COLUMBIA, SC — The South Carolina Senate on Thursday began its homework assignment: drafting a comprehensive bill to guide energy policy in a fast-growing state and a rapidly changing world of energy generation.
The Special Commission on South Carolina’s Energy Future is planning several meetings through October. On Thursday, the commission heard from leaders of the state’s three largest utilities. Future meetings will include regular ratepayers, environmentalists, business leaders and experts on the latest technology to make electricity,
The Senate has taken on this task. put the brakes on a huge energy reform law of more than 80 pages that has been adopted by the House in less than six weeks in March, and the bill died at the end of the session.
Many senators said earlier this year that the process was rushedThey remembered the last time they relied on a maintenance bill supported by utility companies.
State-owned Santee Cooper and privately owned South Carolina Electric & Gas took advantage of rules passed 15 years ago to make taxpayers foot the bill for billions of dollars spent on two new nuclear reactors. Those reactors never produced a watt of power, but construction was halted because of rising costs.
But those terrible memories are mixed with dire predictions of a state left without power.
Unseasonably cold weather on Christmas Eve 2022, coupled with problems at a generating facility, nearly led to rolling blackouts in South Carolina. Demand from advanced manufacturing and data centers is rising. As electric cars become more popular, more power is needed. And a state that has added 1.3 million people since 2000 has many more air conditioners, washing machines and appliance bills, utility leaders said.
Senators interrupted Mike Callahan, the president of Duke Energy in South Carolina, midway through his presentation. He told them that his utility’s most recent forecasts for electricity consumption growth for the rest of this decade were eight times higher than they were two years ago.
“The growth is there, and there’s a lot more to come. We need a clear energy policy to plan for that growth,” Callahan said,
Utility leaders told senators that their companies need to know which energy sources — natural gas, solar, nuclear, wind or others — the state wants to emphasize. They want stable rules from regulators about how they operate.
“A quick no is much better for us than a long-term maybe,” said Jimmy Staton, CEO of Santee Cooper.
Another complicating factor is federal rules that could require utilities to close coal-fired power plants before replacements from other sources are available, Staton said.
Others aren’t so sure the state needs a rapid increase in electricity generation. Environmentalists have suggested that the problems that led to blackouts in 2022 were made worse by the fact that power plants were far from capacity, and better cooperation in the grid would make it easier for electricity to get where it needs to go.
Those less supportive of the reform urge the state not to favor one energy source over another, saying the technology could cause South Carolina to generate too much energy inefficiently.
There will likely be a lot of talk about data centers consuming a lot of electricity, without any consideration of the number of jobs, property taxes, or other benefits a manufacturer provides.
Staton estimates that about 70% of Santee Cooper’s increased demand comes from data centers.
“We clearly need them. I don’t want to go back in time,” said Shane Massey, chairman of the committee and the Republican majority leader in the Senate. “What I’m trying to do is have a better understanding, a better understanding of how much of the expected growth is based on data centers or everything else.”
Massey has been tough on Dominion Energy, which bought South Carolina Electric & Gas after the abandoned nuclear project at the VC Summer Nuclear Station. But Dominion Energy South Carolina President Keller Kissam said it’s important that all options, including a new nuclear plant, remain on the table.
“Everybody thinks that if we build something, we’re absolutely going to do the same thing that we did with VC Summer,” Kissam said. “Well, I promise you that’s not going to happen. OK? I’m going to pack my things and go.”
Massey’s goal is to have a bill ready before the start of the 2025 session in January.