COLUMBIA, S.C. WRDW/WAGT) - Nearly a decade ago, the plug was pulled on the controversial VC Summer nuclear project just north of Columbia before any new power was generated.

Since then, former executives have been sentenced to prison, South Carolina ratepayers have been on the hook for billions of dollars in sunk costs, and the partially completed project has sat dormant, thought by many to be dead.

But a V.C. Summer revival appears now to be more of a possibility than at any point before.

On Wednesday, the state-owned utility Santee Cooper — which owns the Fairfield County site, along with privately owned Dominion Energy — started looking for a potential buyer to purchase the unfinished nuclear reactors at VC Summer and finish the job.

“We think it will benefit our customers, and we think it will benefit the people of South Carolina, or we won’t do it,” Santee Cooper President and CEO Jimmy Staton told a House subcommittee last week.

The VC Summer project was a joint venture between Santee Cooper and SCE&G, which later became part of Dominion Energy.

The two utilities still own the site but have said they themselves are not interested in pursuing the project further.

Santee Cooper is now working with the New York-based banking firm Centerview Partners LLC to solicit proposals from interested parties, including in the private sector, to complete the work, with bids due in early May.

“It’s a move away from the traditional model of just looking solely to the utility to build the generation, and moving toward empowering the private sector to use their capital and their expertise and, at their risk, to solve those energy problems to the benefit of all of us,” said Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort.

It comes as more and more tech companies in particular are searching for huge amounts of energy to power data centers and artificial intelligence technology.

A concept like this is also not novel: For example, in Pennsylvania, Microsoft entered a deal last year to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear site for its tech projects.