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 $1.2 Trillion+ opportunity for Floating Offshore Wind (FOW) developers globally says UK report 1  FOW developers urged to learn lessons from European deployment Seoul, South Korea, 27 November 2024 — As the global wind industry prepares for GWEC’s Wind Energy Summit in South Korea later this week, Principle Power and Shoreline Wind demonstrate how Floating …

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North Carolina regulators on Friday accepted Duke Energy’s controversial plan for curbing carbon pollution, a blueprint that ramps up renewable energy and ratchets down coal power but also includes 9 gigawatts of new plants that burn natural gas.

The biennial plan is mandated under a 2021 state law, which requires Duke to zero out its climate-warming emissions by midcentury and cut them 70% by the end of the decade.

The timing of the order from the North Carolina Utilities Commission, two months ahead of schedule, caught many advocates by surprise. But its content did not: it hewed closely to a settlement deal Duke reached this summer with a trade group for the renewable energy industry; Walmart; and Public Staff, the state-sanctioned ratepayer advocate.

But critics were dismayed by regulators’ abdication of the 2030 deadline. The ruling said Duke no longer needed a plan to make the reductions by decade’s end, instead telling it to “pursue ‘all reasonable steps’ to achieve the [70%] target by the earliest possible date.”

“Major step back on climate,” Maggie Shober, research director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy,” wrote on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, adding, “for those that say it couldn’t be done, Duke had a 67% reduction by 2030 in its 2020 [long-range plan.] The utility industry generally, and Duke in particular, has had opportunity after opportunity to do better. They chose not to, and here we are.”

EPA rules could complicate plans for gas plants

And while many observers say the three large gas plants approved in the near-term carbon plan are better than the five originally proposed by Duke, detractors note the facilities still could run afoul of rules finalized this spring by the Biden-Harris administration.

“Duke’s plan isn’t even compliant with the latest EPA regulations related to greenhouse gas pollution,” David Rogers, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, said in a statement. 

Concerns about the Biden-Harris rules, along with doubt that the natural gas plants could be converted to burn carbon-free hydrogen, appeared not to persuade regulators. 

“The Commission acknowledges that there are uncertainties and risks associated with new natural gas-fired generation resources, but this is true of all resources,” the panel wrote. 

On the contrary, regulators believe Duke can make use of gas plants after the state’s 2050 zero-carbon deadline, even if clean hydrogen doesn’t pan out.

“Accordingly,” the panel said, “the Commission determines that a 35-year anticipated useful life of new natural gas-fired generation and its assumed capital costs are reasonable for planning purposes.”

The greenlight for the gas infrastructure is not absolute, commissioners emphasized in their order, since Duke still must obtain a separate permit for the facilities. But advocates still bemoaned the anticipated impact on customers.

“This order leaves the door open for Duke Energy to stall on carbon compliance in order to develop additional resources, like natural gas, that largely benefit their shareholders over ratepayers,” Matt Abele, the executive director of the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, said via text message.

‘Positive step’ for offshore wind

Still, Abele and other advocates acknowledged the plan’s upsides, including its increase in renewables like solar and batteries. The 2022 plan limited those resources to about 1 gigawatt per year; this year’s version increases the short-term annual addition to about 1.7 gigawatts.

Regulators’ decision to bless 2.4 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2034 and call for Duke to complete an “Acquisition Request for Information” by next summer also drew measured praise. 

“This order is an overall positive step for offshore wind,” Karly Lohan, North Carolina program manager for the Southeastern Wind Coalition, said in an email, adding, “we still need to see Duke move with urgency and administer the [request for information] as soon as possible.”

With regulators required to approve a new carbon-reduction plan for Duke every two years, advocates are already looking ahead to next year, when the process begins anew.

“Proceedings in 2025 present another chance to get North Carolina back on track to achieving the carbon reduction goals as directed by state law,” Will Scott, Environmental Defense Fund’s director of Southeast climate and clean energy, said in a statement.

“By accelerating offshore wind and solar, the Commission could still set a course for meaningful emissions reductions from the power sector that are fueling the effects of climate change, including dangerous and expensive storms like Hurricane Helene.”

And like Scott, David Neal, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, isn’t giving up on the state’s 2030 carbon-reduction deadline, the commission’s latest order notwithstanding.

