Study targets costs of Duke energy plans

A Durham environmental group says concentrating on conservation and cost-effective renewable energy would let Duke Energy Carolinas avoid costly new plants and soften steep rate increases.

The N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network’s new study says new-plant costs -- particularly for multi-billion nuclear plants -- will increase N.C. rates at least 50 percent by 2024.

Report coauthor John Runkle says the increases are likely to be even higher. Nuclear plant costs have increased significantly in recent years. The report used current estimates, but he thinks the plants will cost much more to complete. Prices, he says, could double if utilities go ahead with current plants.

Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan takes issue with the N.C. WARN report. She says it contends Duke alone could produce more renewable energy than a N.C.-commissioned report two years ago found was possible to produce statewide.

She also says N.C. WARN opposed Duke’s Save-A-Watt program for energy efficiency. And she says it didn’t support Duke’s rooftop-solar initiative, one of the largest renewable energy programs ever proposed in the state. And she says a proposal to cut the need for plants by reducing energy reserves would be unacceptable to Duke and probably to regulators.

N.C. WARN has been a frequent Duke critic. It has criticized Save-A-Watt as inadequate. It has been in the forefront of opponents to the 825-megawatt coal-fired expansion at the Cliffside Steam Station at the border of Rutherford and Cleveland counties.

It has opposed plans by both Duke and Raleigh-based Progress Energy Inc. (NYSE:PGN) to build four nuclear reactors to produce power. Duke proposes two units in Gaffney, S.C. Progress would add two units to the Shearon Harris Nuclear Station near Raleigh.

N.C. WARN has argued in the past that these plants are unnecessary. The need for them was based on inflated demand projections, the group says.

But the group’s latest report accepts the demand projections by Duke and Progress at face value. It argues there are better and less expensive ways to get the energy needed.

Runkle the attorney for N.C. WARN. He wrote the report issued Tuesday with John Blackburn, former chairman of the Duke University economics department.

The report recommends four steps it says could save or produce enough energy to replace the need for Cliffside and the nuclear plants. Blackburn says those steps would ultimately cost less than building the new plants.

Rates would still go up, he says. But he contends they would go up more slowly than if the utilities built the plants now planned.

The report addresses energy production and conservation statewide. But it also breaks out demand and production proposals for Duke and Progress separately.

Titled North Carolina’s Energy Future, the report calls for more stringent efficiency requirements; greater production from solar, wind and other alternative technologies; improvements in demand mangement to shift load from peak energy hours, and greater use of waste heat in large industrial plants to produce electricity.

Blackburn argues efficiency programs would be virtually cost-free to customers. Renewable-energy alternatives are generally more expensive than current energy technologies -- coal, gas and nuclear. But the study says energy from the proposed nuclear plants would cost three times as much as current costs.

Solar energy costs more now than the anticipated production costs for nuclear, Blackburn concedes. But he says solar costs are dropping. The costs for nuclear production, he says, are likely to rise.

Sheehan says N.C. WARN has repeatedly argued to state regulators that Duke does not need the proposed plants. She says the arguments it makes against them in the new report have been made before in regulatory hearings. Regulators have so far supported Duke on the construction of the new plants.

She says the proposals in the study distort what can reasonably be saved by efficiency and produced by renewables.

“Duke welcomes critics to the table, but when N.C. WARN continues to misinterpret the numbers, it concerns us,” she says.