NC lawmakers debate: Will proposed new energy policies raise people's bills, or lower them?

Legislative Republicans joined with Duke Energy and other business interests on Wednesday to roll out a new proposal wth sweeping changes to North Carolina energy policy.

Critics say the changes would increase people’s energy bills. Republican lawmakers said they think the opposite is true, and that the bill should help rates go down in the future. Rep. Dean Arp, R-Union, said the bill was written “in a way to explicitly save ratepayers dollars.”

But when a Democratic lawmaker pressed one of the energy industry representatives on such claims during Wednesday’s committee hearing on the bill, he declined to commit to lower rates.

“You can assure us that the rates will not go up? You made that statement?” Rep. Garland Pierce, D-Scotland, asked Don Ashworth, a representative for ElectriCities of NC, one of the industry groups backing the bill.

“I do not believe I did,” Ashworth replied.

A lobbyist for Duke Energy, which provides power to almost everyone in North Carolina, likewise didn’t commit to keeping rates from going up.

“We’re committed to powering our state’s continued success through a reliable and increasingly clean mix of energy resources while keeping costs as low as possible for our customers,” Duke lobbyist Ryan Minto said. “North Carolina is experiencing rapid growth, more people, more businesses and more demand for energy.”

The bill would allow energy companies to charge people for power plants that aren’t built yet. Supporters say it will allow plants to be built and paid off faster, keeping costs down.

Donald Bryson, who leads the pro-business John Locke Foundation think tank, noted that the bill comes as Duke Energy faces a mandate from the legislature to shut down its coal-burning plants and transition to cleaner sources of energy, such as nuclear power, to become carbon-neutral by 2050 — part of a 2021 bill that Duke Energy helped write.

“This bill enables a rational energy transition that balances environmental goals with economic growth and ratepayer protection,” Bryson said. “In short, if we want energy policy grounded in reality and responsible governance, then this is the right step forward.”

Critics say it’ll shift risks from shareholders to customers, leaving regular people on the hook for business mistakes or fraud. They pointed to South Carolina, which has a similar rule as the one being proposed here. There, customers are currently stuck paying for a $9 billion nuclear power plant that never ended up being built.

Arp said the bill has guardrails in place intended to stop that South Carolina example from playing out in North Carolina. Critics weren’t convinced of the strength of those guardrails.

“As our neighbors look to repeal these laws and warn us not to repeat their mistakes, some North Carolina lawmakers want us to learn this lesson the hard way,” Will Scott of the Environmental Defense Fund NC wrote in a statement. “If the utility wants to gamble, they should do it with shareholder money, not with captive North Carolina customers footing the bill.”

Short public notice

At many times during Wednesday’s debate over the bill, lawmakers appeared to be talking past one another as they debated what the bill would mean for people’s pocketbooks — often appearing to misunderstand each other’s questions, or to misunderstand the bill itself.

The confusion might have been due in part to the fact that some legislators on the committee weren’t shown copies of the proposed new language in the bill until Tuesday night; Democratic lawmakers also said the bill wasn’t made available to the general public until 10 minutes before Wednesday’s committee began.

Committee leaders took an unrelated bill — Senate Bill 266, which proposed changes to building code rules related to Hurricane Helene — and rewrote it to delete all the Helene-related language and replace it with dozens of pages of proposed new energy policy rules. The process is known in legislative parlance as gut-and-amend.

Many business interests were at the meeting to praise the bill.

Duke Energy, the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, the North Carolina Manufacturers’ Alliance, the John Locke Foundation, Electricities of North Carolina and the North Carolina Electrical Cooperative all sent representatives to the hearing to offer their support.

Rep. Sarah Crawford, D-Wake, cited the lack of public notice on the highly technical bill that will affect the entire state. For that reason, she asked for the committee’s vote to be delayed to give lawmakers and members of the public more time to read it and consider its impacts. The committee’s chairman Rep. Kyle Hall, R-Stokes, declined.

Offering some insight into the legislative process, Hall said the state Senate won’t agree to pass this bill. The Senate previously voted to pass its own version of these changes, with some notable differences, as part of Senate Bill 261 in March.

Hall said the effort to rush this separate bill through the House was an acknowledgement that the two chambers need to start formally working on negotiating a final deal, and he’d like that to start that process sooner rather than later.

“We do not know how long that’s going to take,” he said.