New power plant slated for Hampton County as alternative to scuttled Georgetown project
State-owned power company Santee Cooper plans to build a natural gas plant in Hampton County to help replace the energy that will be lost when the utility closes an aging coal-fired power station later this decade in Georgetown.
Santee Cooper’s board of directors discussed the proposal, unveiled at its meeting Monday, in the wake of a scuttled plan to build a larger natural gas plant in Georgetown.
The new gas plant would be one-half to one-third the size of the combined cycle natural gas plant that was proposed for Georgetown, according to plans. The new, smaller plant would be in the range of 340 to 520 megawatts. It is not known how the plan would affect monthly power bills.
Santee Cooper had planned to build a large natural gas plant to replace the approximately 1,100 megawatts of coal that would be lost when the Winyah plant closes in Georgetown. The coal plant is scheduled to close in 2029.
But South Carolina’s electric cooperatives, the utility’s major customers, declined to participate in construction of a large natural gas plant, estimated to cost $1 billion.
Last week, they released their own plan that did not include construction of a power plant. The cooperatives said they preferred to buy power from other utilities and store large amounts of energy in utility scale batteries to meet future energy demands.
Collectively, the Santee and cooperative plans would add up to enough energy to replace the Georgetown facility, according to Santee Cooper.
One Santee Cooper board member said natural gas is still the way to go. The state has future energy needs, board members said.
“We’re going to need more resources,’’ Santee Cooper board member Stephen Mudge said. “It’s incumbent on us and the rest of the state to get the biggest, baddest gas plant we can get. It seems obvious to me.’’
Santee Cooper’s latest natural gas plant proposal is to build a facility that, during summer, would have a capacity exceeding 338 megawatts, the utility said in a news release after Monday’s board meeting.
The plant would be constructed so that it later could be converted to take hydrogen, which is emissions free, and is expected to be commercially available.
Santee Cooper’s release said Hampton is being looked at because it “offers lower risk related to gas availability,’’ but it did not elaborate. Hampton is a small county in South Carolina’s Lowcountry north of Hilton Head Island along the Georgia border.
The release said a new natural gas plant would help solar expansion.
“Solar power is an intermittent resource, and natural gas can be ramped up or down quickly as the sun rises, falls, or hides behind an afternoon thunderstorm, which provides the system reliability we need,’’ Santee Cooper chief executive Jimmy Staton said in the release. “The unit we’re planning also could be switched to hydrogen fuel when that market matures, which will further decrease our carbon footprint.”
The company’s latest proposal comes amid concerns about the need to build large generating plants. Santee Cooper pulled the plug on a coal plant in 2009 and, along with SCE&G, walked away from a massive nuclear plant expansion in 2017. In both cases, expense and need killed the projects.
Eddy Moore, who tracks energy issues for the S.C. Coastal Conservation League, was skeptical of Santee Cooper’s latest plan for natural gas. He said it had been developed with limited public participation.
Moore has expressed reservations about building large natural gas plants because of the potential environmental impacts and costs.
“We are 100 percent in favor of maintaining (electrical) reliability but we want all the information to be on the table at the early stage of planning,’’ he said. “Don’t give us a plan that you have finished, and the rest is a dog and pony show.’’
Moore characterized the differences between the cooperatives and Santee Cooper “a dance.’’
Santee Cooper is saying that, if the cooperatives don’t agree to a large natural gas plant, the utility will have to build a slightly smaller one with its own expense — one that could “have higher unit costs for both construction and operation,’’ he said.
Santee Cooper’s plan also may be at odds with what state legislators want. Some lawmakers have expressed interest in Santee Cooper jointly building a large natural gas plant jointly with Dominion Energy, as a way to save money.
Utilities across the country have been shuttering coal-fired power plants in recent years because the plants release tons of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
Increasing restrictions on greenhouse gas pollution and contaminants, such as mercury, have made the plants more expensive to operate, particularly the older facilities, and many utilities have chosen to abandon them.
South Carolina at one time had about a dozen coal-fired power plant sites, but that has dwindled. Today, coal stations remain in fewer than a half-dozen places.
Natural gas, which became more affordable because of fracking, began filling in the gap to replace coal. But while many of these plants are cleaner than coal plants, they still release greenhouse gases.
In recent years, utilities have also been looking at alternative energy sources, such as solar power, to handle some of the load. They also have been seeking to buy energy from other utilities that have excess capacity.
This story was originally published October 24, 2022 at 12:33 PM.
