SCE&G wants you to do them a solid and turn down your heat this week

You guys want to hear the funniest joke of 2018 so far?

The friendly neighborhood power company that’s used 18% of your monthly power bill to pay for a $9 billion project it just threw in the garbage wants you to kindly turn down your thermostat this week.

In a press release today, SCE&G president Kellar Kissam said power demand is expected to be extremely high this week, and that his company is “asking customers to voluntarily reduce energy consumption.”

Kissam says that reducing energy usage during peak times can help the company’s network avoid strain as demand spikes.

SCE&G’s parent company SCANA carries the majority stake in the failed VC Summer nuclear plant expansion project that it walked away from last year after collecting and spending billions of dollars from customers for years. In addition to ratepayers’ money, the move to abandon the project also cost nearly 6,000 workers their jobs. As a result of the project’s collapse, S.C. politicians responsible for appointing the regulators who oversaw the failed project are now shopping the state-owned utility Santee Cooper to the ‘highest’ bidder willing to take on a power company saddled with billions in debt. Santee Cooper holds a minority stake in the project.

In 2012, CP reporter Paul Bowers examined SCE&G reports that included spending on employees’ zumba classes and the company’s private Sand Dunes Club on Sullivan’s Island. Over the weekend, P&C reporter Andrew Brown took a look at how industry-connected figures wine and dine S.C. regulatory officials, throwing pricey junkets that serve as little more than parties for politician-appointed regulators.

S.C. lawmakers are looking to quickly resolve some of the issues uncovered over the course of the project’s crash in the new legislative session.