A new North Carolina climate plan outlines actions that would help curb greenhouse gas pollution by nearly two-thirds by 2030 — surpassing a state goal and meeting scientists’ recommendations for how to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. 

The state is already on pace to cut emissions just over 40% compared to 2005 levels. But the steps outlined in the new blueprint, crafted as part of the federal Inflation Reduction Act, would slash heat-trapping pollution even further.  

If sustained over the ensuing decades, the measures would also bring the state closer to zeroing out its climate footprint by midcentury, though officials stress that doing so would require “significant will, funding, and effort.” 

Finalized earlier this month after weeks of webinars, community meetings, and other forms of public feedback, the Priority Action Climate Plan covers six areas of the state’s economy: transportation, electricity, buildings, industry, waste, and lands. The action items are “implementation ready,” officials say, and not dependent on new state laws or policies. 

By far, the biggest opportunity for curbing pollution is in the building sector. Ramping up support for low-income weatherization assistance, energy efficiency upgrades in government buildings, and other measures to reduce energy usage per square foot could account for 60% of pollution reductions anticipated by 2030. 

“The buildings sector is one with a lot of low-hanging fruit that hasn’t been widely addressed to date,” said Sara Edwards, a spokesperson with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, which took the lead in crafting the action plan.  

Edwards noted the state’s 2009-era residential building code, which is frozen in place until 2031 thanks to a law passed last year. “Even new housing stock coming online is not as energy efficient as it could be,” she said.

Many older commercial and public buildings lack up-to-date lighting and energy management systems, she added. “State agency buildings alone have identified over $200 million of energy saving projects that are waiting for funding to implement,” she said.  

“The same types of projects could be implemented at public universities and community colleges, as well as schools and local government buildings, resulting in significant ongoing savings to [state] taxpayers,” said Edwards. 

Phasing out direct combustion of fossil fuels in buildings, such as from gas furnaces, could achieve another 36 million metric tons of emissions, almost a quarter of the cuts.  

Recommendations in the other five sectors combined could result in a fifth of the reductions, or a total of 29 million metric tons of carbon dioxide or the equivalent. 

In the transportation sector, today the state’s largest source of greenhouse gasses, priority steps include facilitating transportation choices other than cars and increased deployment of electric vehicles and charging infrastructure.  

To curb emissions from electric utilities, the plan focuses on boosting solar panels on homes, local government properties, and other small institutions, complementing a state law requiring Duke to ramp up larger-scale renewable energy investments. 

The blueprint also outlines programs to increase industrial efficiency, better capture methane gas from landfills, and restore and protect peatlands and forests, vital for their ability to capture and store carbon. 

North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality joined 44 other states in submitting its priority climate action plan, according to an announcement this week from the Environmental Protection Agency.  

Charlotte, the Triangle, and the Eastern Band of Cherokees were among nearly 200 metropolitan regions and tribes around the country who submitted their own plans, as well. 

The documents set the stage for the next phase of the federal Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program. With the blueprints as their guide, tribes, states, and large metropolitan regions will now work to apply for $4.6 billion in competitive grants for implementation. 

As the Biden administration races to get Inflation Reduction Act funds out the door this year, the deadline for those proposals is April 1. 

Meanwhile, the Department will take comments on the priority plan until June 3, which it says will inform yet another strategy document required under the Inflation Reduction Act: a comprehensive climate action plan, due in June 2025. 

“Throughout this process,” Edwards said, “we’ve done public outreach and stakeholder engagement. That’s going to continue throughout. It’s not just like we’re going to drop this document and not take public comment.”

Here’s how North Carolina could cut climate emissions two-thirds by 2030 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.

Big boxes of steel, iron, and mineral oil.  

That’s how John Gajda, a long-time utility engineer and professor at North Carolina State University, describes the power transformers Siemens Energy plans to build in Charlotte. 

The hunks of metal are named for their vital function: transforming the electricity produced at power plants to a voltage suitable for transmission, then transforming the voltage again for use in our homes and businesses.  

“Transformers are the key technology that allow us to carry power over a distance,” Gajda said. 

Central to the intricate network of cables, wires, and scaffolding seen at power substations, transformers have long played a critical — if not flashy — role in our electric grid.  

