With an aim to provide its customers with undisrupted power, Dominion Virginia Power has come up with investment plans for the next five years. As a part of its Powering Virginia program, the company worked out strategies for meeting growing electricity demand.

The plan revolves round a balanced mix of highly reliable and economic generation sources including upgrades to existing units, clean-burning natural gas, a state-of-the-art hybrid energy power station, renewable resources, and conservation. Powering Virginia is also expected to create thousands of new construction jobs and other forms of economic development in the process.

Nation's one of the largest producers and transporters of energy, with a portfolio of approximately 27,600 megawatts of generation, Dominion operates the nation's largest natural gas storage system and serves retail energy customers in 13 states. The company reportedly remained very busy over the past year. Currently the company is focused on strengthening its current power line infrastructure.

“We have been very busy over the past year. We've focused on achieving excellence in customer service, strengthening our current power line infrastructure where needed, and planning for the future,” said President and CEO of Dominion Virginia Power, Paul D. Koonce, in a statement.

In his statement, Koonce also disclosed the company’s future plans. He said that the company plans to invest $7.6 billion over the next five years for new power stations and other electric infrastructure to meet growing demand. Of this, approximately $4 billion will be expended on adding or upgrading new transmission and distribution lines, substations and other related facilities. A circuit reconditioning program will continue to target lines that experience higher levels of outages, the company informed.

A significant portion of the investment will be expended on buying new technologies to enhance energy reliability. These steps, the company said are designed to allow customers to save money on their energy bills.

The company also plans to spend more than $2 billion to improve the environmental performance of its fossil-fueled power stations and anticipates that additional investment may be necessary to meet pending federal regulations.

It will be worthwhile to mention here that some ten years back, the company launched a major initiative to reduce emissions from its fossil power stations. Environmental controls were added at six power stations as part of a spending commitment of more than $2 billion that extends through 2015.

Koonce said those efforts are paying off. Virginia's air is much cleaner today than it was in 1970, and the company is on track to reduce emissions of major air pollutants by 80 percent or more by the middle of this decade.

To keep with its commitments toward creating a low carbon Virginia environment, Dominion Virginia Power announced $10,000 to $40,000 grants for five Hampton Roads colleges. The grants were disbursed through The Dominion Foundation, the charitable arm of Dominion Virginia Power. Through a statement, the Dominion announced that the grants will support programs in business, engineering, conservation, environmental and technical studies.