Roofer in McClellanville, SC

An elusive solution for a persistent problem is flickering to life again for one of the most idyllic fishing villages along the South Carolina coast.

A new high-voltage line that would help keep the power on for residents and businesses in outage-prone McClellanville is inching toward its eventual completion.

It's only been in the works since the 1990s.

After years of fits and starts, the project rounded an important turn a few weeks ago, when an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that's expected to help finance the line signed off on a new environmental impact analysis. It marked the last major approval required from the federal government.

"To me, that's good news," said McClellanville native and Carolina Seafood owner Rutledge Leland III, who'll mark his 50th year as mayor in 2026.

It's been more than a decade since Leland noted that his historic hometown had lived with the "nagging problem" of fickle electricity service "for all of my years in office" — a public-service streak that began in 1973.

But the flip won't be switched anytime soon. Central Electric Power Cooperatives Inc., which is spearheading the project with Berkeley Electric Cooperative, said the recent federal approvals allow it to proceed with "finalizing, designing and building this electric transmission line."

For instance, the group must still clear permitting hurdles at the state level and secure a loan from the Agriculture Department's Rural Utilities Service.

Also, Central Electric has yet to nail down a precise cost estimate or construction schedule, partly because it still needs to identify and acquire the specific 75-foot-wide strips of land where the power poles will be placed.

Preferred path

While the marathon process started in the 1990s, it picked up steam around 2005.

"We've supported it from the beginning," Mayor Leland said last week.

He also recalled the previous fractious attempts to map out a palatable pathway for a major infrastructure project that will alter the landscape in a rural and ecologically sensitive area teeming with wetlands and wildlife.

At one point, a dozen potential routes were in the mix at a projected average cost of $438,000 a mile. The most controversial among them was a proposal to run the power line from Belle Isle in Georgetown County to McClellanville through the pristine Santee Delta refuge.

"Every time there'd be a public hearing there’d be some opposition to just about anything they chose," Leland said.

Central Electric appears to be past that point now. It hit a critical milestone in September when the federal government's environmental review singled out the final "preferred" route. The study included two alternatives. Both were eliminated.

The line will carry up to 115 kilovolts of power and measure about 23⅓ miles in length, linking a new substation to be built off Highway 45 in McClellanville with an existing inland connection point near Highway 41 in Jamestown.

Maps show the overhead line snaking from upper Berkeley County toward Honey Hill and onto the coast.

Along the way, it will cross four named creeks. It also will require the use of existing and new rights-of-way — on both privately owned land and 13½ miles of property inside the Francis Marion National Forest.

The high-voltage wires would be strung along as many as 280 heavy-duty utility poles standing about 75-feet tall.

The S.C. Coastal Conservation League, which challenged previous routing ideas, isn't opposed to the latest iteration, though it's urging Central Electric to "take all reasonable measures to limit impacts to endangered species."

"There is a legitimate need to enhance electrical service reliability in McClellanville, and planning has been in the works for 20 years now," Taylor Allred, the Charleston advocacy group's energy and climate program director, said in a statement last week. "While the project has some points of environmental concern, including 13.5 miles of its route running through the Francis Marion National Forest, it avoids the most environmentally harmful alternatives."

What's on the line

Most McClellanville residents and small businesses fall within Dominion Energy South Carolina's territory. The rest are served by Moncks Corner-based Berkeley Electric.

The source of the rural area's power struggles is an aging, inefficient and vulnerable transmission setup. A lone line ties into a Dominion substation about 40 miles away in Mount Pleasant that bleeds voltage the farther north it goes.

And it provides no backup in the event of an outage.

"The long line exposure is through forested properties, increasing the likelihood of service interruption," according to the government's environmental report, which pointed to downed trees, falling limbs and wildfires, as well as severe storms and saltwater corrosion.

"Given that this is a single source of electricity to McClellanville, all these factors render this source inherently unreliable and fail to meet ... the threshold industry standard for acceptable power system reliability," the study continued.

The new and existing lines will provide three electrical circuits rather than one, leading to fewer outages and creating a backup power loop. A similar project that state-owned Santee Cooper started building on Johns Island in June required about 10 years of planning, including delicate negotiations with irate landowners.

Central Electric estimated that McClellanville, on average, has lost power for about 11 hours each year since 2020, or 38 times longer than all other parts of South Carolina served by the cooperative system. The group also projected demand from the area's existing "delivery point" is on track to grow 22 percent.

Central Electric CEO Rob Hochstetler said McClellanville's residents and small businesses experience "by far the least reliable electric service in the state."

"They deal with flickering lights and frequent, lengthy power outages — the kind of problems most consumers haven’t faced in several decades," he said in a written statement last week. "Central and Berkeley Electric Cooperative have worked for 25 years to address this problem, and, finally, we have the federal government’s approval for a plan to fix it."

He added that the painstaking process yielded "a solution that is proven to have the least impact on the environment and local communities. Through multiple rounds of ... engagement and plan revisions, we explored every possible route and exhausted every available option."

The new line is expected to take about three years to complete, once construction begins.

Leland, closing in on his 50th year as mayor of McClellanville, which dates to 1685, has learned to take the long view.

"We've always been optimistic," he said.