NC Attorney General, regulators’ Public Staff, City of Charlotte, others oppose fossil fuel expansion and call to expand rooftop solar
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 28, attorneys representing scores of social justice, environmental, consumer, and business groups, along with Attorney General Josh Stein, widely rejected Duke’s (pro) Carbon Plan proposal for handling the state’s electricity needs in coming decades.
Nearly all parties oppose Duke’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.
As initial filings are digested, we believe many 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 his written testimony proposing Sharing Solar, NC WARN’s 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 is “creating a dependency on transmission to deliver that far away generation …”.
As our allies at Environmental Working Group told the NCUC, Duke 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’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 allied community groups continue pointing to the controversy that will 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 22 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 Duke Energy bosses’ (pro) Carbon Plan is moving this state toward decarbonization.
*A group of co-intervenors filed one expert testimony strongly supporting Duke’s grid buildout. Inexplicably, a second expert witness praised how distributed generation such as SPS could be expanded quickly and inexpensively.
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Now in its 36th year, NC WARN is building people power in the climate and energy justice movement to persuade or require Charlotte-based Duke Energy – one of the world’s largest climate polluters – to make a quick transition to renewable, affordable power generation and energy efficiency in order to avert climate tipping points and ongoing rate hikes.
