South Carolina Clean Energy Guide

South Carolina is a nuclear state that backed into a solar boom. With no renewable portfolio standard, no wholesale market, and zero utility-scale wind, the state has nonetheless built roughly 2,000 MW of solar through utility and cooperative procurement — and now a wave of data center and manufacturing demand is forcing its three vertically integrated utilities into the biggest resource buildout in a generation.

The pivot point was the South Carolina Energy Security Act (Act 41 of 2025), a pro-supply law that streamlines permitting for everything — gas, nuclear, solar, and storage alike — while handing counties a statutory template for solar siting rules. Whether that template calms the county-level moratorium wave or simply codifies it is the central question for developers here.

Policy: No Mandate, But a Full-Throttle Supply Push

South Carolina has never adopted a renewable portfolio standard or clean energy standard, and nothing enacted through mid-2026 changes that. Renewable policy instead rests on three laws: Act 236 of 2014 (the Distributed Energy Resource Program Act, which created the state's net metering rules), Act 62 of 2019 (the Energy Freedom Act, which lifted the old 2% net metering cap, created Solar Choice Metering, and set up PSC-run competitive procurement of renewables), and Act 41 of 2025 — the Energy Security Act — which now dominates the landscape.

The Energy Security Act of 2025 (Act 41)

Signed by Gov. Henry McMaster on May 12, 2025, Act 41 (H.3309) is an everything-on-the-menu supply law framed explicitly around the state's load growth. For clean energy, the meaningful pieces are procedural but real: it declares competitive procurement of targeted volumes of renewables and co-located storage to be in the public interest, establishes a statutory CPRE framework including dual-state programs with North Carolina, and required the PSC to open a docket by November 12, 2025 creating standalone energy storage procurement programs at each electric utility. It also puts state agencies on a shot clock — energy-infrastructure permits must be decided within six months (a provision that expires in 2035), PSC rulings on "like facility" applications within 60 days, and certificates of public convenience and necessity within 180 days.

The same law authorizes the Santee Cooper-Dominion joint venture to build a natural gas plant at the retired Canadys coal site, expands the Nuclear Advisory Council's role, authorizes an SMR pilot program, and lets utilities negotiate economic-development rates for large "transformational" customers — legislative code for data centers and major manufacturers. Clean energy advocates got procurement mandates; gas and nuclear got green lights. Nobody walked away empty-handed except opponents of building things.

Solar Choice Metering: The Post-Retail-Rate Era

Rooftop economics have tightened. Customers who applied before June 2021 keep full retail-rate netting through May 31, 2029, but anyone enrolling since January 1, 2022 at Duke Energy or Dominion Energy South Carolina lands on permanent Solar Choice tariffs: mandatory time-of-use rates with monthly netting inside TOU windows, and excess exports credited at avoided-cost rates of roughly $0.02-$0.04/kWh instead of retail rates near $0.16/kWh.

State Incentives

• 25% state income tax credit on solar (plus small hydro and geothermal) system cost, capped at $3,500 per year or 50% of state tax liability, with a 10-year carryforward — an effective maximum of $35,000.
• Property tax exemption for the value added by residential solar systems.
• Project-level economics: ACP counts $15.5 million per year in state and local taxes and $15.4 million per year in land-lease payments from clean power projects, plus 24 operating clean energy manufacturing facilities statewide.

Major Projects: Solar Scales Up, Storage Finally Arrives

South Carolina's solar fleet was built small by design — most projects historically came in at 75 MW or less, ducking under the threshold that triggers PSC siting review. EIA counted 1,646.7 MW of utility-scale solar at year-end 2024; tracker Cleanview counts 1,967 MW across 126 operating solar farms as of July 2026, the difference largely reflecting 2025 additions. Battery storage stood at just 88 MW at year-end 2024, but that number is about to look quaint.

• Lambert Solar (Georgetown County): The state's largest solar project — two 100 MW phases (SR Lambert I and II) by Silicon Ranch, both online December 2025 on roughly 2,000 acres in the Lambertown community, a $200M-plus investment. Output goes to Santee Cooper and Central Electric Power Cooperative; a roughly 50 MW third phase was rezoned in December 2024.
• Pinopolis Reliability Project (Berkeley County): A 300 MW / 1,200 MWh battery by Aypa Power at the Jefferies Generation Station site, approved by Santee Cooper's board on October 24, 2025 and targeted for the 2027-28 winter season. It would roughly quadruple the state's battery fleet single-handedly.
• Meta / Silicon Ranch solar (Orangeburg County): A 100 MW, roughly $100M project expected online in 2027, timed to Meta's first South Carolina data center in Graniteville. Energy flows to Central Electric Power Cooperative; the RECs go to Meta.
• Sandy Run Solar (Berkeley County): A proposed 198 MW, roughly 1,500-acre RWE project in partnership with Santee Cooper near Cross. Berkeley County Council voted 3-2 in late May 2026 to lift its large-scale development moratorium for the project, which still faces planning commission review.
• TWE Bowman Solar (Orangeburg County): A 75 MW Tradewind Energy project operating since May 2020, tied for largest in Orangeburg County's solar cluster with the 75 MW Huntley and 75 MW Palmetto Plains farms.

