Copyright postandcourier
It was the biggest business failure in South Carolina history. It took out our state’s largest corporation, sent the now-defunct SCANA Corp.’s top executives to prison, cost ratepayers throughout the Lowcountry and Midlands billions of dollars, and the fallout dominated the Legislature for years, forcing lawmakers to roll back a little-known law that incentivized utilities to overbuild. When SCE&G and state-owned Santee Cooper abandoned their over-budget, over-deadline nuclear construction project eight years ago, it was difficult to imagine that the fiasco would ever be anything more than an expensive lesson for our state — and indeed a lesson that more and more legislators are starting to forget. So assuming the deal doesn’t fall apart, Santee Cooper’s announcement Friday that it has selected the New York investment firm Brookfield Asset Management to purchase the two unfinished reactors at the V.C. Summer nuclear site can only be characterized as a huge win for our state. And a wonderful surprise. Utility officials say the reactors will produce 2,200 megawatts of electricity — about twice Santee Cooper’s share of the controversial natural gas plant it plans to build in Canadys — along with several years’ worth of jobs on the construction project. The utility hasn’t announced the anticipated purchase price, although Sen. Tom Davis suggests — based on his conversations with utility officials — that it will be enough to significantly reduce the V.C. Summer surcharge the utility’s customers are still paying. Frankly, any amount of money is more than all but the most optimistic anticipated for years — and more than most people expected even when the Legislature voted earlier this year to direct Santee Cooper to seek a buyer for the abandoned construction project.