“It’s maybe not the sexiest part of power generation,” said Richard Voorberg, president of Siemens Energy’s North America hub. “Everybody likes to talk about the generation side — big wind turbines or solar panels or nuclear plants. But this is one of those quiet backbone things that are necessary.” 

Aging grid creates an opportunity

Transformers come in all shapes and sizes, from the 200-ton version at a power plant switchyard to the small green box outside a home.  

Siemens Energy plans to build the former, highly specialized pieces of equipment whose lead times have ballooned from about 18 months to up to five years, thanks to a global shortage. 

One factor leading to more demand: large power transformers in this country are about 40 years old on average, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, and brushing up against their expiration dates.  

“Some units in the grid are even more than 70 years old and still operating,” the agency says in a recent report. “Aging [large power transformers] cause higher failure risk.” 

The worldwide push to electrify transportation and heat, combined with the transition to renewables from fossil fuels, has also created a surge in need. 

“We need to build a lot more wind and solar,” said Luke O’Dea, vice president of engineering at Durham-based Cypress Creek Renewables, “and we need one or more of these transformers at every site where we want to build a new project.” 

The U.S. Department of Energy says the country bought about 750 large power transformers in 2019. Three years from now, the figure will grow to 900, the agency predicts. 

Compounding the problem, only about a fifth of U.S. large power transformers are produced domestically. Much of the rest are produced in Eastern Europe and Asia. 

“We’ve got to be making these more in our country,” Voorberg said, “not only because of political instability in certain regions — but also plain old logistics issues.” 

Siemens Energy’s new investment in North Carolina will help. The company will expand and refit its existing factory in Charlotte to produce 57 large power transformers and bring in another two dozen for service each year, adding 475 jobs. It will mark the energy giant’s first such facility in the United States. 

Local need

To be sure, the transformers will serve the entire country, not just the Carolinas. But the equipment will be vital for Duke Energy, which is required by law to zero out its carbon emissions by midcentury, and is planning now for transmission upgrades required to interconnect more solar, wind, and battery storage.

“We’re building a lot of new substations,” said spokesperson Jeff Brooks. “That’s part of growing capacity on our system to support not only new business and industry, but also the dynamic power flows required to add more distributed technologies across the grid.” 

Siemens Energy will also confront another challenge posed by the clean energy transition: Transporting renewable electricity hundreds of miles from where it’s readily produced to where it’s needed, such as from large wind farms in the Midwest or in the Atlantic Ocean to the populous East Coast. 

“To transfer it that long distance, you need to convert it to DC,” said Voorberg, referring to direct current as opposed to alternating current. “Otherwise, you’re getting way too many losses going on.” 

That’s why the company will add 84 jobs in Raleigh to design and test high-voltage DC transmission systems. “It’s more like a lab in Raleigh,” he said, “and a factory in Charlotte.” 

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a second-term Democrat who has long championed the state’s clean energy economy, helped bring about the investment along with a host of government partners.

“Bringing production of these high voltage transformers onshore not only creates American jobs but makes our electric grid more resilient and ready for the transition to clean energy,” Cooper said in a statement.

Gajda, part of the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management research center at N.C. State, certainly agrees. But when he saw the news, he said, he first viewed it through the lens of a professor.

“I can tell my students, ‘Hey, here’s another cool place where you can go to work,’” Gajda said. “I’m just excited about what it does for the energy ecosystem in North Carolina.”

A new North Carolina factory will build large power transformers. How do they help the clean energy transition? 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.

The debate over rooftop solar in North Carolina entered the courtroom on Wednesday, when a three-judge Court of Appeals panel heard a challenge to Duke Energy’s reduced payments for home solar arrays.

“We are here this morning because a terrible injury has been inflicted on the rooftop solar industry in our state,” said Matthew Quinn, the lawyer for seven climate justice groups appealing the rates approved last year by the Utilities Commission.

The lowered credits are part of a complicated truce between Duke, some of the state’s oldest rooftop installers, and multiple clean energy groups, all of whom sought to avoid the bruising battles over net metering seen in other states.

But the new payments have undoubtedly tamped interest in homes going solar since they took effect last fall, with one installer reporting residential sales falling by as much as 50%. 

Since the entities who compromised with Duke don’t represent all of those who engaged in the commission’s net metering docket, their agreement should be given “little to no weight,” the challengers, including NC WARN and Environmental Working Group, say in their legal appeal.