“We’ll continue to push for the clean energy future that North Carolinians deserve and that state law and federal carbon pollution limits mandate,” he said in a statement.

Months ahead of schedule, North Carolina regulators accept Duke Energy’s controversial plan to reduce carbon is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A new study on behalf of Milliken has identified the top U.S. states for sustainable energy production. The rapid rise of the sustainable energy sector worldwide has been one of the most important technological and economic stories of recent years. Continued urgency to mitigate the impact of climate change has spurred governments and companies to speed the transition …

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This story was originally published by the Iowa Capital Dispatch.

BOONE – Engineers at Critical Materials Recycling break apart circuit boards, old transmissions and decommissioned wind turbines to extract and recycle rare earth materials.

Most recycling facilities extract things like copper and aluminum from the same scraps, but few know how to break down the batteries, meaning those rare earth material components are often lost. 

Rare earth materials are a series of elements with properties like conduction or magnetism that make them essential to electronics. They’re also part of the 10%-15% of wind turbine materials that are not currently recycled.

Iowa-based Critical Materials Recycling was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy as one of six companies to receive a $500,000 cash prize and $100,000 in assistance from national laboratories. Twenty projects were selected in the initial phase of the DOE prize and awarded smaller sums, $75,000, to further develop their concepts.

The $5.1 million Wind Turbine Materials Recycling prize was funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as part of its efforts to achieve a carbon-pollution-free power sector by 2035.

Dan Bina, Critical Materials Recycling president and CEO, said his company was already interested in wind turbine recycling but the DOE funding expedited and prioritized the project.

“The prize will give us the funding to be able to do that initial leg work, and we’ll build a team to make it happen much sooner and probably much better,” Bina said. 

The need for better wind turbine recycling

Tyler Christoffel, a technology manager for materials manufacturing and design innovation at the DOE wind energy technologies office, said a big goal of the office is to create a circular economy. 

“Basically looking at the ways that we can make our materials more sustainable, be able to reuse them, make them go further,” Christoffel said. 

He said about 90% of the turbines, mostly the parts made of steel and concrete, have an established recycling process.

“The work in the program was really focusing on those materials that have been hard to recycle so far, developing technologies so that you can more cost effectively recycle them and then get them into secondary markets,” Christoffel said. 

Those materials include the fiber reinforced composites that make up the blades, housing components and the rare earth materials found in the turbine generators. 

Christoffel said increasing recycling infrastructure and technology will help reduce waste at all stages of the turbines, from the production process, to the end of life and updating stages that occur less frequently. 

Critical materials recycling is a big focus for the department across various industries, not just wind technology. Most of that research is going on at the Critical Materials Innovation Hub led by Ames National Laboratory, here in Iowa. 

Ikenna Nlebedim, a scientist at the hub who worked with Critical Materials Recycling, said rare earth recycling is “a key strategy” for U.S. sustainability, security and technological advancement.

“Recycling rare earth elements is crucial for the United States, particularly in the context of wind generators, electronic waste (e-waste), and electric vehicles,” Nlebedim said. “It helps reduce the environmental damage caused by mining and processing, conserves finite resources, and supports a circular economy by reusing materials.”

Most of these minerals are mined overseas, with a majority coming from China, which spurred of the U.S. to develop better recycling capacity.

How it works

Critical Materials Recycling worked with the Ames National Laboratory to use an acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) process that has little to no waste, saves more of the metal components and doesn’t expose technicians to dangerous acids.

Nlebedim, who led the research, said the hub invented the process in 2015 and has worked with TdVib, Bina’s other company that produces a very specific type of material used in sonar-like technologies. Bina’s team commercialized the process with its Critical Materials Recycling company.

“ADR is both environmentally friendly and efficient, eliminating the need for pre-heating and reducing pollution, making it a greener alternative to traditional methods,” Nlebedim said in a statement. 

The DOE prize went to Critical Materials Recycling to apply the acid-free dissolution process to wind turbines.

The first step in the process is to break apart the various “feedstocks,” — a wind turbine, car part or other electronics brought to the company — into their components.

Computer hard drives, already shredded by the technology companies for security purposes, get tossed in a rock-tumbler like machine with a copper salt that Bina said selectively dissolves the rare earth materials and pulls them out into a solution. 

