South Carolina’s two legislative chambers are playing rate cut chicken over rolling back the consumer costs for the failed V.C. Summer nuclear project. The House voted to cut SCANA Corp.’s rates by 18%. The Senate scaled that back to 13%. The House then re-upped the cut to 18%, by a 104-7 vote.
Now, as the Associated Press reported, a House-Senate conference committee will have to find a compromise (15% suggests itself) or customers of SCANA’s SCE&G operating utility may find themselves holding an empty bag. The General Assembly has only seven more working days during the current session.
Complicating the end game is that Republican Gov. Henry McMaster has renewed his earlier threat to veto any cut less than 18%, the full impact of the Summer costs on current rates. There may not be enough votes in the Senate to override a veto. Senate Majority Leader, Republican Shane Massey, says he has the votes to override a McMaster veto.
In the meantime, Virginia-based Dominion Energy and SCANA have been threatening to scuttle the $14 billion sale of the South Carolina company to Dominion. According to many analyses, Dominion buying SCANA makes sense only if it can continue billing customers for Summer’s costs, although the plant will never run. Under current rates, customers are paying an extra $3 billion over the next 20 years.
The House and Senate have not been willing partners in dealing with the Summer issues. The House has been adamant about punishing SCANA for its nuclear follies, passing bills to cut the rates, changing the composition of the state’s Public Service Commission, and given the state consumer advocate more muscle. All hit the wall in the Senate.
House Majority Leader Republican Gary Simrill told reporters, “What we want to do is exhaust every single strand to protect the ratepayer, and that number needs to be zero” in Summer cost recovery.
Before the House vote, McMaster said, “I am not concerned about legislator games and threats and contrivances and discussions. I’m not concerned with it. What I’m concerned about are the people of South Carolina who have paid their money, who had no choice to pay it, are not getting what they paid for. They need to get their money back and they need to not pay another cent. So, the amount that they ought to have to pay from here on is zero. That’s the only acceptable amount.”
At the same time as the legislature is at loggerheads over SCE&G rates, the utility is fighting to keep secret a large hoard of documents that could pertain to its mismanagement of the Summer project. The company asked the Public Service Commission to let it not reveal thousands of pages of records that it claims are confidential. The Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are seeking to documents, on top of some 70,000 pages the environmental groups obtained through their lawsuit seeking refunds. The groups released those documents to the public, and newspapers in the state used them to explore how SCANA botched the construction project.
In a filing at the PSC, the utility claimed the environmental groups “have no right to publicly disseminate every document they receive…as they apparently have done to date.”
Bob Guild, lawyer for the environmentalists, says he won’t sign a confidentiality agreement. “We believe journalists are entitled to this information, regulators are entitled to it and ratepayers are entitled to it. We have shared with anybody who has expressed an interest.”
The events in South Carolina prompted Charles Bierbauer, former dean of the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies at the University of South Carolina and a former top CNN correspondent, to comment, “Why covering government and politics is more perilous and less predictable than covering NASCAR.”
— Kennedy Maize