Santee Cooper is the state-owned electric and water utility in South Carolina, as well as the state’s major power supplier and one of the largest public power companies in the country. Santee Cooper serves over 190,000 residential customers in Berkeley, Georgetown, and Horry counties. We provide power to 27 large industrial complexes, as well as the Central Electric Power Cooperative, the cities of Bamberg and Georgetown, the Piedmont Municipal Power Agency (with 10 member communities in South Carolina), and the Alabama Municipal Electric Authority. Santee Cooper supplies Central with wholesale power, which it then distributes to the state’s 20 electric cooperatives. Santee Cooper provides electricity to over 2 million South Carolinians, either directly or indirectly. Customers in Berkeley, Calhoun, Dorchester, and Orangeburg counties, as well as the Town of Santee, receive wholesale water from the utility.
This section provides general information on Santee Cooper and its numerous bond programs to bondholders, potential investors, and others.
Santee Cooper is a publicly traded company.
Santee Cooper has only ratepayers to turn to for debt repayment because it is a state-owned agency rather than a publicly listed enterprise (except for a small contribution from Dominion Energy after a ratepayer lawsuit).
What was the impact of the Santee Cooper power plant on South Carolina?
The Santee Cooper Electricity and Navigation Project, completed in 1939, enhanced navigation on the Santee and Cooper rivers in South Carolina while also providing hydroelectric power. The project’s goal was to improve the area’s health, recreation, and economics by creating Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie. With over 12,500 people removing over 177,000 acres (720 km2) of swamp and forestland, the Santee Cooper Effort was the greatest land-clearing project in US history at the time. Dams and dikes were built over 42 miles (68 km), including a 26-mile (42 km) long, 78-foot (24 m) tall earthen dike. The Pinopolis Dam includes a hydropower facility as well as the world’s highest single-lift lock. To regulate floodwaters, a 3,400-foot (1,000-meter) spillway was erected, with 62 gates enabling excess water to overflow. 42,000,000 cubic yards (32,000,000 m3) of soil were moved and 3.1 million cubic yards of concrete were poured in the nation’s greatest earth-moving endeavor.
On February 17, 1942, the $48.2 million project (55 percent government loan, 45 percent federal grant) began generating power. Power flowed to customers in Berkeley, Georgetown, and Horry counties when transmission lines were erected, and then to electric cooperatives serving customers in 46 counties.
How do I unsubscribe from Santee Cooper?
For the final bill, we’ll need a stop date and a forwarding address. We make every effort to respond the same day, but a minimum of two days notice is required to ensure a prompt response.
We will deduct the last bill from your deposit, if applicable, and the balance will be mailed to you at the forwarding address you indicate once service is disconnected.
Who constructed Santee Cooper?
The South Carolina Public Service Authority was founded by the state legislature to construct and oversee the Santee Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project. The goal of the project, which would result in the creation of two lakes, was to improve the area’s “health, welfare, and material wealth.”
How does Santee Cooper get its electricity?
Green power is electricity generated by Santee Cooper using renewable resources such as wind, solar, and landfill gas. Santee Cooper Green Power contributes to environmental preservation, reduces demand for nonrenewable natural resources, and enhances energy independence.
Our Green Power generating portfolio includes six landfill generating stations, nine solar projects, and one wind turbine spread around the state.
Proceeds from Green Power sales are utilized to develop further renewable energy, including 28 Green Power Solar School demonstration projects, 25 of which are in collaboration with South Carolina’s electric cooperatives. The other three are either direct Santee Cooper customers or are served by a municipality we serve. Green Power Solar Schools are supported by our Green Power customers.
What was the outcome of the Santee Cooper project?
The Santee Cooper Power and Navigation Project, built between 1939 and 1942, provided hydroelectric power from the Santee and Cooper rivers and improved navigation from the coast to the midlands by creating Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie.
Is Santee Cooper owned by Dominion Energy?
On July 20, a district court judge awarded final permission to a $520 million settlement in a class action civil suit filed against Santee Cooper for claimed deceptive business practices concerning the failed nuclear-expansion project at the Summer facility in South Carolina.
The two-reactor project, which was shelved in July 2017, had Santee Cooper as a junior partner to SCANA Corporation’s South Carolina Electric and Gas (NN, Aug. 2017, p. 17). SCANA became a wholly owned subsidiary of Virginia-based Dominion Energy in July 2019. (NN, Feb. 2019, p. 15).
