Attorney General Alan Wilson wants to reduce legal fees for SCE&G ratepayers’ lawyers.

He is asking the court to give more of the money to the ratepayers.

The 11 SCE&G ratepayers’ attorneys want $63.5 million in contingency fees and costs for their lawsuit over the failed $9 billion nuclear project.

That amounts to almost $5.7 million per attorney.

That lawsuit led to a $2.2 billion settlement that includes at least $115 million in refunds to ratepayers.

But Dominion Energy, as the new SCE&G owner, will be allowed to charge electricity users $2.3 billion over the next 20 years.

Due to a Public Service Commission ruling, that cost will be split up among the company’s roughly 725,000 ratepayers, month by month.

That means the typical home will pay $7.10 a month for 1,000 kilowatt-hours of usage, according to an analysis by the Office of Regulatory Staff, the state’s utility watchdog.

Wilson asked the court to set a fee most favorable to ratepayers in view of the state’s substantial contribution to this case.

“The state was a driving force in settlement. That contribution should reduce the amount of the fees going to class counsel and thereby, in effect, provide a rebate to ratepayers.”

Wilson’s filing points out that, even though the state was a defendant, it was the Attorney General’s Office that contended even before the lawsuit that the Base Load Review Act is unconstitutional to ratepayers.

The legislative-passed Base Load Review Act allowed SCE&G to charge ratepayers more than $2 billion for reactors that were never finished.

The court agreed that the BLRA is unconstitutional as applied to ratepayers.

Wilson said SCE&G ratepayers deserve fair and equitable treatment in light of the entire BLRA fiasco.