FAYETTEVILLE — Although top national environmental regulators confirmed GenX and related chemical compounds are used to produce solar panel components, they say their research does not prioritize what risks that might pose to the environment and human health. Peter Grevatt, national director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water in...
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to state the Amazon Wind Farm is in Pasquotank County. We regret the error. A new study from the U.S. Navy says expanding the Amazon Wind Farm site near Elizabeth City, as the operator planned to do, may cause interference with the Navy’s radar-tracking facility in southern Virginia....
The sun keeps shining on North Carolina’s renewable energy investors — at taxpayers’ expense. The state’s renewable energy investment tax credit program expired Dec. 31, 2015. Yet the state paid $454 million in the subsidies the past two years, including a record $245 million for calendar year 2016. It’s likely the state might forgo hundreds...
District Court Judge Pell Cooper, Gov. Roy Cooper’s brother, manages three businesses — a potential violation of state judicial rules designed to prevent conflicts of interest by judges. In 2009, state officials forced another district court judge who refused to leave two corporate boards to resign from the bench. [See editor’s note at end of...
Update: This story was updated 11:08 June 4, with a statement from Jordan McGillis, a spokesman for the Institute for Energy Research. Ohio-based Fifth Third Bank claimed in a March press release it’s the “first Fortune 500 company and first bank to contract for 100 percent renewable power through a single new project.” The project is...
The state Utility Commission will weigh whether the GenX compound that has polluted the Cape Fear River Basin could contaminate the Wilkinson Solar Plant in the Terra Ceia community of Beaufort County. Opponents of the 74-megawatt, industrial-scale solar generating plant have spent the past year raising concerns during N.C. Utility Commission hearings. It may be...
After operating a little more than a year, the Amazon Wind Farm, North Carolina’s only large-scale wind energy project, continues to cause concerns. The project — located in Perquimans and Pasquotank counties near Elizabeth City — generated just 75 percent of its expected power. Military officials also remain uneasy about the wind farm’s interference with...
Tracing the ownership of the land hosting a Nash County solar farm built on a former cow pasture is complicated business. [Editor’s note: The headline of this story was changed to reflect new information from Judge Pell Cooper. See correction below.] On his Statement of Economic Interest covering 2014, then-Attorney General Roy Cooper, in November...
STATESVILLE — Iredell County opponents of an industrial-scale solar project continue facing roadblocks in their goal to prevent the facility from getting a permit. Two days before the county held a hearing on the permit, the state Court of Appeals overturned a local government ruling against a solar development in Currituck County. It was the...
COOL SPRINGS — As more and more rural communities push back against renewable energy developers and the encroachment of solar generating plants on open space, another fight gets far less attention. “Right now it’s neighbor against neighbor,” Ron Heiniger, a crop and soil scientist at N.C. State Cooperative Extension’s Vernon G. James Research and Extension...
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline cuts a 600-mile underground swath through three states, beginning in Harrison County, West Virginia. It branches out to Chesapeake, Virginia, and also continues south near Roanoke Rapids and heads to Pembroke — traversing counties such as Nash and Cumberland before settling in Robeson. The route keeps company with Interstate 95, running...
