South Carolina’s energy sector is at a crossroads, as officials assess how much money should be invested in renewable sources, how long to keep their nuclear reactors in operation and how quickly to shut down the remaining coal plants.
South Carolina’s three main power generators – Duke Energy, Dominion Energy and Santee Cooper – are all in the process of forming long-term plans to supply electricity to millions of energy consumers in the state over the next 15 years.
Whether the South Carolinians realize it or not, the outcome of these plans will affect them.
Dominion Energy’s Williams Power Station in Berkeley County burns coal and natural gas. Environmental groups are pressing the concessionaire to accelerate the withdrawal of this plant and Dominion’s other two coal-fired plants. Archive / Team
The decisions that utilities make will help dictate where South Carolina electricity will come from in the coming decades, how much that energy costs each month and how harmful that energy production is to the environment when people turn on a light switch or adjust the thermostat.
This is not the first time that Duke, Dominion and Santee Cooper have gone through this type of planning process. Predicting how much energy people will use and studying how best to supply that electricity is something that utilities have been doing for decades.
But work has gained much more importance in recent years. Utilities in the electricity sector now need to take into account man-made climate change, the growing adoption of electric vehicles, the expansion of solar and wind energy and investments in new technologies such as large battery storage devices.
“I think the industry is constantly evolving and this latest evolution is a big change,” said Glen Snider, who leads the planning team at Duke’s two South Carolina power utilities.
All utility companies in the country, said Snider, are struggling to provide customers with reliable energy, such as reducing carbon emissions and, at the same time, ensuring that electricity bills do not rise too much for homes and businesses.
South Carolina lawmakers recently put a greater focus on this planning process to ensure that state utilities meet these priorities. In 2019, the Legislature passed a law that defined several basic benchmarks that utilities need to meet when developing their long-term forecasts.
This law also gave South Carolina’s public service regulators, consumer protection agencies, solar energy developers and environmental organizations a chance to challenge public service business plans.
And those groups wasted no time flexing that newly discovered muscle. They are now putting pressure on state utilities to accelerate the adoption of renewable energy, increase energy efficiency measures for customers and close factories that pump the most heat-retaining gases into the atmosphere.
Eddy Moore, director of the Coastal Conservation League’s energy and climate program, said the public now has the ability to keep utilities’ feet from fire. This is important, he said, when companies like Duke and Dominion made public promises to eliminate or offset all of their carbon emissions by 2050.
“I think it’s a turning point,” he said. “You put everything on the table and find out if you can have a better system.”
Moore expects public involvement in companies’ energy planning to increase in the coming years. The process, he said, is becoming more important for large companies, like Google, which have sustainability goals and local governments, like the city of Charleston, which are trying to reduce their carbon footprints.
The plans that South Carolina utilities are now presenting, said Moore, will go a long way in determining how quickly these groups can meet their environmental goals and how costly this transition will be for South Carolina.
‘Complicated problem’
Combined, Duke, Dominion and Santee Cooper operate more than 95 generating stations across South Carolina and North Carolina.
Its plants are a mix of gas turbines, nuclear reactors, old coal-fired boilers, new solar farms, 100-year-old hydroelectric plants and small gas-powered landfill generating units.
Together, these energy sources are capable of meeting most of the energy demands of taxpayers at the three South Carolina utilities and the more than 2 million people who receive energy from South Carolina’s 20 electricity cooperatives. (The factories from Duke also serve approximately 3.4 million customers in North Carolina.)
What South Carolina’s energy suppliers are trying to find out now is how long they should keep their existing plants up and running and what types of energy sources they will need to invest in to replace them. It is a process that can dramatically change the appearance of South Carolina’s energy system by 2035.
In general, all three energy suppliers are considering approaches that include expanding solar energy in South Carolina and adding more natural gas generation. They are also looking to extend the life cycles of the seven nuclear power plants that supply the state, including the VC Summer plant in Midlands, where a $ 9 billion expansion that would have added two new reactors failed in 2017, after years of delays and costs. exceeds.
