After a competitive bid process, Santee Cooper has approved Brookfield Asset Management’s proposal to complete the two partially built AP1000 reactors at the Virgil C. Summer nuclear site in Jenkinsville, S.C.
This move comes as the board of directors at the South Carolina state-owned utility approved the proposal among other key energy projects last week.
Brookfield Asset Management’s letter of intent establishes a six-week initial project feasibility period where the parties will jointly select a project manager and evaluate construction contractors, according to the press release.
Santee Cooper Board Chairman Peter McCoy said the proposal will not require funding from rate payers, which already invested heavily in the unfinished nuclear units. Santee Cooper set out a goal to complete the reactors with private funding. The restarted project could bring 2,200 megawatts onto the grid.
Santee Cooper sought proposals to acquire and finish the Virgil C. Summer units in January with bids due by May 5. The utility said it heard from 70 bidders and received 15 formal proposals to restart the construction of the reactors.
Santee Cooper said a key element of resuming the projects is the continued involvement of Westinghouse, which designed and owns the AP1000 technology.
Brookfield Asset Management, a privately-held global asset management company, won partly because “Brookfield is a majority owner of Westinghouse, which added to their proposal,” Santee Cooper President and CEO Jimmy Staton said in the release.
The Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station has three units, in which only one unit is currently active. Unit 1, which began commercially operating in 1984, is a pressurized water reactor with the capacity of 973 megawatts and is operated by Dominion Energy.
The nuclear expansion project was the center of a legal scandal several years ago that led to some corporate executives being convicted in federal court on fraud-related charges.
Units 2 and 3 were abandoned by Santee Cooper and South Carolina Electric and Gas, a subsidiary of SCANA, in 2017 citing high costs. The project cost around $9 billion.Dominion subsequently purchased SCANA.