What’s more, they argue, the new rates are illegal because they were promulgated after internal Duke studies and stakeholder discussions regarding rooftop solar — not the independent investigation they believe is required by law.

“A 2017 state law mandates the Utilities Commission conduct its own solar net metering cost-benefit analysis,” said Jim Warren, the executive director of NC WARN, in a note to reporters before the oral arguments. “The commission flouted the law, choosing instead to lean on Duke Energy’s deeply flawed and one-sided calculations.”

The reasoning rests in part on an Energy News Network article that quotes one of the 2017 law’s authors, John Szoka, a Fayetteville Republican who served in the state House of Representatives for a decade. The story describes Szoka as “adamant” that the commission should conduct the study. 

“It’s not up to the utility to determine whether net metering is good or bad,” Szoka told the Energy News Network at the time. “We know what that answer will be. We’re not putting the fox in charge of the hen house here. That is not the intent.”

After quoting the piece in their brief, the plaintiffs write: “Clearly, the General Assembly did not intend for [Duke] to satisfy [the law] by performing an internal study. Indeed, such a study would be akin to ‘the fox in charge of the hen house.’”

Duke and other defenders of the new credits say Szoka’s comments don’t override the “plain meaning” of the language in the law, which says simply that the rates, “shall be nondiscriminatory and established only after an investigation of the costs and benefits of customer-sited generation.” 

“Legislative intent,” lawyers for Duke note dryly in one footnote in a legal filing, “is not derived from news articles from Energy News Network.”

The appellants also claim the commission erred by failing to consider all of the benefits of rooftop solar and by forcing solar owners to migrate to time-variable rates instead of allowing flat rates to stand.

The solution, they say in their brief: “The Court of Appeals should reverse the Commission’s… Order and remand this matter for a Commission-led investigation of the costs and benefits for [net metered] solar.”

‘Massive contraction’ ahead?

A dogged Duke foe, NC WARN and its partners aren’t just trying to prevail on an obscure technical point of process. Examinations of distributed solar in other states have shown a clear trend: when utilities conduct the analyses, the benefits of rooftop solar come in lower than when commissions or independent groups are in charge.

Indeed, both Duke and Public Staff, the state-sanctioned customer advocate which sided against the appeal, maintained in court Wednesday that rooftop solar unfairly burdens non-solar customers and the company itself, a point few clean energy advocates or solar industry representatives concede.

Duke also isn’t alone among investor-owned utilities in its years-long quest to lower the one-to-one net metering credit rooftop solar owners have long enjoyed. After all, the fewer electrons the company sells at a markup, the lower its profits.

But Duke has also found compromise with at least some of its critics in ways many of its peers have not, helping to explain why it was groups like NC WARN —  and not the rooftop industry itself — that appeared formally in court on Wednesday.

The crux of the grand bargain is a move toward “time of use” rates, in which diligent solar owners can conceivably squeeze out the same benefits they enjoyed under the old rates, so long as they time their energy use to account for peak demand hours. 

A “bridge rate,” negotiated by long-time installers Southern Energy Management, Sundance Power Systems, and Yes Solar will be available for new customers until 2027, and many in the industry say it’s preferred for its simplicity and its relative low risk.

A final piece of the deal was greenlit last month: financial incentives for home batteries paired with rooftop solar, part of a pilot program to be rolled out in May called PowerPair.

While many veteran installers acknowledged fewer customer inquiries last year after the new rates took effect, they also suggested the harder-to-negotiate terms could weed out “bad actors” in the industry. 

And all say they’re focused long term on maximizing their key business advantage: Fossil fuels are becoming more expensive, while the materials designed to harness and store forever-free sunlight are getting cheaper.

Still, Bryce Bruncati, director of residential sales at 8M Solar and one of the industry’s most outspoken critics of the time-of-use rates, hopes the lawsuit argued today will lay the groundwork for a better long-term solution for installers.

“We’ve got these interim patches,” he told Energy News Network, referring to the bridge rate and the Power Pair program. “But starting in 2027, we’re going to see this massive contraction of the solar industry —  and fewer people going solar in general — if we don’t do something.”

There’s no firm deadline for the judges who heard Wednesday’s argument to issue a decision, but many observers were expecting an outcome within 90 days.

