SC Senate advances sweeping energy legislation despite concerns over speed of process
COLUMBIA — A South Carolina Senate committee voted to fast-track a sweeping and controversial energy policy reform bill despite concerns from members of the public — and some lawmakers — that the process was moving too quickly.
Dubbed the South Carolina Energy Security Act, the bill seeks to knock down a number of regulatory roadblocks to allow Dominion Energy and state-owned utility provider Santee Cooper to join together to develop a gas-fired power plant at a former coal-fired plant in South Carolina’s Lowcountry as a response to the state’s burgeoning energy-capacity crisis. The facility most likely to be converted is the old Canadys coal-fired plant near Walterboro, which was decommissioned several years ago.
It also gives the companies significant leeway to build new gas pipelines to support the plant, and cuts the regulatory red tape involved in breaking ground on projects that have already received a thumbs-up from the Public Service Commission, the regulatory oversight body that oversees in-state utility projects.
State lawmakers advanced controversial legislation to fast-track a new natural gas plant in South Carolina's Lowcountry. Unlike the original b…
But the bill — which advanced through the House of Representatives at a rapid pace late last month before landing on Senators’ desks for the first time last week — includes a series of policy changes some say go well beyond the scope of clearing the way for a new and reportedly necessary natural gas facility.
These changes were enough to leave lawmakers like Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, Penry Gustafson, R-Camden, Tameika Isaac-Devine, D-Columbia, and Wes Climer, R-Rock Hill, with numerous questions before voting it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee to the full Senate on April 9.
Particularly after a single subcommittee meeting the previous week in which the only organizations to give verbal testimony were utility companies.
“Less-significant bills are beat to death on the floor all the time,” Gustafson said. “If we’re going to do that, I think we need to do that bills just like this.”
Sen. Luke Rankin, R-Myrtle Beach and chairman of both the Judiciary Committee and the subcommittee that worked on the bill, wanted to push ahead.
They all agreed South Carolina needs new energy generation now, Rankin said. The Senate is currently in the throes of debating a budget, he said. And with session ending May 9, time was short.
“I’m not trying to make this into a subcommittee,” Rankin said in the middle of a nearly two-hour debate on the bill April 9. “But we do have a responsibility to advance the bill.”
Others on the committee believed there was still much left to resolve. Davis, the chief author of a companion bill in the Senate, offered an amendment in the committee seeking to rectify multiple policies in the legislation he had concerns with.
Power companies and lawmakers are pushing hard for a new gas-fired power plant, likely at a site along the Edisto River. But the push carries …
Plans to reduce the membership of the Public Service Commission from seven members to three, he said, went too far. The Legislature making findings of fact on behalf of utilities companies, he said, was inappropriate. A proposal to move the Office of the Consumer Advocate from the current position in state government to the Office of Regulatory Staff — which oversees the development of various utilities — potentially ran counter to the public interest.
Others just simply wanted longer than two weeks to vet the bill. Particularly given concerns the bill did more than clear the way for a single power plant to begin construction.
“This is a far-reaching bill that has significant consequences up and down the regulatory, governmental and private actor processes related to the generation and transmission and distribution of electricity around the state,” Climer said.
Climer then attempted to demote the bill back to the subcommittee level, saying he believed they as a committee needed to adequately “weigh the consequences of giving absolutely de minimis consideration of what’s before us.”
“My opinion is that this is not a subject matter that lends itself to that kind of rushed process, or that kind of haphazard process,” Climer said. “And that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a haphazard process on a bill that is ultimately going to touch, I would suspect, tens of billions of dollars in private investment and all five and a half million South Carolinians.”
Former state lawmaker Tom Ervin of Greenville resigned from the seven-member Public Service Commission effective immediately.
Rankin objected, saying plenty of bills move quickly through the process before heading to the floor. And there was nothing preventing members of the Senate from attempting to amend the bill and debate it once it reached the Senate chamber in several weeks.
“There are parallels aplenty of how some (bills) are described as haphazard,” said Rankin. “And others, you get a pass because you haven’t read the bill.”
But while the issues that inspired the South Carolina Energy Security Act had been discussed in study committees for several years, the several examples he named were imperfect ones.
Reforms to the Judicial Merit Selection process, which passed after hours of backroom deliberations earlier this year, have been discussed in hearing rooms and public forums since last summer.
Tort reform, which died last week after Senate negotiators could not reach an agreement, had been proposed almost every session for seven consecutive years.
Text of the South Carolina Energy Security Act, critics argue, has only been available since late February .
The stakes for the bill are high. In the weeks since the bill was made public, some have equated the act to the 2005 legislation that cleared the way for the controversial expansion of the V.C. Summer Nuclear Plant in the Savannah River Basin, which gave broad berth to utility companies to build out speculative energy projects using ratepayer dollars.
Others have concerns the state is essentially rubber-stamping a project in which little has publicly been disclosed.
In early April, the Southern Environmental Law Center filed a Freedom of Information request with the state-owned Santee Cooper for information about the placement of pipelines associated with the proposed project, arguing lawmakers could not conscientiously vote for plans they had not even seen.
“The South Carolina public deserves this basic information before the legislature decides on H. 5118 or any other bill involving this gas plant, especially when customers’ trust and wallets are still recovering from the V.C. Summer debacle,” Kate Mixson, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement at the time. “After their repeated refusal to disclose pipeline plans, we decided to find out what these utilities are planning instead of waiting for them to do the right thing.”
Contact Nick Reynolds at 803-919-0578. Follow him on X (formerly known as Twitter) @IAmNickReynolds.