by Jack O'Toole

With only three working days left in this year’s regular legislative session, a controversial energy bill that looked like an irresistible force coming out of the South Carolina House has met an immovable object.  Its name?  The South Carolina Senate.  Senators haven’t scheduled a floor vote on the utility-friendly bill.   

Concerns led then-PSC Commissioner Tom Ervin of Greenville to resign from the utility board on March 13 in protest of the legislation. 

“House Bill 5118 would remove important regulatory guardrails,” Ervin wrote in his resignation letter, “resulting in dramatic changes in existing law which will give investor-owned utilities a blank check with guaranteed profits resulting in much higher utility rates for residential customers.”

Other critics, like League of Women Voters of South Carolina Vice President Lynn Teague, have also noted that much of the anticipated new energy demand is driven not by population growth, but by the state’s ongoing efforts to attract new data centers, like Google’s planned facility in Dorchester County. The data centers, Teague points out, are “energy hogs” that only employ about 20 workers per facility.

“Ideally, there would be a moratorium on building them,” Teague told Statehouse Report Thursday. “Absent that, data centers should pay in full for the energy they use, not expect other ratepayers to subsidize them.”

Of the energy bill itself, Teague says it was “wildly overambitious,” and failed to consider the concerns of ratepayers.

“We are still paying, and will be paying for years, for the failed V.C. Summer,” Teague said, referring to the legislature-approved nuclear power project that was abandoned in 2017 at a cost of $9 billion to ratepayers. “And this bill eliminates the protections we put in place to ensure we don’t have that same kind  of problem again.” 

Read the full article at the link above.