North Carolina moved one step closer to scrapping part of the state’s carbon reduction plan in a new bill that passed the Senate on Thursday afternoon with bipartisan support.
In an effort to save the state billions of dollars, the Energy Security and Affordability Act (SB 261) would remove the Carbon Plan’s interim goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 70% by 2030 or shortly thereafter. However, the legislation retains the long-term goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 for electric utilities, as legislation passed in 2021 requires.
“This is about keeping the cost from going up and even higher. And $13 billion is real money,” said state Sen. Paul Newton, R-Cabarrus, during the floor debate. “The choice is simple. Are you going to vote to make sure that the rates continue to go up? Are you going to vote to keep the rates down and reasonable?”
After a floor debate, the legislation passed in a 31-12 vote and now heads to the House for consideration.
In 2021, Republicans and Democrats together established the first carbon-emissions reduction goals for the electricity sector in the Southeast. While they enacted safeguards to ensure prioritizing reliability and the lowest possible cost, the 2030 interim goal complicated how the commission approached energy decisions, such as natural gas and nuclear options.
“Reducing carbon on our grid costs money. Reducing carbon will cost customers across North Carolina money,” added Newton. “So the question we’re grappling with today is not whether to do that. We’re going to keep the 2050 goal. It’s just, how do we do it in the least expensive way? That’s all we’re asking is to give the commission the opportunity to actually choose the least cost path forward.”
Though the bill passed with support from both parties, some Democrats debated the math behind the modeled savings and other savings programs that were previously rejected by Duke Energy.
“Models are models. You get out based on what you put in. We don’t know what was put in,” said state Sen. Julie Mayfield, D-Buncombe. “We want to see the math. We haven’t seen the math. Nobody objects to lower rates.”
Despite the Carbon Plan law requiring the North Carolina Utilities Commission to take the least-cost path to reducing emissions, and one that would maintain or enhance the reliability of the grid, the short-term interim goal has had the unintended consequence of favoring solar facilities, as explained by Jon Sanders, director of the Center for Food, Power and Life at the John Locke Foundation.
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“Unfortunately, the solar facilities are unreliable, weather-dependent, and extremely land-intensive facilities,” Sanders said. “They obligate the building of an inordinate amount of new transmission lines, and they need a great deal of redundancy — overbuilding — to approximate reliability. On plain reading, the solar facilities called for don’t fit the bill of least-cost, nor do they do anything to help with grid reliability.”
The North Carolina Utilities Commission moved the interim goal from 2030 to 2034, a decision that saved North Carolinians $4 billion. However, models showed removing the interim goal altogether would save North Carolinians a projected $13 billion.