Conservation coalition urges careful clean-energy transition and expanded efficiency programs

Conservation advocates told the Senate Fish, Game and Forestry annual briefing that South Carolina’s transition to cleaner energy must be managed with improved utility forecasting, stronger oversight and broader efficiency programs to avoid cost-shifts to long-time ratepayers and to capture economic benefits from clean-energy jobs.

The coalition asked lawmakers to require utilities to adopt industry best practices for load forecasting, to guard against unexpected rate impacts, and to expand weatherization and efficiency programs that lower household energy burden.

Taylor Allred, energy and climate program director at the Coastal Conservation League, said rapid industrial load growth — in part from proposed data centers — creates new forecasting challenges. “This new kind of electrical load growth calls for new…