Two crucial issues are moving through the South Carolina Public Service Commission, the agency charged with setting how much you pay on your utility bill. Both issues will end up on South Carolina families’ kitchen tables for years to come.

Neither one is a direct request to increase electricity rates. Neither will change your energy bill next month. But together, they set a worrisome direction for what our residents will pay on their monthly utility bills over the next 15 years and beyond.

The first item is Dominion Energy South Carolina’s integrated resource plan. An IRP is the utility’s long-range blueprint: how much electricity it expects customers will need and what it intends to build to meet that need. The numbers in this one deserve everyone’s attention.

Dominion’s preferred plan would add more than five gigawatts of new generating resources by 2040 — nearly doubling the generation resources Dominion operates today — at a projected cost of $2.3 billion. Under that plan, the company itself estimates the typical residential bill will rise 58 percent by 2040, from about $157 a month today to $248.

Residents and businesses have a stake here. What gets built, where it gets built and who pays for it are questions our residents will live with directly. I respectfully ask the commission to consider two things on behalf of the households that will carry the cost:

• Ensure infrastructure decisions are being made based on real, not speculative, energy demand. Dominion’s forecast for energy needs includes “potential but not yet committed” economic development prospects. The plan doesn’t say how many megawatts those uncommitted projects represent, nor how much of the proposed construction they justify. That distinction matters enormously. If a utility builds for electricity demand that never shows up, existing customers foot the bill for massive, expensive power plants nobody uses.

• Explain the impact of data centers on our energy future. The integrated resource plan never once uses the term “data center,” but we read about data centers coming to our state every week. We are entitled to know how much of this buildout will serve these users, and to be assured that data center costs aren’t passed to residential customers.

The second issue before the PSC is the NextEra Energy and Dominion merger, filed on July 15. If this merger goes through, our local utility will become just one part of a massive for-profit company headquartered outside of our state. The companies have offered $2.25 billion in bill credits across Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina, roughly $9.40 a month returned per customer. Don’t get me wrong: We welcome relief for our residents, but those credits stop for S.C. customers after two years, and nothing prevents future rate increase requests that could offset them entirely.

My question is simple: Is this deal good for S.C. families? Dominion and NextEra have promised long-term affordability without defining what that means for your wallet. Before the PSC considers what conditions to attach, it should first evaluate whether the transaction benefits South Carolina. A clear answer to that question is worth more to our residents than any two-year credit.

Residents can weigh in on both of these critical decisions that can affect their future energy bills. The commission will hold a public hearing on the integrated resource plan at 10 a.m. on Nov. 9 and on the proposed merger at 8 a.m. on Dec. 8, both at 101 Executive Center Drive in Columbia. You can send written comments to [email protected].

In today’s economy, many families are already stretched by their monthly energy bills. This fall, we decide whether the next 15 years ease that pressure or add to it — and we should do that while the plans are still on paper, not when the bill arrives.

As published in The Post and Courier