A South Carolina utility desires to restart building on an influence plant that was mothballed eight years in the past after working over price range and pushing an iconic American firm out of business.
Hoping to capitalize on the info middle energy growth, state-owned utility Santee Cooper is searching for companions to assist finance and full the 2 reactors on the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station, the Wall Street Journal reviews.
Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station is a single reactor energy plant. Santee Cooper was spearheading the development of two new reactors, an enlargement that started in 2008. The unfinished undertaking was halted in 2017 after an audit revealed the undertaking value had ballooned from $9.8 billion to $25 billion and that completion would take far longer than anticipated, inflicting it to overlook $2 billion in federal incentives.
The boondoggle contributed to the chapter of Westinghouse, the nuclear energy firm descended from one of many earliest electrical firms within the United States. It additionally led to securities fraud convictions for 2 executives at SCANA, Santee Cooper’s accomplice within the undertaking.
The two reactors that had been below building are sisters of a pair put in on the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia. The Vogtle enlargement was lastly commissioned in 2023 after years of delays and billions in overruns, casting a pall over your entire U.S. nuclear energy business.
Despite the troubled historical past at V.C. Summer, Santee Cooper is optimistic that it’ll discover consumers as nuclear energy experiences a resurgence of curiosity fueled by skyrocketing energy demand from AI knowledge facilities.
The utility has some tailwinds: Microsoft lately inked a take care of Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island, and Meta is searching for builders to suggest 1 to 4 gigawatts of recent nuclear capability. Santee Cooper is reportedly hoping to promote to a consortium that would come with a tech firm taken with securing energy.
Any deal Santee places collectively will nonetheless face some probably thorny politics. A portion of the prices for the V.C. Summer enlargement had been foisted onto ratepayers on account of a state regulation that allowed utilities to dump the price of new nuclear reactors. Completing the enlargement and discovering a purchaser for the ability might assist relieve the burden. Being a state-owned utility, politicians will undoubtedly take an curiosity in any deal, for higher or worse.
