Brian Coy, the governor’s spokesman, said Northam had “a productive meeting with Mr. Farrell,” though he added that “we don’t comment on his private discussions.”

The meeting between one of the state’s most powerful business leaders and its top elected official underscores how much is at stake as lawmakers wrangle over the undoing of the 2015 law and on whose terms review of utility earnings will resume.

The base rate freeze bill — which also prevented regulators at the State Corporation Commission from requiring refunds to customers of Dominion and the state’s other large utility, Appalachian Power — was passed ostensibly to shield ratepayers from the cost of federal carbon regulation. Critics charge that it was really about locking in big windfalls for the utilities.

The SCC has found that the base rate freeze would not have protected utility customers from any costs of compliance from the now-seemingly scuttled Clean Power Plan pushed by former President Barack Obama.

“We’re working through the process on improving the bill, particularly to ensure the refund ratepayers get from previous years aligns with the amount that was overcharged, enhance the provisions regarding clean energy and grid modernization, and ensure that the SCC has the proper authority to review rates going forward,” Coy said. “He’s confident we can reach a resolution that works for all Virginians.”

A group of bipartisan lawmakers is pushing Dominion-driven legislation that would bring back SCC oversight, though with some major differences from the scheme that was in place before 2015.

Among the biggest: a change from a biennial review to a triennial review, meaning regulators would look at three years of the utilities’ earnings instead of two.

Appalachian’s first review would be in 2020, according to an analysis of just one of the bills filed, House Bill 1558 by Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott. Dominion’s would be in 2021, reviewing earnings for 2018, 2019 and 2020, according to the review by Will Reisinger, a former assistant Virginia attorney general in the consumer counsel office who is now with energy law firm GreeneHurlocker.

Dominion’s earnings from 2015 to 2017 would not be reviewed, though the legislative package pushed by the utility’s allies in the General Assembly includes a $133 million rate credit to Dominion customers, equivalent to the SCC’s low-end estimate on what they would have been owed for 2015 and 2016 had rate review been in place.

Customers will also get rate reductions equivalent to about $125 million because of the recently passed federal tax reform, though those tax savings would ordinarily be required to be passed on to ratepayers anyway.

But the bill will make it more difficult for the SCC to order refunds and lower base rates, which make up about half of customers’ electric bills.

The utilities would have to have excess earnings in two consecutive triennial reviews before the commission could order refunds and lower base rates. Under the old regulatory scheme, refunds could be ordered after a single biennial review established excess earnings though it took that finding in two consecutive reviews to lower base rates.

“The SCC does not have to approve these expenditures,” the report says. “This accounting treatment could reduce Dominion/APCO’s reported earnings in a triennial review.”

Kilgore’s bill also contains another provision the utility has been pushing for years: strong-arming the SCC into approving distribution line burial programs the commission has rejected as too expensive.

The bill says about $180 million a year in line-burying expenses “shall be approved for recovery.”

“It would reduce the SCC’s discretion to approve the reasonableness and prudence of costs that will be charged to ratepayers in several areas,” Reisinger said.

Another group of lawmakers of both parties are pushing a straightforward repeal of the 2015 law and a return to SCC oversight under the previous system, though a Senate measure that would accomplish that has already been killed in committee.

And many of them are asking the commission to analyze the legislation and report back to the General Assembly “as soon as practical.”