Dominion Energy South Carolina now says it can retire coal-fired power generation by 2030, a significant reversal from plans released by the utility just last year.

Dominion’s new 15-year plan said shuttering two coal plants and converting a third to natural gas is the best option by multiple measures. Natural gas would mostly replace the coal generation.

The utility took over S.C. Electric & Gas in 2019 and serves customers around Charleston, Columbia, Aiken, Orangeburg and Beaufort. Its initial proposal could have kept at least one coal furnace running until 2071. That plan was turned down in December by the S.C. Public Service Commission.

In a hearing beforehand, commissioners questioned whether Dominion was following its parent company’s goals of ultimately taking carbon emissions to net-zero. Now, the utility’s preferred path would close the coal-fired Williams Station in Goose Creek by 2028, close the Wateree Station in Eastover that same year, and convert the Cope Station to gas-only by 2030.

“The closure of these plants will be a huge health benefit for families and children who have been forced to live, work and play in the shadow of coal-burning plants that pollute their air and the rivers where they boat and fish,” said Will Harlan, of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.

Sierra Club is one of several groups that critiqued Dominion’s original plan before the PSC.

The utility would mostly make up the difference with more natural gas-burning plants, which Harlan called “shortsighted.” Dominion would also add some solar generation and batteries to store power.

“As we transition toward a cleaner energy future for South Carolina, we remain committed to low-cost and low-emitting natural gas-fired generation as an integral part of a sustainable and diverse fuel mix which is critical to serving our customers and communities with safe, affordable and reliable energy,” said Paul Fischer, a spokesman for Dominion.

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Natural gas releases about half as much carbon dioxide as coal when burned for electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and doesn’t include some other pollution that comes with coal, such as mercury contamination.

But the largest component of natural gas is methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 25 times more potent in warming the earth than carbon dioxide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Methane leaks during gas extraction or transportation can make the fuel’s ultimate carbon footprint more significant.

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Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Gudrun Thompson said the revised plan is a huge improvement, but the gas reliance makes the bigger picture a “mixed bag.” She said it may become less economically feasible if stricter rules to fight climate change come into play on the federal level.

Dominion was ordered to rework its proposal at the end of last year after the utility-regulating PSC said some of the base assumptions in the work were wrong. The commission was given significantly more power to scrutinize utilities’ plans in a 2019 state law. Dominion was the first utility to submit a plan after that change.

“This is a sea change from a few years ago, when the intervenors like us would file comments, and basically nothing would happen,” said Thompson, who is representing the Coastal Conservation League and Southern Alliance for Clean Energy in the proceedings.

Dominion’s updated plan still analyzed its former preferred path, which would have kept coal online longer. But by using different base assumptions, including the possibility that the government starts taxing carbon emissions, the overall math changed.

The utility still plans to study in further detail how it will retire its coal units, Fischer said.

That layer of green powder blanketing your car signals the annual springtime onslaught of pollen in the Upstate and the allergies it triggers.

The pollen count was high on Wednesday and is forecast to be high at least through Sunday, according to pollen.com, a North Carolina health information and research company.

Trees are the current culprit sending out pollen as part of their annual reproductive cycle.

And as spring unfolds, it's keeping allergists occupied.

“We have been very busy,” said Dr. Emil Sarmiento of the Allergic Disease and Asthma Center in Greenville.

“It started really strong in February, and then the rain came and ... brought down the pollen count,” he said.

“But once the weather settled, the pollen count went up," he added. "And all that water was good for the trees, which start pollinating. We’re getting the vengeance of the trees now.”

Mold spores have also been a problem because of all the rain in recent months, he said.

So if you’ve got the tell-tale runny nose, itchy eyes, sneezing and other symptoms associated with seasonal allergies, what can you do?

Sarmiento offers these helpful tips:

1. Do what you can to avoid the pollen.

“Pollen counts are highest between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.,” he said. “So you should postpone your outdoor activities until after 5 p.m. or before 10 a.m.”

