Santee Cooper and the bottom line
The South Carolina Public Service Authority (Santee Cooper) has the monopoly on producing electric energy for about 2 million customers in almost all of the State of South Carolina. As a state owned enterprise there is no over-sight or control of how they operate. Very similar to the Federal Tennessee Valley Authority.
Both have very similar mission statements.
Santee Cooper’s mission is “to be the state’s leading resource for improving the quality of life for the people of South Carolina. Among the activities to fulfill this mission, Santee Cooper is committed to being a leader in economic development”.
The mission of the TVA is to “provide and improve the lives, economies, environment, and commercial development for the citizens”.
Looking at these statements it is very interesting to see the difference in the way these two utilities work at improving “quality of life” for their areas.
TVA launched a program called Generation Partners, which offers homeowners the option of installing their own rooftop solar system or windmill and selling the electricity generated back to TVA for 15 cents per kWh, more than twice the going rate for traditionally generated juice.
Ed Colston, marketing manager at TVA and director of the Generation Partners program, puts it more bluntly: “We are not trying to change the world,” he said, “we’re just trying to make that option available — in a way that makes practical sense for our bottom line.” To wit, the Generation Partners program is nearly cost-free for TVA.
“We are appealing to a constituency out there that would be putting solar and wind on their homes anyway,” said Colston. Still, the program has its advantages: For those who do want to add renewables to their home, TVA makes the process much quicker and easier — addressing safety concerns with local distributors and smoothing out the technical issues related to interconnecting the system to the grid (which can be a tedious and time-intensive challenge with some utilities). Plus, the TVA offers a one-time $500 disbursement and 15 cent-per-kilowatt payment for residences generating surplus power. As a point of reference, the retail outfits that buy from the TVA charge customers about 7.5 cents for power, meaning that if it’s a sunny summer in the South, a solar-powered home can net a homeowner a decent profit.
That’s more incentive than most utilities offer. But in the long run, it may be as good a deal for TVA as it is for the customer: The Generation Partners program is an easy alternative to adding solar to the Green Power Switch program. It has cost TVA almost 10 times more to install solar projects than to build wind farms. “We will essentially pay less to help these homeowners add the solar generation themselves than we can build those projects ourselves,” said Colston. Right now, of TVA’s roughly 30 MW renewables capacity, 0.5 MW is solar-generated.
Let’s look at another strategy that utilities use to live up to their mission statement. To implement an increase in solar-energy use they incentivize the building of solar systems directly. Austin Energy, a community-owned utility in Austin, Texas, offers low-interest, no-fee loans up to $20,000 for the purchase and installation of PV solar systems, payable over 10 years with no prepayment penalties. They also have a very good net metering and interconnection program. It’s another program that is nearly cost-free for Austin Energy. All of these programs do fulfill their mission statements and “improve quality of life” for their customers.
Now lets look at Santee Cooper and what they offer for the quality of life in South Carolina. They have NO net metering program. They make it tedious and time-intensive to interconnect any system to the grid. They will not say how much they will pay for the excess energy you produce, if you ever get to the point of producing any. It is easy to see that Santee Cooper is offering nothing. The thing about solar power is, it’s impossible to control the distribution…and that’s where Santee Cooper makes its money, but as shown above, great renewable energy programs can be put in place by utilities with little or no cost to the utility and certainly have no effect on their bottom line.
The question that everyone in the nation should be asking is what is wrong with the thinking of a State owned utility like Santee Cooper? Why are they the last in the nation to implement renewable energy programs that would “improve the quality of life” for the people of South Carolina. It works for Austin Energy and it works for the TVA. Isn’t it time that the State of South Carolina stopped treating it’s people like a bastard child?
Please, take a minute and send an e-mail to Governor Mark Sanford and ask him to please change the thinking at The South Carolina Public Service Authority so that renewable energy can improve your quality of life.
Here is an e-mail to the Governor Mark Sanford, just add your name and address, or write your own, change this one as you like, but….
Please send one.