North Carolina Utilities Watch is a public education initiative by North Carolinians who are sick and tired of high energy bills and no accountability as we hurtle towards climate chaos.
Our Utilities Commission is failing us. For years, commissioners have failed to do their jobs and stand up for our best interests. They sacrifice our health and wealth through their complicity in propping up the very monopolies they are supposed to regulate.
That’s why we’re exposing the broken system that keeps our families stuck with expensive, polluting energy that’s wrecking our communities and environment. We illuminate what a real democratic future of energy could look like for North Carolina.
WHO IS
RESPONSIBLE?
The North Carolina Utilities Commission is required to regulate Duke Energy, and protect us and our environment from abuses. In 2021, the state legislature passed HB 961, the law requiring power companies to cut carbon emissions 70% by 2030, it became the job of the Utilities Commission to ensure that Duke Energy meets the terms of this law.
We’re going in the wrong direction. Duke Energy is demanding more reliance on fossil fuels–such as fracked gas pipelines–dangerous forms of energy like nuclear, and unproven, carbon-intensive technologies like hydrogen.
The Utilities Commissions should be forcing Duke Energy to stop harming us, but instead it keeps giving the monopoly a green light at every turn. We North Carolinians are trapped by this system, by an incompetent and ineffectual Utilities Commission that ignores our expert testimonies and sacrifices our families’ health and bank accounts. Low-income communities and communities of color, who already have a higher energy burden, feel these impacts first and worst.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
We all need energy to power our daily lives. As long as the Utilities Commission prioritizes Duke Energy’s freedom–free to pollute, free to ignore the law, free to charge us to clean up their deadly messes–we are not truly free or living in a democracy, and we will continue to hurtle towards climate chaos.
The climate is heating up from fossil fuel pollution, and hundreds of families continue to suffer from the diseases caused by Duke Energy’s coal ash spill. Our fate is intertwined with our energy system. Right now, we are under the dirty boot of an unaccountable, polluting and dangerous energy monopoly, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
We can and we must build a new future on
non-polluting sources of energy like solar and
wind, that are controlled by and accountable
to communities.
JOIN US TO TAKE CONTROL
OF OUR ENERGY FUTURE
© 2024 NC Utilities Watch