By Peter Key

SCANA stockholders on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the company’s sale to Dominion Energy, moving the deal one step closer to completion.

In a vote taken at a special meeting, shareholders voted 72% in favor of the sale, more than the two-thirds required for approval.

The sale now has only three more major hurdles to clear: authorizations by South Carolina and North Carolina regulators as well as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

FERC and the Georgia Public Service Commission have already approved the deal, and the Federal Trade Commission has indicated it won’t try to block it on antitrust grounds.

SCANA shareholders also voted against paying severance packages to SCANA executives if they are let go after the sale is completed, but that vote is non-binding. SCANA has set aside $110 million in severance for its executives, attorneys for the South Carolina legislature said Monday.

If approved, the deal would be a stock-for-stock transaction with Dominion paying two-thirds of a share of its stock for each SCANA share it acquires. At Dominion’s Tuesday closing price of $71.71, the company would be paying $6.83 billion for SCANA.

SCANA became an acquisition target due to its failed attempt to expand the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in Fairfield County. S.C. It and Santee Cooper, a utility owned by the state of South Carolina, gave up on the expansion last summer after spending $9 billion on it over a decade.

If the deal were to go through, it would give Dominion 6.5 million regulated electric customer accounts, 31.4 GW of generation capacity and 93,600 miles of electric transmission and distribution lines.

The deal is controversial, in large part because customers of SCANA’s South Carolina Electric & Gas subsidiary have already been charged more than $2 billion for the failed expansion and continue to pay about $27 a month for it.

South Carolina passed a bill that would roll back most of the payment, but SCANA is challenging its constitutionality.