PSC Commission Hears from Critics, Proponents of Proposed Anderson Gas Power Plant

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

More than 200 citizens gathered Monday night at the Anderson Civic Center for a South Carolina Public Service Commission hearing on Duke Energy’s proposal to build a 1,365-megawatt natural gas power plant in Southern Anderson County. The $3.2 billion facility, sited on nearly 200 acres near Highway 81 South and True Temper Road, would be Duke’s first new generation project in South Carolina in a decade. If approved, construction would begin in summer 2027, with operations commencing by early 2031.

The company filed its application for a Certificate of Environmental Compatibility and Public Convenience and Necessity on October 30, 2025, and Anderson County Council approved tax incentives for the project in December. The facility would use existing transmission infrastructure and air-cooled condensers to reduce water consumption, and local cooperatives would hold a 7 percent stake in the venture.

More than 25 citizens signed up to testify, their competing visions of the region’s future clashing in real time.

Burriss Nelson, Anderson County’s economic development director, cast the plant as essential to the area’s competitive position. “We need more power generation,” he told the Commission, to keep recruiting high-quality industry to the county. His mandate from County Council, Nelson said, is “to bring companies to this county that will pay scales greater than our county average.” The current average wage in Anderson County is “$25.14” an hour, but companies recruited last year averaged “a little over $32 an hour”—proof, in his view, that the county can attract sophisticated manufacturers if it has the power to support them.

These new firms arrive with “greater equipment needs” and increasingly power-hungry robotics. “That’s why there’s a huge power requirement for manufacturing,” Nelson explained. “It takes more power to run the robotics and the equipment in the plant.”

He invoked what H.R. directors now call the “labor shed cliff”—the prospect that “about half of our labor force will retire in the next five years, not to be replaced by anybody.” Yet even as the county faces this demographic squeeze, it remains locked out of major opportunities. Nelson said industrial “requests for information,” or RFIs, have nearly doubled since the recession, reaching “99” in 2025, but nine of those deals fell through “because of a need for power.” Manufacturing prospects once asked for one or two megawatts; today, “now it’s not uncommon to have somebody ask for 10 to 15 megawatts of power,” which “is not readily available anywhere on the system unless you’re right under the transmission line.” The result, Nelson testified, is that the county has “not even had a shot at” major projects with power needs beyond “the standard line that runs down the street at your house.”

“We want jobs. We want to recruit great companies. We want to do great in Anderson County. And without that power, we don’t have the chance,” he said.

Nelson acknowledged the opposition to alternative energy sources, citing his “35 years of experience of hearing people say no to solar.” The county had “recently lost a 500-acre project because of naysayers in the community.” With residents resistant to solar installations “in the neighborhood,” and nuclear power dismissed outright—“Nobody wants nuclear”—he posed the problem plainly: “How do you solve this problem with the available resources we have?”

Kathy Hipp, superintendent of Anderson School District 3, saw the plant as a lifeline for one of the state’s poorest districts.

“School District 3, you may not know, is the 15th poorest school district in South Carolina,” she said. “We have a flat tax base and have had very limited industry coming in for the last 25 to 30 years. So, the potential tax revenue from this project is enormous.”

Hipp had lived in the area her entire life and had worked in the district for “37 of my 38 years in education,” having begun as a student there and returned after college. The fiscal constraints were stark. The district “needs to replace three schools that were built in the mid-fifties,” she said, even as 75 percent of her students live in poverty. The property currently generated just $245 in tax revenue; within eighteen months, she expected it to bring in between $500,000 and $1 million annually.

She had done her homework. Duke Energy had hosted a presentation at Flat Rock Elementary where engineers addressed environmental questions, water concerns, and emissions data. Hipp had visited the company’s comparable WS Lee plant in Williamston to verify the claims. “So it checks both boxes,” she concluded. “A good industry for Anderson School District three that will give good tax money to Anderson School District three so that we can better prepare students and build them learning spaces that are in the 21st century.”

Environmental advocates painted a starkly different picture.

Emily Poole, an attorney for the South Carolina Environmental Law Project, argued that Duke Energy had failed to demonstrate that the plant’s harms were justified. The facility would emit particulate matter “which is a harmful form of air pollution linked to adverse health outcomes such as respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, asthma, and in more severe cases, heart attack, stroke and cancer.”

