Sierra Club challenges latest SCE&G nuclear plant cost overrun
July 13, 2016
COLUMBIA, SC – The South Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club filed a petition to intervene before the state Public Service Commission (PSC) to challenge SCE&G’s latest $850 million cost overrun and schedule delay for its V.C. Summer Nuclear Plant, Units 2 and 3.
This latest price hike will bring the estimated sticker-price of the plant to over $14 billion, some 43% over the originally promised price tag. Sierra Club will urge the PSC to reject the utility’s efforts to charge ratepayers for these imprudent new costs; and, instead, make SCE&G stockholders bear the costs of mismanaging this project. Approval of these latest burdensome cost overruns will simply add to the now annual automatic electric rate hikes passed on to ratepayers by the PSC under the unjust 2007 SC Baseload Review Act.
This fall the PSC will OK a ninth straight annual rate hike for its customers since plant construction began. 17% of customers’ electric bills will go to financing this nuclear project, for a net total of $1.1 billion paid by customers to finance SCE&G’s own construction costs instead of for their actual electric service. The Baseload Review Act, rammed through the SC General Assembly by SCE&G, provides a ‘blank check’ for the utility to recover risky nuclear plant costs up front from ratepayers whether or not they will ever benefit from its electricity output. However, the PSC does have the authority to reject plant cost increases if deemed “imprudent.”
The Sierra Club has led multiple challenges to approval of this project and to repeated cost overruns. Other intervenors at the PSC now include large industrial customers (the South Carolina Energy Users Committee) and the electric cooperatives which must buy their power from the plants co-owner, Santee Cooper. Chapter Conservation Chair and attorney Bob Guild will serve as legal counsel for the Club in the matter.
Since day one, the SC Sierra Club has decried the V.C. Summer project as a boondoggle that would bring more dirty, dangerous and expensive nuclear generation to our state, all the while crowding out the cheaper and cleaner energy alternatives of improved energy efficiency and renewables like solar and wind power. Increased energy efficiency and solar, controlled by customers themselves, also free ratepayers from further dependence on monopoly utilities. Meanwhile, the regressive impact of this costly project hits marginalized populations of our state the hardest — impoverished and elderly citizens who live paycheck to paycheck.
“This project is a formula for wealthy, corporate stockholders to profit off the backs of everyday citizens of our state, while posing the inherent risks of a nuclear accident and increasing the community’s nuclear waste burden,” said Chapter Vice Chair and Environmental Justice lead liaison Marcurius Byrd.
Chapter Steering Committee Member and Energy Chair Susan Corbett noted, “Nuclear is now the most expensive, time consuming, ratepayer dependent and risky energy source we have, not to mention being the only technology which will burden us with deadly radioactive waste forever. There are so many other clean, safer and more affordable ways to generate electricity. Let’s focus on energy efficiency improvements and solar power that provide more cost-effective electricity and create economic freedom for future generations.”
“We don’t have time to sit around and say, ‘We told you so.’ It’s time to act, and we look to the public to stand up for its rights and to call on elected officials and Public Service Commissioners to look out for ratepayers, not corporate stockholders,” concluded Chairman Hall.
The South Carolina Sierra Club has over 5,000 members statewide and is an affiliate of the larger national Sierra Club. The Club’s mission is to explore, enjoy and protect the wild places of the earth.