The rest of the hard drive, which has copper, gold and aluminum, can go to a more traditional recycler after CMR has extracted the approximately 2% rare earth materials from the hard drives. 

“We insert ourselves into the process, and actually add value, because now there’s more copper,” Bina said. 

The process is more or less the same moving up the line to larger, discarded magnets and the “swarf,” which is like magnet sawdust, accumulated from cutting them to size. 

Bigger items, like a transmission from a sedan or the generator of a wind turbine, have to be taken apart before they undergo the same process. Some of these magnets can also be recut and used again in various components. 

Each type of magnet has a slightly different process, but Bina said they go through a selective leaching process, like the hard drives in the copper salt tumbler, and come out as a rare earth solution. 

The solution then goes through a series of tanks where it is precipitated into a solid form and cleaned to a rare earth material that Bina said is “exactly” like what a buyer would find on the open market. 

Bina said the water used in the process goes through treatment and filtration and can be used again. 

“We’re not using any strong acids throughout the entire process, we don’t produce any hazardous waste, and we almost have no waste whatsoever,” Bina said.

An acid process would break down everything but rare earth materials, which are typically such a small portion of the electronic that it rarely makes financial sense to do. Critical Materials Recycling pulls the copper and aluminum to sell to smelters, to make up for the cost of gathering the rare earth materials.

“In order to get the rare earth from something like this, you have to valorize everything,” Bina said.

Moving forward

Soon, as part of the second phase of the DOE prize, Bina said his team will process several of the big, 4-megawatt or larger, turbines. 

“Not just looking to see if we can do it, but actually doing it,” Bina said. 

He said part of the challenge is building a team and the partnerships to operate. He doesn’t have a contract in place but has been in conversation with big energy and wind companies in Iowa to work into their decommissioning plans.

A spokesperson with MidAmerican Energy said the company was aware of Critical Materials Recycling and wrote a letter of support for its project with DOE. 

“We look forward to seeing how the company develops and we embrace the potential for additional recycling and disposal options,” the statement read. “The more options, the better.” 

Some of the other recipients of the DOE prize are developing processes for recycling wind turbine blades, which had proven to be rather difficult, as more than one company has run into problems processing the blades quickly enough.

MidAmerican has partnered, in the past, with a company that was later sued by the state for leaving piles of wind turbine blades, destined for recycling, around the state. MidAmerican has since partnered with another facility in Fairfax for recycling the blades. 

Bina hopes wind turbines become a large part of his business, which he has plans to expand into a larger space soon. But, since wind turbines are typically decommissioned en masse at intervals of 10 or 20 years, the other items, like hard drives and swarf will be constant inputs for the plant. 

“We have seen numerous pieces of these feedstocks just getting thrown away, in our eyes, the rare earth anyways, because there just isn’t that technology, that industry in place to capture them,” Bina said. “

The team in Boone is at the beginning of the growing industry. 

“Rare earth recycling, five years or so ago, was unheard of,” Bina said. 

Christoffel said the development of a circular economy of these expensive materials will help the U.S. to more sustainably build out expanded wind and solar infrastructure. 

“It’ll provide some insulation to our supply and help us to ensure a more sustainable build out of clean energy domestically,” Christoffel said.

Iowa company recycles rare earth materials from wind turbines, electronics is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Offshore wind faces intensified operational and maintenance challenges from bigger turbines and aging fleets, risking project efficiencies, durability, and profitability   Shoreline Wind’s new white paper underscores an urgent need to review and update existing O&M strategies, as the industry enters new territories and matures globally   Esbjerg, Denmark, 16th September 2024 – With the offshore wind …

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This story was co-published by Energy News Network, the Maine Monitor, and Grist.

Ron Huber rifled through a thick folder full of decades of state environmental records outside a community hall in the tiny coastal Maine town of Searsport. For the longtime local conservation activist, the scene inside was a familiar one: dozens of neighbors, workers and environmentalists mingled over pizza and coffee, discussing the merits of a proposed industrial project that has potential to transform the local economy, but at the expense of a locally beloved natural area.

