You won’t see this on your monthly power bill, but if you’re one of the 800,000 people forced by S.C. law to purchase your electricity from Dominion Energy, you’re paying about $100 a year for those two abandoned nuclear reactors at V.C. Summer that never produced a watt of electricity.
The S.C. Daily Gazette reports — reminds us, actually — that we’ll be paying those boondoggle surcharges for another 15 years, until Dominion recoups the $2.3 billion of debt regulators required it to take on as part of its purchase of SCE&G after the now-defunct utility pulled the plug on the over-budget, far-beyond-deadline construction project. Customers of junior partner Santee Cooper will continue paying about 5% of their monthly bills for at least eight more years to cover the state-owned utility’s $3.6 billion debt.
Even if you believe — as we do — that we’re going to have to keep relying on natural gas until we get to the point where the sun, wind, battery and additional nuclear power can supplant fossil fuels, V.C. Summer is the essential backdrop for what’s happening at the Statehouse. And it is what has drawn a growing chorus of Republican and Democratic senators to join us in opposing the rush to pass H.5118, which removes regulatory protections that utilities say hinder their ability to build new generating capacity to prevent a looming energy crisis.
Last week, Senate Judiciary Chairman Luke Rankin allowed only supporters to testify in an initial 105-minute hearing before speeding what they call the S.C. Energy Security Act to the full Senate. On Tuesday, he responded to mounting concerns by letting a few opponents testify at a quickie do-over subcommittee hearing. But then he brought in utility executives to make their case again before the full committee later that day.
Dominion, Santee Cooper and Duke Energy bristle when we compare H.5118 to the infamous Base Load Review Act that paved the way for the $9 billion boondoggle at V.C. Summer, saying this year’s bill doesn’t authorize a new nuclear design or force the Public Service Commission to grant rate hikes to pay for construction.
They’re right — but they’re also missing the point.
What’s reminiscent of the Base Load Review Act is rushing legislation into law without most legislators having a clue that it dismantled existing ratepayers protections — or about pretty much anything else except the explanations utility executives spoon-fed them. It’s the absence of sufficient public vetting, to uncover the unintended consequences — or the intended consequences that lawmakers might not recognize until their colleagues start asking questions to tease them out.
As several senators have pointed out, holding open public hearings, where critics can air their concerns and legislators can ask questions of them and of supporters, helps everybody learn more about the benefits and problems with legislation — even when they don’t realize they need that education.
Senate Republican Leader Shane Massey, who with then-Democratic Leader Nikki Setzler led the yearslong unwinding of the mess at V.C. Summer, wisely advised his colleagues between those two meetings on Tuesday that the Senate should heed the lessons of that debacle and not allow themselves to be “held hostage by people saying if you don’t give me exactly…
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