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Paul Koonce to retire from Dominion Energy

Effective Dec. 1, 2019, Koonce will step down as head of the company’s generation operating segment to become executive vice president and strategic advisor, reporting to Thomas F. Farrell, II, chairman, president and CEO
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Paul Koonce to retire from Dominion Energy

Dominion Energy announced that Paul D. Koonce, executive vice president and president and CEO of the utility’s power generation group, will retire on February 1, 2020, after a 38-year career in the energy industry, the past 20 of which he has spent at Dominion Energy. 

Effective Dec. 1, 2019, Koonce will step down as head of the company’s generation operating segment to become executive vice president and strategic advisor, reporting to Thomas F. Farrell, II, chairman, president and CEO.

“Paul Koonce has been a leader in the energy industry, in his community and at our company,” Farrell said. “We have turned to Paul for trusted leadership in a variety of areas since he joined the company two decades ago. Although he had always skillfully navigated the natural gas world, particularly in his stint at Consolidated Natural Gas and in his time leading our gas businesses, Paul has been equally adept on the electric side, overseeing safe, reliable and cost-effective electric operations throughout the past 10 years. Paul has been a tremendous asset to Dominion Energy, and he will be missed by all.”

Koonce came to Dominion Energy in 1999 after a career spanning more than 15 years at other companies in the energy sector. In his time at Dominion Energy, Koonce has led three of the company’s current operating segments. In 2004, he became chief executive officer of the Dominion Energy operating unit (now the Gas Infrastructure Group). He rotated to lead the Dominion Virginia Power operating unit (electric transmission and distribution, now known as the Power Delivery Group) in 2009, and joined the Power Generation Group as its head in 2016.

Highlights of his career include oversight of a storage expansion at Cove Point, a program that has rebuilt several high-voltage transmission lines that serve as the backbone for Virginia’s electric grid, and a buildout of solar generation that has resulted in a tripling of the company’s solar portfolio in the past three years.

Koonce’s leadership in the energy sector includes the Nuclear Energy Institute, where he is vice chair and a member of the executive committee; and the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America and the Southern Gas Association, both of which he is a past chairman.

In the commonwealth of Virginia, he serves on board of trustees of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation and its 2019 Commemoration, which recognizes the New World’s first legislative body in the New World, and the Virginia Colony’s arrival of Africans and its first Thanksgiving. Koonce serves on the board of visitors of Virginia State University, a historically black university near Richmond, and on the board of directors of the Virginia Business Higher Education Council. He also is a past chairman of the Virginia Chamber’s Blueprint Virginia plan to improve the state’s economy by tackling such issues as education, transportation and health care.

“I have gratitude and admiration for Tom, the board of directors and my colleagues,” Koonce said. “I look forward to a very active next chapter, and hope to remain engaged in some way with this essential industry.”