North Carolina court hears challenge to Duke Energy’s reduced credits for rooftop solar 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 called the “solar coaster:” The ups and downs the industry faces as solar-friendly policies ebb and flow. And in North Carolina, rooftop installers are in the middle of one wild ride.

On the heels of cutting bill credits for residential solar panels in October, Duke Energy is now poised to offer new rebates for rooftop arrays that are paired with batteries. Combined with federal incentives, the new “PowerPair” rebates could cut the cost of solar and battery systems in half and inject new interest in rooftop solar, which many installers say waned last fall.

“We definitely saw a dip,” said Doug Ager, the CEO and co-founder of Sugar Hollow Solar, describing his company’s business in the last quarter of 2023. But at least in the short-term, he said, “PowerPair will change all that.”

Approved to roll out in May, the pilot program will initially serve only an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 households. But proponents say it could pave the way for a new paradigm in which Duke invests in and manages distributed renewable energy and storage the same way it might a traditional power plant.

“It’s opening the door to active load management from Duke that is going to be increasingly important,” said David Neal, the senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center who helped negotiate the program. Heralding the pilot as one of the first of its kind, he said, “it’s going to be a lot more cost effective than just building new generation to meet expected loads.”

Ultimately, advocates are also hopeful that the solar coaster can be smoothed out a little.

“The rooftop solar industry really has experienced quite a bit of ups and downs,” said Matt Abele, executive director of the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, which also helped devise the rebates. There’s still the question of what long-term strategies would support installers, he said. “But I would say this is not an insignificant program in the interim.”

‘The result of…negotiations around net metering’

Greenlit by regulators last month, the rebates grew out of a years-long dispute between Duke Energy, advocates, and the solar industry about how rooftop solar owners should be compensated for the electricity they produce. 

About 40,000 rooftops across the state boast solar arrays, the bulk of them on homes and in Duke territory. The figure accounts for a tiny fraction of North Carolina’s roughly 5 million housing units.

Despite these small numbers, Duke, like other investor-owned utilities around the country, has long sought to lower the state’s one-to-one net metering credit, which it says unfairly burdens both the company and customers that don’t have solar panels.  

Solar installers and advocates contend that rooftop arrays provide more benefits than costs, including cleaner air, fewer electrons lost in transmission, and reduced need for electricity from centralized fossil fuel power plants. Their assertion is backed up by most independent studies of rooftop solar, a 2019 analysis found.

Still, a pair of state laws, both heavily influenced by Duke, mandate a change to the current net metering scheme by 2027. To avoid the bruising battles and excessive fees on solar customers seen in California and elsewhere, some of the state’s leading clean energy advocates and solar installers forged a complicated truce with the utility. 

The crux of the agreement is a move toward “time of use” billing. New residential solar owners are charged and rewarded more for electrons they add to or subtract from the grid during peak demand hours of 6 to 9 p.m. in the summer and 6 to 9 a.m. in the winter. On a monthly basis, any net solar electrons added to the grid are credited at the “avoided cost” rate — akin to a wholesale rate and currently about 3.4 cents per kilowatt hour.

Diligent solar owners can squeeze benefits out of this complex billing scheme, some installers say. But to ease the transition, they also negotiated a simpler, lower-risk “bridge rate” with Duke, in which solar customers enrolling before 2027 get a monthly credit at the wholesale rate for any electrons they add to the grid. 

Regulators on the utilities commission accepted these compromises last March and ultimately ordered new rates to begin October 1. But they rejected another component of the deal, which would have given customers with electric heat an extra rebate for enrolling in Duke’s smart thermostat program, in which the utility can make temperature adjustments from afar.  

“Instead, the Commission directs Duke to develop a pilot program,” their order read, “to evaluate operational impacts to the electric system, if any, of behind the meter residential solar plus energy storage.” 

PowerPair is the result. “This program was in many ways a result of our negotiations around net metering,” Dave Hollister, the president of Sundance Power Systems, said over email.

‘Possibly a win-win for everyone’ 

Devised after months of conversations between Duke, solar installers, clean energy advocates, and others, the new rebates would be based on the size of the solar array and battery and capped at $3,600 and $5,400 respectively. Combined with a 30% federal tax credit, the cash back could cut the cost of an average $40,500 system down to less than $20,000. 

