Santee Cooper celebrates green power milestone in Horry County

Barbara Streeter signed up for Santee Cooper’s green power program for the same reason she recycles most of the byproducts from her family’s glassblowing business.

She hates wasting anything.

“We throw nothing away,” said Streeter, who runs Conway Glass with her husband, Ed. “We just reuse it. We really feel like that’s important, especially in the glass industry, because we use so much electricity to produce our products. We have to do something to compensate for that.”

For 14 years, Santee Cooper has offered Horry County residents and business owners the option of paying a little extra for green power. The utility runs a generating station at the county landfill on S.C. 90 that captures methane gas at the site. A statewide program, which now includes five additional landfill stations across the state, celebrated a milestone this week by generating its 1 millionth megawatt hour of green power.

The program hit the mark between noon and 1 p.m. Tuesday.

“It shows our commitment, for years now, to renewable energy,” said Santee Cooper spokeswoman Susan Mungo. “And we’re just so thrilled that in 14 years we’ve gone from generating the first megawatt to now hitting a million megawatts.”

Santee Cooper was the first South Carolina utility to bring green power to the state’s electric grid in 2001 with the Horry station. The site holds three generators and receives methane from 68 gas wells managed by the Horry County Solid Waste Authority.

Inside each generator, the system runs sort of like an automobile engine, said Art Chadwick, a mechanic who has worked on the generators for 14 years.

“This is a V-20, if you will,” he said. “Ten cylinders on each side.”

Overall, the Horry site has generated more than 228,000 megawatts of green power.

What goes into the landfill can affect the quality of the gas, Chadwick said. He recently spoke to another landfill station operator who noticed that his system’s gas was altered when a textile mill began hauling waste there.

“It changed his gas drastically,” he said. “I don’t think that they’re bringing in anything different here. … If you’ve got a lot of moisture in the gas and you’re not able to get the moisture out quick enough, that can affect it.”

Lately, Santee Cooper has only been using two of the generators at the county station because the quality of the methane hasn’t been as good.

“It appears in the last few months, the composition of the gas has changed which is affecting the buildup on the pistons,” Chadwick said. “With the gas situation the way it’s getting, we keep one now as kind of a backup.”

Despite the challenges, utility leaders and local officials say the benefits of the landfill station are many.

“It helps reduce odor, greenhouse gases, helps us stay up under federal [emissions] standards,” said Mike Bessant, assistant executive director for the county’s Solid Waste Authority.

And if the local system produces more methane than needed?

“If we’re making more than they can use, we burn it to keep it from going into the atmosphere, which reduces greenhouse gases,” he said.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the program, officials said, is that residents and business owners are willing to pay for the more expensive power source. Residents can buy 100 kilowatt hours for $3 per month and additional blocks at the same rate. For commercial customers, the rate is $6 per 200 kilowatt hours. There’s even an option for event organizers to power their festival or expo with green energy. Apart from the landfill stations, Santee Cooper has added solar facilities at Coastal Carolina University and in Myrtle Beach. The utility also operates a wind turbine in North Myrtle Beach.

Statewide, Santee Cooper has 1,253 green power residential customers and 213 commercial ones.

“This is a choice for our customers,” Mungo said. “It does cost them a little more. … So we’re very proud to see that our customers are embracing renewable energy and are willing to not only improve the environment but the future.”

This story was originally published August 26, 2015 at 5:41 PM with the headline "Santee Cooper celebrates green power milestone in Horry County."