On the 16th of every month, I dread it: opening my Duke Energy bill.
After the shock of seeing our first electric bill of $182 back in October 2022, I knew we were in for a long winter. I thought I was imagining bills going up every month, but it’s not all in my head. In December 2022, Duke Energy rates where I live in Asheville, North Carolina, rose 10 percent due to increased fuel costs.
I’m in a privileged position, but the price hike still hurts.
Relative to the demographics of Buncombe County (with a per capita income of around $36,000 in 2021), I’m well off. I work for a living wage-certified employer (shoutout to the Center for Progressive Reform!) and live in a dual-income home. I have low-interest student loans and relatively affordable health care.
But our electric bills will keep rising unless we press the state’s utility commission to take action. The North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC) regulates the state’s monopoly electric utility provider, Duke Energy, which recently asked the commission to allow it to increase electric rates by 18 percent over three years.
I’m nervous NCUC will approve these rate hikes given the recent price increases in Florida. An average residential customer could see a $115 monthly bill spike up to $134 — around $250 extra per year, including in my household.
That’s $250 I won’t be able to spend on other necessities like groceries or medications. And households with far lower wealth than mine will inevitably suffer the most. With more money spent on electric bills, some families will have fewer funds for child care, rent, or keeping their homes warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
Already, millions of North Carolinians face high energy bills; nearly 20 percent of residents were unable to pay their electric bills at least once in 2021. Black and Latino customers, as well as people who live in multi-family and rental households, mobile and manufactured homes, urban areas, and low-value housing, already face high "energy burdens" — the share of their income that goes to electricity and gas. I fear their burden will only intensify as rates increase.
A better way
There is a better way. We can ensure that all North Carolina residents can both afford their electricity and invest in cleaner, more equitable solar energy.
The solution: customer-owned solar electricity generation (think solar panels on residential properties and subscriptions to community solar projects).
The Center launched a Campaign for Energy Justice last year to help ensure that all people have reliable access to clean, affordable electricity as our state decarbonizes and our climate changes. As part of that effort, we are releasing a policy brief today that outlines recommendations the state can take to encourage customer-owned generation, particularly among low-wealth people. While focused on North Carolina, it has lessons for energy justice advocates in other states, too.
The brief — Power to the People: Advancing Energy Equity via Customer-Owned Electricity Generation — recommends the following proposals:
If adopted, these recommendations would allow more customers in the state, particularly low-wealth customers, to benefit from their own energy production. Customers who own their own energy production systems build wealth as they reduce spending on energy bills and can even sell excess energy produced back to the grid. Because solar energy is a renewable resource, it has the added benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the environmental and public health of communities. Clean, affordable solar energy is power — and a win-win!
To learn more about the Center’s Campaign for Energy Justice, read our paper, watch the recording of our related March 30 webinar, visit our campaign webpage, subscribe to our email list, and follow us on social media.
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Sophie Loeb | April 12, 2023
On the 16th of every month, I dread it: opening my Duke Energy bill. After the shock of seeing our first electric bill of $182 back in October 2022, I knew we were in for a long winter. I thought I was imagining bills going up every month, but it’s not all in my head. In December 2022, Duke Energy rates where I live in Asheville, North Carolina, rose 10 percent due to increased fuel costs. I’m in a privileged position, but the price hike still hurts. But there is a better way.
Katlyn Schmitt | April 11, 2023
On April 10, the Maryland General Assembly passed the Private Well Safety Act (HB 11/SB 483) before it wrapped up the 2023 legislative session at midnight (Happy Sine Die!). With its passage, the Private Well Safety Act will provide roughly 830,000 Marylanders who get their drinking water from a private well with the necessary resources and information to monitor and safeguard their household drinking water and ultimately protect their and their family’s health.
Federico Holm, Katlyn Schmitt | April 10, 2023
The Maryland Senate has just one day left to pass a bill that would deliver greater energy savings for Marylanders through the EmPOWER program — the state’s energy efficiency and weatherization program. The bill would build on the success of the EmPOWER program by ensuring lower energy bills for low-wealth Marylanders, as well as greater public health and climate benefits that coincide with improved energy efficiency.
Kimberly Shields | April 3, 2023
In a recent post, my colleague M. Isabelle Chaudry provided readers with an overview of some of the toxic chemical threats facing the Delaware River basin in the northeastern United States. In this post, I dig deeper into the modern history of flooding in a region that will be home to 9 million people by 2030 and how this poses a growing risk of toxic floodwaters for families and communities in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York.
Sidney A. Shapiro | March 30, 2023
The American public has lost faith in expertise. The reason why, as author and national security expert Tom Nichols points out in his 2017 book The Death of Expertise, includes the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, the number of “low-information voters,” political leaders who traffic in “alternative facts,” and, as Nichols puts it, a “Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and lay people, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers — in other words between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.” Bill Araiza offers another important insight in his book, Rebuilding Expertise: Increasing legal and political efforts to oversee agencies have resulted in the deterioration of civil service expertise and, with it, of public faith in government. On the front end, these efforts send a message that expertise can’t be trusted. On the back end, when the government stumbles in carrying out its functions, the message is that experts are not so expert after all. What is missed, as Liz Fisher and I contend in our book, Administrative Competence, is that law and politics can hold agencies accountable and still facilitate their capacity to do their job. Araiza’s last chapter ably discusses how this can be done.
James Goodwin | March 16, 2023
The regulatory policy world is often a sleepy one — I’m the first to admit that — but last week was a notable exception. In addition to a U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on regulations, the Biden administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) wrapped up efforts to solicit public input on its recommendations for broadening public input in the regulatory process.
Daniel Farber | March 16, 2023
EPA proposed new regulations last week to reduce the water pollution impacts of coal-fired power plants. As EPA regulations go, these count as fairly minor. They got a bit of news coverage in coal country and industry publications. But they will eliminate the discharge of thousands of tons of pollutants, including a lot of metals that pose health problems. The rulemaking illustrates the highly technical nature of regulations and the lawless nature of Trump’s EPA. It also gives some clues about where the Biden administration may be headed in the way it approaches regulatory decisions.
James Goodwin, Marcha Chaudry | March 15, 2023
The Delaware River Basin is a vital ecosystem that provides drinking water for millions of people and supports diverse wildlife, recreation, and agriculture in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. Unfortunately, industrial activities in the basin contaminate the water with toxic pollutants, leading to a variety of negative impacts on human health and the environment and endangering industrial workers.
Marcha Chaudry | March 14, 2023
On average, women who work full-time earn 84 cents for every dollar that men earn. Addressing these barriers requires a multifaceted approach.