For customers, the deal is “actually really, really good in terms of the economics,” one installer said. And for Duke, the rebates could prove a low-cost strategy for smoothing out spikes in demand and strengthening the resilience of the grid.

“Cost effective and dispatchable customer-sited resources are key components of our clean energy transition,” Lon Huber, a senior vice president at Duke, said in an email. “We are committed to expanding the scope and adding ways for our customers to deploy grid beneficial technology.”

Customers will be divided into two equal cohorts. Those subscribed to the simpler bridge will allow the utility to remotely control their battery up to 18 times a year and will earn an extra $37 a month on average. Enrollees in the more complicated time-of-use rate plan, on the other hand, won’t get monthly incentives but would have control of their batteries. 

“It will be interesting to see how many folks will allow Duke to control their battery and who wants to have that freedom and independence to manage their customer-generated electricity themselves,” Hollister said. “ We deal with so many folks who are looking for self-reliance and the idea of ‘smart grid’ is somewhat of a third rail for them.”

Already, batteries are popular options for rooftop solar customers. Installers say between a quarter and 40% of their clients were already choosing them for a variety of reasons, from a desire to save money to a quest for energy security in the face of outages. 

Sugar Hollow Solar’s Ager said residential storage fits with the western North Carolina vibe. “Being in the mountains,” he said, “people just want batteries.”

With the PowerPair, the percentage of solar arrays paired with storage will undoubtedly rise, and many installers predicted it would double. 

“I fully anticipate us selling tons of systems with batteries,” said Brandon Pendry, communications and outreach specialist with Southern Energy Management, one of the state’s oldest installers and a negotiator for both the bridge rate and the PowerPair scheme. 

To avoid the problem installers and their clients faced with the last round of rooftop solar rebates — when demand far exceeded supply each year and available grants disappeared in minutes — the architects of the program gave it an overall cap of 60,000 kilowatts but no annual limits. That way, rooftop solar and battery owners can get the rebates on a rolling basis.  

“In this case, there is only one capacity and it’s not time dependent,” said Pendry. “It’s just: when it runs out, it runs out.”

If customers choose the maximum allowable size of a 10 kilowatt solar array, a total of 6,000 households could benefit. But no one really knows when the capacity will be reached, with some predicting 18 months from May and others estimating as few as four. 

Duke projects it will connect 11,400 residential rooftop systems this year. But a spokesperson said it was simply too early to tell when PowerPair rebates would dry up. 

Once they do, the hope is that data gathered during the pilot will inform whatever comes next. 

“It may possibly be a win-win for everyone,” Hollister said, “especially if it can be extended or transformed into a more permanent program.” 

‘A better and better investment’

Since half of the PowerPair cohorts will be using the bridge rate, there’s some chance a permanent program would extend that rate’s life — a key priority for some in the industry.  

No matter what, while most installers contacted for this article eagerly await the pilot, they’re also clear-eyed about their business plan for the future.

“We have been installing solar in [the state] for over a decade and have certainly seen lots of incentives come and go, said Jesse Solomon, vice president and director of sales for N.C Solar Now, in an email. “But we have always been able to design the investment to make sense for our clients.” 

Solar installers also focus on the overall trends buoying their industry: Fossil fuels are becoming more expensive, while the materials designed to harness and store forever-free sunlight are getting cheaper.

Every year Duke raises rates, said Pendry of Southern Energy Management, “solar becomes a better and better investment.”

In North Carolina, Duke Energy to offer rebates for rooftop solar paired with batteries 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.

Clean energy is aligned with conservative values. So says North Carolina Rep. Kyle Hall, a Republican legislator in his fifth term from a small town near Winston-Salem.

“It’s conservative to support market competition, consumer savings, property rights, and innovation,” Hall said at an event last November, when he received an award for spearheading a bill to promote rooftop solar and other clean energy measures in 2023.

The event also showcased what pollsters have known for years: Energy independence, less pollution, economic development, and other aspects of clean energy are popular with voters across the political spectrum.

Still, last year’s defeats and half-wins in North Carolina – where Republicans control both houses of the state legislature – show those factors aren’t always enough to propel policies favoring solar, wind, and electric vehicles forward. Obstacles remain in this purple state, including powerful special interests, misinformation, and individual lawmakers who have the power to make or break legislation.

