Duke Energy defends greenhouse gas reduction process, says technical info not ready
Duke Energy officials told the N.C. Utilities Commission on Monday that they will provide the technical information used by company analysts to shape a carbon reduction plan shortly after providing a draft of the plan to regulators.
That has raised concern among many who are tracking the process, particularly because they will have 60 days once the plan is filed to offer comments and other feedback. Nadia Luhr of North Carolina’s Public Staff, said inputs and assumptions Duke is using to shape its plan should be made available on a rolling basis as they become available.
““This is especially important as the 60-day window for comments and alternate carbon plans provide little time for intervenors and public staff to do their own modeling and prepare comments,” Luhr said.
Public Staff is an independent state agency that represents ratepayers in front of the Utilities Commission.
The details of when Duke’s assumptions and models will be made available were among the concerns voiced Monday by a wide range of interested parties including the North Carolina’s attorney general’s office, environmental groups and industry trade groups. During a regular update provided to the Utilities Commission, other concerns included whether Duke could make some information available immediately and whether the company should offer additional small groups to discuss targeted technical topics.
Under last year’s House Bill 951, Duke must submit a plan describing how it intends to slash greenhouse gas emissions 70% from 2005 levels by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. Greenhouse gases are responsible for warming the planet, causing a broad range of climate impacts from warmer nights to wetter storms.
An N.C. Department of Environmental Quality greenhouse gas inventory showed that energy generation caused 32.8% of the state’s greenhouse gases in 2018, the last year for which information is available. Between 2005 and 2018, the sector cut 34.7% of its greenhouse gases, about halfway to the goal set out in last year’s law.
Timeline for emissions plan
A draft plan describing how Duke plans to generate power while achieving lower emissions needs to be submitted to the N.C. Utilities Commission by May 16.
From there, interested parties including individuals, environmental organizations, energy advocates and industrial customer groups will have 60 days to comment on the plan. Those groups can also submit alternative carbon plans, taking Duke’s assumptions and analyses about the costs of energy sources, applying different costs that they feel are more appropriate and feeding the information into a model that could result in different energy sources than those the company suggests.
Duke plans to create an online “reading room” where interested parties will be able to access data and alter inputs before running them through models. Monday, Jack Jirak, a deputy general counsel for Duke Energy, told the Utilities Commission that the information would be available within a week after the May 16 filing deadline.
“Every single piece of data input, final input, assumptions and modeling data, the entire EnCompass modeling database will be made available to all intervenors according to the normal commission process,” Jirak said.
Duke has held two stakeholder meetings, with a third planned for March 22. The company also set up and held meetings for technical committees on connecting solar to the grid; the technical assumptions and operating costs of solar and wind energy; and energy storage operations and costs.
Jirak also said Duke doesn’t have the staff to respond to detailed discovery requests while also creating the carbon plan. While Duke was creating a 2020 plan outlining how it would generate power, Jirak said the company received 3,500 requests for information that took thousands of hours to compile.
“It’s not only impractical to respond to discovery at this stage of the process given we don’t have a final carbon plan process and we don’t have finalized inputs and assumptions, it’s also just untenable from a work perspective and a resource perspective to be asked to do that in parallel with this process,” Jirak said.
Gudrun Thompson, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, agreed with Luhr that Duke should provide details on a rolling basis. Thompson is representing the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
By the time Duke files the carbon plan, Thompson noted, its analysts will have had about eight months to work with models and inputs from the time HB 951 was passed, significantly longer than the 60 days those responding to the draft plan will have to offer alternatives.
“It sounds like (inputs are) not ready yet,” Thompson said, “but once it is and they’re ready to press ‘Go’ on the model, they should be sharing that database with stakeholders that ask for it.”
This story was produced with financial support from 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.
This story was originally published March 8, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Duke Energy defends greenhouse gas reduction process, says technical info not ready."