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SCE&G agrees to release additional 'privileged' V.C. Summer documents

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SCE&G agrees to release additional 'privileged' V.C. Summer documents

South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. has agreed to release more records in response to a probe into the abandoned V.C. Summer nuclear project.

The Office of Regulatory Staff, or ORS, on May 23 filed a motion for the Public Service Commission of South Carolina to order South Carolina Electric and Gas, or SCE&G, to produce all copies of a Bechtel Corp. audit critical of the now-scrapped twin reactors, and any related documents, as it seeks rate relief for SCE&G customers.

In a joint filing with the PSC, SCE&G and Dominion Energy Inc., which has offered to acquire SCE&G parent SCANA Corp., pointed out that they have already provided more than 91,500 pages of information to the ORS in response to its discovery requests.

"Despite joint applicants' good-faith efforts in responding to ORS's voluminous demands, ORS has continued to demand that joint applicants produce large quantities of irrelevant, confidential, and privileged information, all on a compressed time frame," SCE&G and Dominion wrote in their June 11 filing with the PSC.

But although SCE&G and Dominion continue to maintain the Bechtel report and other information ORS seeks is "plainly privileged" and protected, the utilities agreed to release some documents that will "provide the commission with a full account of Bechtel's involvement with the project."

The companies contend ORS has painted a "grossly incomplete and misleading picture" of SCE&G's involvement with Bechtel and the purpose of the report based on "scattered" information obtained from project partner Santee Cooper. State-owned utility Santee Cooper, known legally as South Carolina Public Service Authority, provided the Bechtel report to South Carolina's governor, who publicly released the document in September 2017.

Former SCANA CEO Kevin Marsh repeatedly told lawmakers during legislative hearings that the report was a confidential document that verified the plant owners' concerns with bankrupt contractor Westinghouse Electric Co. LLC.

"Any potential SCE&G lawsuit against Westinghouse would seemingly hinge on how Westinghouse had misled SCE&G about the timeline of the project, and yet that is the precise information left out of the Bechtel report," ORS wrote in its May 23 motion.

SCE&G, however, said ORS's belief that the report was designed to protect Westinghouse and its former construction partner in litigation with the owners of the Alvin W. Vogtle Nuclear Plant expansion in Georgia "makes no sense."

The utility said the information it has agreed to release will show it was skeptical of Bechtel's "true motives" including its pursuit of an expanded role in the V.C. Summer project. In addition, SCE&G said the documents will show the utility "had no confidence in the report based on the limited data Bechtel obtained from Westinghouse and the elementary scheduling methodology used by Bechtel."

"Because Bechtel was a direct competitor of Westinghouse, Westinghouse was reluctant to provide Bechtel with access to underlying documents related to the project schedule, meaning that Bechtel, by its own account, did not have access to the data it needed to conduct a full schedule assessment," SCE&G said in the filing. "Bechtel made a number of assumptions that were not based on actual project realities rather than thoroughly assessing the existing schedule."

SCE&G also continues to maintain that the report did not provide any information that the V.C. Summer project owners did not already know.

(SC PSC dockets 2017-207-E, 2017-305-E and 2017-370-E)