Duke to keep coal plant burning longer than expected

Oct 20, 2024

Duke Energy is backing off its plan to move away from using coal to generate power by 2035 in a move advocates say is harmful to consumers and the environment.

The utility's latest resource plan also scales back Duke's near-future expansion of renewable energy sources and added new gas-fired plants to replace coal units in Vermillion County.

Nate Gagnon, Duke's managing director for Midwest resource planning, said changes reflect the utility's needs to strike a balance between federal emissions obligations, long-term costs and near-term customer impacts.

But Ben Inskeep of Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer watchdog group, said the delay in retiring coal would allow Duke to comply with federal greenhouse gas emissions without having to make significant investments to reduce emissions.

Duke's previous plan, submitted in 2021, committed the utility to going coal-free by 2035. This new plan would extend that to 2038. Duke's Gibson Plant, located in southwest Indiana, will be the only one in the utility’s portfolio to use coal exclusively after 2032.

The company’s plan, with the exclusion of the Gibson plant, will convert or replace its coal burning generating stations with gas-fired or co-fired plants as the utility moves away from the fossil fuel. A co-fired plant utilizes both coal and gas.

Gagnon said that over a 20-year period, the long-term costs of moving to a more efficient set of renewable and natural gas fired resources has lower total cost, but the projected impacts to customer bills by the early 2030s when that turnover is happening is just much higher than the other cases.

The company currently generates about 96% of its electricity from coal and gas or oil.

“It wouldn't be responsible for us to try to turn over our entire coal fleet by 2032, and so that's why you start to see some of the conversion, the modification to balance out the retirements,” Gagnon said.

Burning fossil fuels — such as coal, oil and gas — is the biggest contributor of carbon emissions across the globe, according to the United Nations. In the U.S., electric power generation makes up about 25% of the total greenhouse gas’s emissions, according to the U.S. EPA.

Carbon emissions continue to rise and reached record levels last year making goals of curbing the effects of climate change harder to meet, according to multiple U.S. scientists.

“The climate crisis is here,” Inskeep said, “and where Duke’s headquarters is in North Carolina they’re seeing a massive crisis right now as result of a climate change-fueled hurricane that dumped unprecedented amount of rain. So, the climate crisis — first and foremost — is a risk to all of us, and Duke’s strategy of doubling down on fossil fuels is particularly ridiculous.”

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Gagnon and Duke’s Angeline Protogere emphasized that the utility’s plans are prioritizing balance.

“As you're making a transition to modernize an older fleet with aging units, we have to balance that with reliability of service 24/7 and a priority of affordability as well as environmental sustainability,” Protogere said.

Duke is Indiana’s largest supplier of electricity, Gagnon said, and has more infrastructure to transition into efficient units. That goes with building out renewable sources of energy as well.

Duke’s new plan calls for 500 megawatts of solar with 400 megawatts of batteries to store that power by 2030. Duke’s previous plan in 2021 called for about 1,500 megawatts of solar by 2030.

This year’s commitment to solar makes up a little more than 10% of Duke’s 20-year plan to have about 4,500 megawatts of solar power. Gagnon said there will be a significant build out of wind and solar energy in the second half of the 20-year planning period “as the economics swing a little more in favor of renewables.”

Cost for renewable energy has moved against Duke, Gagnon said, and there needs to be a robust storage system in place to provide customers with a reliable source of renewable energy.

Duke’s plan will head to state regulators in November, providing the utility with a blueprint on how it builds, converts and reorganizes its energy production.

When it comes to new costs to customers, there will be no immediate impact from the plan, Protogere said. It’s only when the final decisions are being made on certain projects that new costs will be reviewed.

Karl Schneider is an IndyStar environment reporter. You can reach him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @karlstartswithk

IndyStar's environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.