2. Stay clean

Because pollen sticks to the hair, eye lashes, clothes and skin, shower and wash your hair after coming in from outdoors and wash clothes with hot water making sure to machine dry them and not hang them outside, he said.

3. Stay covered

Wear a mask and/or sunglasses or goggles and gloves while gardening or mowing the lawn, he said, and close the windows in your home and car to keep the pollen out.

4. Take your medicine.

“There’s a lot of over-the-counter medication ... that's available now, like Xyzal, and the generic, Levocetirizine,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour antihistamine. Some people may get sleepy ... so I tell people to take it at night.”

Nasal sprays like Flonase and Nasonex, and their generic counterparts, can help congestion and inflammation and are now affordable over-the-counter options as well, he said.

“But don’t overuse it,” he said. “If it says to take it once a day, take it once a day."

There are new eye drops on the market as well, such as Pazeo, that will calm itchy eyes, he said.

5. Get evaluated

If you still have symptoms in spite of taking those medicines, Sarmiento advises seeing a doctor for an allergy evaluation to learn what substance or substances are triggering your allergies. Allergy shots are available for those people as well as pills for some allergens, he said.

And there are newer medications on the market for a subset of patients whose symptoms aren’t controlled by high-dose steroids and inhalers, he said. Those drugs reduce symptoms by affecting the body’s immune response to allergens.

The Upstate is in for several more months of troublesome pollen that will plague allergy sufferers.

“For people with allergic asthma, tree pollen is an important trigger,” he said. “We now have tree pollen until mid-May and then grass pollen.”

And of course, ragweed season starts in late summer.

For the daily pollen count, go to pollen.com.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

COLUMBIA, S.C. – The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) and the Edgefield County Sheriff’s Office are pleased to announce the first successful contact of DHEC’s new Community Opioid Paramedic Education (COPE) program.

Begun at DHEC in 2019, seven counties currently participate in the program, which is a post-overdose outreach program in which people who experienced an opioid overdose and were treated with Narcan® are provided access to substance use treatment. The program uses referrals from EMS, law enforcement or hospitals to identify survivors for follow-up visits during a critical window for successful intervention to help treat substance use disorder and reduce harmful health outcomes for survivors, their family members and communities.

Typically, within 72 hours of a person’s overdose, a COPE team – which consists of a paramedic; law enforcement officer; and peer-support specialist, mental health counselor or social worker – will visit a survivor at their residence for a wellness check and provide educational drug treatment materials and resources.

Edgefield County Sheriff Jody Rowland was an eager partner for DHEC’s COPE program and began helping the agency make connections in Edgefield County. That effort led to a candidate being selected by Garrett Lynn, EMS director for Edgefield County.

The overdose survivor, who previously had a significant period of sobriety, was visited by DHEC COPE Provider Richard Naugler, along with members of the Edgefield County Sheriff’s Department and EMS, and was given wellness tools and harm reduction information and offered a variety of treatment services.

“This is the only state-led initiative of its kind,” said Kenny Polson, DHEC COPE Program Coordinator. “We still have a long road ahead, but we are working hard to be able to provide the best possible options for treatment and forge partnerships with law enforcement and EMS across the state.”

Polson also said the agency is planning to hire two additional part-time personnel to be able to reach all corners of the state.

For first responders such as Sheriff Rowland, a program like COPE provides crucial hope after an overdose contact that can be particularly stressful for responders.

“With increasing numbers of drug overdose calls in Edgefield County and statewide, the traditional first response and use of Narcan® for an overdose is simply not enough,” Rowland said. “Over the last two years, I have witnessed multiple deaths due to repeated overdoses.”

“Until the COPE program, no coordinated paramedic effort to connect overdose survivors to services and resources existed. When EMS Director Garrett Lynn introduced me to Richard Naugler and the COPE program, the Sheriff’s Office immediately joined the effort. We will work together to bring timely support to reach those citizens in our community that there is a path to recovery following an overdose.”

