The Post and Courier Pee Dee reports that A year after Duke Energy, Dominion Energy and our state-owned Santee Cooper convinced the Legislature to change South Carolina’s utility law, a lot has already changed.
And those changes come, not coincidentally, as Dominion and Santee Cooper embark on their plans to build a natural gas plant at Canadys.
The old law required Duke and Dominion to wait until new plants were completed, tested and ready to serve their customers before they could recover their construction costs.
They had to track their financing costs and construction expenses, and only when the plant was ready to deliver power to the electric grid — when it was “used and useful” — could they add their reasonable costs to their rate base.
But under pressure from the investor-owned utilities and Santee Cooper, the General Assembly authorized a questionable accounting principle that allows them to charge customers for “construction work in progress.” And if the cost of the plant under construction exceeds the utilities’ original estimate?
This new law allows them to just keep adding cost overruns for reimbursement.