Duke Energy quietly proposes second massive gas plant in North Carolina

It’s been a grim five weeks for the clean energy transition in North Carolina. From rooftop solar to electric vehicle charging to offshore wind, a slew of renewable energy advances have faced setbacks.

President Donald Trump’s edicts against climate spending and wind and solar aren’t the only problem. Earlier this month, Duke Energy quietly proposed a massive new fossil-gas plant in Person County to help replace two aging coal units that advocates say seldom operate. Designed in part to meet rising demand expected from data centers and large new customers, the 1,360-megawatt facility has already received an initial green light from regulators as part of the utility’s long-range plan.

Shelley Robbins, senior decarbonization manager for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said her group was ​“disappointed but not surprised” by Duke’s application, noting that the new plant and its air pollution — albeit less intense than that from the shuttering coal plant — would be within a mile of Woodland Elementary School.

“The school was there first,” Robbins said, and its students and faculty have long borne health impacts from burning coal. ​“Person County has higher than average asthma rates,” she lamented, ​“And now [Duke] is saying, ​‘We’re just going to poison the air differently.’”

Duke’s proposal comes as advocates grow increasingly dismayed at how regulators are implementing a state law that requires the utility to zero out its carbon pollution by 2050.

The company’s first carbon-reduction blueprint, adopted by utility commissioners at the close of 2022, presaged at least one new large combined-cycle gas plant in the state in the near term. That plant, also in Person County, got the official go-ahead last year, even as advocates argued it would run afoul of fresh emissions-reduction rules from the Biden administration.

A second iteration of the carbon plan, approved last November, added two more combined-cycle plants, including one in South Carolina, and abdicated a 2030 deadline for the company to cut its climate pollution by 70%. In all, the scheme projects upwards of 9 new gigawatts of fossil-gas generation while cutting coal power, the carbon benefits of which are largely canceled out by leakage of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The utility’s application this month leans heavily on that November order, noting that commissioners ruled that gas is needed to ​“maintain system reliability during [Duke’s] fleet transition towards carbon neutrality in 2050.” Quoting the decision, Duke said the new gas generation would “‘enable coal retirements, assist in meeting load growth, facilitate the integration of renewable energy, and contribute to resource adequacy.’”

The bid for the new plant comes after Duke joined with nine other utilities around the country to urge Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency to abort the Biden-era greenhouse gas emissions rules. The agency has yet to comply directly but is weighing a wholesale abandonment of climate regulations.

The North Carolina Utilities Commission hasn’t said yet when it will hold a hearing on Duke’s plant application. The facility, billed as the second phase of the Person County plant that the panel greenlit last year, already has an air pollution permit.

Still, Robbins is hopeful that the proposal will receive ample scrutiny and perhaps even get punted until Duke has a better handle on how much demand from new data centers and other sources will materialize.

“Why are we plopping down two massive gas plants when there’s so much that we don’t know right now?” Robbins said, referring to the two Person County facilities. ​“If we could slow down, give the load time to firm up, and cleaner technologies time to come into the space, that would be the more sensible solution. … It’s not easy, but it’s better.”

Despite provisional support from regulators, Will Scott, Southeast climate and clean energy director with the Environmental Defense Fund, is confident that the proposed plant, along with its already approved twin, is unnecessary for the state’s energy security and at cross-purposes with state law.

“For our people and economy to continue thriving in a climate-safe future, North Carolina must take all deliberate action to transition aggressively away from fossil fuels,” Scott said in an email. His group’s 2024 analysis, he said, ​“shows that this must be the last new pollution emitting power plant constructed in North Carolina. Neither ratepayers nor our climate can afford the continuing cost of fossil fuels.”