Electricity rates in Columbia and the rest of South Mississippi could have jumped up to 40 percent if customers had been made to pay for the lignite portion of the Kemper County power plant, Southern District Public Service Commissioner Sam Britton said this week.
That comes out to about $34,000 per ratepayer over the life of the plant. The Republican said during a talk to the Columbia Rotary Club Tuesday that could have “absolutely devastated” the region and state.
“Your businesses, they have to be competitive. And if a business is heavily reliant on electricity, and that’s a big cost, then all of a sudden you may have jobs going elsewhere,” he said.
But now Mississippi Power is eating the $6.4 billion cost of the lignite coal gasification part of the plant, and customers are paying $1.1 billion for the more conventional natural gas plant that it converted to after the lignite plan didn’t work. That will cost customers roughly $6,000 more over the life of the plant.
The settlement came after Britton and Democrat Cecil Brown were elected in 2015, replacing pro-Kemper commissioners. Democrat Brandon Presley, the other person on the three-member board that oversees utilities in the state, had opposed the project from the beginning.
Britton said the issue is now over, as March 8 was the final deadline for any lawsuit opposing the settlement.
A decade ago Mississippi Power had said it could build a technologically revolutionary power plant that would convert low-grade coal into electricity for $2.9 billion. However, the plant had numerous delays and ended up costing more than 2.5 times that estimate. Mississippi Power, and its parent Southern Company, were not able to scale up the experimental project, which has never been done at any other power plant in the world.
Tom Blanton, a Hattiesburg oilman, and other watchdog groups exposed the project and built opposition to putting the cost of the failed experiment on customers. Britton said Blanton gave time through a lawsuit for two new public service commissioners to be elected and then conclude Kemper.
The Laurel CPA and investment banker said with his math background he looked at the numbers and could see what would happen to electricity rates if Kemper had gone through. That led him to run for office.
“It was not being quote-unquote anti-Kemper; it was to get in and do the right thing to make sure that the costs would not devastate us because if you look at the cost it could have absolutely devastated South Mississippi and the rest of the state,” Britton said.
Pictured Above: Sam Britton, the Southern District representative on the Mississippi Public Service Commission, talks after a speech to the Columbia Rotary Club Tuesday. | Photo by Charlie Smith
