What happened to those $1,000 rebate checks Dominion Energy promised?
They weren’t in the mail for 727,000 ratepayers.
At 10 am Thursday, March 7, Dominion is to tell the Public Service Commission why it did not aggressively advertise scrapping the promised $1,000 as it did last year in offering it.
Dominion will continue to pivot from “the $1,000 check scam advertising,” said Tom Clements of Friends of the Earth, “to pat the PSC on the back for approving the plan that customers pay for the nuclear project for 20 years and to dishonestly declare that customers are better off with rates being imposed on them rather than the $1,000 pay-day loan. 
“The undertone will be that the ratepayer came out on top, even if untrue, and that Dominion is the best company for SCE&G customers in the future.”
Dominion executives and regulators decided to lower power rates over 20 years $20 a month instead. 
But those $1,000 checks were burned into the brains of many customers.
Now Dominion will do a new advertising blitz over the next several weeks, the Associated Press reported.
“We understand some customers will be disappointed,” Dominion spokesperson Rhonda Maree O’Banion said in an email.
Lawmakers from poor districts feel Dominion pulled a bait-and-switch scam.
They sought support from African-Americans then reneged on promises. The ads urged calls to legislators to support selling Lexington County-based SCANA.
“It seems that you were trying to advertise to the black community to impress upon us on this $1,000 charity,” said Democratic Sen. Margie Bright Mathews of Walterboro told Dominion officials at the Black Legislative Caucus.
“Your first order of business was to get a couple of black lobbyists and go to black colleges and advertise in black medium radio.”