“We’ve seen these things rise and fall many times,” Huber said outside the event late this past spring. Conservationists have celebrated over the decades as plans for a coal plant and a liquefied natural gas terminal on Sears Island came and went without success. 

This latest proposal presents a new kind of conflict. Rather than pitting townspeople against a corporate polluter, this development would support clean energy and be integral to the state’s plan for cutting climate emissions.

In May, the state applied for a $456 million federal grant to build a specially designed port on about 100 acres of Sears Island to support Maine’s nascent floating offshore wind industry. About two-thirds of the 941 acre island is in permanent conservation, and the state retains an easement on the rest, which has been reserved for a potential port for years. 

“We’re not optimistic that this one’s going to die under its own weight,” Huber said, noting that the offshore wind port has far more popular support than previous development proposals. 

Visits to recent community events like this one show that, unlike the polarized fights over clean energy projects in other parts of the country, Maine’s wind port is creating more personal divides — challenging residents’ values around climate change, conservation and economic factors. It previews what could be coming as wind grows in the Northeast. 

Conflicting values

“My question is really about why we’re not actually all on the same team,” said Belfast, Maine, resident Julianne Dow inside the community hall, during a question-and-answer period with New England labor organizers. “I’m very pro-union, I’m pro-offshore wind and pro having it here, and for the economic benefits for the region. But I’m also very pro maintaining Sears Island as a precious Midcoast resource.” 

Dow and activists like Huber want the port built instead at a Sprague Energy-owned oil and logistics terminal across the water known as Mack Point. It was considered as an alternative in lengthy public processes in recent years, and Sprague and opponents of the Sears Island proposal have continued to urge reconsideration for it so far this summer. 

Offshore wind has taken some big steps forward in Maine this year. Federal regulators approved a state research array of floating turbines, which generate power in deep waters far offshore, and are nearing leasing for commercial projects. A new state law calls for Maine to procure three gigawatts of offshore wind by 2040, using union-standard labor to build the projects and a floating wind-focused port.

Formal environmental assessments and site analyses are still pending. But state port authority director Matthew Burns wrote in June that Mack Point’s “physical and logistical constraints, need for significant dredging, and increased costs to taxpayers for land leasing and port construction would result in an expensive and inferior port for Maine compared to a versatile, purpose-built port on Sears Island.”

Still, opponents worry that wetlands and forests on Sears Island could be disrupted by port construction, even if most of the surrounding ecosystem remains intact. 

“Because we have to sacrifice something, let’s sacrifice something irreplaceable, instead of cleaning up a dirty old existing port?” Huber said outside the event. “That’s just ridiculous.” 

Asked if he saw wind as a climate solution more broadly, Huber began to express doubts about how turbine arrays would affect the ocean ecosystem. Fellow opponent Lou MacGregor of Belfast cut in. 

“Right now, what we’re focusing on is protecting Sears Island,” MacGregor said. “We can get to whether we support offshore wind or not after we protect Sears Island.” 

‘Skills that pay the bills’

Scott Cuddy, who until recently was policy director of the Maine Labor Climate Council, emphasized at the recent event that his group is agnostic about the port’s location, focusing instead on the benefits it could bring. Under Maine’s wind procurement law, he said, the port’s labor standards will be the same wherever it ends up. 

“We desperately want to see this happen, because we need to fight climate change, and we need to do it with good jobs,” Cuddy said. 

Cuddy and other labor organizers said state studies indicate that the port project and new wind farms could bring thousands of jobs to coastal Maine towns like Searsport. Local leaders said it could be a boost for shrinking school populations, attracting families to stay in the town long-term. 

“I think there’s been a mindset for a long time among kids, especially in rural Maine, like this was the thing I always heard — ‘You got to leave the state if you want to get a good job,'” said Sam Boss, the director of apprenticeships, workforce and equity for the Maine AFL-CIO. “We’ve got to find ways to keep our people here. And if there’s good opportunities, people will stay for them.”

Boss, Cuddy and others answered locals’ questions about plans for training programs for young people to enter the trades, and the family-sustaining wages and benefits promised by the growing wind industry — both in short-term construction positions and into the future.

“These are the skills that pay the bills, and they’re skills that don’t go away. The work might change — you know, we went from nuclear power plants, to now we’re doing offshore wind power development. But the skills are transferable,” said Nicki Kent, a union electrician who came to talk about her experience working on offshore wind in Rhode Island. “We’ve just got to get screwdrivers and wrenches into kids’ hands.”