“Polling consistently shows overwhelming public support statewide — in every community and across political ideologies — for more clean energy and for freer energy markets,” Carson Butts, the director of Conservatives for Clean Energy North Carolina, said in an email. But, he acknowledged, “clearly, we have more work to do.”

‘The perfect example’

Advocates like Butts believe they’re making progress in winning Republicans over to their cause, and there’s evidence for that.

In 2013, for the first time in over 100 years, the North Carolina GOP assumed control of the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the General Assembly. Members of their ranks immediately sought to weaken clean energy policies, with some success. Today, state-level solar tax incentives are gone, and land-based wind turbines are scant albeit legal. 

But strong bipartisan support for clean energy also started to congeal, culminating in 2021, when the legislature and a Democratic governor elected in 2016 crafted a law to zero out electricity sector carbon emissions by midcentury. It remains the only such bipartisan measure in the region.

John Szoka, who helped write that law, may be the greatest testament to the efforts of right-leaning clean energy advocates. A former legislator who took office the first year of the GOP trifecta, today he leads the Conservative Energy Network, a nationwide association of state-based groups like Conservatives for Clean Energy. 

“I’m the perfect example,” Szoka said in an interview, about how conservatives can evolve through education.

“When I first ran for office, I thought solar only existed because of subsidies and a bunch of crazy stuff,” he said. “But then, I ended up being a proponent for it. I made the transition because I had people who are trusted conservatives tell me what the truth was.”

‘Kind of a victory’

Though Republicans regained a legislative supermajority in 2022, the bipartisan emissions law faced no attacks last year. A largely symbolic measure to ban ocean-based wind turbines in state-controlled waters also never got a hearing. 

“Sometimes we define success as something that didn’t happen,” said Brian Turner, a former Democratic state representative who now directs policy for Audubon North Carolina. “We didn’t get another wind moratorium,” he noted at a November energy conference. “That’s something we were able to bottle up and keep from moving.”

What’s more, Republicans allocated at least $10 million in matching funds for an avalanche of clean energy grants headed to North Carolina thanks to federal initiatives like the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. 

“There was significant funding allocated for clean energy related items, and that wasn’t necessarily a given,” said Cassie Gavin, policy director at the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association. “Every state hasn’t done that.”

Rep. Hall also moved to raise the current cap on leasing rooftop solar from 1% of Duke Energy electricity sales to 10%, a key change for businesses and nonprofits looking to rely more renewable energy. After paring down the scope of the bill to satisfy Duke, it cleared the house with just 10 “no” votes — a milestone he called significant.

“Being able to carry it through,” Hall said in an interview, “I think was kind of a victory.”

‘A winning issue’ 

This activity aligns with poll after poll showing that voters across the political spectrum support wind, solar, and other forms of clean energy. Last year, a trio of surveys continued that trend. 

The left-leaning North Carolina League of Conservation Voters found divisions between conservative and liberal voters on fossil fuels, but strong majorities in favor of “solar energy,” “clean energy,” and “renewable energy.”

Szoka’s group found that 67% of voters support community solar — in which individuals pay in for a share of a large solar farm — including 59% of Republicans. 

And Conservatives for Clean Energy found that 73% of voters, including a majority of Republicans, would be more likely to support a candidate who backed policies to encourage “wind, solar, and waste-to-energy technologies.”

Consultant Paul Shumaker conducted the latter poll, a survey of 500 North Carolina voters last spring. In terms of running election campaigns, he said during a presentation of the results, “anything over 70% is a winning issue.” 

But lawmakers didn’t always heed these surveys. 

Shumaker’s poll, for instance, found that more than three quarters of voters, including 72% of Republicans, favored more competition in the electricity market.

Slightly smaller majorities said they would support “current legislation that would authorize a study to examine the public benefits of restructuring options for the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity in North Carolina.”

The question references House Bill 503, aimed at analyzing the pros and cons of Duke joining a competitive wholesale electricity market, among other reforms. Like similar measures introduced in 2019 and 2021, it saw no movement last year. 

“With the overwhelming numbers of voters supporting competition, why can’t we even study it?” asked Kevin Martin, the director of the Carolina Utility Customers Association, after the presentation.

