Mapped: The NextEra-Dominion Deal Remakes the Power Landscape

Last week, two of North America's largest power companies announced plans to become one. NextEra Energy is acquiring Dominion Energy in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $67 billion. The combined entity would reshape the map of who generates electricity in the US.

The combination creates the world's largest regulated electric utility business, serving approximately 10 million customer accounts across Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and owning 110 gigawatts of generation across a broad mix of energy sources. To put that in perspective, that's roughly the generating capacity of Canada's entire electricity grid.

Currently today, roughly 80% of the electricity generated in the US by private utilities.

Why is North American power generation so fragmented?

Electricity is, almost by design, a local business. Unlike oil or natural gas, power can't easily be put in a tanker and shipped across the world. High-voltage transmission is expensive to build, subject to significant line losses over long distances, and has to cross multiple regulatory jurisdictions to get anywhere. Most megawatt-hours are produced and consumed within a tightly bounded regional grid.

That regulatory patchwork matters as much as the grid. In the US, investor-owned utilities operate under public utility commission oversight, meaning a company that wants to serve customers in Virginia faces an entirely different regulatory regime than one serving customers in Texas.

Canada adds another layer with provincial jurisdiction over electricity. In practice, this means BC Hydro, Manitoba Hydro and Hydro-Québec each operate as vertically integrated monopolies within their own borders, with no incentive to expand and significant political pressure to stay that way.

The patchwork power map

The result is dozens of regional champions: companies that are massive within their footprint and largely invisible outside it. The NextEra-Dominion combination is unusual precisely because it spans two distinct service territories with virtually no geographic overlap. That also means regulators may have less to object to on competition grounds.