Multi-Billion Investment, Arthrex Expansion Close Out Economic Development for 2025

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

Two days before Christmas, with rain clouds stalled over the Piedmont, Anderson County Administrator Rusty Burns sat in his office and tried to explain what a 2.5 billion dollar power plant actually means to a county that still prides itself on the heritage of mill hills and Friday-night football.  The numbers—billions in private investment, hundreds of millions for schools over time—sound like something that might happen in Charlotte or Atlanta, not in the rural stretch of southern Anderson County where Duke Energy now plans to build its newest cogeneration facility.

The project, made official last week after months of low-key anticipation, will place a Duke Energy cogeneration plant in the southern part of the county, a landscape of pasture, new housing, aging farmhouses, and county/state roads that carry school buses and trucks in equal measure.  Burns describes the new facility as something “for everybody,” a piece of heavy infrastructure that will hum away largely unseen yet shape the daily lives of manufacturers, homeowners, and students from Starr to Iva.

From a distance, a cogen facility can look like any other industrial plant—a tangle of pipes and stacks, a steady plume rising into the sky—but Burns is careful to stress that this one is a power plant first and last.

“It will make electricity,” he says, repeating the phrase with the patience of someone correcting a rumor, before adding that it will not, despite talk at coffee shops and on social media, be a bespoke power source for some secretive data center.

In Burns’s telling, the most important metric for modern industrial recruitment is no longer road access or tax rate but “how many brownouts you have.”  A brief sag in voltage—barely noticeable at a kitchen light fixture—can be catastrophic on a manufacturing line, turning a momentary flicker into millions of dollars of lost product and overtime.

Anderson County already lives in the shadow of serious infrastructure: Lee Steam Plant, humming along the Saluda River, and the long-standing Sandy Cooper cogen operation that has quietly fed the grid for more than twenty years.  The new Duke facility will join them, creating a cluster of energy assets that Burns believes will “strengthen the electrical grid” and put the county “in really good shape” to keep lights, and machines, reliably on.

The power, of course, will not stay put.  Electricity generated in southern Anderson can be sold “all over America,” as Burns puts it, routed along transmission lines that largely ignore county boundaries and school district maps.  Yet in the calculus of site selection, where multinational companies weigh locations by the fraction of a cent per kilowatt hour and the frequency of service interruptions, the simple fact of a robust local grid is its own calling card.

“One of the first things that a company looks at,” Burns says, “is your power.”  The presence of three major facilities—a legacy plant, an existing cogen operation, and now Duke’s new investment—forms a sort of invisible industrial park, one measured not in square footage but in megawatts and redundancy.  For economic development officials who have spent years trying to coax advanced manufacturers and logistics firms into the county’s industrial parks, the promise is less glamorous than ribbon-cuttings but more fundamental.

The quiet winner in this arrangement, at least on paper, may be Anderson School District 3, a compact and, in Burns’s view, “very well run” district that spans much of the county’s southern tier.  At a recent county council meeting, Superintendent Kathy Hipp spoke in plain, unsentimental terms about what the Duke project could mean: a “major step forward” in dependable funding existing schools and the new campus her team is already sketching out in the planning stages.

The mechanics are prosaic—property taxes from a multi-billion-dollar industrial investment, structured over time, flowing into a local school budget that has more needs than luxuries.  The effect, if the projections hold, could be transformative: more money for classrooms, facilities that do not leak in hard rain, a new school funded not by pleading at the ballot box but by the steady hum of a power plant a few miles down the road.

Inside the county government, the Duke deal is already being talked about as one of those rare arrangements that feels, in Burns’s phrase, like “a win-win.”  The grid becomes more reliable for both factories and living rooms; the prospect of rolling brownouts recedes; a rural school district gains a long-term revenue stream that does not depend on squeezing homeowners.

Outside, in the places where people swap theories in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee, the story is messier: a multi-billion-dollar company, a plant that “will generate electricity” but is unlikely to ever be visited by the people whose utility bills it underwrites, and a promise that the lights will flicker less often.  In Anderson County, where megaprojects used to be things one read about happening somewhere else, the arrival of a new cogen facility may signal something quieter but no less consequential: a small, rural county wiring itself for a future in which stability—of power, of funding, of opportunity—becomes its most coveted local product.

Burns also praised the new investment by an unnamed existing company in the northwestern part of the county (Arthrex), which promised to bring a minimum of $125 million in new investment with a minimum of 125 new jobs. More details and the official naming of the company is expected in January.

Both new investments are the direct result of tax incentives known as FILOTs, or Fee In Lieu of Tax structures, which allows counties in South Carolina to offer tax incentives to potential manufacturing concerns, that have played a pivotal role in Anderson County in the past three decades, and continue to be a central part of retaining many companies.

Attracting manufacturing to the state was very low on the priority list of a state legislature primarily made up of farmers who wanted to protect their labor force in the late 1800s.

In 1897, these representatives established an assessment ratio for manufacturing properties of 10.5 percent, which remains on the books today despite a series of other options aimed at blunting this tax.

It is among the highest industrial tax in the nation and fees in lieu of taxes which help level the playing field for counties in South Carolina, a state with a 10.5 percent Manufacturing/Industrial assessment ratio, among the highest in the nation.

FILOTs are responsible for almost every major manufacturer in the county including Michelin, First Quality and Arthrex.

Burns said to qualify for the incentives, which he said brings in funds more quickly than traditional tax structures, the companies must offer full benefits and substantial wages.