By Scott Graber
It is Wednesday and I have the Post and Courier that reveals a pending bill that is supposed to “give more protections to Confederate monuments.”
Wait a minute!
I thought we had dealt with these forlorn statues.
Alas our legislators want to make sure there are no additional plaques putting a heretical spin on Wade Hampton or “Pitchfork Ben” or the forlorn-faced stone men mostly ignored by locals and tourists alike.
While our young, conservative salons walk to the podium — bloviating to an almost empty chamber about the ongoing pollution of South Carolina’s history — there are real problems that bedevil our State.
One of which is electricity.
Many who read this column are new to South Carolina and do not remember the astounding negligence and subsequent cover up surrounding two nuclear reactors at the VC Summer Nuclear Site.
In an attempt to install these Westinghouse-built reactors in 2008, SCE&G and Santee Cooper spent billions of dollars before the engineers and executive finally realized that they simply didn’t have the expertise to do the job. Furthermore they knew this about two years before revealing this fact to the public.
Roughly $9 billion was “lost” in this process — $2.3 billion was eventually passed-on to stunned SCE&G “rate-payers” who were were allowed to pay-off this debt over the next 15 years.
The Generally Assembly sensed they needed to do something — something beyond shaking their youthful fingers at the utility executives. And so, in 2018, the Legislature repealed the South Carolina Base Load Review Act which allowed SCE&G to charge its customers for construction costs before the new nuclear plants were finished.
Then, in May of 2025, these same salons came up with a new idea — legislation that had a provision that effectively locked-in the utility’s “profit margin” for five years.
Normally this Return on Equity (ROE) would be determined every time the utility wanted to raise rates. Normally they would have to open their books and prove every dollar they intended to spend was justified.
But our utilities argued that this was too burdensome; that it caused “rate shock;” and God knows the rate-payers had suffered enough.
“Utilities sold this as a way to avoid ‘rate shock.’ In their pitch, smaller annual rate increases would be easier to swallow than one big 10% jump every few years. But here’s the trick: because Duke or Dominion gets to lock in its profit rate first, it has every incentive to set that profit rate as high as possible. Then for the next five years, every new cost it adds to your bill gets multiplied by that inflated profit rate.” (Vote Solar)
Dominion got a 9.94% profit rate in 2024 and, now, has applied for 10.5 % profit rate in 2026, saying it needs another $322 million dollars to support $1.4 billion it has invested in the electric grid.
Meanwhile costs of construction have sky-rocketed and Donald Trump — worried about the resulting increased rates and the forthcoming mid-terms—convened a conference on January 16 to discuss these record high rates.
The White House also dealt with the power demand driven by new “data centers” that are part and parcel of Artificial Intelligence. The National Electrical Manufacturing Association projects that data centers and transportation electrification — whatever that means — will drive a 50% increase in demand through 2050.
Recently I interviewed S.C. Sen. Tom Davis who revealed a draft of his new “Data Center Bill” designed to ensure that “existing taxpayers are protected from infrastructure cost allocation” as it relates to “the extraordinary amount of electricity” required.
Section 49-35-60 (B) of his bill says, in part, that the Public Service Commission shall have jurisdiction over “all rates charged,” “cost allocation methodologies,” and “shall approve rate agreements that insure data center operators bear full infrastructure costs …”
And Davis wants to expand this requirement (of paying for one’s own power infrastructure) beyond data centers to others who arrive in South Carolina with big electricity demands.
If one looks around it is obvious that rate payers are looking at profound increases for electricity, sewer treatment and — if you include the sales tax “pennies” for highways, bridges and open space — you’re talking about real tax payer money to subsidize the explosive suburbanization in the Lowcountry.
When Dominion comes before the Public Service Commission in May, I doubt the Commissioners will consider the collective impact of these fees that one can hardly avoid.
Previously the PSC gave Duke 70% of what it wanted.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
