By Molly Parker
Staff Writer

    In his early college years, Lonnie Carter took a job at the Edisto Electric Cooperative, where he had a laundry list of chores, the most difficult being the collection of delinquent electric payments from customers.

If the money wasn’t there, he had to cut off the power. It wasn’t a matter of a phone call or a threatening letter.

The company collected past-due payments the old-fashioned way: door-to-door.

“Nobody liked to do it and they had a policy of sending two people out when they did because one time somebody was shot,” recalled Carter, Santee Cooper’s chief executive officer, of his foray into the utility industry, a door that was opened for him because he was dating the co-op manager’s daughter. 

Without fail, Carter said, he could divide the people he encountered into three categories. There were deadbeats who looked for any opportunity to “beat you out of a dollar.” He didn’t have much sympathy for them. There were others who simply were sloppy with their business and had forgotten to pay; they generally made good with an apology.

And then there were the customers that “yanked away at your gut. They were the people who could not afford to pay the bill,” Carter said. “I saw it in a very real way.”

One day on a round of collections, Carter said, he and a lineman knocked on a door in rural Bamberg County about 70 miles to the northwest of Charleston, where Carter grew up and the co-op is headquartered. They were greeted by a kind, elderly woman watching over her grandchildren. 

“She was surprised to see us,” Carter said, recalling the desperate look the woman wore as she explained that she had given her son $40 and asked him to pay the bill. She didn’t have another $40 to spare. 

“That lineman and I did something we weren’t supposed to do. We dug in our pockets and we paid that lady’s power bill. That lady’s name was never on the list again, but I’ll never forget the devastation in (her) eyes when I told her we were there to collect the power bill. I knew she didn’t have the money. I could look around the place and tell.”

Missing from the debate

Carter recalled this story last month while sitting in a cozy chair in his spacious office at Santee Cooper’s headquarters in Moncks Corner, a long way from his bill-collecting days.

“Those are the ones who are left out of this debate today,” Carter said, referencing the utility’s controversial plan to build a coal-fired plant in rural Florence County to meet growing electricity demands.

Coal plant proposals are falling to the wayside across the country, and Carter’s unyielding commitment to build one has drawn the wrath of environmental groups and national policy makers. Just recently, eight attorneys general, from seven states and the District of Columbia, pleaded with the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control to deny permitting.

The environmental concerns are important, Carter said, quick to insist that Santee Cooper’s plant will be one of the cleanest in the nation. But so too are the socioeconomic consequences, he said, of sky-high electricity costs or rolling power outages.

Affordable electricity is not only of paramount significance to businesses that power the economy, but also to the lower echelon of wage earners who live in vast numbers throughout the South Carolina countryside.

Without the new plant, the state will face a power shortage by 2013, he said, and even if he can keep the lights on, people will pay dearly. The utility is the state’s largest electric provider, directly or indirectly serving 2 million people in all 46 counties.

With so much at stake, Carter said he cannot afford to be distracted by the debate.

“It’s something The Citadel taught me. I stay focused on the duty and the responsibility I have and I try to ignore the chatter. I have an obligation and our board has an obligation to provide that reliable power and to make sure it’s affordable,” he said.

Climbing the utility ladder

Carter has a long history with Santee Cooper. In fact, he’s spent most of his adult life there. His senior year at The Citadel, a school he chose because of its neat campus and the discipline it promised, Carter was poised to take a job with one of the nation’s major financial firms. Until they delivered the bad news about where he would have to live, that is. 

“Of all places, I was going to have to go to New York City,” Carter said.

A week after graduation in May 1982, Carter instead took a job with Santee Cooper as a computer programmer in the finance department. He has worked in various departments over the years, but spent most of his time as a financial analyst. In 1997, he took a year off to build a startup company, the Jacksonville, Fla.-based Energy Authority, which shops the wholesale market for a number of public utilities including Santee Cooper, a chief partner in the company.     

Four years ago, he put in his application to fill the vacant CEO post. He didn’t really expect to get the job at the time, but wanted the board to know he was interested for when the vacancy rolled around again.  

As it turned out, Carter possessed just the mix of experience and folksy charm the majority of the board wanted at the helm of the utility. 

“It sort of just worked out,” Carter said, quoting that old adage about how luck is a case of preparation meeting opportunity.

Today, Carter lives with his wife Laurie (not the co-op manager’s daughter) and their three teenage children — two girls, one boy — in Moncks Corner. When he moved there 25 years ago, Carter said he was the only one of his peers who chose to live in Moncks Corner. 

“They thought I was crazy,” he said. “(But) think about where I came from. Moncks Corner is bigger than the county seat in Bamberg. It had two grocery stores. It had a couple of fast food places.”

Not to mention a power company.

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