CoolSculpting in Santee, SC

Santee Cooper is ponying up at least $83 million for power that will flow from the nation's newest nuclear reactors to ensure it can meet short-term demand on its system.

The utility has struck a deal to buy electricity generated at Plant Vogtle in eastern Georgia from Jacksonville, Fla.-based JEA, which approved the purchase agreement last week.

State-owned Santee Cooper will pay at least $83 million to tap into 206 megawatts in 2027 — enough to run up to about 200,000 homes — and 103 megawatts the next year.

JEA's board was told last week that it could expect $203 million in revenue from the agreement while also confirming the $83 million figure on March 5.

The city-run Florida utility pays $250 million annually under a long-term contract to buy electricity from Plant Vogtle, according to a report in the Jacksonville Daily Record. JEA is offsetting the energy it's selling with new purchase agreements with Florida Power & Light.

Santee Cooper said it began scouring the market to buy excess electricity last year in what it described as an increasingly routine business practice for the utility industry.

The JEA deal was the largest of the transactions.

“Energy purchases we make over those two years would be based on pricing and our system needs," Santee Cooper said this week.

Opened in the late 1980s, the Alvin W. Vogtle Generating Plant is about 10 miles west of the Savannah River and Allendale County in South Carolina. It's operated by Southern Co.’s Georgia Power division.

Two of the four nuclear reactors at the site were completed in 2023 and 2024, making them the last in the U.S. to plug into the grid. Santee Cooper’s agreement with JEA requires that all of power comes from the new units, which cost about $35 billion to construct.

The Palmetto State utility serves about 2.2 million residents and businesses, directly or indirectly through small electric cooperatives. It has estimated that energy-intensive data centers will drive about 70 percent of its future power demand, coupled with population increases and commercial growth.

Santee Cooper is entering year two of a $10.6 billion decade-long capital spending plan to add 650 megawatts of new power to its system by 2028. It said the deal with JEA and other suppliers will "support customer needs before those resources are complete."

Santee Cooper this week finalized a deal to borrow about $650 million, partly to help pay for an array of upgrades and system expansions that will begin in 2026. Its biggest long-term financial commitment will be half of a $5 billion natural-gas plant that it's proposing to build with Dominion Energy in Colleton County by 2033. The Canadys project is expected to add another 1,100 megawatts to its system.

Santee Cooper had planned by now to be tapping into its own clean energy produced at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station that it partly owns. But in mid-2017, the utility and Dominion Energy’s predecessor abandoned work on two reactors they were building at the site following years of delays, mismanagement and cost overruns.

Brookfield Asset Management is now negotiating with Santee Cooper to buy a majority stake in the unfinished units for $2.7 billion.