Climate Lawsuit Filed vs Duke Energy
Take Action!NC WARN partnered with Faith Community Church in Greensboro on a test case challenging Duke Energy’s blockade against competition from companies that install solar with little or no upfront cost. Learn more here and in the news items below.
As a legal battle begins over whether only Duke Energy can sell electricity in its captive territories, the nation’s largest electric corporation is calling for massive financial punishment of its long-time critic, nonprofit NC WARN, for selling solar power to a community church in Greensboro.
Duke Energy wants fines against Greensboro church’s solar project — Taft Wareback, News & Record
Duke Energy urges regulators to fine advocates in solar case — Bruce Henderson, The Charlotte Observer
The church, it turns out, did not pay to install the solar panels, like a homeowner would. Instead, NC Warn, an advocacy group, paid for the panels and is selling electricity back to the church at about half the rate Duke Energy charges.
It’s called third-party sales, and it’s illegal in just four states in the country: North Carolina, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Florida.
It’s the latest chapter in a solar industry saga in which North Carolina soars above other states in many categories of solar deployment linked to large-scale commercial power projects, but paradoxically it lags in dispersing this burgeoning technology onto rooftops throughout its cities and rural areas.
If it [the Energy Freedom Act] becomes law, it would legalize the solar partnership between NC WARN and the Greensboro church without the need for commission approval of the local plan, which is aimed at trailblazing a method of financing that could make solar-energy system affordable for more people.
The Solar Freedom project was announced at a ribbon-cutting ceremony hosted by Rev. Nelson Johnson, pastor of Faith Community Church in downtown Greensboro. In a partnership that could impact state policy at a critical time, NC WARN will own and operate a 5.2 kW solar system on the church roof and the church will buy the solar power produced by the system from NC WARN at a price far lower than what it pays on its monthly bill to Duke Energy.
Faith Community Church and the advocacy group NC WARN unveiled a partnership in which the Durham-based nonprofit has installed solar panels on the African American congregation’s rooftop to produce electricity for sale to the church.
Op-Ed by Rev. Nelson Johnson and Jim Warren. It is curious that Duke Energy is aggressively lobbying against the new Energy Freedom Act, bipartisan state legislation that would open the door to rooftop solar competition, thereby helping the same low-wealth communities for which Duke now professes concern.
