Santee Cooper is leaning into our performance objectives with the hiring of Michael Finissi, an electric utility executive with a 38-year record safely building and running generation stations, as Chief Operations Officer, and Scott Smith, who has more than 22 years in the electric utility industry. Finissi and Smith’s combined 60-plus years of experience will be put to work helping Santee Cooper deliver capital projects on time and on budget.
Finissi joined the company in April and is responsible for the areas of Generation, Capital Projects and Construction, Transmission Line Operations, Transmission Technical, Power Systems Design and Engineering, Power Systems Project Management, and Operational Training. He has extensive experience managing generation and transmission operations and construction for electric and gas utilities in the United States and Canada, and he has accumulated a strong record in safety across the areas he has managed.
“Michael brings a wealth of experience successfully building and retrofitting generating units and managing large capital programs, at a time when Santee Cooper needs to add significant generating resources to meet a growing customer base,” said Santee Cooper President and CEO Jimmy Staton. “His leadership will be critical as we finalize our Integrated Resource Plan and begin building for the next generation of South Carolina residents and businesses.”
Finissi came to Santee Cooper from Bruce Power, a commercial nuclear power facility in Ontario, Canada, where he was Senior Vice President of Performance Assurance. He has held senior executive positions with NiSource, a Columbus, Ohio-based utility with electric and gas generation, transmission, distribution, and gas storage serving four million customers, and with NiSource subsidiary NIPSCO, an electric and gas utility with 1.2 million customers serving northwestern Indiana.
Smith, who was named the General Manager of Projects and Construction, joined the company in September, after retiring from American Electric Power as the Senior Vice President of AEP Transmission Field Service. Smith joined the United States Army in 1982 and completed his service as a Captain in the combat engineering field in 1994.