Here’s good news for Mid-Carolina Electric members in Lexington County.
Santee Cooper’s new executive team plans to freeze rates for the next 5 years.
They also have a plan to pay off part of their $4 billion nuclear fiasco debt.
To avoid lawmakers selling Santee Cooper, they plan to add solar energy, a new gas-fired power plant and cost sharing with an investor-owned Georgia utility.
Word of Santee Cooper’s plans reached state lawmakers and set off a dispute between new CEO Mark Bonsall and Sen. Hugh Leatherman, the powerful Senate Finance Committee chair, the Charleston Post and Courier reported.
Leatherman was concerned about a new Santee Cooper agreement with the Southern Co. of Georgia.
Southern is one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the Southeast.
It is building twin reactors similar to those on which Santee Cooper and SC Electric & Gas lost $9 billion.
Santee Cooper’s new leaders are working with Southern to find ways they can jointly manage their fuel supplies, expenses, energy trading and coal ash waste.
The Department of Administration that is handling the bids for Santee Cooper argued this would “disrupt, bias or circumvent” state lawmakers’ plans.
Lawmakers plan to vote early next year on selling tax payer-owned Santee Cooper, hiring a company to manage it or retaining state control.
Bonsall and Santee Cooper Chairman Dan Ray responded in letters to every state lawmaker that Southern did not plan to take part in bidding to buy them.
Santee Cooper, they added, was doing what lawmakers asked them to do.
Bonsall wrote that they are reforming a business, generating electricity to about 183,000 ratepayers and supplies power to Mid-Carolina Electric and the state’s other 19 electric cooperatives.
Santee Cooper told its 180 employees at a coal-fired generating station near Georgetown last week that the plant would be phased out over 10 years.
That’s not all. Santee Cooper is planning to:
 • Increase solar capacity 500% adding more than 1,000 megawatts of power.
• Gain another 100 megawatts from a turbine fueled by natural gas.