Utility executives are right: We’re not yet at a place where we can rely entirely on solar energy, battery storage and other alternative sources to power South Carolina, and it’ll be years before we are.
Legislative leaders are right when they say our state needs an all-of-the-above approach as we transition toward a future beyond fossil fuels: nuclear, solar, wind, battery storage, energy efficiency and, until alternatives become more dependable or until someone figures out how to build more of that nuclear without taking consumers to the cleaners, natural gas.
Where they’re not clearly right is in suggesting the state needs to dramatically speed up approval for Dominion South Carolina and Santee Cooper to build as much new generating capacity as the abandoned V.C. Summer nuclear project that they abandoned less than seven years ago because of legislatively blessed cost overruns and because they concluded that was just too much energy for South Carolina’s foreseeable future.
And where they’re flat wrong is in pushing legislation that strips out important consumer protections that were enacted after the V.C. Summer fiasco.
It’s true that H.5118 would not set us up for a repeat of precisely what happened at V.C. Summer; it does not, for instance, restore the roundly discredited Base Load Review Act, which required the S.C. Public Service Commission to rubber stamp multiple rate increases to pay for building two nuclear reactors that never produced a single watt of energy. It’s also true, though, that parts of the bill are reminiscent of other laws that enabled that whole mess. For instance:
• The state consumer advocate would no longer be allowed to represent ratepayers in utility cases.
• The Office of Regulatory Staff would revert to the discredited pre-2018 rules, which required it to balance the interests of ratepayers with economic development and the “financial integrity” of regulated utilities. That balancing act, by the way, is already the job of the PSC.
• The PSC would be required to give testimony of utilities greater weight than the voices of the public or independent analysts in reviewing utilities’ long-term plans. Of course we know this already happens; how much worse will it be when it’s a legal requirement?
• If a utility tries to build a “small modular nuclear reactor” but abandons the project mid-construction (a la V.C. Summer), it still could charge ratepayers if it provides a “fulsome accounting” of its decision. (We hope regulators would read “fulsome” to mean abundant, but it has several other definitions, including offensive and excessively flattering.) True, there’s nothing automatic here like there was in the Base Load Review Act, but it’s still heavily weighted toward raising our power bills once again to pay for an abandoned nuclear plant that never generates electricity.
On Tuesday, utility executives told critics not to worry, they will still have to get approval from the PSC for their long-term plans and rate increases, and that’s absolutely true. But the changes in the bill mean what the commissioners hear will be much more one-sided than what they’ve heard in recent years — and in some ways even more one-sided than it was during the V.C. Summer boondoggle era. There will no longer be a…
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