Customers of Duke Energy in the Carolinas could end up paying more than $4.8 billion for planned natural gas-fired capacity that could become stranded as part of the company’s pledge to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, a report published by the Energy Transition Institute has found. The report, authored by Tyler Fitch, regulatory manager for the Southeast at advocacy organization Vote Solar, examined Duke Energy’s 2020 Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs) in North and South Carolina. These were the first plans the utility has filed with regulators since it pledged in September 2019 to reach net-zero carbon emissions from electric generation by the middle of the century. The IRPs entail the addition of 9.6 gigawatts (GW) of new gas-fired generation capacity in their baseline scenarios, which, the report’s author Fitch says, is one of the largest proposed expansions of fossil fuel generation capacity of any utility in the United […]