Lonnie Carter is president of Santee Cooper, the state-owned utility founded during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The utility is based in Moncks Corner and sells electricity directly — or indirectly through cooperatives — to about a third of S.C. homeowners and businesses statewide.

Gov. Mark Sanford criticized the agency’s board in October for what he called inappropriate spending on charities and called for a study of the agency to determine how best to measure its performance. In December, Sanford ousted T. Graham Edwards as chairman, 20 months after the Republican governor picked him for the job.

Carter joined Santee Cooper in 1982 and was named president a year ago. He met with The State newspaper this week to talk about the agency’s purpose and performance.

QUESTION: Santee Cooper is borrowing about $900 million to build a $1.4 billion coal-fired power plant in Berkeley County. Does the utility’s public status allow it to borrow money more cheaply than an investor-owned power company?

ANSWER: Being part of the state doesn’t necessarily help. The state’s statutes created Santee Cooper and gave it the ability to borrow money. But it has to stand on its own; it can’t get any tax support at all. When we borrow money, we borrow it simply on Santee Cooper’s name and operation.

QUESTION: Talk about selling off Santee Cooper continues to resurface. Do you think it is inevitable?

ANSWER: Let me say this about privatization: It’s a good thing that the potential always exists because it reminds us every day that we have to be better at what we do than the average company is, or we probably aren’t going to exist.

If you do an objective study, you’ll find the state is much better off keeping Santee Cooper as an asset, rather than selling it. That doesn’t have anything to do with your philosophy about whether there should be more government or less government; it’s a flat-out business decision.

QUESTION: How much would Santee Cooper fetch? How much money would state taxpayers net from a sale, and how would ratepayers fare?

ANSWER: The last time we looked at it, a little over a year ago, it (a sale of Santee Cooper) would produce anywhere from zero to $1.3 billion dollars. That’s net. That’s what the state would get. That would mean you would be looking at $3.5 billion to $5 billion dollars (as a sales price) because you have about $3.5 billion in debt.

If you look at what the customers pay as a result of that (sale), the customers’ higher bills would exceed what the state gets in every scenario within five years. The one-third of the state’s population served by Santee Cooper would be footing that bill. That number could be anywhere from about a 15 percent cost increase to as much as 40 (percent).