Dominion meets record winter demand

Dominion Virginia Power Tuesday met a record winter peak demand for electricity from its 2.4 million Virginia customers when cold arctic air blasted the region earlier this week.

The Richmond-based energy company said it supplied 19,730 megawatts of electricity between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. Tuesday. That’s an increase of about 1,650 megawatts over the previous winter peak demand record of 18,079 megawatts, set between the same hours on Feb. 6, 2007.

The all-time peak demand record is a summertime mark of 20,061 megawatts set on July 22, 2011.  One megawatt supplies enough electricity at peak for 250 homes.

In addition, Dominion also established an all-time record for energy usage over a 24-hour period. Total energy usage for Tuesday was 419,791 megawatts. The old record was 392,347 megawatt hours set on July 23, 2011.

During the cold spell from Monday evening through noon on Wednesday, about 35,200 Dominion customers lost power. While not all outages were directly attributed to the arctic weather, the company said 1.4 percent of its Virginia customers experienced a power interruption. Dominion has restored power to all affected customers.

Dominion, one of the nation's largest producers and transporters of energy, has a portfolio of about 23,500 megawatts of generation, 11,000 miles of natural gas transmission, gathering and storage pipeline and 6,400 miles of electric transmission lines.  Dominion operates one of the nation's largest natural gas storage systems with 947 billion cubic feet of storage capacity, serving retail energy customers in 15 states.