The proposed location made the threat especially acute. Within a few miles of the site lay “neighborhoods, at least three elementary schools, nearly a dozen places of worship, and extensive city limits”—all situated in an area already disproportionately burdened by pollution. Screening data revealed the cumulative toll: the region scored “in the ninetieth percentile of low-income households in the ninety-second percentile of people with asthma, in the ninety-seventh percentile of people with heart disease, and in the ninety-fourth percentile for existing particulate matter exposure.”

“The decision to cite here will only exacerbate current environmental and public health inequities,” Poole said.

The plant would also disturb a greenfield site containing “a stretch of Beaver Creek and its wetlands, which eventually connect to Rocky River and Lake Secession”—resources “extremely important” for “water quality, filtration of pollutants and resilience in the face of more extreme weather events.” These onsite wetlands “will be disturbed by the siting, construction and operation of this gas plant,” she warned.

Duke Energy had provided little clarity on water needs. There was, Poole noted, “little to no information available on how much water will be required, where it will be pulled from, what the contingency plan is if the air-cooling systems fail” and what impact withdrawals would have when “nearly 85 percent of the Upper Savannah River Basin’s surface water is already permitted or registered for other uses.”

“Duke Energy has not provided sufficient information to define the probable environmental impact of this facility and has also not shown how this environmental impact is justified,” Poole concluded, urging the Commission to deny the certificate.

David Freeman, an environmental engineering professor at Clemson University, offered a competing economic analysis. The real choice, he argued, was not between the gas plant and nothing, but between the gas plant and solar. “Utility-scale solar with battery backup is already competitive to natural gas with an energy store,” he testified, and the economics would only improve. Solar facilities have “mineral operating expenses,” while “natural gas plants have higher variable costs due to the fuel,” making them vulnerable to “fluctuating global markets and uncertainty in the reliability of natural gas supply.”

Land availability was not a constraint. A Clemson University study of the entire state confirmed that “South Carolina has sufficient suitable acreage for the transition.” The proposed 1,400-megawatt facility “could be met by approximately 12,400 acres”—less than 0.1 percent of the state’s total land area. Nationally, “solar energy comprised two thirds of all new U.S. electric utility scale capacity in 2025,” with Texas alone adding “2.7 gigawatts in the first quarter of 2025.”

But Freeman’s deepest objection was climate-centered. Over the plant’s fifty-year lifespan, “the facility will release approximately two hundred twenty megatons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of adding roughly one million cars to the road every year just from this one power plant.” That calculation did not even account for methane fugitive emissions during production, processing, and transmission—losses that could “raise the greenhouse gas total emissions to rival coal as an energy source.”

“As a state that is highly susceptible to the impacts of climate change, we cannot continue to rely on the technology of the past to power our future,” Freeman said. “We can do better. We must do better.”

Duke Energy spokesman Ryan Mosier said the hearing was a civic necessity. Residents attending “don’t necessarily make it down to Columbia for some of the bigger hearings, or they just aren’t aware of some of the processes,” he noted. “When they have the opportunity to talk, face to face to the public service commissioners, the folks who will make a final decision on whether this is a good project or not, it’s an important thing, and it’s important for Duke Energy to be here to hear those same concerns.”

Many of those concerns, Mosier suggested, had already been addressed. “The documentation that we’ve supplied to residents, on our website, and will be discussed in detail at the Commission in a couple of weeks when we go to a hearing” covered the key points, he said. “It’s important to hear those voices, it’s important to hear those concerns, and try to answer questions whenever we can.”

The combined-cycle design of Duke’s proposed facility represents a technological middle ground. A gas turbine burns fuel to power a generator (the Brayton cycle), then the hot exhaust, normally wasted, heats water in a Heat Recovery Steam Generator to create steam, which spins a second turbine for additional power (the Rankine cycle). The efficiency gain is significant compared with simple gas turbines. The proposed site, advantageously positioned near existing transmission infrastructure, would supply roughly 1,400 megawatts of electricity—enough, theoretically, to power 1.4 million homes and support major industrial operations and thousands of electric vehicles, depending on usage patterns and time of day.

The Public Service Commission will reconvene on February 25 at 10 a.m. to hear evidence and witness testimony regarding the facility’s merits. The hearing will be streamed live via SCETV and the PSC’s YouTube channel and will continue on February 26 if necessary.