Rogers' radio interview goes silent

A funny thing happened, says public radio reporter Alex Chadwick, during his interview about the nation's electric grid with Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers: The power went out.

It happened during taping of an hour-long special called "The Switch" that will air on Charlotte's WFAE at 7 p.m. Sunday. The apparently brief outage, Rogers quickly pointed out, wasn't Duke's fault.

The special is part of "Burn: An Energy Journal," hosted by Chadwick. It's about the aging, over-capacity electric grid, which transmits energy from power plants to consumers and most people don't think about until the lights go out.

Chadwick was in a Los Angeles studio, recording Rogers at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., when, Chadwick says in the piece, the connection went "boom."

Rogers set the record straight once power was restored. "I want the record to reflect that the power hit you just took had nothing to do with Duke Energy," he laughed. Duke doesn't serve either city.

Rogers went on to describe the grid as an engineering marvel "because it enables virtually everything else. It's the great enabler."

He'll give up CEO duties at Duke on Sunday, remaining as chairman through the end of the year.

Duke Energy 8th in solar power

The nation's largest electric utility, Duke Energy, comes in eighth among holding companies for solar-energy capacity, the Solar Electric Power Association reports.

Duke's regulated operations have a combined solar capacity of 183 megawatts, most of it bought from other companies. San Francisco-based PG&E Corp., parent of Pacific Gas and Electric, led the list with 1,569 megawatts.

Duke Energy Progress, which serves much of eastern North Carolina, the Asheville area and parts of South Carolina, ranked eighth for the growth of its solar installations last year. It has 94 megawatts of solar capacity while Duke Energy Carolinas, serving Charlotte and the western Carolinas, has 77 megawatts. Duke has 12 megawatts of solar in Florida.

Duke Energy Renewables, an unregulated subsidiary, owns more than 100 megawatts of utility-scale solar, including 15 projects in five states. The power they produce is sold to other utilities.

Feds deny late entry into Alcoa hydro relicensing

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission won't let a New Hampshire private equity fund join the Alcoa hydro relicensing case on the Yadkin River.

As recounted in today's Observer, New Energy Capital Partners made a late -- like six years late -- bid to intervene in Alcoa's bid for a new license to control four dams on 38 miles of the Yadkin.

The fund claimed Alcoa's intention was to secure the new license and flip the Yadkin project, as it did last year with a hydro project in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee that sold for nearly $600 million. Alcoa doesn't deny Yadkin could be sold at some point.

New Energy proposed an alternative. A public agency or the fund itself could buy Alcoa's assets and somehow, eventually, transfer them back to public ownership. It offered no details on the mechanics of such a move.

But FERC's order says the fund didn't show the "good cause" needed to allow late interventions.

With backing from Stanly County, its dogged rival for control of the Yadkin (the two settled their differences this month), Alcoa needs only a North Carolina water-quality certification for FERC to approve the new license.

  

AG Cooper, Public Staff disagree over Duke rate hike case

Attorney General Roy Cooper said he was standing up for consumers when he challenged Duke Energy's 2012 rate hike, and won. Last month the state Supreme Court sent the case back to the N.C. Utilities Commission to better assess the 7.2 percent hike's impact on customers during a sour economy.

But Cooper apparently won't get any help from the state's other consumer advocates -- the commission's Public Staff.

Days after the high court ruled, Cooper wrote Robert Gruber, the Public Staff's longtime executive director. The court order, he said, meant Gruber's staff no longer had to defend a settlement agreement with Duke that formed the basis for the rate hike.

"We strongly believe that ... the Utilities Commission cannot simply go back and add a few sentences to its decision to justify the return on equity and the rate increase that the court has just reversed," Cooper wrote. "In fact, we believe the commission must consider new evidence on consumer impact in order to provide the analysis that the Supreme Court now requires."

In a 1998 remand, involving a natural gas utility, the commission allowed parties to the case to offer new evidence and held an additional hearing. Cooper has asked the commission to put Duke's rate increase on hold until the current issue is settled; Duke has argued against that.

But Gruber, who will retire June 30 after 30 years on the job, was having no part of walking away from the settlement agreement.

The agreement cut Duke's increase by more than half, he noted in a response to Cooper, and spread it evenly across all customer classes. It also deferred $51 million in revenue Duke had sought for its Cliffside power plant construction and required Duke to donate $11 million to help low-income customers -- provisions that the commission itself could not have independently ordered.