Belfast resident Daniel Cowan was taking diligent notes on the back of an envelope while his teenage sons listened from the audience. A Navy veteran now pursuing a degree through the GI Bill, Cowan said he was curious about the possibility of wind industry jobs that could help him and his kids stay in Maine. 

Cowan empathized with attendees who were opposed to building the port on Sears Island, but said he thought the project’s benefits sounded like they would outweigh the costs.

“You’re going to destroy something no matter what you do. I love Sears Island, I think it’s great, I love walking my dogs out there. But I don’t think that’s going to change,” he said. “The world is coming to an end one way or another, and how fast we get there makes a difference.” 

Support from anti-wind groups

The island itself is connected to the mainland by a long causeway, bisected at its start by rail lines that snake around the coastline toward nearby Mack Point. The causeway juts out into Penobscot Bay, and Sears Island opens up at its end, an oval of land covered in trees and flanked by sandy, seaweedy shores. 

On a Saturday morning not long before the Searsport labor dinner, a large group of birders gathered at the gate where the causeway’s pavement continues into the forest. They had come to scout for the tiny, colorful songbirds that rest on the island each year amid long migrations between Canada and the tropics. 

Near the edge of the woods, someone had spray-painted the asphalt road with “Wassumkeag,” the indigenous Wabanaki name for the island. Hand-lettered signs with the web address for the advocacy group Alliance for Sears Island read, “Wind power = Good? On Sears Island = Bad!” 

The state does not plan to site wind turbines on Sears Island itself. Workers at the proposed port would help build and assemble towers and blades in pieces, towing them far out to sea for final assembly. 

Still, anti-wind groups have seized on the proposed project. Lobstermen affiliated with the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA), a Maine-based advocacy group founded in 2023 that focuses partly on opposing offshore wind, spoke out against the port at the recent jobs event. 

“My concern is only that in trying to affect climate change, that we’re going to cause more damage to the environment than climate change is already causing,” said NEFSA officer Dustin Delano, a commercial fisherman from Friendship, Maine. 

NEFSA has since posted signs where the island causeway intersects with the heavily trafficked Route 1 that read “Keep Sears Island wild.” Similar signs showing a crossed-out wind turbine bore the name of Rhode Island-based Green Oceans. Since its founding in 2022, it has focused mostly on opposing Revolution Wind, currently under construction in waters between Rhode Island and Connecticut. 

Many who joined the recent birding trip seemed unaware that Maine’s plans for Sears Island did not involve actually erecting turbines there or close to shore. Others expressed doubts about wind generally. Some did not want to discuss the issue at all, focusing instead on peering through binoculars at the Northern parula, black-throated green warbler or hermit thrush chirping in the trees along the road. 

A few people mentioned concerns that wind projects could harm whales. Scientists have found no evidence to support this claim, which has been linked to fossil fuel-funded disinformation campaigns. Green Oceans’ campaigns in Rhode Island have mimicked the delay and disinformation strategies of climate denialist groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation, according to Brown University research. 

Climate impacts close to home

The threat of climate change to ecosystems like Sears Island’s, meanwhile, is very real. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest-warming water bodies in the world, swelling sea levels, threatening the lobster fishery and leading to more frequent, destructive storms. Maine saw a state-record four federal disaster declarations in 2023 and has received two more already this year. 

The warming trend may affect the migratory birds that draw crowds to Sears Island each year. Warming temperatures are reshaping the length and timing of Maine’s seasons, which, combined with declines in insect populations driven by agriculture and other factors, could threaten the birds’ success, studies show. 

“If you look at decades and decades of patterns, you’ll see that birds are arriving one to two weeks earlier,” said William Broussard, a Midcoast Audubon board member who led the recent Sears Island trip. “If they get here early, they might not have the insects that they depend on to be out, because maybe the trees aren’t leafing out… and that can be really tough.” 

Midcoast Audubon hasn’t taken a position on the wind port issue. It’s a chapter of Maine Audubon, which separately supports the project but is not advocating for one site over the other. Maine Audubon is likewise independent from the National Audubon Society, which advocates for “responsibly sited renewable energy,” including wind, as a climate solution.

