A day after inking a $2.7 billion deal to lead South Carolina’s nuclear reboot, executives of a New York investment firm were in the Palmetto State to talk about what drew them to the multibillion-dollar undertaking.
Hundreds gathered Tuesday on the floor of Colonial Life Arena in Columbia to hear from South Carolina utility executives, legislators and leadership of Brookfield Asset Management — the winning bid holder selected to restart construction on two abandoned reactors at the V.C. Summer nuclear plant in Fairfield County.
“It’s a bit of a no-brainer for us,” Mitch Davidson, a managing partner in Brookfield’s Renewable Power and Transition Group, told the crowd at the second annual nuclear summit.
In October, Brookfield, its subsidiary Westinghouse and Canada-based Cameco inked a partnership deal valued at $80 billion with the U.S. government. The companies will build 10 reactors identical to those at V.C. Summer.
South Carolina’s reactors could be the first and second on the list.
“There are parts of this project that are already there, big parts that are there — equipment is there, foundations are there,” Davidson told the SC Daily Gazette. “So this seems to be the perfect opportunity for us as a start.”
The companies involved still have at least six months’ worth of engineering and financial feasibility studies to determine whether the project — a black mark on the state for nearly a decade — stands a chance of ever getting done.
“I’m not going to tell you that we’re able to do it faster. That’s all things that we have to determine,” Davidson said. “But you would think, because it’s already partially built, that you can do quicker, faster, cheaper.”
And according to the leaders of Santee Cooper, if it happens, it will be done differently this time.
“This is not going to be on the backs of rate payers. It’s not going to be on the backs of our taxpayers in the state,” said board chairman Peter McCoy, who’s led the utility since 2021.
He draws a distinction from the debacle he investigated as a House committee chairman, then prosecuted as U.S. attorney.
“This is private business stepping up, with help from the federal government,” McCoy said.
Santee Cooper and the now defunct South Carolina Electric & Gas started construction on the two first-of-their-kind nuclear reactors alongside an existing unit near rural Jenkinsville in early 2013. But the project was riddled with delays, cost overruns and fraud that led to multiple federal convictions of former executives.
The utilities scrapped the plant’s expansion in 2017, but not before jointly spending $9 billion on the reactors that never produced a megawatt.
As part of the restart, Santee Cooper and its customers won’t put a single cent more into construction. The utility will, however, retain a 25% ownership interest in the expansion should it be successful, allowing it to buy, at cost, a portion of power produced to sell to its customers.
Davidson said this arrangement works differently than historical nuclear projects because it’s not just utilities and their customers putting their pocketbooks on the line. There are more parties involved so the financial risk gets chopped into smaller pieces.
“I work with utility companies around the United States, and I would tell you that all of them are very focused on this project,” said John Cogan of Centerview Partners, financial advisors to state-owned utility Santee Cooper amid the sale effort. “They see Jenkinsville as the rebirth of the nuclear renaissance in the United States.”
And the driver behind this “renaissance,” according to the panelists, is the massive demand for electricity coming from major industrial users — namely, data centers.
“We haven’t seen load growth, like true load growth, in this country for a decade,” Davidson said. “The data centers have been the driver behind all of this. The data centers, and the size that they’re getting to today, are the genesis.”
That’s why tech giants, such as Microsoft, have taken an interest and been willing to act as financial partners in the restart of retired nuclear reactors in places such as Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island.
“We’ve got to make sure that we build these power plants efficiently and at a reasonable price,” Davidson said.
Especially, he added, if the United States wants to continue to play host to these massive data centers and the advancements in artificial intelligence that the centers make possible.
Source: South Carolina Daily Gazette