Santee Cooper gauges interest in completing VC Summer nuclear plant
Santee Cooper is seeking proposals to acquire and finish the VC Summer nuclear power plant in South Carolina in the USA, where construction of two AP1000 units was abandoned in 2017, but has no plans to operate the units itself.
The company has launched a process seeking proposals to acquire and complete, or propose alternatives, for the two partially constructed generating units. Parties that are "interested in acquiring the project and related assets, and potentially completing one or both units or pursuing alternative uses of the assets" have until 5 May to respond to a Request for Proposal being conducted on behalf of Santee Cooper by Centerview Partners LLC.
"We are seeing renewed interest in nuclear energy, fuelled by advanced manufacturing investments, AI-driven data centre demand, and the tech industry's zero-carbon targets," Santee Cooper President and CEO Jimmy Staton said. "Considering the long timelines required to bring new nuclear units online, Santee Cooper has a unique opportunity to explore options for Summer Units 2 and 3 and their related assets that could allow someone to generate reliable, carbon emissions-free electricity on a meaningfully shortened timeline."
Santee Cooper "has no plans to own or operate those units", Staton said, but added that the process could help identify "another entity with a viable alternative" that would benefit the company's customers, support economic development and provide value to the state of South Carolina.
Factors cited by the company for its decision include a need for new generating capacity, driven by data centre growth, the "continued onshoring of advanced manufacturing", and fossil fuel unit retirements, as well as "significant" US interest in repowering previously closed or cancelled nuclear projects. It also noted federal support for nuclear construction, including tax credits and loan guarantees.
Construction of two AP1000 units began at VC Summer in 2013. However, the owners of the Summer project - Scana subsidiary South Carolina Electric & Gas Company (SCE&G) and Santee Cooper - decided in August 2017 to abandon construction of the units following reactor vendor Westinghouse's filing for bankruptcy in March that year.
In January 2017, SCE&G shared this image of the VC Summer unit 2's first steam generator being lifted into place (Image: SCE&G)
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved SCE&G's request to terminate the combined construction and operating licences for the units in 2019.
Majority owner SCE&G (now Dominion Energy South Carolina) transferred its interest in the assets to Santee Cooper in 2018, and in 2020 Santee Cooper and Westinghouse finalised a settlement giving Santee Cooper full ownership of the non-nuclear equipment and to split the net sale proceeds of the nuclear-related equipment associated with the project. Westinghouse was responsible for marketing the nuclear-related equipment, with parts from the cancelled plants earmarked for the completion of Khmelnitsky unit 4 in Ukraine.
The two-unit Vogtle plant was at a similar stage of construction to Summer at the time the South Carolina project was abandoned, and Vogtle's owners - Southern Company's Georgia Power, Oglethorpe Power, MEAG Power and Dalton Utilities - opted to continue with the project. Vogtle 3 and 4 became the first new nuclear units to be constructed in the USA in more than 30 years, with unit 3 entering commercial operation in 2023 and unit 4 in 2024.
The successful use of AP1000 technology at Vogtle is highlighted by Santee Cooper in its announcement. It also claims that Summer is "the only site in the USA that could deliver 2,200 MWs of nuclear capacity on an accelerated timeline", located in the "nuclear envelope" of the existing VC Summer station site - home to an operating single-unit pressurised water plant - with water and transmission infrastructure upgrades built to accommodate output from the units.
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