The end result of the concessionaires’ plans may depend on a variety of factors, such as the price of natural gas, potential regulations on carbon pollution and the concessionaires obtaining federal government approval to continue operating their old nuclear reactors, some of which have has been in use since the early 1970s.
Rodney Blevins, CEO of Dominion Energy South Carolina, said he sees the next decade and a half as an opportunity to reform the industry and meet growing customer expectations that its energy will come from “cleaner sources”.
“If you were to start today, you wouldn’t build what we have, but it is what we have,” said Blevins. “It’s a complicated problem”
South Carolina’s three largest energy companies have undergone substantial changes in the past decade.
Data collected by the Energy Information Administration show that the amount of energy generated by burning coal has dropped sharply for the three companies in the past 10 years. Concessionaires have largely replaced this energy by building new gas turbines and converting older coal plants to burn other fuels.
Charlie Duckworth, deputy CEO of Santee Cooper, said that this has been the trend across the country. Coal plants, he said, are being phased out for two reasons: it helps reduce a utility company’s carbon footprint and is increasingly saving customers’ money.
“There was a time at the beginning of my career when the cheapest addition you could make was a coal-fired power plant,” said Duckworth, who was hired to draft a new energy plan for Santee Cooper. “This is no longer the case.”
Data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency shows that cuts in the fleet of coal-fired power plants from Duke, Dominion and Santee Cooper have helped to substantially reduce utility companies’ carbon dioxide emissions in recent years. But the three still have a long way to go if they plan to cut remaining emissions in the coming decades.
EPA data shows that plants operated by South Carolina’s three energy suppliers emitted more than 71 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2019.
Part of that total comes from the electricity that Duke supplied to its customers in North Carolina. However, this total is equal to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released annually by approximately 15.4 million passenger vehicles.
Closing the coal
One of the biggest points of debate now is what to do with the coal plants that Duke, Dominion and Santee Cooper still operate.
Several environmental groups, including the Coastal Conservation League, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and the Sierra Club, are trying to persuade South Carolina companies and utility regulators to shut them down forever.
All three suppliers recognize that coal plants will need to be shut down at some point. But the deadlines for these closings vary.
Santee Cooper, for example, recently announced that it would begin decommissioning its Winyah station near Georgetown from 2023, but said it could keep its Cross station near Lake Moultrie open after 2030.
Duke has already closed all of its coal plants in South Carolina, but is still working to eliminate its remaining North Carolina coal stations. The Charlotte-based company presented a forecast last year showing some of its coal units being retired in early 2022 and the rest being closed in 2035.
Meanwhile, Dominion’s plans for its remaining coal-fired power plants have recently put the utility in trouble.
Dominion, a Virginia-based company that bought South Carolina Electric & Gas two years ago, told state regulators that it has no plans to shut down any of its three coal-fired plants until after 2028. Dealership leaders also said this it would take several years before they could complete a study that would explore the possibility of retiring these factories more quickly.
As a result, the SC Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, voted in December to dismiss Dominion’s power plan and send the company back to the drawing board.
During the hearings, several commissioners asked why the company was not accelerating the closure of its coal-fired plants, and others questioned whether Dominion was aggressively pursuing its carbon reduction goals.
“Why wait several years before making these decisions? Why not start now? “Asked Tom Ervin, one of the PSC members.
Officials at all three South Carolina utilities said the decision to close their remaining thermoelectric plants is a balancing act. They understand the pressure to shut down these plants, they said, but they need to do so in a way that ensures that utilities can still generate enough energy when electricity demand peaks in summer and winter.
“I cannot retire the coal units we have now because I would not be able to meet demand,” said Blevins. “This is just the end result.”
Blevins said his team is trying to solve this problem, but said it “is not in the cards right now”.