‘A terrible dilemma’

Marge Stickler, a birder from Belfast, said she wished the port would be built at Mack Point instead. “I have mixed feelings about what they’re doing here,” she said. “I love coming here… it’s a special place.” 

She had read an opinion piece earlier this year by activist Bill McKibben, founder of the climate groups 350 and Third Act, that urged Mainers to support the wind port even on Sears Island. McKibben wrote for Mother Jones last year that solving climate change will require a new “yes in my backyard” mindset. 

“McKibben wrote that you have to look at the climate as a whole, and this may be a good thing to have here,” Stickler said. “I’m not sure — why did he write that for Maine, he lives in Vermont, but… he said it’s better to have it and it’s better to have it here, maybe.” 

Dave Andrews, a retired engineer from South Bristol, Maine, struck a different tone as he trailed after the other birders. He’d worked on Superfund cleanups and brownfield solar projects in his career, and said he’d often heard “not in my backyard” sentiments from neighbors who were worried about viewshed impacts or a change in a place’s character. 

“If it’s a Walmart shopping center, I guess you have a valid statement,” he said. “But when it comes to something like this, this is a different balance.” 

Andrews called the port’s siting a “terrible dilemma.” But he felt swayed by the urgency of climate change and the fact that the project would leave much of Sears Island intact. As permitting and siting progress in the coming months, he said he hoped others who love the island would be able to accept the sacrifice.

“I don’t think there is a choice,” he said.

This story has been updated to clarify Maine Audubon’s position on the project and to correct Scott Cuddy’s title.

Offshore wind port siting raises new conflicts for coastal Mainers, environmental activists is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

It’s become a biannual tradition.

Since 2021, when North Carolina adopted a law requiring Duke Energy to zero out its carbon pollution, advocates have spent every other year poring over the company’s plans for supplying this state of 11 million with clean electricity. 

As of late last month, the first phase of the new ritual is now complete: citizens turned out by the hundreds to public hearings around the state and submitted written comments; and dozens of organizations, businesses, and large customers filed testimony to the state’s Utilities Commission, charged with approving or amending Duke’s plan by year’s end.  

A review of these comments shows clear dissatisfaction with Duke’s plan, which critics say is too reliant on gas and unproven technologies and too dismissive of resources like solar and battery storage.  

But there are also a few powerful institutions pulling in the opposite direction. And their voices could grow louder in the coming months, as the state enters the next phase of in-person, expert witness hearings. 

The law requires Duke to cut its carbon pollution by 70% by 2030 and at least 95% by midcentury, in line with scientists’ recommendations for avoiding catastrophic global warming. The statute directs regulators on the Utilities Commission to develop a plan to make that happen and to update the blueprint every two years.

Even as the popular, bipartisan measure moved through the legislative process, some critics worried it gave too much deference to Duke and did not make clear that regulators — not the utility — would chart the state’s path to a decarbonized electricity sector.

Still, after Duke in 2022 issued its first Carbon Plan proposal — a document covering hundreds of pages and including four different pathways for achieving net zero — a host of outside stakeholders put forward their own plans for the commission to mull, hoping the panel would pick and choose from them or even craft its own blueprint.

But in the end, after months upon months of expert hearings, public input, and thousands of pages of written testimony, the commission adopted Duke’s plan with few edits. 

This first Carbon Plan order was largely nonbinding. But after regulators sided with Duke on virtually every major issue — from how much the company should drive energy efficiency to how much solar it can connect annually to the grid — advocates this year are taking a slightly different tack. 

Rather than devise their own painstaking models to compete with Duke and its army of lawyers, engineers, and other experts, this time most organizations are starting with the company’s portfolios and critiquing key elements.

‘Most reasonable, least cost, least risk plan’

As in the lead up to the first Carbon Plan, this year Duke has proposed multiple routes to zero carbon by midcentury, with one clear preference. Offered in January after predicting a steep rise in electricity demand, that pathway is to add over 22 gigawatts of renewable energy and battery storage in the next decade, including from ocean-based wind turbines.