Any EMS agency in South Carolina is eligible for the COPE program. To learn more about the program or to enroll, contact [provide number and/or website]. Current EMS partners include Bowers EMS in Pickens County, Greenville County EMS, Lancaster County EMS, Lexington County EMS, Fairfield County EMS, Clarendon Fire & Rescue, and the Myrtle Beach Fire Department.

For more information about Narcan resources and instructional material, visit scdhec.gov/opioid-epidemic. Click here for an instructional video from COPE about the proper administration of Narcan during an overdose.

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Media Relations Statewide

COLUMBIA – Gov. Henry McMaster and administration officials announced a long-awaited plan to respond to the impact of climate change on a growing population. Released June 29, the plan focuses on beefing up the state’s data collection efforts and conserving the state’s natural defenses against rising seas and stronger storms.

The hefty report, which runs 746 pages and contains more than 50 recommendations, focuses on better data collection efforts, mitigating flooding by conserving natural environments like swamps and forests and encouraging local governments to introduce regulations that reduce risky development in flood-prone areas.

The new effort is the direct work of the state’s Office of Resilience, a cabinet agency that was created in 2021. Building resilience to increasingly strong storms is an ambitious goal for a new agency. The question remains: what will change for communities most affected by hurricanes?

A new focus on anticipating storm impacts is one of them.

“This work and our history is very tied to hurricanes,” said Carissa Cochrane, the communications director for the South Carolina Office of Resilience. The predecessor of her current office was a temporary agency that went by another name — the South Carolina Disaster Recovery Office — which was formed in 2015 during the aftermath of Hurricane Joaquin.

Cochrane said the term “resilience” came to the forefront in the years the temporary agency was responding to Joaquin and later on hurricanes Matthew and Florence. In addressing hurricane recovery, she said, the state realized it needed to do a better job at collecting data, anticipating flood waters, increasing community awareness and safeguarding protective area that already exist.

They also were intentional about defining what resilience means for South Carolina.

“We define resilience as the ability of communities, economies and ecosystems to anticipate, absorb, recover and thrive when presented with environmental changes and natural hazards,” said Cochrane.

One of the visible changes that coastal communities can expect as a result of the plan is a new flood hazard signage program. This will provide road signs that point out the high water mark in places with high storm surge. The height of the sign will be the height of high water mark, said Cochrane, and will help increase public awareness of hazard areas.

Another visible outcome will be the conservation of undeveloped natural areas, like coastal wetlands and forests, that already provide flood protection and mitigation.

The resilience office plans to hold public meetings within the state’s eight watersheds to get local input on which areas should be prioritized for conservation and other resilience planning decisions. At the beginning of 2023, the office received a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Federation to hold a series of public meetings in the Salkehatchie River Basin. Cochrane said that could be a model to replicate in the state’s seven other watersheds.

Coastal communities will not see these new flood signs or conserved areas pop up any time this year. Those projects will take time to roll out.

But state officials and the governor insisted that plan will provide an immediate benefit for this year’s hurricane season: a much expanded effort to collect better data on flooding and flooded communities.

“Our state has a lot of water,” McMaster told the press. Mostly, that’s a good thing, he said. “But we will have a problem if we don’t take the steps to find out what water we have, where we have it, when we have it.”

The state’s resilience plan is backed up some $200 million in funding McMaster secured from the legislature in this year’s budget negotiations for resiliency efforts.

The office also hopes to move quickly to drastically increase the number of weather stations and river and groundwater monitors around the state. The move will improve understanding of water patterns and how they’re changing, as well as improve the state’s ability to adapt and predict, said Alex Butler, the Office’s Resilience Planning Director, who led the creation of the report.

