Collaboration and progress on energy is possible. Just look at Asheville.
In recent years, energy issues have been the source of great contention in North Carolina.
The coal ash spill in 2014 at Duke Energy’s Dan River plant sparked huge controversy and triggered multiple lawsuits over Duke’s environmental practices and who should pay for the cleanup.
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would bring natural gas from West Virginia to Eastern North Carolina, has divided North Carolinians and embroiled North Carolina’s energy companies in more litigation.
Last year, disputes over wind farms in Eastern North Carolina even led the General Assembly to impose a moratorium on new windmills.
Six years ago, a similar battle was playing out in Asheville, where Duke Energy’s coal-fired power plant was the target of an “Asheville Beyond Coal Campaign” organized by the Sierra Club, MountainView and other NGOs. For three years, the campaign mobilized local groups to pressure Duke Energy. After the Dan River spill, it brought a lawsuit against Duke to force it to clean up the coal ash deposits near Asheville.
In May 2015, Duke announced that it would close the coal plant and replace it with a natural gas facility. Natural gas creates much less pollution and emits fewer greenhouse gases than coal, so this was a victory for the environmental coalition. But Beyond Coal thought Duke could do better and kept up the pressure.
Duke came back with a new plan for a scaled-down replacement unit, a further improvement in the eyes the activists, but because the plan also called for an additional small gas plant to handle peak demand on the coldest winter mornings, Beyond Coal still wasn’t satisfied.
To this point, neither side of the dispute had much trust in the other. For the environmental groups, Duke Energy was not sufficiently responsive to community concerns. For Duke Energy, the environmentalists were being unreasonable. Public officials were caught in the middle. But then an unusual thing happened.
As part of its revised plan, Duke had indicated that it would be willing to talk about whether it might be possible to delay or avoid building the additional “peaker” plant. In response, Buncombe County, the City of Asheville, and Duke Energy created the Energy Innovation Task Force (EITF) in February 2016 — a partnership that also brought together business, non-profit and environmental leaders.
Working with the Rocky Mountain Institute, a leading energy research and consulting firm based in Colorado, the EITF studied how it might be possible to avoid additional investments in fossil fuels.
This March the EITF had a plan all could agree on that promises to avoid the additional power plant. The result was a public-private initiative called the Blue Horizons Project. Its goal is to provide a comprehensive hub of energy-efficiency and renewable energy programs that help residents and businesses both save money and help Asheville move to a cleaner energy future.
Through the Blue Horizons website, residential customers can access Duke Energy’s free home energy assessment program and its EnergyWise program, which allows customers to save money on their electricity bills (up to $175 a year) if they make energy efficiency investments. It also provides help in connecting to solar power resources. Low-income households can find help with bills and energy-efficiency improvements. For businesses, Blue Horizons helps them tap into available rebates for energy efficiency.
Recently, at a meeting of the North Carolina Leadership Forum in Asheville (which Frederick directs), the leaders behind Blue Horizons spoke about how they had done it. What was plain was through their collaboration, they had come to respect and, indeed, like each other, and found a better path forward for Asheville that offers a model of community development that can hopefully be emulated elsewhere.