not is that Dominion acquired the CPV Warren unit and blatantly slowed down its completion date; and Dominion has decided that it fits its own purposes better to delay the new unit at Possum Point. There still seems to be time to get those up and running by the summer of 2011, except for Dominion’s own actions -- the details of which are confidential.

7. There is a long menu of options to address reliability concerns, such as upgrades to lower voltage facilities; flexible AC flow shifting control devices and other new technologies; Reliability Must Run contracts on requested deactivations; and operating procedures and system reconfigurations to minimize risk. Some or all of these could be employed as a bridge to 2012 or 2013, and all should be carefully examined.

8. The PJM and Dominion runs all assume demand growth unaffected by energy efficiency improvements (even though many of these improvements are mandated by federal and state law, and Dominion has been touting its work in achieving these improvements).

9. The PJM and Dominion runs also all assume demand growth unaffected by the higher price of electricity that will inevitably result from both high oil prices and greenhouse gas regulation -- not to mention the rate increase that could be necessitated by the costs of building the Loudoun line itself.