Quick Facts:
Clean Path 2025 will save NC billions of dollars Duke Energy plans to spend building unneeded power plants and other outdated infrastructure.
Clean Path 2025 will create thousands of jobs while helping all customers save money.
This strategy can replace all fossil fuel power — rapidly — with proven clean energy, battery storage and energy-saving programs.
Action Teams are already operating in 7 key counties, and local governments are responding.
Help us publicize and advance NC Clean Path 2025.
NC WARN has matched the report with an Action Plan and local governments are working with residents across the state to implement the Clean Path 2025 plan, putting meat on the bones of their recent pledges to help slow the accelerating climate crisis. Contact us to join an Action Team or find out about resources for local governments.
North Carolina Clean Path 2025: Achieving an Economical Clean Energy Future is a 2017 report prepared for NC WARN by engineer Bill Powers. It is a strategy for North Carolina’s electricity supply system showing that local solar combined with battery storage, energy efficiency, energy-balancing programs and on-bill financing can rapidly replace fossil fuels, save tens of billions of dollars and create thousands of jobs across the state.
Resources
Background
Local governments can directly implement Clean Path programs, but we’re also urging them to press Duke Energy, the cooperatives, municipal utilities and Governor Cooper to join the effort. And we’re reaching out to scientists, civic leaders, news media and the public to foster an open, constructive discussion about moving quickly into the 21st Century on energy and climate.
We believe this report is a first for the nation and we’re urging other states to join the shift to local solar with storage – even as the Koch brothers and many utilities work vigorously to stifle the growth of renewables.
We can and must move quickly. The report shows that North Carolina has twice as much local solar potential as needed to retire all fossil fuel plants, and that local power lines can handle large flows of local solar at little additional cost. The only barrier to adoption of this plan is Duke Energy’s longstanding control over state government and public debate. Author Bill Powers emphasizes that there are no economic or technical barriers.
NC Clean Path 2025 author Bill Powers has over 30 years’ experience in energy and environmental engineering. He wrote the 2012 strategic energy plan, Bay Area Smart Energy 2020, for the San Francisco Bay region, a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power consumption in the Bay Area region 60% by 2020. Powers has a strong Tar Heel pedigree, having earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Duke University and an M.P.H. in environmental sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Specifically, NC Clean Path 2025 will:
- Reduce power generated by coal- and natural gas-fired plants 57 percent by 2025.
- Reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation 100 percent by 2030. All coal-fired plants will be closed and gas-fired plants will be used only for backup supply.
- Maintain the current growth rate, 1,000 megawatts per year, of large-scale solar in North Carolina, but build it on vacant urban and suburban land, and on brownfields.
- Add 2,000 megawatts of solar power each year at homes, businesses, schools, and other buildings – and back it up with cost-effective battery storage, capitalizing on rapid progress by Tesla and other companies.
- Create financing options for local solar power, battery storage, and efficiency upgrades that allow everyone to benefit without financial burden.
- Accelerate energy-saving programs to reduce electricity usage 20 percent by 2025.
- Expand demand response programs and energy efficiency upgrades to reduce peak summer cooling and peak winter heating loads 50 percent by 2025.
- Create 16,000 good jobs across the state in the first three years.
- Save billions more in avoided purchase of coal and natural gas.
Recent News
Solar With Storage Surges as Gas Falls — Common Dreams
Op-Ed by Jim Warren. There’s good news – outside of North Carolina – in the increasingly desperate fight to slow the climate crisis before its own momentum makes acceleration unstoppable. Economical storage, the long-sought Holy Grail of renewable energy, is surging in the marketplace while climate-wrecking fracked “natural” gas has begun to decline. Op-Ed also featured in Raleigh News & Observer, Fayetteville Observer, and Greensboro News & Record.
SEE ALL NC CLEAN PATH 2025 POSTSIn North Carolina, renewable energy losing its edge as a political wedge — Energy News Network
Despite anti-wind bluster from parts of the state, candidates who supported renewables came out on top in Republican primaries earlier this year.
SEE ALL NC CLEAN PATH 2025 POSTSYour Voice Matters. Become a Member!
Be part of the climate justice movement in North Carolina.
