COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina’s state-owned utility is looking to a private company to revive a project to build two nuclear power plants that was abandoned eight years ago, losing more than $9 billion without generating a watt of power.
Santee Cooper’s board agreed Friday to start six weeks of negotiations with Brookfield Asset Management that they hope will lead to a deal that lets the private company build the nuclear plants at the V.C. Summer site near Jenkinsville at their own risk to generate power that they could mostly sell to whom they want, such as energy-gobbling data centers.
Santee Cooper said Brookfield preliminarily agreed to provide the utility with some of the power generated. But that and probably thousands of other details will have to be negotiated. In a twist, Brookfield took over the assets of Westinghouse Electric Co., which had to declare bankruptcy because of difficulties building new nuclear reactors.
Utility officials said the agreement gives hope the state can get something out of a debacle that led to four executives going to prison or home confinement for lying to regulators, shareholders, ratepayers and investigators and left millions of people paying for decades for a project that never produced electricity.
“The risk to the ratepayer is nil. The risk to the taxpayer is nil,” Santee Cooper Board Chairman Peter McCoy said.
There are still too many hurdles for the project to get past to consider this a win right now, said Tom Clements, executive director of the nuclear watchdog group Savannah River Site Watch.
After eight years in the elem