The Demand for Power; Hot Days, Electric Use Underscore Growing Energy Challenges
The Charlotte Observer
July 24, 2006
By Ellen Ruff
President, Duke Energy Carolinas
This past week has seen stifling heat in the Carolinas, and when Duke Energy urged citizens to conserve electricity to help reduce peak demand for our product, our customers met the challenge. As a result, we saw a meaningful reduction in power demand in our Carolinas service area.
Conservation and energy efficiency are important not only during peak energy demands on hot summer days, but every day. We are seeing healthy economic and population growth in the Carolinas, and that means ever-increasing demand for power.
We also believe that more can be done to encourage smart energy use -- and that energy efficiency is vital to maintaining a reliable and low-cost energy system.
Duke Energy has an obligation to meet our customers' growing power demand as cost effectively as possible. We plan to do so with a comprehensive plan using energy conservation, efficiency, and a diverse mix of generation including renewables, natural gas, hydro, coal and nuclear.
Duke Energy Carolinas' energy efficiency programs include residential Energy Star, which promotes the development of homes that are significantly more energy efficient than standard homes; loans to encourage increased energy efficiency in existing homes; and a special needs program that provides loans to low-income customers for energy efficiency.
At the national level, Jim Rogers, Duke Energy's president and CEO is leading a broad-based, collaborative effort -- sponsored by the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency -- to develop a National Action Plan on Energy Efficiency. The plan -- to be launched at the end of the month, serves as a "call to action" for companies, regulators, consumer advocates, environmental groups and others to work together in considering how best to implement energy efficiency solutions that can be adopted and embraced by customers in state after state across the U.S. We expect to carry forward that discussion in the months ahead with energy stakeholders in the Carolinas and beyond.
But even beefed up energy efficiency efforts won't offset growing customer demand in our service territory. In the Carolinas, we're seeing 40,000 to 60,000 new electricity customers annually.
A modernization project planned for Cliffside Steam Station in Rutherford and Cleveland counties is part of our strategy to provide the energy customers need while reducing environmental impacts. By building two state of the art, 800-megawatt, coal-fired units, adding environmental controls and retiring older Cliffside units, the company will triple the plant's output and decrease the plant's emissions and water use.
We are also actively pursuing permits for a new nuclear station in South Carolina which would provide enough electricity to power up to two million homes and have no greenhouse gas emissions. And down the road, we expect alternative fuels will play an increasingly important role in the energy mix as technologies advance, reliability improves and costs decrease.
Duke Energy is encouraging this development through support of the North Carolina GreenPower program, the collaborative development of model small generator interconnection standards approved by the North Carolina Utilities Commission; and purchased-power contracts with qualified renewable energy providers.
We appreciate those customers who helped us conserve energy this past week and look forward to continuing to work together as we plan to meet your growing demand for power in the future. Our focus is on sustainability -- to protect the environment in which we all must live and to facilitate the economic growth that we, our children and their children will depend on.