In the same time frame, the company wants to shutter most of its coal plants and add nearly 9 gigawatts of new gas plants, nearly three times the immediate build-out it proffered two years ago and one of the largest such proposals in the country. It also envisions two small nuclear plants of 300 megawatts each, about a seventh the size of the state’s largest nuclear plant outside Charlotte.

The company seeks to exploit exceptions in the state’s law to achieve a 70% cut in carbon emissions by 2035 instead of 2030. And while its plans to zero out its pollution are vague, they rest partially on building more nuclear reactors by 2050 and fueling any remaining gas plants with hydrogen – a technology still under development.

Still, Duke’s focus is on the immediate term. In its January filing, it sought support for “pursuing near-term actions that align with [its preferred pathway] as the most reasonable, least cost, least risk plan to reliably transition the system and prudently plan for the needs of…customers at this time.”

‘Imperative that the 2030 target be met’ 

Numerous commenters questioned that assertion, including the company’s premise that ratcheting down emissions more slowly than the law prescribes presents a “lower execution risk.” 

Perhaps most notably, the Clean Energy Buyers Association, a group of 400 major corporations from a range of sectors with their own sustainability targets, argued forcefully against delaying the 2030 target. 

“The ability of [our] members that are Duke customers to meet their clean energy commitments depends in large part on how clean Duke’s resource mix is,” the association’s Kyle Davis said in written testimony. He went on to say regulators should “only” approve a near-term plan that would allow Duke to cut its pollution 70% by decade’s end. 

Similarly, a group of local government Duke customers with climate goals, including major cities Raleigh and Greensboro and small college towns Boone and Davidson, noted that Duke’s energy mix would dictate whether they could meet their aims.

“Due to the urgency of the climate crisis and the implications to the health and well-being of the constituents we serve,” the cities and counties wrote, “it is imperative that the 2030 target be met in the timelines specified in [the law.]”

Testifying for the office of the Attorney General Josh Stein, expert witness Edward Burgess noted that the commission has not yet abandoned the 2030 deadline and that, according to the law, the 70% cut could only slip past 2032 under “very specific conditions” that have not been met.

Regulators haven’t authorized a nuclear or wind project that has been delayed beyond Duke’s control, he asserted, and a delay wasn’t necessary to maintain the “adequacy and reliability of the existing grid.”

Recognizing Duke’s latest increased demand projections, Burgess urged commissioners to “set a clear directive for Duke to achieve the Interim Target by no later than 2032.” Otherwise, said the witness for the attorney general, the public interest would be harmed by the “increase [in] the cumulative tons of CO2 emitted, which would remain in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years.”

‘Arbitrary limits on battery and solar’

The process by which Duke maps its generation plans over the next decade is complex and time intensive. But it’s aided by a computer modeling program that weighs various factors including costs to produce an optimal generation mix.

This method produces more solar and battery storage each year than Duke thinks is possible or appropriate to connect to the grid, so the company imposes manual limits on the computer program. Critics call that step unnecessary and damaging to the project of curbing carbon emissions in a least-cost manner. 

“Solar [photovoltaic] is the cheapest source of carbon-free electrons on the grid now and for the foreseeable future,” testified expert witness John Michael Hagerty on behalf of the Carolinas Clean Energy Business Association. “All things being equal, the more generation… that Duke can get from solar PV instead of other resources, the cheaper it will be for Duke to comply with carbon reduction targets.”

Michael Goggin, an expert witness for the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association and clean energy groups represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, analyzed other grid operators around the country and estimated that Duke could connect around 4 gigawatts of solar and storage annually, compared to the upper limit of 2.8 gigawatts suggested by the utility.

“Duke’s arbitrary limits on solar and battery interconnection should be greatly increased if not eliminated,” Goggin wrote. “These limits do not reflect reality, and there are many potential solutions to the interconnection challenges Duke claims in its attempt to justify these limits.” 

Pleading for more offshore wind

While numerous commenters were happy to see Duke move much more ambitiously toward offshore wind than it did two years ago, they noted the utility’s projected 2.4 gigawatts — enough to power about a million homes — fell significantly short of the near-term potential in ocean wind areas off the state’s coast. 

“The Carolina Long Bay projects have the potential to reach more than 2 gigawatts, and the Kitty Hawk Projects have the potential to reach nearly 3.5 gigawatts,” two employees of wind company Avangrid testified. “Therefore, there is additional offshore wind resource beyond the Preferred Portfolio request available to North Carolina.”

