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South Carolina generates more of its electricity from nuclear power than almost any other state — roughly 55–60% of in-state generation comes from nuclear plants, a percentage that rivals France and makes the state's grid fundamentally different from its Southeast neighbors in terms of how it must be managed, maintained, and evolved. Duke Energy Carolinas serves the Piedmont corridor and Charlotte metro areas extending into South Carolina, operating Catawba Nuclear Station on the South Carolina-North Carolina border and sharing operational responsibilities with Duke Energy Progress. Dominion Energy South Carolina, formerly SCE&G and a subsidiary acquired through the SCANA Corporation's 2019 merger with Dominion Energy after the catastrophic V.C. Summer Units 2 and 3 new-build failure, serves the Columbia metro, the Midlands, and coastal communities including Hilton Head Island. Santee Cooper — South Carolina's state-owned electric and water utility — serves Berkeley, Georgetown, and Horry Counties directly and provides wholesale power to Central Electric Power Cooperative, which distributes to 20 distribution cooperatives across the state. The V.C. Summer new-build failure — the $9 billion nuclear construction project abandoned in 2017, one of the most expensive utility project failures in U.S. history — left a financial wound that the South Carolina Public Service Commission is still managing through rate proceedings, Dominion's acquisition obligations, and the ongoing question of whether the Sumner station's existing Unit 1 can be optimized enough to partially offset the ratepayer burden from Units 2 and 3. That regulatory backdrop, combined with four operating nuclear units at Catawba, Robinson, Summer Unit 1, and Oconee (in northwestern South Carolina), creates an AI market where nuclear operations, SCPSC compliance, and post-SCANA trust rebuilding are the dominant themes.
Updated June 2026
The SCANA Corporation's abandonment of V.C. Summer Units 2 and 3 in 2017 — after collecting over $2 billion in construction costs from ratepayers through South Carolina's Base Load Review Act — produced what the South Carolina Public Service Commission described as a fundamental failure of utility cost transparency and project oversight. Dominion Energy acquired SCANA in January 2019 partly to take on the regulatory remediation burden, agreeing to rate reductions, customer refunds, and enhanced SCPSC oversight as merger conditions. The consequence for utility AI in South Carolina is specific: any AI investment that Dominion Energy South Carolina proposes before the SCPSC is evaluated in the context of a commission that, since 2017, has been acutely sensitive to utility capital spending justification. AI tools that improve operational transparency — predictive maintenance AI with auditable performance logs, demand-response program management with real-time SCPSC-accessible performance dashboards, grid reliability AI with documented reliability metric improvement — are better positioned in South Carolina than tools that primarily reduce utility operating costs without clear customer benefit articulation. Dominion SC's procurement teams have been explicitly told in SCPSC proceedings to frame technology investments in customer-benefit terms and to provide performance benchmarks against comparable utility deployments. Vendors who come to Dominion SC with case studies from Dominion Energy Virginia or Duke Energy Carolinas — both of whom have SCPSC-reviewed deployments as precedent — are starting from a stronger position than firms with only midwest or northeast utility references. Santee Cooper's AI procurement follows a different decision path as a state-owned utility: the South Carolina General Assembly provides oversight through the budget and control board, and Santee Cooper's board of directors makes technology investment decisions without the SCPSC rate-case framework. That governance difference means Santee Cooper can move faster on AI pilots than Dominion SC, but also means that procurement decisions are more relationship-driven and less driven by formal RFP processes.
South Carolina's four operating nuclear units represent a scale of nuclear operations that only Pennsylvania and Illinois match among eastern states. Catawba Nuclear Station (Duke Energy, two 1,129 MW Westinghouse PWR units) near Rock Hill is among the most consistently high-capacity-factor nuclear plants in the Southeast. H.B. Robinson Steam Electric Plant (Duke Energy Progress, 728 MW) near Hartsville is a single-unit PWR with a distinct operations profile. Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Station (Dominion Energy SC, 966 MW) near Jenkinsville is the survivor of the failed expansion project, operating as a single unit with the financial burden of the abandoned Units 2 and 3 in its rate structure. Oconee Nuclear Station (Duke Energy Carolinas, three units totaling 2,538 MW) near Seneca is the largest nuclear complex in South Carolina by capacity. AI applications across these plants follow similar categories to the Pennsylvania nuclear fleet discussion — balance-of-plant predictive maintenance, turbine secondary system monitoring, cooling water system performance, and transformer health analytics — but the South Carolina units have two additional context-specific challenges. First, Catawba, Oconee, and Summer are all located on freshwater reservoirs (Lake Wylie, Lake Keowee/Lake Hartwell, Lake Murray), and cooling water temperature during extreme summer heat events affects thermal discharge permit compliance under South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control permits. AI models that integrate reservoir temperature monitoring, downstream ecological monitoring data, and plant thermal output planning can optimize operations within environmental permit bounds — a specific compliance challenge that nuclear plants on the Connecticut River or Ohio River don't face in exactly the same form. Second, Summer Unit 1's operating economics are under continuous SCPSC scrutiny because of the ongoing V.C. Summer rate case proceedings. Any AI investment at Summer that improves capacity factor or reduces forced outage rate directly supports Dominion's regulatory position in those proceedings — the SCPSC has made clear that Summer's operational performance is a factor in how it evaluates the ongoing rate structure for the abandoned units' cost recovery.
South Carolina's coastal and resort communities — Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head Island, and the Charleston metro area — create a seasonal demand pattern that Dominion SC and Santee Cooper's coastal distribution systems have to manage with limited peaking flexibility. The Grand Strand's Myrtle Beach area, served by Santee Cooper through the Horry Electric Cooperative, draws peak loads during June-August beach tourism season that can exceed winter heating peaks by 40–60%. AI-based seasonal load forecasting that integrates hotel occupancy data, traffic counts on US-17, and vacation rental occupancy rates — which can be extracted from Airbnb and VRBO public data with some lead time — would improve Santee Cooper's summer reserve margin planning for the coastal distribution system. Charleston's rapid economic growth — Boeing's 787 Dreamliner manufacturing in North Charleston, Volvo's assembly plant in Berkeley County, and expanding port operations at the South Carolina Ports Authority — is creating large industrial load additions in Dominion SC's service territory that require AI-level load forecasting to manage. The Charleston metro added roughly 600 MW of industrial load between 2018 and 2024, and Dominion SC's distribution planning for the North Charleston industrial corridor has been running close to its engineering margins. AI tools that integrate SCPA container volume data, Boeing production schedules, and Volvo vehicle build rates as industrial load predictors would materially improve Dominion SC's planning accuracy for this corridor. The South Carolina Association of Electric Cooperatives provides shared-service procurement channels for Central Electric Power Cooperative's 20 member co-ops. AI vendors targeting South Carolina's cooperative market should engage SCAEC's technology committee, which has been reviewing AI tools for outage management, meter data analytics, and demand-response program administration. The COOP's member utilities have a combined meter count that makes shared-platform AI economics favorable, but procurement decisions require member co-op consensus that adds time to the cycle.
Connecting AI systems to existing business infrastructure and workflows
Workflow automation using AI, including Make.com-style automation and RPA
Predictive models, data analysis, and ML pipeline development
Image recognition, object detection, video analysis, and visual inspection systems