A new report from the Center for Food, Power, and Life estimates how much and what kinds of energy infrastructure North Carolina would need to instill in order to satisfy emissions reduction targets written in state law.
When state lawmakers passed House Bill 951 a little over three years ago, they included timeline targets for North Carolina to go “carbon neutral,” or to counterbalance lowered carbon emissions with offsetting factors so no net addition of carbon makes it into the atmosphere. The subsequent Carbon Plan, developed by the NC Utilities Commission as stipulated by the legislation, requires Duke Energy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from its electric generating facilities by 70% from 2005 levels by 2030 (recently pushed to 2035), and achieve full carbon neutrality by 2050.
This, the report reads. “will require the largest expansion of electric infrastructure since electrification began in the early 1920s.”
The report authors examine two different paths for achieving the emissions reduction targets, spelling out the true costs of meeting growing energy needs while going carbon neutral, whether incorporating emission-free nuclear energy, versus relying on more solar, wind, and battery technology to reach the vaunted goal.
When it comes to the latter, the Renewable Model, researchers determined North Carolina would require exponential increases in solar, wind, and battery capacities. (Emphasis added)
This resource portfolio would require a nearly tenfold increase in energy infrastructure and consume much more land than the current electric grid. It would require a 426-fold increase in onshore wind capacity (more than twice the amount of onshore wind capacity installed in the state of Texas) and a 21-fold increase in solar capacity (nearly double the amount of solar capacity currently installed in the rest of the United States). It would also require nearly 13 times as much four-hour battery capacity as the entire United States. All this solar and onshore wind would require enormous amounts of land, especially in comparison with what would be needed by new nuclear facilities.
Lighting the Path: Meeting North Carolina’s Coming Energy Needs
North Carolina has substantially reduced emissions from electricity generation in recent years by retiring and upgrading coal-fired power plants and converting many of them to natural gas, which emits less carbon and provides consistent baseload generation for the grid.
Yet, as coal plants are retired, authors note, the utility faces a decision of how to replace the baseload capacity, while increasing total generation to meet the aggressive growth North Carolina is and will continue to experience. As seen in the excerpt above, choosing the Renewable Model will, at the very least, require comically large investments in solar, wind, and batteries.
As noted by Jon Sanders, director of the Center for Food, Power, and Life, the land use requirements, alone, are eye-popping. He points out that the estimated need of an additional 850,000 acres of land for solar are “unthinkable.”
“How much land is 850,000 acres?” Sanders asked rhetorically in reaction to the report’s findings. “It’s more than 1,328 square miles. How big is that? Put it this way: It would take up more area than the state’s 13 biggest cities combined. Charlotte, Fayetteville, Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Durham, Concord, Cary, High Point, Wilmington, Gastonia, Jacksonville, and Asheville put together would be smaller than all the land the new solar facilities would require to satisfy the Renewable Scenario.”
But the reasons for such a huge growth in renewable capacity aren’t quite as humorous; North Carolina has a winter-peaking system, in which the highest demand for power comes during the coldest hours of the night — that is, when the sun is not shining.
Many North Carolinians experienced the bite of mixing of winter-peaking demand with increased solar capacity. During a cold snap on Christmas Eve 2022, Duke Energy instituted rolling blackouts across high-strain areas of the grid when baseload power was overburdened and solar capacity was unavailable on account of it being night time.
With no solar to help meet peak demand for power, the needed capacities for wind and battery storage under this scenario rise astronomically as well. So, what about ‘Scenario B,’ the Nuclear Scenario? From physical footprints, to required new infrastructure, to reliability, the fission-based path looks markedly different. (Emphasis added)
By contrast, the Nuclear Scenario would require a resource mix that utilizes the built-in flexibility in HB 951 that allows existing coal and natural gas plants to remain online as needed to ensure reliability and keep electricity prices low while new nuclear power plants are constructed to replace them. Compared with the Renewable Scenario, this resource portfolio would produce far more electricity with far less energy infrastructure. The land needed by all this new nuclear power would amount to just 38 percent of the land consumed by all of North Carolina’s existing solar facilities. As a result, the Nuclear Scenario would require fewer new power plants and less transmission infrastructure and would consume much less land than the Renewable Scenario.
Lighting the Path: Meeting North Carolina’s Coming Energy Needs
In addition to reliable baseload power, researchers find the Nuclear Scenario requires far less in new energy infrastructure like transmission lines. Whereas the Renewable Scenario calls for more than 12,500 miles of new transmission lines, pursuing nuclear requires less than about a tenth of that.
“Overbuilding large, sprawling, and inherently unreliable solar facilities would necessitate building extensive transmission lines to connect them all,” write Sanders in a research brief on the report. “North Carolina law would roll those costs into customers’ electricity bills, while sticking them with less reliable electricity service. Especially because electricity is a basic human necessity, the implications for North Carolina consumers would be dire.”
For more interesting findings from the report, including how much money North Carolinians will have to pay to meet Gov. Roy Cooper’s Executive Order 246, calling for 1.25 million Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs) by 2030 and making them half of all new vehicle sales, read the full report here or below.