“That’s a question for lawmakers,” Shumaker answered. He then relayed an adage he said came from the late historian David McCullough: “Special interests drive the narrative.” 

‘Special interests drive the narrative’ 

Duke has a long public record of opposing the market reform study and did not respond to a request for comment for this story. But it wasn’t the only special interest that influenced policy last year. 

The state budget prohibited an effort by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to reduce pollution from the state’s transportation sector. Called the Advanced Clean Truck Rule, it would have required manufacturers to sell increasing percentages of electric heavy-duty vehicles. 

The provision originated in the House and endured when the Senate passed its version of the state spending plan. Still, Hall said he fought to remove it in conference — to no avail.  

“That sent a signal to electric vehicle companies across the country that you’re not welcome in North Carolina,” Hall said.

The source of the provision, Hall believes, was the North Carolina Chamber, the business lobby that represents a host of companies including truck makers Daimler Truck and Volvo Group. “They wanted that in the budget,” he said, “and like Duke Energy, they wield a lot of power.”

The Chamber celebrated the budget language on its website in September. “Government mandates and intervention into the market would stifle… innovation and investment, as well as increase costs in new trucks, on which nearly all of our members rely,” it said.

The lesson, said Hall, is that companies with a vested interest in clean energy policy — in this case manufacturers and fleet managers who want their companies to go electric — need to do a better job of educating both lawmakers and the trade groups they belong to.   

“Groups like Duke and the [electric] co-ops are doing it,” Hall said. “This side of the energy sector needs to do it as well.”

Still, the clean energy economy remains nascent compared to the entrenched business interests that benefit, at least in the short term, from the status quo. That was certainly true last year, when the well-organized building lobby faced off against the more diffuse energy efficiency industry.

State standards for insulation thickness, window quality, and other energy-saving building features in new single-family homes have remained virtually unchanged for over a decade. 

The state’s Building Code Council sought to change that, tying updated standards to a 2021 international model code. The move was expected to add an average of $5,000 to the cost of a new house but generate a positive cash flow immediately by lowering energy bills. 

The math was generated by an independent government lab and confirmed anecdotally by green builders, who supported the code updates. But the powerful North Carolina Home Builders Association refused to accept it. A major campaign donor and presence in the legislature, the builders lobby instead claimed the average cost would exceed $20,000. 

With the state in dire need of affordable housing, the builders’ reasoning was potent – convincing several Democrats and every single Republican to vote for a measure to reject the update and freeze the 2009-era codes in place until 2031. 

“We do have an affordable housing crisis,” said Hall, a realtor by trade who’s observed soaring home prices even in his small town of King. And if the builders had less “burdensome regulations,” he said, they could build homes more cost-effectively. “I think that was a compelling argument.”

‘The Paul Wall’

Special interests aren’t the only ones with sway in Raleigh. Sen. Paul Newton, a Cabarrus County Republican and former Duke Energy North Carolina president, is widely viewed as the arbiter of clean energy policy for the Senate. 

A lead negotiator for the 2021 decarbonization law, his positions frequently align with Duke’s. But he also asserts himself on bills that don’t directly concern the utility, and his influence extends beyond his chamber. 

For four years in a row, he was thought to be the sticking point for government building efficiency legislation — a measure with no organized opposition and few detractors in the House. The 2023 Conservatives for Clean Energy poll found the measure had 79% support, including 68% of Republicans. Last year, the measure was reintroduced in the House with bipartisan support, but never got a hearing. 

Newton’s key imprint from 2023 was his bill to promote nuclear, a carbon-free but non-renewable power source. The measure is more message than substance, but one key provision removes a requirement that Duke pursue more cost-effective measures like energy efficiency and renewables before trying to build a new nuclear plant. 

“We support energy efficiency as the most affordable energy resource, and so we remain concerned about the changes to the [Certificate of Convenience and Public Necessity] section,” said Gavin of the Sustainable Energy Association.

When the bill first cleared the House, it included language sought by Hall to increase the solar leasing cap. That provision was rejected by Newton and other senators in the conference committee between the two chambers. “The Senate just stood their ground,” Hall said, “and flat out said ‘no.’” 

Though his solar leasing bill is still eligible this year, Hall lamented its failure to become law in 2023. “That’s probably the most disappointing thing from the session,” he said.

