Duke Energy is facing serious regulatory battles in its home state of North Carolina, with climate-action groups doggedly trying to block the company’s planned fracked gas plant in Asheville and the state’s environmental agency recently deciding — at least temporarily — that all of the company’s coal ash impoundments must be excavated and the waste moved to safer dry storage.
But the power giant is fighting back with the help of friends in high places.
On the gas plant front, Duke Energy earlier this month asked the NC Utilities Commission to order NC WARN and The Climate Times to post a $50 million bond to continue their appeal of the commission’s approval of the company’s proposed $1 billion gas plant on the site of a shuttered coal plant near Asheville, citing a never-before-used provision of a 1963 state law allowing the utility to seek a bond from critics challenging a power plant approval. Though the bond is supposed to offset costs stemming from a delay in starting construction, Duke Energy has not shown any evidence that the appeal would lead to delays.
The commission, where Duke Energy holds considerable influence thanks in part to appointments by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, a former Duke Energy executive, rejected the $50 million bond requested by the company. But it ordered the environmental nonprofits to show they have assets to post a $10 million bond, what’s known as an “undertaking,” which they say is impossible. NC WARN’s annual income is just over $1 million, according to IRS filings, and The Climate Times is a new nonprofit incorporated last year by Harvard Ayers, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.
“[I]t goes without saying that the Petitioners cannot afford a $10,000,000.00 bond or undertaking,” the groups stated in their request for a stay on the bond filed earlier this month with the NC Court of Appeals. “Thus, the Commission’s Bond Order is tantamount to dismissing any appeal of the…