For instance, recent studies have shown that not only are South Carolina’s tides rising with climate change, the state’s coast is sinking, Butler said. But there aren’t any on-the-ground sensors measuring the phenomenon. It was discovered through remote sensing, which is often done with aerial or satellite observation, he said. The office hopes to change that, and fast.

Finally, the state hopes to use education, outreach and encouragement to local communities to introduce more stringent building regulations to ensure more homes and businesses aren’t built in risky areas. Butler said the office also hopes to create a “pre-disaster buyout” program that would offer cash to homeowners in flood-prone regions to move out before catastrophes. The current program only buys out homeowners after storms.

The resilience office intends to take the new plan on a statewide “road show” in the coming months to coordinate with local officials and watershed districts, Butler said.

The strategy offers another view of McMaster’s approach to climate change, which none of the speakers mentioned directly during the announcement.

McMaster has focused on adapting the state to climate change with a strong emphasis on conservation, while efforts to stem carbon emissions are not directly mentioned. Yet, McMaster has become a national leader on promoting electric vehicles and hosted a recent energy summit in Columbia that featured significant discussion of nuclear technology.

The resilience report itself contains myriad references to climate change and climate science.

“Here in South Carolina under the governor’s leadership, we’ve been able to dispel that you have to choose between economic and environmental sustainability,” Tom Mullikin, the former chairman of the S.C. Floodwater Commission and who has been deeply involved in shaping the state’s resilience policy, said June 29.

South Carolina is the second to last state on the Eastern Seaboard to adopt a resilience plan. But Ben Duncan, the state’s chief resilience officer, stressed that they have been working on many of the initiatives outlined in the report since the office was founded in 2020.

“Every state has taken this differently. I wouldn’t say we’re late to the party, but … certainly there’s no time to lose,” Butler said.

Hurricane Wire is a pop-up newsletter during hurricane season that delivers anyone who lives on the East Coast all the information they need to know as storms brew in the Atlantic and beyond.

ORANGEBURG COUNTY, SC (WIS) - Orangeburg County Sheriff's deputies are investigating burglaries at six churches in Cope this weekend.

On January 10, a member of Emanuel AME Church on Hudson Road called deputies to the church Sunday morning to report the building had been broken into some time between 7 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. The incident report says a glass window at the back of the church found broken and the church member told investigators "this is the second time this incident happened this week."

RELATED: See mugshots of the Midlands Most Wanted.

Upon investigation, deputies say they found a brick had been thrown through the window and power and phone lines had been cut. The church member told investigators nothing was missing "but some items were disturbed inside," according to the incident report.

The pastor of Canaan Baptist Church on Canaan Bridge Road also reported Sunday morning someone had forced their way into the church by breaking glass on a back door. The pastor said nothing was stolen, but several boxes in the secretary's office had been searched. The break-in occurred some time between midnight and 9:50 a.m. Sunday, the incident report says.

Deputies say they were also called to Canaan United Methodist Church Sunday for a report of a burglary. A member arriving at the church Sunday morning told deputies he found broken glass and "things moved around," according to the incident report. The handle to a door had been broken off.

Just after 1 a.m. Monday, an alarm called deputies to Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Neighbors Road. The arriving deputy reported finding a door and a window to the banquet hall open

An alarm went off at Mt. Olive Baptist Church on Wood Olive Street at about 2 a.m. on the 11th, luring a deputy who noticed a side door was open and several windows broken. The deputy reported the door to the pastor's study was forced open, but nothing was reported missing

At about the same time, deputies responded to an alarm at St. George Baptist Church on Shillings Bridge Road. Upon arriving they found a window on a back door had been pried open. Nothing was reported stolen from the church.

If you know anything that could help deputies find the person responsible, contact Crimestoppers in any of the following ways: Call 1-888-CRIME SC (888-274-6372), Text TIPSC plus your tip info to CRIMES (274637), visit www.midlandscrimestoppers.com and email a tip. Your identity will be kept anonymous, and if your tip leads to an arrest, you could be eligible for a cash reward of up to $1,000.

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