By Jerry Bellune 
JerryBellune@yahoo.com
You are already paying among the highest electric rates in the US.
What will those rates be like in the next 10 years?
Smart investors are betting on higher rates – and higher profits for them.
The state’s energy industry is under pressure from lawmakers and the Public Service Commission.
Utility officials are weighing how much money they should invest into renewable sources such as wind and solar, how long to keep their aging nuclear reactors operating and when to close aging coal-fired power plants.
Dominion Energy and Santee Cooper are making long-term plans for how to supply electricity to Lexington County ratepayers.
Their decisions may dictate where your electricity comes from, how much that power costs and how damaging that energy production may be to the environment, the Charleston Post and Courier reported.
Dominion and Santee Cooper have been forecasting how much power you will use and studying how to best supply it to you.
This is more important than ever now.
Electric utilities need to account for man-made climate change, more and more electric vehicles, the expansion of solar and wind energy, and new technologies such as large battery-storage devices.
In 2019, SC lawmakers passed a law to set standardsutilities need to meet.
The law also gave utility regulators, consumer advocates, solar developers and environmentalists a chance to challenge utility plans.
Those groups are now pushing the state’s utilities to rush adoption of renewable energy, increase energy-efficiency for customers and close aging coal plants.
Eddy Moore of the Coastal Conservation League said the public can now hold the utilities accountable. 
That’s important because Dominion has promised to eliminate or offset all carbon emissions by 2050.
Moore told the Post and Courier he expects public involvement in energy planning to increase.
 This is becoming more important for large businesses that have sustainability goals and local governments that are trying to reduce their carbon footprints.
Dominion, Duke and Santee Cooper operate more than 95 generating stations throughout the Carolinas.
Their plants are a mixture of gas turbines, nuclear reactors, aging coal-fired boilers, new solar farms, 100-year-old hydroelectric dams and small generating units powered by landfill methane.
Those can meet most of the demands of the utilities’ ratepayers in the state and more than 2 million electric cooperative members.
What they are trying to figure out is how long they should keep existing plants running and what types of energy sources they’ll need to invest in to replace them.
 They are looking at solar power, adding natural gas generation and extending the life of 7 nuclear stations including the VC Summer plant where a $9 billion fiasco that would have added two new reactors.