Duke Energy will discuss its 2025 earnings this morning. The company took $4.97 billion in profit, up from $4.4 billion the previous year.

Wild times in Alabama. After Georgia voters kicked out incumbent utilities commissioners cozy with Georgia Power, Alabama lawmakers are considering *ending elections* for their commission and moving to appointments made by politicians subject to the influence of Alabama Power's money.

In Florida communities considering cutting ties with Duke Energy, shadowy alliances have sprung up to fight municipalization, and local officials suspect they're connected to the company. Duke denies it, but it's refusing to answer follow-up questions about whether it's funding them.

Dump Duke was joined by Faith in Florida, Suncoast Sierra Club, Food and Water Watch, St. Petersburg City Council Vice Chair Richie Floyd, and the Pinellas chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. www.cltampa.com/news/dump-du...

WRAL compared Texas' robust electrical grid protection regime with North Carolina's. "The Texas situation should have sprung us into action, to think about this in advance," said North Carolina state Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford.

The group pressing the Florida cities of St. Petersburg and Clearwater to take over local electric power systems now operated by Duke Energy held a press conference yesterday to talk about the effort. "We already run our own water and trash with no hiccups," noted Clearwater resident Megan Panek.

The schedule of public hearings on Duke Energy's proposed North Carolina rate hikes is out. They kick off with a hearing on the Duke Energy Progress request on March 30 in Raleigh.

Many North Carolina solar farms are nearing the end of their initial agreements with Duke Energy. But under a new proposal before state regulators, project owners could lock in favorable long-term renewals if they add batteries.

Duke Energy avoided major disruptions during this past weekend's Winter Storm Fern, but it's not out of the woods yet as this week brings unusually cold temperatures that will stress power systems.

Hearings on Duke Energy's proposed carbon plan for the Carolinas kick off on Feb. 4 in Durham, and the NC Sustainable Energy Association has released a helpful analysis of the proposal.

Though Duke Energy says it's taken steps to avoid blackouts since previous winter weather disasters, it's still warning customers across the Carolinas to brace for multi-day outages during upcoming Winter Storm Fern.

Winter Storm Fern will test Duke Energy's claims that it's made changes to avoid extended power outages.

After Hurricane Helene, a network of government and nonprofit groups came together to install solar panels and batteries at fire departments and other community centers in the North Carolina mountains so they can serve as so-called "resilience hubs."

Duke Energy says a 1,360-megawatt methane gas plant could be built in Davidson County, North Carolina. Potential sites for the plant have not been previously reported.

Duke Energy brought a 50-megawatt battery online this week near the former Allen coal plant site in Gaston County, North Carolina. The 54-unit battery can store 200 megawatt-hours of energy at a time — enough to power about 50,000 homes for up to four hours.

Electric utilities are not only impoverishing Americans by profiteering through power bills; they're also choosing generation strategies that are worsening climate change, which in turn is shrinking Americans' income.

“Duke put this forward as something they were going to do, and everybody agreed,” said David Neal, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. ​“To take out the one thing that everybody agreed on, without any announcement, without any fanfare,” he said, ​“is just baffling to me.”

NC Utilities Commissioner Karen Kemerait, one of two Democratic appointments to the five-member body, is leaving to return to practicing law with Fox Rothschild, where she previous represented gas companies, independent power producers, solar developers, etc. Gov. Stein appoints her replacement.

A lawsuit over Duke Energy's efforts to block NTE Carolinas from competing for Fayetteville NC's long-term electricity contract can now move forward.

"They lured him out of his house, and they took him," Ruiz said in an interview about the first instance he heard about.

The trade association representing for-profit electric utility companies hosted utility regulators alongside industry lobbyists in a luxury Fenway Park suite for a Red Sox game during a regulators' conference last July. NC Commissioner Karen Kemerait meant to be there but had a scheduling glitch.

When utilities want higher rates, they file a rate case with the state utilities commission, which involves lots of lawyers; utilities can now recoup legal costs from customers rather than shareholders. A new article in Energy Law Journal questions the ethics of this. www.eba-net.org/wp-content/u...

