Scores of Businesses, Nonprofits Come Out Against Duke Energy’s Carbon Plan

Image credit: CNN

Amid a ghastly global escalation of crippling heat waves, wildfires and superstorms, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said last week that world leaders must quickly find “an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.” He slammed fossil fuel corporations as the “godfathers of climate chaos.”

In North Carolina, one of the largest of those corporate godfathers, Duke Energy, proposes to greatly expand fossil fuel use while strangling the fastest, cheapest and fairest path to slow the crisis: rooftop solar-plus-storage (SPS), also known as local solar and distributed generation.

In voluminous filings to the NC Utilities Commission on May 28th, attorneys representing scores of social justice, environmental, consumer, and business groups, along with Attorney General Josh Stein, widely rejected Duke Energy’s Carbon Plan proposal for handling the state’s electricity needs in coming decades.

Nearly all parties oppose Duke Energy’s plans to gamble on high-risk, super-costly experimental technologies and to greatly expand the use of methane gas for power generation. Most parties cite the need for a shift to renewable power, with Stein’s lawyers alluding to more solar-plus-storage on homes and businesses.

NC WARN proposes prioritizing SPS installations on schools, emergency services, and facilities in low-income and vulnerable communities.

As initial filings are digested, it seems that many groups will explicitly support NC WARN’s proposal for a sweeping expansion of SPS by having it funded through the rate system. Joining NC WARN in presenting that proposal to the NCUC are the Charlotte-Mecklenburg NAACP, Robeson County’s Seeds of HOPE and the Down East Coal Ash Environmental and Social Justice Coalition.

At least six other interveners’ refer to the need for more distributed generation including the office of Attorney General Josh Stein, The City of Charlotte, Walmart, the Environmental Working Group, the NCUC’s public staff and more.

Sharing Solar Proposal Helps All Customers:

• Local solar-plus-storage (SPS) could expand across NC quickly, inexpensively and equitably – with priority given to disadvantaged communities and emergency facilities.

• There’s no cost for customers to add SPS; it would be funded through the rate system – just as we now all pay for dirty power.

• All homes, businesses and nonprofits benefit – even if they don’t have solar.

• Solar companies grow, creating thousands of jobs in small towns and cities.

• Sharing Solar would improve resiliency and provide backup power during outages.

• It avoids the constant rate hikes and high risks saddling Duke Energy’s plans.

In written testimony supporting Sharing Solar, engineer Rao Konidena describes how Duke Energy rigged its modeling to virtually exclude consideration of SPS. He also told the NCUC that, in proposing large generation projects situated far from where power is most used, Duke Energy is “creating a dependency on transmission to deliver that far away generation …”.

Not all private utilities have chosen Duke Energy's path of obstructing solar-plus-storage. In Vermont, a utility company called Green Mountain Power helped pioneer "virtual power plants".

As the Environmental Working Group told the NCUC, Duke Energy favors large scale power infrastructure over cheaper and more reliable smaller scale alternatives, such as SPS, which can act as “virtual power plants” that allow the utility to draw from customers’ batteries during periods of high, system-wide demand.

Among the interveners, there was little support for Duke Energy’s high-risk and secretive plans to risk tens of billions building questionable transmission corridors that might lead to giant solar farms many years from now.* NC WARN and other community groups have predicted that controversy would spring from any attempt by Duke Energy to intrude upon farms, forests and communities in eastern North Carolina while blocking local SPS.

The NCUC will conduct a judicial-style hearing beginning on July 22nd in Raleigh.

It is clear that the only way North Carolina can finally get aligned with the climate scientists is to rapidly expand local solar-plus-storage. All professed leaders must stop pretending that the Duke Energy Carbon Plan is moving the state toward decarbonization.

*A group of co-intervenors filed one expert testimony strongly supporting Duke Energy’s grid buildout. Inexplicably, a second expert witness praised how distributed generation such as SPS could be expanded quickly and inexpensively. 

This article was published first by NC WARN.

North Carolina has twice the practical space on rooftops, parking areas, contaminated brownfields and vacant land close to towns and cities to meet our climate goals.