For the sake of Mid-Carolina Electric members, lets hope Santee Cooper’s new executive team knows what it’s doing.

They got off to a bit of a rocky start. To prevent lawmakers selling taxpayer-owned Santee Cooper, they planned to add solar energy, a new gas-fired power plant and cost sharing with an investor-owned Georgia utility.

When word of this reached state lawmakers, it triggered a dispute between new CEO Mark Bonsall and Sen. Hugh Leather-man, the powerful Senate Finance Committee chair.

Leatherman was concerned about any Santee Cooper agreement with the Southern Co. of Georgia. Southern Co. is one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the Southeast.

It is building twin reactors similar to those on which Santee Cooper and SC Electric & Gas lost $9 billion.

Santee Cooper brass were working with Southern to find ways to jointly manage their fuel supplies, expenses, energy trading and coal ash waste.

The Department of Administration that is handling the bids for Santee Cooper argued this would “disrupt, bias or circumvent” state lawmakers’ plans.

Lawmakers plan to vote early next year on selling taxpayer-owned Santee Cooper, hiring a company to manage it or retaining state control.

Bonsall and Santee Cooper Chairman Dan Ray wrote every state lawmaker that Southern did not plan to take part in bidding to buy them.

Santee Cooper, they added, was doing what lawmakers asked them to do – reforming a business that supplies electricity to Mid-Carolina Electric and the state’s other 19 cooperatives.

Santee Cooper is planning to:

• Freeze rates for 5 years.

• Pay off some of their $4 billion nuclear fiasco debt.

• Increase solar capacity 500% adding more than 1,000 megawatts of power.

• Gain up to 100 megawatts from a natural gas turbine.

Santee Cooper has a dismal track record but the new leadership has fresh ideas. There may be hope after all.

– Jerry Bellune