Westinghouse, the lead contractor in the collapsed V.C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina, has sued the statewide public power system Santee Cooper in Westinghouse’s bankruptcy proceeding, charging last week that Santee Cooper has been balking at selling millions of dollars of unused equipment at the failed, two-unit Westinghouse reactor construction.
The State newspaper reported that Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse, in a bankruptcy filing, “won’t agree to a sale because it doesn’t want to share the profits” with its reactor vendor.
Westinghouse claims the sale of the unneeded equipment is urgent “because there is a limited market for the parts and because Georgia-based Southern Company – in the midst of building its own nuclear power plant – has made a multimillion-dollar offer that expires in two weeks.” Georgia Power is soldiering on with a twin project at its Vogtle nuclear site, featuring the same Westinghouse reactor design, despite years of delays and billions of umplanned dollars.
Neither Santee Cooper nor Southern Co. responded to the South Carolina newspaper’s requests for comment. The paper added, “Santee Cooper and Westinghouse have been in a weeks-long dispute over who owns the equipment left” at the abandoned nuke. The paper added that the former lead in the project, SCANA Corp., now vanished into the Dominion Energy business dominion, “already gave up its ownership stake to the site in order to claim hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits.”
Santee Cooper asserts that it now owns the site and all of the materials left behind when the project cratered. Among the on-site equipment are the steam generators, reactor coolant pumps, steam turbine-generators, cooling tower innards, and lots of rebar, pipe, and cables. Westinghouse claims that Santee Cooper hasn’t paid for all of the material on the site, but, according to The State, “has not disclosed how much of the equipment it claims to own.”
Westinghouse proposed to sell the equipment now, bank the proceeds, and sort out who gets what when later.
In the meantime, the frenzied dance around whether, how, and to whom to sell what was once one of the nation’s premier public power systems continues. Santee Cooper faces a mountain of debt, some $8 billion, of which half is the result of the Summer misadventure.The Post and Courier newspaper reported last week that the South Carolina House approved legislation that would preserve the legislature’s power to control a sale. Gov. Henry McMaster has been pushing to unload the system since the 2,000-MW V.C. Summer nuclear project bit the dust, saying most recently, “I think the sale of Santee Cooper is inevitable.”
Earlier, Senate President Harvey Peeler introduced legislation that would give McMaster full control of the sale of the utility. Republicans control the House, Senate, and Governorship. Peeler’s bill appears stalled, with two senators blocking debate.
The House plan would continue to empower a joint committee, including McMaster, to evaluate the 15 bids from 10 bidders it received in February and negotiate a deal with a buyer. But that committee would then send the deal to the legislature for a final okay.
Andy Brack, editor of the Statehouse Report, which follows the South Carolina legislature, commented, “State lawmakers, some grumbling Santee Cooper is an economic dinosaur with a bleak future, appear to be rushing pell-mell toward selling the utility at a bargain-basement price as private companies dump money into advertising, lobbying and who knows what else to acquire its assets.”
Brack added, “It’s a Statehouse drama that blends the worst of politics, the utility’s institutional arrogance, bad corporate decision-making, the search for a scapegoat, misinformation and too many myths to digest in one sitting. Example: Many people think all S.C. taxpayers will have to foot Santee Cooper’s debt if it remains as it is. Not true, according to state law, which specifically limits debts to ratepayers to pay off bonds.”
That still leaves a lot of folks in the Palmetto State facing increased rates for nothing in return. Santee Cooper sells power to the state’s 20 rural electric distribution cooperatives, serving some 1.5 million citizens. According to the web site for the state’s electric co-ops, “As a group, electric cooperatives serve more consumers in South Carolina than any other utility.”
— Kennedy Maize