The overly-ambitious, $9 billion V.C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina – a joint venture of then SCANA Corp. and state-owned generation and transmission utility Santee Cooper – failed miserably in July 2017, when the two essentially equal partners walked away and left an uncompleted hulk on the site of two operating nuclear power plants.
Since then, South Carolina has found itself mired in a financial, regulatory, and political quagmire from which the state has been unable to emerge. The wreckage has included the demise of the investor-owned utility that was the lead partner, SCANA’s South Carolina Electric & Gas, and a so-far feckless attempt by the state that owns it to unload Santee Cooper, once a paragon of virtue among public power systems.
The sale of SCANA to Virginia-based Dominion has caused regulatory grief at the state’s Public Service Commission, nasty claims that lawyers representing SCE&G’s customers filed “outrageously high fees” for their work in the case, and that customers didn’t get what they should have in rate relief from the sale.
At the other end of the blame game for the Summer collapse, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster has been trying to no avail for two years to unload his public power system. This is where a Brexit analogy comes in. The Republican governor and his Republican-dominated state legislature have been unable to come up with a plan to actually unload Santee Cooper.
The governor and the legislature have hatched plan after plan (not just a single plan like British Prime Minister has been pushing, multiple times with no success to get the UK out of the EU). The Palmetto State solons have gone round and round with various iterations and approaches to shed Santee Cooper. Nothing has stuck, and the hang up has been what to do about Santee Cooper’s overhanging debt from the failed, decade-long, nuclear project.
The latest development is an alleged compromise last week between the state Senate and McMasters. The influential state-wide political blog Fits News described it: “According to the deal struck by the S.C. Senate on Thursday, the S.C. Department of Administration (SCDOA) – part of the cabinet of governor Henry McMaster – would be tasked with reviewing ‘serious offers’ to either purchase, partially purchase or manage the debt-addled utility.
“After choosing what it believes to be the best offer, McMaster’s agency would submit this ‘winning’ proposal to the S.C. General Assembly – which would then cast an up-or-down vote.”
The feisty blog commented, “Will the public get to see the competing offers? No.”
South Carolina has already received 15 so-far anonymous, possibly hand-waving bids to either buy or manage the large, 85-year-old public power system. A key issue is whether and how a successful bidder might deal with the system’s crushing $4 billion debt for the failed, two-unit Summer project.
There is no sure way to sell Santee Cooper and many legislators are skeptical. The State newspaper reported that “a final decision on whether to sell or relinquish control of Santee Cooper will be punted for at least another few months, until lawmakers reconvene to consider the best of those offers.”
The headline from that story tells it all: “SC to field offers for Santee Cooper, but lawmakers haven’t decided whether to sell it.”
In the meantime, McMaster has been unable to put new management in at Santee Cooper. He installed Charlie Condon, a former state attorney general, as interim chairman of the utility’s board, pending approval of the nomination by the state Senate. In a rebuff to the governor, the Senate Judiciary Committee last week promptly turned down the Condon nomination by a 19-4 vote. McMaster on Monday withdrew the nomination.
— Kennedy Maize