South Carolina Senate turns wide-ranging energy bill into resolution supporting more power

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A bill that power companies call vital to keeping the lights on in South Carolina has been turned into a resolution that only expresses support for the idea by the Senate, which wasn’t ready to give more latitude to utilities that cost ratepayers billions.

The Senate agreed on a 39-2 vote Wednesday to gut the House’s 80-plus page energy bill and replace it with a resolution acknowledging the state’s power needs are growing. They also promised to extensively discuss energy matters this fall and have their own legislation ready around the time the General Assembly returns in 2025.

Upset that the Senate wasn’t taking up the proposal, the House started attaching it to entirely different bills like one requiring therapists to take suicide prevention training and another to allow firefighters who live outside the state to get cancer health care benefits if they work in South Carolina.

Republican Sen. Tom Davis spent weeks trying to broker the impasse, but many senators, including their leadership, did not want to act quickly to relax rules and safeguards.

Those rules were put in place after state-owned Santee Cooper and private South Carolina Electric & Gas cost ratepayers and shareholders billions of dollars when they collected the money to build a pair of nuclear reactors that were abandoned before construction was finished.

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