"If the Public Staff abandoned the settlement in light of the Supreme Court's decision, as you suggest we do, these benefits would be in jeopardy and consumers could face even higher rates as a result," Gruber responded to Cooper. "....Our intention now is to fulfill our statutory obligations by assisting the commission in this process, while striving to preserve the substantial benefits to consumers achieved in the settlement."

Duke Energy paid no federal income taxes in 2012

Just in time for Tax Day comes word that the nation's largest electric utility, Duke Energy, paid no federal income taxes on last year's profit of nearly $1.8 billion.

Duke instead got a $46 million rebate in 2012, says N.C. Policy Watch, a project of the anti-poverty group N.C. Justice Center. Last week's blog post cites previous work on corporate taxation and off-shoring of profits by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Duke says it and other large companies are simply following the tax guidance in the federal government's 2008 economic stimulus package. Duke also accelerated $9 billion in spending to replace old power plants and upgrade other infrastructure, creating "tens of thousands" of temporary and permanent jobs, it says.

Much of Duke's tax treatment relied on deferrals related to accelerated depreciation, Citizens for Tax Justice has reported. That's allowed Duke to take in $299 million in federal rebates despite profits of $9.1 billion between 2008 and 2012, for a negative tax rate of 3.3 percent, Policy Watch calculates.

"If Duke wants to get serious about living up to its claims about what it is and what it stands for and begin to repair its tarnished image, it would do well to begin by paying its federal income taxes," Policy Watch writes, referring to state investigations of Duke's merger with Progress Energy.

Duke will ultimately have to pay the deferred federal taxes, spokesman Tom Williams said. Duke also paid $402 million in property and other utility non-income taxes in North Carolina in 2012, the company said.

New air rules would hurt coal power, study says

Tougher federal air standards could further tilt U.S. electric power away from coal fuel and toward natural gas, says a Duke University study published online this week.

Utilities including Duke Energy are fast moving toward gas as prices drop, retiring older coal-burning plants rather than fit them with new pollution controls.

The cost of complying with stricter air regulations could make nearly two-thirds of the nation's coal-fired power plants as expensive to run as those fueled by natural gas, the study found. That would be true even if gas prices rise to four times coal's cost, it says.

Duke Energy Carolinas' latest 20-year generation plan forecasts a 45 percent drop in coal use by 2032 and an 86 percent increase in natural gas. Duke Carolinas is retiring 38 coal-fired units in its territory.

The Energy Information Administration released this graph Friday. It shows that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2012 were the lowest in the United States since 1994.

The Duke study was published in the online edition of Environmental Science & Technology. The study is behind a pay wall, but here's the abstract. The lead author is Lincoln Pratson, a professor of earth and ocean sciences at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, with Drew Haerer and Dalia Patino-Echeverri.

McCrory's budget slices conservation funds

Gov. Pat McCrory's first budget cuts conservation funding so deeply it could affect the state's economy, says Land for Tomorrow, a coalition of pro-conservation groups.

The proposed budget cuts:

-- The Clean Water Management Trust Fund to $6.75 million from $10.75 million this year, and includes an appropriation only for the first year of the biennial budget. The grandaddy of North Carolina conservation funds, Clean Water once got $100 million a year.

-- The state Parks and Recreation Trust Fund to $15.5 million from $27.5 million.

-- The Natural Heritage Trust Fund to $4.23 million from $9.9 million. The budget also removes the fund's dedicated funding, a portion of the deed stamp tax.

Advocates have pointed lately to conservation spending's effects on the North Carolina economy, including the creation of new state parks, 250,000 acres of state gamelands and protection of the borders of Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune.

"The creation and consistent funding of North Carolina's conservation trust funds have been the result of bipartisan leadership over the past 25 years," said Katherine Skinner, executive director of the Nature Conservancy in the state. “These land protection successes have played a major
role in the state’s economy – boosting agriculture, the military, tourism, forestry, hunting,
fishing and outdoor recreation. As our economy continues to recover, we need to
continue a strong investment in these economic drivers. Gov. McCrory’s proposed
budget doesn’t reflect the level of investment needed to carry us forward.”

Stay tuned for how legislators respond.