A day after Duke Energy submits rate hikes for both of its North Carolina utilities... www.barrons.com/livecoverage...

Past due balances to utility companies jumped 9.7% annually to $789 between the April-June periods of 2024 and 2025, said The Century Foundation, a liberal think tank, and the advocacy group Protect Borrowers. That overlapped with a 12% jump in monthly energy bills during the same period.

A new brief from the Center for Progressive Reform looks at alternatives to investor-owned utilities -- including electric cooperatives, publicly owned utilities, and community choice aggregators -- for achieving an equitable, clean energy transition.

Duke Energy once loudly proclaimed its commitment to diversity and environmental initiatives, but now it's distancing themselves from those promises while declining to talk about it.

Energy costs could be moving the political needle in ways that other issues, like climate change, have not.

Once a major coal-burning nation, Australia has moved to solar power -- and now electricity is so cheap the government is literally giving it away.

"The Southern Environment Law Center says it’s a question of whether these credits 'add' something new to the grid or are just subsidizing actions the company had to take anyway under state regulations."

The Duke Energy PAC is a major supporter of the North Carolina lawmakers who led the recent congressional redistricting, and over the last decade and a half it's been contributing disproportionately to Republican legislators compared to their actual numbers in Raleigh.

"In a study I led earlier this year, my colleagues and I found that if big new power users curbed demand just 0.25 percent of the time — about 22 hours a year — the United States could accommodate more data centers without burdening household electricity users," says Duke University's Tyler Norris.

“If approved, the project would be the first commercial well drilled into the Triassic Basin, a natural gas repository underlying North Carolina and other Eastern Seaboard states.”

A TVA-like federal authority for offshore wind? "We have to think about big, ambitious solutions like this. Is this actually an opportunity to lower costs, not just decarb?" asks Bozuwa. "Are there ways to think about that to build an enduring political coalition?"

"Bills are going to go up — dramatically," said Kerwin Olson of Indiana's Citizens Action Coalition. Ratepayers "can't afford to pay what they're paying today. And disappointingly, the commission somehow justified that this proposal satisfies the affordability pillar of state policy."

"This isn't a myth or fake news ... prices are indeed going up, and voters at some point are going to be asking, 'Who's responsible for this?'" said Heather Reams, president and CEO of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions.

It was 20 years ago that 69% of voters in Winter Park, Florida, opted to divorce Progress Energy, now Duke Energy. Power bills in the city are now 28% lower than Duke's, and the city has used the profits it makes to bury 81% of power lines, meaning fewer outages during major storms.

The case centers around whether Duke Energy prevented NTE, a Florida-based builder and operator of power plants, from negotiating with the city of Fayetteville, North Carolina, by offering discounts and disrupting the construction of a new NTE power plant.

Happening this Sunday in Raleigh.

Always a utility at the center of some bullshit.

“Lease sales in southern and central Californian waters would be available in 2027; East Coast areas would open in 2028, according to the internal plans.“

If you care about keeping bills down while transitioning to clean energy, read this report. statesleadtheway.justsolutionscollective.org/wp-content/u...

Good advice when facing high electric bills: "Share that bill with your local and state elected officials and let them know how you feel about it. And also contact your [utility commission] because they're the ones who ultimately decide what your utility bill looks like." www.msn.com/en-us/money/...

North Carolina regulators have approved Duke Energy's plan to build another gas-burning power plant on Hyco Lake despite local opposition and concerns the electricity produced will be used largely for data centers.

Duke Energy's two North Carolina utilities filed notices this week with the state Utilities Commission announcing their plan to seek rate hikes. They expect to submit those rate case filings within 30 days.

An eye-opening look at the international fight against massive data centers.

The grants through a program called Solar For All were meant to go to low-income families, and people in rural areas, to help them put solar panels on their homes.

Eight US senators sent a letter to energy, water, and broadband companies -- including Duke Energy -- asking them to halt shutoffs and other penalties for federal workers affected by the ongoing government shutdown.

The N.C. Utilities Commission is holding a hearing today and tomorrow on new large-load customers, requested by the Southern Environmental Law Center to consider how the energy needs of data centers will affect the grid and customers' electric bills. Watch here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3gV...

Duke Energy officials point to the Trump administration's coal-friendly policies as key to its decision to keep three North Carolina coal plants -- Belews Creek, Cliffside, and Marshall -- online longer than previously intended.

