Americans are accustomed to thinking of corporate mergers as exercises in scale: bigger balance sheets, greater efficiencies, broader markets. But some companies occupy a category in which size carries consequences far beyond shareholders. Electric utilities are among them.

That is why the proposed combination of NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy should be regarded not simply as another corporate transaction, but as a test of how much power the public is prepared to place in the hands of a company controlling essential infrastructure.

The deal would create what the companies describe as the world’s largest regulated electric utility business, serving roughly 10 million customer accounts. For households across Virginia, the Carolinas, Florida, and elsewhere, electricity is not a product that can easily be purchased from a competitor if service deteriorates or prices rise. It is closer to a public necessity delivered through a private monopoly.

That distinction changes what regulators should demand.

NextEra and Dominion can point to the advantages of scale, improved reliability, and some $2.25 billion in short-term customer credits. Those benefits deserve consideration. But so does NextEra’s record.

Its Florida subsidiary, Florida Power & Light, has been associated through litigation and extensive reporting with allegations involving so-called ghost candidates, opaque political spending, efforts to influence media coverage, and the surveillance of a journalist investigating the company. NextEra and FPL have denied wrongdoing. An investor lawsuit separately accused NextEra of misleading shareholders about risks associated with the controversies; the defendants agreed to a proposed $150 million settlement while continuing to deny wrongdoing.

Regulators need not decide that every allegation is true to recognize why they matter.

A public-utility commission is not a criminal court. Its responsibility is broader in one sense: determining whether a company entrusted with monopoly privileges, critical infrastructure, and millions of captive customers can demonstrate that expanding its power serves the public interest.

The question is particularly urgent in Virginia, where another transformation is already testing the electrical system.

Northern Virginia has become the center of the global data-center economy. The facilities powering cloud computing and artificial intelligence are economically important, but they also consume enormous quantities of electricity. Their expansion requires new generation, transmission infrastructure, land, permitting, and ultimately decisions about who pays for the grid necessary to support them.

Dominion sits at the heart of that transformation. A NextEra-controlled Dominion would therefore occupy an extraordinary position at the intersection of two of the most consequential forces reshaping the state: utility consolidation and explosive growth in electricity demand.

This is where an ordinary merger review becomes inadequate.

The issue is not whether large utilities are inherently undesirable. Scale can produce real advantages, particularly when America’s electrical grid requires enormous investment to meet rising demand while simultaneously pursuing decarbonization and reliability. Nor should NextEra’s significant renewable-energy portfolio be ignored.

But the company’s clean-energy record is not uncomplicated. In New England, NextEra helped oppose the New England Clean Energy Connect project, which was intended to transmit Canadian hydropower into the regional grid. Critics argued that the company’s commercial interests conflicted with a project that threatened existing generation assets.

That episode points to the larger dilemma. A company can be both a major developer of renewable energy and a corporation with powerful incentives to protect investments that may be threatened by competing energy infrastructure.

Regulators exist precisely because corporate incentives and public interests do not always coincide.

Virginia’s State Corporation Commission should therefore resist treating assurances about rates, reliability, employment, and clean energy as sufficient simply because they appear in merger announcements.

Promises should become obligations.

Any approval should include enforceable protections against shifting merger costs onto customers, safeguards for workers, measurable reliability requirements, meaningful disclosure of political spending, and clear commitments concerning Virginia’s clean-energy goals. Regulators should also examine whether the combined company’s growing influence over generation, transmission, and major new data-center loads could give it disproportionate power over the state’s energy policy.

Most importantly, the burden should not rest primarily on critics to prove that the merger will cause harm. A transaction of this magnitude should require the companies seeking approval to demonstrate that it will produce a durable public benefit.

That distinction matters because Virginia’s existing review process is comparatively narrow. The SCC has only 180 days to consider the proposal, and the state’s standard does not necessarily require the companies to establish that rates will remain unchanged or that the transaction affirmatively benefits Virginians.

For a smaller acquisition, such restraints might be defensible. For a merger that could reshape the ownership of essential infrastructure just as artificial intelligence is dramatically increasing electricity demand, they look increasingly mismatched to the decision before the state.

Utilities receive extraordinary privileges because electricity cannot function like an ordinary consumer market. Their customers cannot meaningfully opt out of the grid. Hospitals, military installations, schools, businesses, and households cannot simply decline electricity when they dislike the supplier.

That arrangement depends on a bargain: private companies receive monopoly characteristics and predictable returns; the public receives reliability, reasonable rates, transparency, and accountability.

The NextEra-Dominion proposal tests whether that bargain still means anything when the companies involved become enormous.

Virginia does not have to assume the worst about NextEra to insist upon scrutiny. It merely has to recognize something regulators sometimes forget: the more indispensable an institution becomes, the stronger the case for limits on its power.

When big power meets big data, oversight cannot be an afterthought. It is the price of the privilege.