PSC Approves New $2.5B Natural Gas Plant in Anderson County
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On a stretch of red-clay pasture where Anderson County shades into suburb, Duke Energy has obtained permission to put up something more imposing than a church steeple: a $2.5 billion, nearly 1.4-gigawatt natural-gas plant at the crossroads of Highway 81 and True Temper Road, a junction better known, until now, for hay bales and pickup traffic than for the future of the grid.
The S.C. Public Service Commission, in a March 26 meeting that managed to turn “capacity expansion” into a term of art, approved Duke’s request, clearing the way for construction to begin in the summer of 2027; if everything goes according to schedule—the if being as big as the plant itself—electricity from the facility is supposed to be flowing into homes and server racks by early 2031. This is Duke’s first new generation plant in the state in a decade, and the first major project to emerge from the fog of the recently enacted S.C. Energy Security Act, which imagines a South Carolina whose chief vulnerability is not hurricanes or politics but a faltering air-conditioner in July.
The need for more power, Duke and its peers say, comes from familiar American story lines: more people arriving, more factories and distribution centers blinking on, more subdivisions named after the trees they replaced. Environmental and ratepayer advocates, scanning the same demand curves, see instead the outline of another character—energy-hungry data centers, many devoted to artificial intelligence, those unseen neighbors whose appetites for electrons have begun to rival the old textile mills. The argument over who is really driving the buildout—families or algorithms—has become a minor regional sport, less visible than college football but consequential for anyone who pays a power bill.
Because the plant site falls within Anderson School District 3, local officials say the investment will eventually show up in classroom budgets as well as on power lines, with new tax revenue helping pay for teacher salaries, facility upgrades, and student programs even as the district absorbs the growth that follows industrial projects of this scale. Taxes from the facility should help fund the new Crescent Middle School bond recently approved by voters.
State officials have cast the project as a kind of patriotic infrastructure, a bulwark of “energy security” at a moment when the phrase now has to make room, rhetorically, for the U.S.-Israel war on Iran and the resulting jitters in global energy prices. In a news release, Governor Henry McMaster, who has made a hobby of welcoming large industrial projects, said that as South Carolina continues to “attract new businesses and new residents at a record pace, the need for dependable energy has never been more urgent,” praising Duke as a “strong partner” engaged in “forward-thinking planning.” Forward-thinking, in this case, means more gas turbines, not fewer.
The Anderson plant, the county’s third such production site, is one node in a larger constellation of big gas projects now proposed or under construction across the Southeast, including another facility sketched out for Colleton County by Santee Cooper and Dominion Energy. Duke estimates that the Upstate plant will deliver an eighty-four-million-dollar annual impact statewide, supporting 125 jobs and ten million dollars in yearly labor income, numbers precise enough to suggest a spreadsheet somewhere labeled “Talking Points.” For now, the intersection at Highway 81 and True Temper still offers more cows than kilowatts; if the timelines hold, it will soon offer something else: a monument to the proposition that, in the age of artificial intelligence, the landscape must keep making more and more very real power.
