New renewable plan looks like a coat of green paint for Duke and the rich data corporations it’s aggressively recruiting
Duke Energy Carolinas’ new proposal for renewable power for a few of its largest customers might be a continuation of its long-running business plan to keep building fossil and nuclear power plants that we don’t need. Below are concerns and questions based on NC WARN’s initial review (the plan was filed after hours Friday):
> It appears there might be no new renewables built anywhere, and much of the power sold would likely come from existing Duke wind or solar farms in Texas or other western states in the form of “offsets.”
> So it’s not clear that Google, Apple, Facebook or other high-using data centers would actually be using renewable power at all. Their electricity might well keep coming from the Cliffside coal plant and Duke’s nuclear and fracking-gas plants.
> Duke wants to offer incentives only to new facilities that would also need baseload power during off-peak periods – the lion’s share of hours. This would perpetuate Duke’s business plan to drive up demand, thus build fossil and nuclear plants for big data centers while forcing other customers to subsidize them.
Duke Energy should be opening the market for renewable power by offering it to all customer groups – especially existing customers – not just to new facilities built by the world’s richest corporations, which drives Duke to build power plants we don’t need.
See December 4 news release on NC WARN’s intervention in Duke’s solar docket.
