Energy Outfits Generate Business for Pee Dee Region
Published Dec 02, 2008
The Pee Dee Region’s energy players are major forces in economic development.
Clean, cost-effective, dependable and available power is a Florence County strength, thanks to energy players such as Santee Cooper, Progress Energy and the Pee Dee Electric Cooperative.
Yet their contributions to the community and the Pee Dee Region don’t stop with the investments necessary to ensure continued electricity reliability.
The utilities also play other powerful roles, from participating in economic development initiatives to encouraging conservation to offering low-cost loans and educational scholarships.
Take, for example, Progress Energy’s partnership with Florence County and the private sector to develop the 194-acre Godley Morris Commerce Center in Lake City and construct a speculative building within the park.
“Helping communities develop the facilities they need to attract new businesses and industries represents an investment in the future,” says Peggy McLean, senior economic development executive for Progress Energy. Headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., Progress Energy is a power generator and distributor with 52,000 customers, including 9,400 commercial and industrial clients in South Carolina. A new 230-kilovolt transmission line serves Florence, Darlington and Lee counties.
Another partner in the area’s economic development efforts is Pee Dee Electric Cooperative, one of 20 electric cooperatives in the state.
“We are so much involved in the county and in job creation. We’re all in this thing together,” says Tom Kinard, who is Pee Dee Electric’s manager of business development.
The Pee Dee Commerce Center industrial park represents an $11 million investment by the cooperative to establish a “shovel-ready” site to lure companies to Florence County, says Kinard, who adds that the cooperative often makes its airplane available to local economic development officials. Individual residents of Florence County also benefit from the cooperative’s community-minded efforts.
Several students at Francis Marion University and Florence-Darlington Technical College are beneficiaries of Pee Dee Electric scholarships.
The cooperative buys its power from Santee Cooper, South Carolina’s state-owned electric and water utility.
In 2007, the efforts of Santee Cooper and its partners resulted in 2,925 new jobs, $891.3 million in capital investments and more than 28,650 new kilowatts of needed capacity, says Laura Varn, Santee Cooper vice president of corporate communications.
While the utility’s community-support efforts are broad and robust, it’s sinking its teeth into an industrious green-power and conservation initiative. In October 2007, Santee Cooper announced that it would generate 40 percent of its energy from non-greenhouse gas emitting resources and biomass fuels, with the help of energy efficiency and conservation.
To that end, the utility is working toward the addition of two nuclear units and a 50-megawatt biomass unit to burn wood waste such as forest and yard debris.
Santee Cooper offers low-interest loans to homeowners for the installation of energy-efficient measures such as insulation and replacement windows and distributed 1.6 million compact fluorescent light bulbs to customers in 2008.
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
Photo by Todd Bennett
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