Santee Cooper, according to the lawsuit filed by customers, boosted rates to meet the rising expenses of the Summer expansion even after it became clear that the project was no longer viable.
Santee Cooper is a cooperative.
The co-op distributes power to the state’s electric co-ops, which encompass all 46 counties and serve more than 1.3 million people, primarily from Santee Cooper and Duke Energy Carolinas.
How did Santee Cooper come to be?
The Santee Cooper project has a long history dating back to 1785, when a group of affluent investors petitioned the General Assembly to build a canal connecting the Santee and Cooper Rivers to promote inland navigation between Charleston and Columbia. The twenty-two-mile canal opened in 1800 and allowed landowners to export cotton, rice, and lumber to Charleston for the following fifty years. Railroads virtually eliminated the necessity for the inland waterway by the midnineteenth century, and marshy vines recovered the canal. During the 1920s, an engineer and riverboat operator named Thomas C. Williams was granted permission to repair the canal and reopen the area to inland navigation. For eight years, Williams’ Columbia Railroad and Navigation Company held the rights to this project, but construction was hampered by financial difficulties.
Governor Ibra Blackwood signed a bill in 1934 that established the South Carolina Public Service Authority and allowed it to dam the Santee River, divert its water into the Cooper River, clear land for two large reservoirs, build a hydroelectric plant at Pinopolis, and sell electricity to residents in surrounding counties. President Franklin D. Roosevelt awarded the Public Service Authority permission to use funds from the Public Works Administration a year later, making the Santee Cooper project (as it was rapidly nicknamed) the Palmetto State’s largest New Deal enterprise. Santee Cooper served a number of purposes. The hydroelectric facility would contribute to the electrification of rural farms; the establishment of two reservoirs would reopen navigation from Charleston to Columbia; and the management of the Santee River would prevent future floods and reduce malarial epidemics. The state’s impoverished agricultural sector would be attracted to industry by a mix of low-cost energy, efficient transportation, and a healthy environment. Senator James F. Byrnes, who was largely responsible for persuading President Franklin D. Roosevelt to endorse the project, and Charleston mayor Burnet Maybank, who drove the drive for public and political support inside the state, both backed Santee Cooper.
However, construction was not a given conclusion. Several groups objected to the Santee Cooper project. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes opposed government support of the project for personal and political reasons in Washington. Private utility companies in South Carolina chastised what they regarded as a government monopoly on power generation and distribution. Private landowners in the Santee Cooper area protested the displacement of families residing in the new flood basins, as well as the flooding of historic homes, churches, and battlefields. Environmentalists also expressed their displeasure with the loss of thousands of acres of virgin hardwood forest in the Santee Swamp and the devastation of wildlife habitat.
Construction began in 1939, after a four-year legal dispute. The project employed approximately fifteen thousand people at its peak, the majority of whom were on the Depression relief rolls. The employees cleared over 160,000 acres with handsaws and mule-drawn wagons while living in military-style camps distributed throughout the Santee and Pinopolis basins. They transported dirt and clay to dam sites, built railroads, relocated cemeteries, and helped build the diversion and tail-race canals, as well as the new power plant. Thousands of visitors traveled from all across the state to observe the mammoth operation, which became the greatest land-clearing project in US history and constructed the world’s largest single-lift lock. President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated the Santee Cooper as a defense project in 1941, and the power plant at Pinopolis began generating electricity a year later. Within two decades, it had supplied energy to the majority of the state’s farms as well as neighbouring counties’ industry. Surprisingly, the renamed Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie reservoirs drew sport anglers from all around the country. The 450-mile circumference of the lakes was soon littered with vacation homes, state parks, and fishing cottages. Fishing, boating, and other recreational activities provided more than $200 million in annual revenue to Santee Cooper country by the end of the twentieth century.
The Public Service Authority provided wholesale power to twenty cooperatives and two municipalities serving over 600,000 people by the end of the twentieth century, and it directly retailed electricity to over 130,000 more in-state customers. Santee Cooper is one of the largest state-owned utilities in the US, serving all 46 counties in South Carolina. The Santee Cooper Regional Water System was established in the 1990s by the Public Service Authority to clean and transport water from Lake Moultrie and provide water to much of the South Carolina lowcountry.
Walter B. Edgar, Santee Cooper: 19341984, Santee Cooper: 19341984, Santee Cooper: 19341984, Santee Cooper: 1934 R. L. Bryan, Columbia, S.C., 1984.
Irby, Jack Hayes. The New Deal in South Carolina. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 2001.