Siting & Opposition: The County Line Is the Battle Line

Siting authority splits by size. Generating plants above 75 MW are "major utility facilities" requiring a certificate from the SC Public Service Commission under the Utility Facility Siting and Environmental Protection Act (S.C. Code Title 58, Chapter 33). Below that threshold — which covers most of the state's solar fleet — siting is county zoning, full stop. That makes county councils the real permitting agencies for South Carolina solar, and they have been flexing.

Act 41 added a statewide default: in counties without rural zoning or their own solar ordinances, solar projects over 13 acres must meet setbacks of 50 feet from property lines and road rights-of-way and 200 feet from the nearest residence, church, or school, with a 15-foot panel height cap, staggered rows of vegetative buffer, and 6-foot perimeter fencing. But where counties have written their own rules, those control — and several have gone much further. Calhoun County followed a 2023 six-month moratorium with an ordinance (September 25, 2023) requiring 500-foot setbacks from towns, subdivisions, churches, schools, hospitals and homes, plus decommissioning surety at 125% of cost. Clarendon County's Ordinance 2024-05 (September 9, 2024) sets 500-foot property-line setbacks, a five-mile exclusion zone around Lake Marion and the airport, a 150% decommissioning bond, and a hard countywide cap: no new permits once 3,900 acres of solar are authorized.

The fights are not hypothetical. In May 2025, Sumter County's zoning board unanimously denied a special exception for Treaty Oak Clean Energy's White Palmetto Solar Farm — more than 1,700 acres near Dalzell — after 100-plus residents turned out citing wildlife habitat; local reporting says residents have helped defeat two other proposed Sumter County solar farms since 2023, and that Treaty Oak has since petitioned the PSC to proceed despite the denial, with the outcome unresolved as of mid-2026. Even the state's flagship project caught flak: Georgetown County council twice deferred Lambert's rezoning in 2022, and the phase-3 expansion passed its final reading only 5-2 in December 2024 after councilmembers criticized construction delays, smoke from land clearing, and thin local hiring. In Berkeley County, the Sandy Run fight featured a distinctly 2026 anxiety — residents arguing that approving solar would open the door to data-center industrialization. We track these disputes county by county in our South Carolina opposition tracker.

Demand: Data Centers, EV Trucks, and a 2029 Crunch

The demand side is why Act 41 exists. Google announced a $9 billion South Carolina investment through 2027 (October 13, 2025), expanding its Berkeley County campus at Moncks Corner and building two new Dorchester County campuses in Ridgeville and St. George — stacked on top of a $3.3 billion expansion announced in September 2024. Meta's first South Carolina data center is under construction at Sage Mill Industrial Park near Graniteville in Aiken County, opening 2027 and served by Aiken Electric Cooperative. And Scout Motors is building a $2 billion, roughly 1,100-acre EV plant in Blythewood with capacity for 200,000 electric trucks and SUVs a year and about 4,000 jobs, with production targeted by the end of 2026.

The utilities' response is telling. Facing a projected power shortfall by 2029, Santee Cooper's board approved a slate topping 5,000 MW on October 24, 2025: the 2,200 MW Canadys gas combined-cycle joint venture with Dominion, 100 MW of dual-fuel combustion turbines at Winyah, the 300 MW Pinopolis battery, a 250 MW Rainey Station expansion, and a potential 2,200 MW restart of the V.C. Summer nuclear units. Duke Energy's 2025 Carolinas Resource Plan, filed October 1, 2025, projects Carolinas demand growing at eight times the pace of the prior 15 years and targets 4,000 MW of solar and 5,600 MW of battery storage by 2034, plus a new gas combined-cycle unit in Anderson County and evaluation of large light-water reactors at the W.S. Lee site in Cherokee County with a potential 2037 in-service date.

Act 41's storage mandate is already producing steel-in-the-ground procurement: Duke's 2026 South Carolina Battery RFP, posted April 20, 2026, seeks roughly 400 MW of new four-hour battery storage — about 300 MW in Duke Energy Carolinas territory and 100 MW in Duke Energy Progress — for commercial operation by the beginning of 2032, with a 25 MW minimum project size and both utility-ownership and IPP tracks.

Outlook: Growth Is the Policy Now

South Carolina's clean energy trajectory is not being set by climate targets — there are none — but by load growth, and load growth is a powerful legislator. The state ranks 35th in operating clean power capacity and 44th in wind, solar, and storage share of generation (3.90%, per ACP), yet every serious resource plan on file now includes gigawatts of solar and storage, because that is what can be built fast enough to meet a 2029 shortfall. The structural risks are equally clear: no RTO means three utilities set the pace, and county-by-county siting means a single council vote can strand a 198 MW project behind a moratorium. Developers who pre-wire county relationships, size projects around the 75 MW PSC threshold deliberately rather than reflexively, and chase the Act 41 storage procurements have the clearest runway in the Southeast's quietest boom state.

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