By Chris Herndon
State Director, North Carolina Sierra Club
Duke Energy has been an environmental wrecking ball for years, even more so since the latest presidential election. The utility company has been quick to embrace greed and pollution under President Trump while remaining disappointingly quiet in areas where it claims to be a leader, such as clean energy and diversity.
Now the utility is trying to make its captive audience of North Carolina ratepayers front the costs and risks of power plant construction, with no assurance that those plants will ever produce a single kilowatt of power. And it wants to back off its pledge to reduce carbon emissions by 2030, meaning those plants are likely to be powered by polluting fossil fuels or dangerous nuclear.
The N.C. General Assembly just gave a green light to Duke Energy's plans in Senate Bill 266, what we call the Ratepayer Risks Act. The legislation has been sent to Gov. Josh Stein: Join us now in urging him to veto it.
Duke Energy's activities since November have been a cascading series of disappointments and damages to customers and the public. One executive proclaimed that the utility would consider burning more coal under Trump. Then the company supported an industry letter urging the EPA to undo clean air and water safeguards. The monopoly utility has been noticeably silent on Trump’s attacks on renewable energy and federal agencies working to address climate change, and his wide-ranging attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs like those Duke previously touted.
In April, Duke Energy polluted Earth Day in Indiana when it successfully compelled lawmakers to force captive utility ratepayers to finance new power plants during construction, years before a single kilowatt of electricity is produced. This policy had disastrous consequences for states including South Carolina. S266 would do the same thing here in North Carolina, on top of watering down our state’s greenhouse gas reduction targets.
Four years ago, Duke agreed to deadlines for lowering its carbon emissions in North Carolina, in exchange for an easier path to increase utility bills. Duke has taken full advantage of the smoother process to raise its prices, but this year it sought to replace that bipartisan deal with legislation written by a former Duke executive turned lawmaker. When that lawmaker left office, others in the General Assembly stepped up to carry out his plan.
They took multiple avenues to ram their plan through. Language from the original bill, S261, was inserted wholesale into the state Senate's proposed budget. Then it found a new vehicle in S266, originally a bill to ease building code requirements for Hurricane Helene victims. The full House passed that bill on Tuesday, June 10, and the Senate voted on xxxx to concur with the House rewrite.
It's now heading to Governor Stein's desk. We've asked him to veto it.
S266 would add more grease to the skids of Duke's rate hikes while giving the utility a pass on its near-term pledge to cut carbon emissions. The only winners in this deal are financially healthy utilities and tech companies that want to make ratepayers foot the bills for new power plants to run their energy-gorging facilities. The losers are the people of our state who get a one-two punch: more money snatched from their wallets and a broken promise of cleaner air to breathe.
Duke Energy customers may soon be asked to pay in advance for a gas or nuclear plant during the multi-year construction process. That means families who already struggle to pay the electric bill may see their power shut off if Duke buries them under the weight of construction costs. Duke customers who need their money now for prescriptions, food, rent, and other costs of living may not even live to see a single minute of light or heat produced by these conceptual power plants – assuming they produce any power at all.
We may not be able to slow Duke’s insatiable greed and embrace of the Trump administration's catastrophic policies. But, together, we can compel our state lawmakers to fulfill their duty to hold Duke Energy accountable for the promises it made to us just a few years ago.
Governor Stein must veto S266, and our state representatives and senators must refuse any attempt to override that veto.
Our elected leaders must reject this bid to let a monopoly utility dig into our wallets and shrug off its promises to clean up the air we breathe. They must refuse to bow to Duke's dollars, and instead do right by the people they were elected to serve.