Conservation league releases Pee Dee Energy analysis

Opponents of Santee Cooper’s Pee Dee Energy Campus gathered in Columbia on Wednesday to announce the findings of a new study.

Nancy Cave, Northcoast Office director for the Coastal Conservation League, the organization that released the study, said it confirmed the assumptions they’ve had about rate increases for Santee Cooper customers.

“Santee Cooper has said that they will be planning hearings this summer regarding increasing the rates of electricity and this proposed plant is the reason they are going to have to increase rates,” she said.

David Schlissel, lead author of the analysis and senior consultant at Synapse Energy Economics, said the rate increase could have been avoided with a little bit of extra planning.

“A flexible plan would allow for Santee Cooper to modify its course if the circumstances change,” he said. “That is what responsible utility planners do. Because Santee Cooper’s customers will be the ones who have to pay.”

Laura Varn, however, spokeswoman for Santee Cooper, said the report doesn’t accurately portray all the facts of the situation.

“I think the report is Monday morning quarterbacking,” Varn said. “We don’t have the luxury to work with the short term or the hypothetical. We had to make some critical decisions about two years ago that dealt with the longterm energy needs of South Carolina.”

She said the need for the facility is real, despite claims from opponents that better energy efficiency could free up the needed energy stores to power the state.

“We are disappointed that the Coastal Conservation League (CCL) didn’t honor their promise to allow us to look at the report before it went public,” she said. “I think we would have been able to point some (inconsistencies) out to them.”

But Ben Moore, energy and climate director for the CCL, said the preliminary report was sent to Santee Cooper more than a month ago.

“We presented the preliminary findings to them in an in-person meeting well over a month ago,” he said. “We made David available to them over the phone. Then we forwarded the final report to them early last week.”

Moore said the utility company then got back in touch with the CCL to say the report was fine to release to the public.

But Varn said the report did not allow for the fact that the planning decisions for the facility were made roughly two years earlier.

“Certainly, a lot has changed since we made the decision two years ago,” she said. “But it doesn’t impact our decision. Even things like a recession are negated with the longterm energy needs. We’re looking at how do we meet the needs 10, or even 20, years from now.”

Schlissel said the issue isn’t when the plans were made, but rather that the customers will be paying for the decisions made by the state-owned utility for years to come.

“Quite simply, they are going to have to pay for the actual price,” he said. “If the plant cost $3 billion instead of $2 billion, the customers have to pay for it.”

Varn said while rate increases for Santee Cooper customers are on the way, not all of the money will go toward paying for the new facility.

“We certainly wish we didn’t have to (increase rates),” Varn said. “We know it’s a bad time to do it. Unfortunately, the time has come where we need to have a rate increase and a restructuring. It’s not just new generation, it’s operating expenses.”

She said the rate increase will be the first of its kind in 13 years for the state-owned utility.

The 600-megawatt coal-fired generation facility would be located on a 2,709-acre tract in Kingsburg, scheduled to become operational sometime after 2012 at a cost of about $1.25 billion to build. The study was paid for by the Rockefeller Family Fund.