Santee Cooper is protecting SC jobs by opposing Century’s power grab in Goose Creek

Let me start with a question: Is it fair to take away financial savings from 2 million South Carolinians across the state and give them to a single company in Goose Creek in order to increase its profit?

In 2015 Chicago-based Century Aluminum became the 100% owner of Berkeley County’s Mt. Holly aluminum plant — and ever since then Century has relentlessly pursued a sweetheart electric deal that would improve its balance sheet at the expense of Santee Cooper’s other electric customers.

Santee Cooper produces and dispatches our own generation as economically as possible, and we buy and transmit lower-priced off-system electricity when we can.

And Century has demanded “first dibs” on that off-system electricity.

It first did so through contract negotiations with Santee Cooper — and then through legislative lobbying and even a federal lawsuit against Santee Cooper.

All of these efforts, however, ended in failure.

Now the investor-owned company has convinced the city of Goose Creek to annex the Mt. Holly plant site and form a municipal utility in order to grab that electricity solely for Century’s use, which would raise costs for everyone else.

In doing so Century also seeks to control transmission capacity that Santee Cooper owns and used last year to bring in 25% of the power we provided to wholesale and retail customers; in all, that’s more than 2 million people — as well as the industries that provide tens of thousands of jobs across South Carolina.

It’s not fair

But Santee Cooper has said no.

It has said that it’s not fair to take savings away from 2 million South Carolinians — and that it’s not fair to give those savings to Century.

And Santee Cooper has maintained residential bills that are clearly the lowest among large utilities serving South Carolina; in fact, our industrial power price is 20% lower than the national average (hardly the punishingly high power rates that some have alleged).

Contrary to what others have said, Santee Cooper does not oppose Goose Creek forming an electric utility.

We do, however, oppose any effort that tries to seize a facility we are obligated to serve — and tries to do so at the expense of our other customers while also being in violation of state law and federal energy regulations. Creating a municipal utility under the pretext of serving only one customer is the very definition of a “sham transaction” prohibited by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Santee Cooper supports municipal utilities; in fact, we serve two-thirds of South Carolina’s existing electric cities through competitively bid (and won) contracts.

We have helped bring industries with more than 84,000 jobs to the state, and we also directly serve some 27 large industrial customers.

In addition we conduct annual independent customer satisfaction surveys, and the most recent surveys found 100% satisfaction among both municipal and industrial respondents. (Century declined to participate in the industrial survey, citing ongoing legal matters.)

Enough is enough

As for Mt. Holly, Santee Cooper built and maintains generation and transmission specifically to serve the plant, and Santee Cooper has structured service to Century that has saved the smelter hundreds of millions of dollars since 2012.

In addition, even though our contract with Century ends in December, we have offered to extend this current arrangement if needed until the courts resolve Century’s latest legal challenges.

We have bent over backwards to help Century without hurting our other customers.

But enough is enough.

If South Carolina wants to solve the problems created by low aluminum prices, clearly that is possible — but it should not be done on the backs of all other electric customers.

We sympathize with Century’s profitability issues but the problem is low aluminum prices, not Santee Cooper.

That’s why we will continue to fight Century’s efforts to increase its profit at the expense of everyone else.

Peggy Pinnell represents Berkeley County on the Santee Cooper Board of Directors.

This story was originally published June 24, 2020 at 1:34 PM.