On Tuesday, Gov. Josh Stein announced the creation of the North Carolina Energy Policy Task Force, through an executive order. Stein says it will aim at strengthening the electricity infrastructure and energy affordability in the state while pushing for renewable energy sources like solar.
“North Carolina is a leader in the clean energy economy and is home to more than 100,000 clean energy jobs,” he said in a press release. “I am grateful for this task force helping to determine how our state can build on this economic momentum, meet growing energy demands, and ensure electricity is affordable for North Carolinians.”
Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Reid Wilson and state Rep. Kyle Hall, R Stokes, will co-chair the 26-member task force.
Stein, a Democrat, noted that North Carolina is the third-fastest-growing state in the country, with a rapidly growing manufacturing base.
He said that since he took office, $4.9 billion in new investments and more than 15,000 new jobs have been announced from clean energy and clean technology companies, including JetZero, which plans to manufacture high-efficiency, low-emissions aircraft; and Boviet Solar’s new solar module factory in Greenville.
In addition, Stein mentioned that in January, he launched Energy Saver NC, an initiative to promote energy efficiency that provides rebates to households that install energy-efficient appliances, improve home insulation, or upgrade electrical systems.
The governor also said that as the use of energy-intensive data centers for artificial intelligence and other purposes increases, the need for electrical power will place additional demand on the state’s energy grid. That in turn may lead to higher utility bills for families.
One of those is the $10 billion Amazon AI center that is planned for Richmond County.
Consumer advocates like Clark Howard have said that consumers in states with monopoly power providers will see the burden of higher prices due to the increased demand from data centers, not industrial users. The state regulatory bodies, Howard said, are shifting the cost burden directly to consumers, which means higher bills, even if someone uses the same amount of power they have in previous years.
A paper from Harvard Electricity Law Initiative concurs with Howard’s statements.
Stein was critical in his press release of President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which he said repealed key components of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, ending access to many energy and manufacturing tax credits for North Carolina businesses.
He said former President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act led to more than $24 billion in clean energy technology investments across the state.
According to the governor, the combination of the “Big Beautiful Bill” and the General Assembly’s Senate Bill 266, The Power Bill Reduction Act, will mean higher costs for families and threaten up to 50,000 future jobs.
SB 266, which Stein vetoed and the legislature overrode, repeals North Carolina’s interim 2030 carbon-reduction mandate, which is projected to save consumers $15 billion by eliminating costly compliance measures.
Jon Sanders, director of the Center for Food, Power, and Life at the John Locke Foundation, said that while he would welcome the governor joining Locke’s push to keep North Carolina’s electrical grid reliable while keeping electricity costs low, he is going about it all wrong.
“First, you don’t keep costs down by shifting them from electricity bills to tax bills,” he said. “Second, as the world learned from the Soviet Union, you don’t put the economy under the direction of an executive government committee and expect growth. Third, even if the governor worries about fuel costs, he should know that there are many costs to electricity generating facilities other than fuel, including capital costs, curtailment, operations and maintenance, and utility profits.”
Sanders continued by saying that new facilities are more expensive to electricity consumers than preexisting ones, and that advocating for utilities to overbuild high-cost, unreliable, weather-dependent “zero-fuel-cost” solar and wind facilities would spike electricity costs and cripple reliability.
“Stein wants to preserve what he calls the “clean energy economy,” but the name gives away the game — it’s not for the good of the state’s economy as a whole,” Sanders said. “It’s for the good of only a particular segment of the state’s economy, and he’s packing this committee with its advocates.”
“Shamefully, Stein confuses weather with climate and even attempts to blame Hurricane Helene on climate change, as if North Carolina was responsible for the hurricane by not having his preferred portfolio of power generation sources. As Dr. Steven E. Koonin, President Barack Obama’s Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy, put it, ‘pointing to hurricanes as an example of the ravages of human-caused climate change is at best unconvincing, and at worst plainly dishonest.’”
The task force will submit an annual report to the governor, the General Assembly, the North Carolina Utilities Commission, the North Carolina Rural Electrification Authority, and the public.
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