Personal Injury Attorneyin Santee, SC.

The "Mickey Mouse ears" helped open a few eyes last week.

The famous theme-park souvenir became a key visual clue during a Dec. 9 budget presentation for the board of state-owned electric utility Santee Cooper.

The "ears," in this case, were actually three large overlapping circles on a map showing the biggest business expansions in South Carolina this year. Specifically, they represented the data center projects Google is pursuing in Dorchester and Berkeley counties.

Similarly, a battery manufacturing plant coming to the Pee Dee region formed the crux of a smaller cluster that resembled "a tiger paw if you want to use that analogy," Greg McCormack, Santee Cooper's director of financial forecasting, told the board.

"So a lot of economic development going on in South Carolina," he said.

Not to mention a scorching population growth rate, fueled in large part by a newcomers moving to Santee Cooper's Grand Strand service territory from the Northeast and other places.

"We expect it to go on for quite some time," McCormack said. "And it's not just South Carolina but all of the states surrounding South Carolina. So really a migration to the Southeast."

Business

'Coming fast'

The pronounced influx of residents and, more critically, power-hungry businesses is wreaking havoc with utility planning forecasts, rendering even the most recent "load" projections obsolete.

State-owned Santee Cooper is a case in point.

In its best-guess scenario just two years ago, the Moncks Corner-based utility told regulators it would likely need to increase the amount of power it produces by 9 percent by 2040 — to 6,000 megawatts from 5,500 — to keep up with growth.

A year ago, it moved up the timeline to 2036.

The target date has been pushed yet again — shaving nearly a decade off the original estimate.

"Based on our new load forecast, we're a 6,000-megawatt system by 2027 as we quickly move to a 7,000-megawatt system," McCormack said Monday.

"Just a drastic change in Santee Cooper's planning process," he continued.

The lion's share of the growth-in-waiting isn't from Grand Strand retirees and other Palmetto State transplants.

The driving force is the existing industrial base combined with the growing carousel of energy-intensive businesses setting up shop in the state. They include the mammoth data centers being built in the Lowcountry and Aiken to support the artificial-intelligence boom and manufacturers riding the electric-vehicle bandwagon.

"And these loads are coming fast," McCormack told the board.

He projected Santee Cooper could potentially need to boost its total power output by nearly two-thirds over the long run, or about 3,500 megawatts, based on the latest forecast models.

10 years, $7.6B

Other utilities are feeling the squeeze, too, meaning they'll have less surplus electricity to sell on the open market. Dominion Energy South Carolina, Duke Energy Carolinas and Georgia Power are all predicting and preparing for unprecedented growth within their service territories, according to figures from public planning documents.

"If you think about what is happening ... all of the utilities in the Southeast are having capacity constraints, and so we're having to be very intentional about our own system and making sure our own system can stand on its own instead off relying on our neighboring utilities and things like we've done over the, say, last 20 years," McCormack said.

The upgrades won't come cheap for Santee Cooper and its ratepayers, who will see their bills go up in April for the first time since 2017.

The total tab for a laundry list of big-ticket projects through 2034 will come to about $7.64 billion, according to an early estimate. The "build cycle" will be "heavily frontloaded in the first five years ... before trailing off," according to McCormack.