South Carolina’s growth is a problem from an electrical perspective, Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative President and CEO Bob Paulling told Lexington locals at the Oct. 8 Lexington Chamber and Visitor Center’s Business Over Breakfast event.

“Nuclear is the answer in the long term. Natural gas is the answer in the short term,” Paulling said. “The problem we have in South Carolina is our growth. I say it’s a problem from an electrical perspective or a power supply perspective.”

Paulling also detailed the power restoration process after Hurricane Helene swept through the East Coast, damaging infrastructure, killing over 200 and leaving many without power.

“Believe it or not, during [Hurricane Helene], when the majority of the co-ops had power lines on the ground, we got an alert from Santee Cooper,” he said. “They were short on generation in the midst of the storm. That’s unbelievable.”

Noting that the Santee Cooper system is tied to Dominion and Duke and so on thus creating widespread outages when the storm damaged a lot of Southern power lines and more, Paulling emphasized the need for more generation in reserve to ensure electricity and power.

These changes come about at the state and federal levels, he said.

Amid Helene damage, outages peaked at around 97% of Mid-Carolina’s system and there were nearly 500 broken polls identified along with downed power and fiber lines.

So be nice to line workers, Paulling said, noting that it takes around four hours to restore just one pole, and the Carolinas had linemen travel hours to make these fixes, hailing from other United States electrical co-ops.

Across South Carolina, according to poweroutage.us, as of 10 a.m. on Oct. 8, there are 21,188 outages reported after Helene. And in Lexington County, according to poweroutage.us, there are 66 outages (two under Dominion Energy and 64 under Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative) as of 10 a.m. on Oct. 8.