This op-ed was written by Palmetto Promise Senior Fellow Dr. Oran Smith and was published in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. Because I registered my opinion way back in 1994, surely I was among the first to call for the state to sell Santee Cooper and get out of the utility business. But that said, my opinion
I was among the first to call for the state to Sell Santee Cooper and get out of the utility business. This call came not under Governor Henry McMaster (2017) or even under Governor Mark Sanford (2002), but in the 1990s when I was asked to contribute ideas to a bipartisan policy manual for Governor-Elect
On July 31, 2017, Santee Cooper and SCE&G announced that they were abandoning work on the expansion of the V.C. Nuclear Station in Fairfield County. Shortly thereafter, Palmetto Promise went to work digging into the financial and policy implications of that decision for taxpayers and ratepayers. PPI has stayed true to our research mission, providing an
Palmetto Promise’s Oran Smith and board chair Phil Hughes are quoted in this Forbes pieces comparing California and South Carolina’s approach to their utilities. To learn more about the research referenced in this article, click here. By Patrick Gleason, Forbes Contributor California lawmakers and state officials recently went through a very high profile failure in
Earlier this week, the state Department of Administration (DOA) released its long-anticipated report presenting three possible options for the future of Santee Cooper.
Columbia, SC. (Feb. 11, 2020) – Palmetto Promise Institute (PPI), the most prolific publisher of independent analysis of state-owned utility Santee Cooper, issued the following statement in response to the report released this morning by the state Department of Administration (DOA): “The facts of the DOA report are clearly in line with what our two
On Thursday, The Post & Courier reported that Justice Jean Toal denied Santee Cooper’s request to stop the case against them from remaining a class-action lawsuit. This was a severe blow to Santee Cooper’s court fight over whether or not their customers should shoulder the burden of billions in debt from their failed nuclear project.
Before the bell rang on the 2019 legislative session, lawmakers passed a bill that set the stage for a potential sale of Santee Cooper in 2020. The bill stipulated that the Department of Administration would receive proposals to (1) sell the state-owned utility, (2) management offers, and (3) a proposal from Santee Cooper to reform themselves.
The manufacturing process for Century Aluminum is extremely electricity dependent, requiring at full capacity 400 megawatts of electricity per year. That level of use (400 megawatts would power 80,000 homes) means that electricity is about 40% of the cost of operating the plant, its single highest expense. Unfortunately, high energy costs risk putting it out of business.
Earlier this summer, Palmetto Promise Institute conducted an in-depth study of aspects of Santee Cooper’s finances. Due to the opaque nature of Santee Cooper’s finances, our research was based on Santee Cooper published sources, legal filings, correspondence to elected officials, legislative hearings, and the reporting of The State and The Post & Courier.
