On Monday North Carolina-based Duke Energy announced it will invest $500 million to acquire and construct three large solar farms in the state including a 65-megawatt array that Duke says will be the largest east of the Mississippi River. Duke Energy also said that it will be buying power from a number of new solar projects in an effort to meet the states’ renewable energy requirements. In 2008, North Carolina became the first state in the Southeast to adopt such a standard, which requires investor-owned utilities to get 12.5 percent of their energy needs from renewable energy resources or energy efficiency measures by 2021.
In February, Duke solicited proposals for projects equaling 300 megawatts of new solar capacity. The purchases announced on Monday will total 278 megawatts. This includes 128 megawatts of newly acquired solar facilities and 150 megawatts-worth of power-purchase agreements with five new solar projects in the state.
“This is Duke Energy’s largest single announcement for solar power and represents a 60 percent increase in the amount of solar power for our North Carolina customers,” Rob Caldwell, Duke’s senior vice president for distributed generation, said in a statement.
While Duke Energy is making inroads into renewable energy sources, the Fortune 250 company is still by and large a fossil fuel venture. The 57,500 megawatts of generating capacity serving over seven million people comes from a mix of coal, nuclear, natural gas, oil and renewable resources. As of 2011, 45 percent of the company’s generation came from coal-fired power plants and 51 percent from nuclear power. The company predicts coal’s percent of the mix will drop to 29 percent by 2031.
In February, one of Duke Energy’s storage ponds for coal waste spilled 39,000 tons of coal ash sludge into North Carolina’s Dan River. This led to widespread disapproval of the company’s waste disposal practice and the passage of a state law on the matter that while criticized for being weak and kowtowing to industry is still one of the only coal ash laws on the books.
North Carolina’s governor, Republican Pat McCrory, is a former longtime employee of Duke Energy. While he downplays climate change and laments the EPA, solar power is rising in North Carolina during his tenure — even if it’s not his doing. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, North Carolina added 335 megawatts of capacity in 2013. As of this summer, the state had a total of 592 megawatts of solar capacity installed, ranking it fourth among all states.
This race to the front of the solar pack is powered by the state’s energy goals as well as its desire to court big technology companies, like Google and Apple, to put data centers in the state.
“North Carolina has aggressively courted big technology companies to locate data centers in the state,” writes Daniel Gross, a Daily Beast editor and columnist, about North Carolina solar. “Many of these firms have their own agendas when it comes to energy: They want to be powered by renewable energy produced close by.”
Apple has achieved 100 percent renewable energy use at all of its data centers, including one in Maiden, North Carolina.