An asset like Santee Cooper should benefit its owners and customers.

Those owners are state taxpayers.

Those customers are Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative members who buy its power.

Benefiting owners and customers is not always the case. Santee Cooper is an unhappy example. It bet its future and its stakeholders’ investment and deeply failed. Santee Cooper failed itself and the people who own it and buy from it.

Human nature has an odd way of looking at failures. Check this discussion about risk from the Harvard Business Review:

WE TEND TO BE overconfident about the accuracy of our forecasts and risk assessments and far too narrow in our assessment of the range of outcomes that may occur.

We often compound this problem with a confirmation bias, which drives us to favor information that supports our positions (successes) and suppress information that contradicts them (failures).

When events depart from our expectations, we tend to escalate commitment, irrationally direct even more resources to our failed course of action and throw good money after bad.

Santee Cooper hits the punch list:

• It is incapable of realistically assessing and addressing risk. It is blind to it.

• It overestimates its ability to change. It has convinced its apologists. “Confirmation bias” clouds the future of a hobbled entity.

IN RESPONSE Santee Cooper and South Carolina are “directing even more resources to our failed course of action – throwing good money after bad.” Every day that goes by with massive debt is money gone. In this case, billions of customer dollars.

How can we realize the value of Santee Cooper as an asset?

The SC Small Business Chamber dissected that question in a report, “No Longer an Asset.” It pulled together a litany of Santee Cooper behaviors that have tarnished the utility. It’s an amazing list of issues, too.

The report starkly shows how irredeemable Santee Cooper has become.

“An asset is anything of value or a resource that can be converted into cash.”

An asset’s balance sheet is benefits versus liabilities? Do the negatives outweigh the positives of state ownership? Yes.

Add to that Santee Cooper’s risk to the state – open-ended surprises, opaque operations, lack of common sense. Recurring surprises throw wrenches into any prospect of planning a reasonable future. A culture of ill-advised decisions and insular thinking is no way to operate an asset.

LOOK AT IT like this: If an out-of-state company wanted to come into the state with Santee Cooper’s record, we would say it does not measure up. No thanks. We don’t need those kinds of problems.

It seems odd that risk is preferred to more certainty and lack of openness is preferred to no secrets and no surprises.

South Carolina juggles a litany of concerns: A challenging economy, covid, education and economic development.

We can save valuable time and prevent risk by selling Santee Cooper. A utility with real energy resources and skills can turn Santee Cooper into an example of a clean, efficient, open organization.

Scott Carlberg is executive director of Energy Consumers of the Carolinas’ Is Santee Cooper an Asset?