Duke Energy customers at a public hearing for the utility’s carbon and resource plan this week brought their concerns over energy-intensive data centers and expressed their frustration after the utility asked them to conserve energy.
“If this plan is approved, I worry that household customers doing what we can to cut costs and conserve energy will be stuck paying the bill for energy-intensive data centers and gas plants,” said Amelia Covington, a Raleigh resident.
The utility said there is an opportunity for data centers to lower monthly electric bills for all customers by spreading out “fixed system costs” over more energy sales.
“When you're spreading fixed costs over a wider customer base, it can drive costs down over time,” said Bill Norton, a Duke Energy spokesperson.
Duke doesn’t have a uniform tariff that it applies to customers like large data centers. But the utility did share details with WFAE about its general contract for large-load customers, including several provisions to ensure data centers pay their fair share, such as a minimum contract length, early termination fees and minimum monthly payments. However, Duke doesn’t release specific contracts, so any incentives the utility offers to attract data centers to the region aren't made available to the public.
“We fully agree that that's something that we need to be transparent about,” Norton said. “At the same time, we can't talk about an individual customer's contract details.”
Specifics about the prospective facilities waiting to connect to the grid have not been made public. Tobin Freid, Durham County’s sustainability manager, requested “greater transparency” into how Duke accounts for future load growth from data centers. She also requested “frequent and detailed updates” on this pipeline of future facilities.
“2050 is only 24 years away, and any new generation assets brought on in the next 10 years will still be in their prime in 2050,” Freid said. The law requires Duke Energy to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
Some Durham County residents expressed similar concerns over the resources Duke chooses to dispatch to meet growing demand.
“We look back at this last week — we all got a message saying that the power grid was at capacity,” said Pablo Friedman, a Durham resident, referencing that Monday call to conserve. “If we add more data centers, how will that be managed? Where is that power generation coming from?”
In the short term, much of that new “power generation” will come from new natural gas generators. Duke has already received permission from state regulators to build new peaker turbines in Catawba County and combined-cycle turbines in Person County.
“At the end of the day, we need to come up with a balance in energy resources,” Norton said. “We can't rely on just solar or just natural gas or just nuclear. We need all of it.”
Looking ahead, the utility plans to deploy new nuclear reactors in the mid-to-late 2030s, which would provide significant baseload energy without carbon emissions. The utility has omitted wind energy from its long-term planning.
