Charlotte commuters drive more than most Americans

Charlotte-area commuters log 1,000 more miles a year and urbanites use public transit half as much as average Americans, says an analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

That pattern means local commuters spend some $350 more a year on driving than most Americans, says the analysis of National Household Travel Survey data.

The NRDC's point in all this, of course, is that drivers could save money -- and carbon emissions -- by using transit, carpooling and combining trips more often. Urban commuters in the Charlotte area could save $931 and rural residents $2,163 a year if they took transit, it found.

Shannon Binns, executive director of the nonprofit Sustain Charlotte, said "it is critical that we expand our transit system while also encouraging more carpooling, telecommuting, and moving closer to work, if possible."

In that vein, officials broke ground Thursday for the Lynx Blue Line light-rail extension from uptown to UNC Charlotte. The 9.3-mile line is expected to open in 2017.

Duke gets thumbs-up on endangered fish

The National Marine Fisheries Service says Duke Energy's Catawba River hydroelectric dams won't snuff out two endangered fish species, inching Duke toward a new, 50-year license to manage the river.

Shortnose sturgeon

The fisheries service's final biological opinion says Duke's 11 dams "is likely to adversely affect but is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of shortnose sturgeon and Atlantic sturgeon." That's good news for Duke, whose hydro license expired in 2008 and has operated on yearly extensions since then.

An ancient species, sturgeon swim upriver to spawn but can't get past dams. The fisheries service estimates their adult spawning populations at only about 300 of each species.

Duke has agreed to start trapping two other migratory species, American shad and blueback herring, and truck them around its Wateree Dam in South Carolina by 2018. The trapping system isn't supposed to capture sturgeon.

Duke says it's reviewing the fisheries service opinion, which has been years in coming. But it still has to resolve legal issues in South Carolina.

The S.C. Court of Appeals ruled last December that state environmental officials had not missed a deadline to oppose a water-quality permit Duke also needs to renew the federal license. Duke asked the S.C. Supreme Court in June to review that ruling.

Once those issues are resolved, Catawba licensing manager Mark Oakley said last month, Duke expects the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to take about six months to review the license. If the review begins this summer, Duke could finally have its license in the first quarter of 2014.

Approval will unleash millions of dollars in recreational improvements and land conservation Duke promised in negotiating the license terms.

Air study looks at the Southeast's cooling trend

Part of the largest U.S. air-quality field study in decades is examining whether human-caused pollution and natural chemical emissions explain a cooling trend in the leafy Southeast.

The Southern Oxidant and Aerosol Study began last month and runs through July 15. It's part of a five-pronged air study that will deploy airplanes and ground-based instruments from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic.

The study will look at how interactions between natural and human-made emissions affect air quality -- and how they relate to climate change. Unlike much of the world, the Southeast has seen a cooling trend over the past century.

The region saw a warm period during the 1920s to 1940s, says the U.S. Global Change Research Program, followed by a downward trend through the 1960s. Temperatures have been rising again since the 1970s.

Pollutants interact with volatile organic compounds that come from plants, turning them into airborne particles called aerosols. So-called black aerosols absorb solar radiation and warm up temperatures. But lighter-colored ones, typical of the Southeast, reflect sunlight and have a cooling effect.

Light aerosols have a dark side. They can make ground-level ozone -- which cities such as Charlotte and Atlanta have wrestled with for decades -- worse.

The larger study is supported by the National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Electric Power Research Institute, with researchers from 30 U.S. and international institutions.

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."