A North Carolina Court of Appeals panel has ruled against Democratic Gov. Josh Stein in his challenge of a state law the Republican legislature passed shortly after his election that stripped him of appointment powers, including to the state Utilities Commission.

Tom Ervin, a former member of the South Carolina Public Service Commission, on how Duke Energy is saving its Florida customers money with solar power.

Though Duke Energy has submitted an early site permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a long-planned reactor near the Belews Creek Steam Station, a coal and gas plant in Stokes County, N.C., it says that it "has yet to make a decision to build new nuclear units."

Duke Energy acknowledges here that clean energy development lowers its customers' bills.

“Gov. Josh Stein should push to continue the extensive planning and testing needed to expand wind power in North Carolina,” writes N&O associate opinion editor Ned Barnett. “By the time Trump leaves office, North Carolina should be ready to go with the wind.”

My latest blog post for the Energy and Policy Institute looks at Duke Energy's North Carolina rate hike requests in the context of soaring utility disconnections in the state. I also break down what portion of its N.C. customers' electric bills flows straight to investors. It's a big chunk.

A new report commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center finds utilities in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina are planning for data-center-driven electricity demand growth that has a roughly 0.2% chance of actually occurring.

The climate justice nonprofit NC WARN has released an 18-minute documentary about Duke Energy's climate deceptions, and I'm among the experts interviewed. For more details about the company's long disinformation campaign, see our "Duke Energy Knew" report: energyandpolicy.org/duke-energy-...

So-called "vertically integrated" electric utilities like Duke Energy and Southern Co., which own both fossil-fuel generation and power lines, see interregional transmission projects carrying cheaper renewable power into their territories as an economic threat.

Duke Energy has three coal plants on this list, all of them in North Carolina: Rogers, Marshall, and Belews Creek.

Interesting timing for Duke Energy's rate hike requests in North Carolina.

Duke Energy wants to extend its North Carolina program encouraging battery adoption to nonresidential customers. The program aims to save money by reducing the need for new power plants and expensive grid upgrades.

The news about the reimbursements comes after WRAL’s consumer reporter pressed Duke Energy for answers on how the company planned to make things right.

North Carolina law requires Duke Energy's rates to be set for three years at a time. But the company's latest rate hike request addresses only two years of rates, leading a group of industrial users to cry foul.

Three years later, we have no answers on who's responsible for the attack on Duke Energy infrastructure that left more than 45,000 people without power for a week and resulted in the death of 87-year-old Karin Zoanelli. Few details have been released about the investigation.

Climate justice group NC WARN wrote to Gov. Josh Stein today, asking him to oppose Duke Energy's plans to build new nuclear reactors in the Carolinas, citing the industry's extreme cost overruns and many project failures that have cost customers and taxpayers dearly. www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/u...

In short, yes, except under a few narrow circumstances -- but it doesn't have to be that way. There are states that completely ban cutoffs during the winter, and North Carolina could do so, too.

NC's Triangle chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is collecting signatures on petitions to get solar energy bonds on next year's ballots in Wake, Durham, and Orange counties, and in the cities of Durham and Raleigh, with the goal of solarizing public buildings. Links to petitions below.

"Customers in South Carolina were significant outliers in terms of outage duration, the report said, experiencing an average of 53 hours of outages in 2024. Much of this was due to last September’s Hurricane Helene, which left 1.2 million customers in South Carolina without electricity."

Good ideas from a leading scholar of energy policy.

North Carolina's governor and attorney general are opposing Duke Energy's proposed rate hikes for its North Carolina utilities. www.qcnews.com/news/duke-en...

In a setback for Duke Energy, the U.S. solicitor general opposes the company's request for the Supreme Court to review an anti-monopoly lawsuit over its attempt to block Florida-based NTE from competing to provide electricity to the city of Fayetteville, North Carolina.

"Utilities must justify any rate increases and convince regulators of the need for their actions," writes James Baratta in his examination of the industry's structural illogic. "But 2025 may be the year that this regulatory framework collapses under its own contradictions."

The Charlotte Observer has published a must-read investigation into the speculation and secrecy surrounding the development of data centers in North Carolina.

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.