NC WARN, a North Carolina climate justice watchdog, and Friends of the Earth, a leading environmental organization, began legal action today to ban the pervasive influence spending by Duke Energy in a case with national ramifications for climate change, electricity rates and corporate control over government and civic leaders.
See coverage in Facing South
NC WARN News Releases
All News Categories
NC WARN Launches Statewide TV & Online Ad: It’s Time to End the Duke Energy Monopoly — News Release from NC WARN
NC WARN today began running a hard-hitting TV and online ad in all major media markets across North Carolina. The goal is to counter Duke executives’ pervasive deception by going straight to people across the political spectrum.
Duke Plans More Climate Destruction, Rate Hikes, Puny Renewables — News Release from NC WARN
Today NC WARN attorneys filed a motion calling for the NC Utilities Commission to hold an open, evidentiary process to allow careful scrutiny of Duke’s 15-year plan and alternatives to it.
Duke Energy’s “Major Breakthrough for Renewables” – Energy from Hog Manure – was PR Fiction – News Release From NC WARN
Now, Duke Energy has admitted once again to state regulators that it can’t back the PR with action. It can’t meet a state renewable energy requirement that it generate a tiny amount of electricity from hog waste now or anytime soon. By 2018, 0.2 percent of the renewable requirement was supposed to come from hog waste.
A More Just Hurricane Florence Recovery Effort in North Carolina — OP-ED
Op-ed by Connie Leeper and Jodi Lasseter. Now that the winds and rains of Hurricane Florence have gone, North Carolinians are mobilizing a relief and recovery process for the eastern part of the state… Without an intentional focus on equity and access, this kind of giving often misses the people who are most in need of assistance and who have been leading the work to build community resilience long before this storm hit.
Duke Energy Leaders Made Hurricane Florence Worse — Op-Ed from NC WARN
Op-Ed by Jim Warren. The latest in a string of monster storms of recent years, Hurricane Florence punctuates the fact that the cost of climate pollution is accelerating. Duke Energy executives bear much of the blame for Hurricane Florence’s devastation.
Read Duke’s deceptive rebuttal
And NC WARN’s response to it
Solar-with-Storage Projects Surge as Fracked Gas Falls — News Release from NC WARN
There’s a ton of good news in the fight to slow the global climate crisis – outside of North Carolina. A key question remains: Will this state finally get out from under Duke Energy’s climate-wrecking, fracked gas obsession and clean-power sabotage in its monopoly-captured territories?
Duke’s Community Solar Program was Designed to Fail, Would Gouge Customers, Should be Ditched — News Release From NC WARN
Duke Energy’s proposed “community solar” proposal would cause participating customers to lose 51 percent of their investment and would take five years to implement. The program is clearly designed to fail and is further proof that the Charlotte-based corporation prefers to stifle and delay – not advance – clean energy.
See coverage in Charlotte Business Journal
Duke Energy Profits from Execs’ Major Blunders — News Release from NC WARN
The NC Utilities Commission ordered this state’s Duke Energy Carolinas customers to pay $545 million for coal ash negligence and $347 million for the utility’s 13-year, failed effort to begin construction of twin nuclear reactors – a project now cancelled. Even more shameful is that the commission granted Duke a roughly 10 percent mark-up on the coal ash mistake by corporate execs, just as it did in the Duke Progress case earlier this year.
Duke CEO Promised Investors $16 Billion in Grid Upgrades – On Top of Multiple Rate Hikes for Gas Plants and Coal Ash — News Release from NC WARN
Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good recently promised investors they could count on “multiple rate cases” in both of the corporation’s Carolinas service areas beginning next year – to fund seemingly endless construction of fracked gas power plants and clean-up of coal ash. Separately, she promised to boost rates and profits via a $16 billion electric “grid modernization” scheme that an expert for the NC Sustainable Energy Association (NCSEA) testified could, on its own, raise residential rates by up to 50 percent.