Dan Crawford, director of governmental relations with the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters, said the situation was indicative of the dynamic on energy policy at the General Assembly.

In the House, “you have conservatives that are trying to lead and do something positive,” he said. “But then you have the Paul Wall in the Senate.”

Newton didn’t respond to a request for a comment for this story.

Along with Hall, many observers point to Rep. Larry Strickland, a Johnston County Republican in his fourth term, as an emerging leader on energy in the House. 

But they also note the absence of Szoka, who left in 2022, and former Republican representative Chuck McGrady, who now sits on the state’s Board of Transportation.

“Those are two really big losses,” Crawford said.

‘Separating fact from fiction’

Szoka says one reason Republicans don’t always seem to follow the will of the majority of voters traces back to conservative grassroots circles.  

Of the GOP voters his group polled who self-identified as “more conservative” on energy than their party as a whole, a whopping 64% said there was either no reason to be concerned about climate change or that more research was needed. 

“So, that raises a question,” Szoka said. “How do you get elected? What’s going on in Republican grassroots organizations? Where do they get their information from?”

While outlets like Fox News have largely abandoned outright climate denial, misinformation persists about climate science, renewable energy sources, and energy policy. Throughout much of last year, for example, conservative media amplified false claims that offshore wind development was killing whales along the Atlantic Coast, an analysis by the liberal group Media Matters found.

Former president Donald Trump also trumpets such falsehoods, deepening distrust of the clean energy transition among Republican voters. And numerous studies have shown social media algorithms tend to push some users toward conspiracy theories and other misinformation.

At the same time, activists fighting solar, wind, and transmission projects, sometimes backed by fossil fuel interests, sow untruths in otherwise receptive or neutral rural communities. 

“That stuff is still prevalent in a lot of rural areas, because there are people who actively work against clean energy, and they perpetuate misinformation,” Szoka said. Debunking it — a key mission of his organization — takes time and patience, he said, but it can work. “You’ve got to convince them,” he said, “and separate fact from fiction.”

Even so, with districts increasingly gerrymandered for partisan advantage, Republican candidates who support clean energy may never campaign on it: it doesn’t necessarily help them win a primary, and it rarely distinguishes them from their Democratic opponents. 

“Most people don’t talk about it enough,” Szoka said, especially considering clean energy’s importance to unaffiliated voters – now the largest cohort in the state’s electorate. “And in some of these tight races, conservatives should talk about it more and the race wouldn’t be quite as tight.”

Still, advancing the clean energy transition may not be a simple matter of translating popular polling issues into policy. As politics becomes more nationalized and more polarized, with top Republicans deriding wind and solar, there’s some evidence that voters could be following suit.

Conservatives for Clean Energy has conducted polling for eight years. In 2015, nearly 87% of voters were more likely to vote for candidates who supported wind and solar. But that figure has seen a steady, if slight, decline ever since, and last year reached a new low of 73%.

The fossil fuel industry has also likely benefited from the centuries-old term “natural gas,” which despite its coinage describes a fuel that contributes substantial heat-warming pollutants to the atmosphere.

While most voters in the Conservative Energy Network poll believe we should put “less emphasis” on developing coal and oil, most said production of natural gas should stay “about the same.” Similarly, the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters poll found that 68% of all voters, including 55% of “left-leaning voters,” had a favorable view of natural gas. 

Hall, who doesn’t advocate a full transition to “things like solar and wind,” believes the key is focusing on not just economics, but independence.

“If you ask people, ‘do you want to be energy independent, or do you want to rely on China and Russia for your energy,’ everybody’s going to vote for America first,” Hall said. “When I speak to constituents, their number one concern is that when they flip the switch that the light turns on — and if you could do it cheaper, cleaner, and made right here in America, that’s what they care about.”

Some way or another, clean energy advocates on the right are going to have to figure out what works. For all the intrigue in this year’s elections, legislative district lines leave little doubt that Republicans will retain control of the General Assembly. And left-leaning advocates say they’re not the best messengers in that case. 

“There is an important role for Conservatives for Clean Energy to be that validator on the economy and clean energy,” Crawford said.

Polls show most conservatives like clean energy. So why isn’t the North Carolina GOP doing more to support it? 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.