The state’s Department of Commerce has taken a keen interest in offshore wind because of its vast potential for economic development. Jennifer Mundt, an assistant secretary at the Department, implored regulators and Duke to “set a path forward… that directs the deployment of at least 6.0 gigawatts of offshore wind by the mid-2030s.” 

Such development is achievable with the Carolina Long Bay and Kitty Hawk areas, she said, and “will unlock billions in capital expenditures and tens of thousands of good-paying jobs for North Carolinians, and boost Duke towards its mandate to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century – a true win-win-win scenario.”

A pair of experts testifying for the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association noted that Duke would benefit from being a “second mover” on offshore wind in the United States: it could learn from the many other projects underway on the Eastern seaboard without putting ratepayers at risk. 

In contrast, John O’Brien and Philip Moor warned that for small modular nuclear reactors, “it is unclear when the Companies will be a second mover… the only approved project design…has been cancelled, and the closest designs… are under development by TerraPower and the Tennessee Valley Authority.”

Skepticism of new gas and ‘advanced’ nuclear

Indeed, while most clean energy advocates believe large, existing, emissions-free nuclear power plants can play a vital role in curbing carbon pollution, several say Duke’s near-term pursuit of as-yet unproven small modular reactors over more readily available alternatives is a mistake.

“Given the long lead-times, nuclear experts have found that [small modular reactors] will do nothing to address climate change, as the technology is too little, too late,” Grant Smith, senior energy policy advisor with Environmental Working Group, testified on behalf of his group, Durham nonprofit NC WARN, and others.

Numerous stakeholders criticized Duke’s plan to build 10 new gas plants in the next decade, half of which would be large baseload plants forced by new federal rules to run 40% of the time or less. Not only would Duke customers be on the hook for these underutilized plants, critics argued, they’d also be subject to erratic fuel prices.

“In North Carolina, this volatility was at the heart of hundreds of millions of dollars of recent fuel cost increases approved by the commission,” expert witness Evan Hansen testified on behalf of Appalachian Voices. “The Companies’ proposed aggressive build-out of natural gas-fired power plants will only increase their exposure, and their ratepayers’ exposure, to the future volatility of natural gas prices.”

The company’s strategy of converting gas plants to run on hydrogen molecules separated from other compounds as late as 2049 also strains credulity for some. 

“Duke’s general plan to build new natural gas-firing facilities and then transition those facilities to 100% hydrogen-firing faces significant technical uncertainty, infrastructure hurdles and costs,” testified William McAleb for the Environmental Defense Fund. The plants, he said, “are not necessary to maintain grid reliability, may never be co-fired with hydrogen, and will likely raise rates.”

The Clean Energy Buyers Association also suggested that Duke’s plan to supply its members with gas-fired electricity could backfire, causing the state to lose economic development projects and the utility to lose new customers.

“Some of the new load that Duke is forecasting may not materialize if Duke increases the carbon intensity of its resource mix as it has proposed to do in this docket, since some of the customers bringing new load… have clean energy targets,” the association’s Davis wrote. 

If that happens, he said, “and Duke overbuilds with fossil fuel capacity, it would result in higher costs for existing customers and make it more difficult for existing customers to meet their sustainability targets.”

Amid all this criticism, support for Duke’s approach stood out, especially where the timeline is concerned.

Testifying for the Carolina Industrial Group for Fair Industrial Rates, a powerful consortium of manufacturers and other large Duke customers, Brian Collins asserted, “there is increased cost and risk in reliably meeting the interim 70% target by 2030. As a result, I recommend that the Commission not require Duke to meet the 70% emission reductions target by 2030.”

Public Staff, the state-sanctioned ratepayer advocate, believes that compliance with the interim pollution cut is possible by 2034 but not before. And the state’s 26 electric cooperatives, which buy electricity wholesale from Duke, expressed some concern about the speed of transmission upgrades necessary to add renewable energy to the grid fast enough. 

A technical conference is scheduled for next week in Raleigh, and what is likely to be weeks of expert-witness hearings begin July 22.

Groups urge N.C. regulators to push Duke Energy on solar and wind, pump the brakes on new gas is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.