The leader of the country’s largest energy company has no plans to play along with a political vengeance by Palmetto launched by the most liberal “Republican” member of the South Carolina General Assembly.
Now let’s wait and see how far this liberal leader will go in his quest for revenge … and how much rope other lawmakers are willing to extend to him in the process.
In a letter (.pdf) dated January 15, 2021, Jim Robo – Florida CEO NextEra Energy – said to the President of the Judiciary of the Senate of SC Luke Rankin that his company “respectfully … would not be providing additional documentation” to the Horry County lawmaker who switched parties. Robo’s letter came in response to a demand on December 31, 2020 for documents linked to the company’s efforts to acquire public services that are usually poorly managed and indebted, Santee Cooper.
According to Robo, NextEra – which last fall surpassed ExxonMobil to become America’s largest energy company – it has already provided lawmakers and regulators with “a very significant amount of information and materials” related to the company and its offer to buy a usually poorly managed and indebted government utility, Santee Cooper.
“As you know, all of this information, together with the information and data that we routinely store as a company operating in a highly regulated industry, is readily accessible to you and anyone interested,” wrote Robo.
Two and a half weeks ago, this media outlet reported on Rankin’s continued efforts to take revenge on those individuals and entities he believes opposed him in his run for reelection in 2020. Part of that effort involves discovering an alleged conspiracy involving NextEra , sources familiar with the “investigation” told this medium.
Rankin’s effort was met with mixed criticism … partly because of his documented hypocrisy with regard to the high-profile energy issues underlying this so-called “investigation” and partly because of concerns among his supporters that his own Campaign activities would be dragged into the light as a result of the investigation.
“Nobody wants this fight,” a state senator told us recently, citing half a dozen state legislators who are said to have direct links to specific interests in the energy sector.
Meanwhile, the ploy seems to have failed to dampen the legislative appetite to get rid of Santee Cooper – a state-owned energy supplier that helped plunge Palmetto State into billions of dollars in debt, thanks to its star role in the now notorious NukeGate fiasco.
According to our sources, there are enough votes in the SC Senate to approve the sale of Santee Cooper – and the recent changes to the house rules make it easier for lawmakers to introduce bills on objection from obstructionist lawmakers like Rankin.
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As we documented in a recent post, Rankin is one of several opponents for selling Santee Cooper (Larry Grooms and Stephen Goldfinch are two others) who received campaign contributions from the agency’s chairman, Dan Ray. Rankin also reportedly has personal financial ties to at least one member of the Santee Cooper board.
Isn’t that exactly the kind of thing that your “investigation” aims to discover?
In any case, the fact remains that no other legislator in the SC General Assembly has as much direct responsibility for NukeGate as Rankin.
With the 58-year-old lawyer serving as chief facilitator, Santee Cooper and his fellow capitalist, SCANA, were allowed to raise energy rates for South Carolina consumers and incur new debt by building a pair of next-generation pressurized water reactors at the VC Summer nuclear power station in Fairfield County. These reactors were expected to start operating in 2016 and 2017, respectively.
It never happened, however. Despite a large expenditure of money, the project was abandoned on July 31, 2017, with the reactors only in half – leaving taxpayers and taxpayers holding the bag to the sound of $ 10 billion. Shortly thereafter, SCANA and Santee Cooper executives were revealed knew the project was doomed – but it lied to regulators and the public to keep the joy train moving.
Santee Cooper is still deceiving regulators and legislators, by the way.
(Click to view)
(Via: High Flyer SC)
In addition to lying to the public, Santee Cooper also cheated his investors about the NukeGate project – the collapse of which caused the state utility debt to rise to almost $ 7.5 billion.
NextEra presented the winning bid to buy Santee Cooper in February, a $ 9.6 billion offer that Robo said would provide “immediate elimination of all existing Santee Cooper debts, billions of dollars in new investments in clean energy generation across the state of South Carolina, hundreds of millions of dollars in additional repayments to customers of Santee Cooper in the first year, hundreds of millions of dollars to be remitted as general revenue to the state and billions of dollars in new state and local taxes. ”
“We would like to respectfully suggest that no individual initiative, legislative or otherwise, could better position South Carolina to attract business and industry while protecting its environment,” added Robo.
Rankin’s “investigation” of NextEra is part of a two-pronged approach to keeping this “dishonest agency”, run in an atrocious, debt-ridden and usually dishonest manner, under state control. The other part? Rankin’s so-called “reform plan” – which he revealed last week.
As noted earlier, Rankin is desperate to take the focus off Santee Cooper, who has been mired in scandal after scandal in recent months – earning the ire of an increasing number of legislative leaders as a result of his perpetual duplicity.
Rankin also wants to divert the public’s focus on the issues of Santee Cooper’s own lobbyist … and the costs they continue to accrue on taxpayers and taxpayers.
Most importantly, however, Rankin hopes that this investigation will cause lawmakers to ignore the fact that all assumptions associated with Santee Cooper’s so-called “reform plan” have failed.
This means that the concessionaire will be forced to continue depending on its old environmentally friendly coal-fired plants – which will be increasingly expensive to operate (and which expose the concessionaire in trouble to increasing financial losses and legal problems).
This leaves the state with no realistic option but to sell … or to continue passing on the costs associated with the concessionaire’s huge debt to taxpayers and taxpayers.
Our opinion on all this? It has remained unchanged for the past thirteen years, when we first asked state lawmakers to sell the utility company “with all the proceeds going to the general fund”. If lawmakers had done what we suggested at the time, the state would still be reaping the rewards – and it would never have accumulated billions of dollars in NukeGate-related debt.
Instead, they heard Rankin and dug a $ 10 billion hole …
-FITSNews
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