The nonprofit CleanAIRE NC issued a statement expressing “serious concerns about Duke Energy’s proposed plan, which continues to prioritize fossil fuel expansion, delays coal retirement, and lacks meaningful engagement with the communities most vulnerable to environmental and economic harm.”

Instead of focusing on solar and wind, Duke Energy is prioritizing meeting increasing demand from expected new data centers and manufacturers by turning to coal plants at times when energy demand is highest.

“It’s certainly a regressive vision for North Carolina’s energy future,” said Josh Brooks, chief of policy strategy and innovation for the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association.

Duke’s new resource plan "continues the horrible record of one of the world’s worst climate polluters," said Jim Warren of the energy justice group NC WARN.

"This plan prematurely removes or delays low-cost, easy-to-develop generation options from the portfolio while extending the life of uneconomic resources," said Matt Abele, executive director of the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association.

Duke Energy has released a new carbon plan for the Carolinas that would increase its methane gas capacity, delay closure of coal plants, evaluate two sites for nuclear power, slow the addition of solar power, and abandon plans for offshore wind for at least a decade and a half.

The trade group for electric utilities opposes the EPA proposal to scrap the greenhouse gas endangerment finding, arguing it would make companies even more vulnerable to lawsuits like the one Carrboro, NC, filed against Duke Energy over its climate deceptions. www.regulations.gov/comment/EPA-...

“The source of Duke’s liability is their deception. It’s not emissions,” said Matthew Quinn, attorney for the plaintiffs.

“It’s no secret that private equity is extremely aggressive in chasing profits, and when it comes to utilities, the profit motive lands squarely on the backs of ratepayers who don’t have a choice of who they buy their electricity from,” said Karlee Weinmann of the Energy and Policy Institute.

"(Duke's) deception campaign caused a doubling down on fossil fuels, (which) caused a delay to renewable energy, (which) caused climate change impacts that Carrboro (is now facing)," said Carrboro attorney Matthew Quinn.

"What we’ve alleged is: we’d be materially further along [in using renewable energy options] and the climate crisis would be much less acute if Duke had not engaged in this deception," said Matthew Quinn, attorney for Carrboro.

"Our theory is that Duke's massive deception got everybody hooked on fossil fuels, like Philip Morris" and cigarettes, Carrboro attorney Matthew Quinn told the court: insideclimatenews.org/news/2609202...

Clearwater, Florida, has completed its yearlong study into ditching Duke Energy for municipal power. It found that the move would save customers about 7% each year for the first five years, then about 18% annually in the following 25 years.

A cautionary tale for utility watchers everywhere: Marissa Gillett, a winning advocate for consumers as chair of Connecticut's Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, will step down on Oct. 10 after a years-long campaign by the state's monopoly utilities to knock her out of office.

A North Carolina Business Court judge will hear Duke Energy's motion to dismiss Carrboro’s climate lawsuit today.

As high and climbing power bills pose a political problem for the ruling Republicans, House Democrats have introduced the Cheap Energy Act to speed the country's shift away from expensive fossil fuels to less costly renewables.

Duke Energy is among the utility companies calling for a rollback of federal greenhouse gas regulations.

"As the South becomes the new epicenter of data center growth, it is becoming increasingly clear that Big Tech is following Big Oil’s footsteps, compounding the harms of decades of environmental racism in the South," writes Jai Dulani of MediaJustice.

All of Duke Energy's utility subsidiaries received failing grades in the Sierra Club's new report examining how electric utilities are backsliding on the clean energy transition. www.sierraclub.org/sites/defaul...

A 250-megawatt data center can use about a billion gallons of water each year. "That’s about what the demand is for some of our merger communities like Knightdale and Wendell," said Ed Buchan, assistant director of Raleigh Water.

At a recent public hearing in rural North Carolina about a pipeline planned primarily to serve Duke Energy gas plants, only five people spoke in favor of the permitting -- and four were current employees or recent associates of Williams Transco, the company that wants to build the pipeline.

An expert analysis of Duke Energy Progress's fuel costs in North Carolina found that the utility is dispatching coal units even when they're not the cheapest resource. Their customers bear the financial consequences, since fuels costs are passed directly on to them. cleanenergy.org/news/duke-en...

More than 200 businesses and nonprofit groups have signed a letter to North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein asking him to challenge Duke Energy's planned fossil fuel expansion and suppression of renewables. www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/u...