Last week, Duke Energy was slapped with a demand from the North Carolina governor's office to come up with a plan to shut down its coal ash ponds across the state. Yesterday, Duke CEO Lynn Good indicated that its customers should foot the bill for ash removal.
McCrory’s demand added to the pressure on Duke, after a disastrous spill last month on the Dan River, to move millions of tons of ash away from water supplies such as Charlotte’s Mountain Island Lake.Duke is making it just as clear that closing its ponds will be an expense – likely to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars – that customers should pay. Duke has said the company and its stockholders will pay the costs of cleaning up the Dan River.
Good, in a brief interview after receiving the BusinessWoman of the Year award at Queens University of Charlotte, gave no hint of how Duke would respond to McCrory.
Asked whether Duke expects its customers to pay for closing its ponds, including removing ash, she indicated it did.
“Ash pond closure has been a plan for a very long time,” she said. “And because that ash was created over decades for the generation of electricity, we do believe that ash pond disposal costs are ultimately a part of our cost structure.
“But the determination of payment will be up to the North Carolina Utilities Commission and how that they handle that, so I think that’s something that will unfold over time.”
Watch the interview here.Although Duke has been allowed to recover the cost of environmental measures in the past, it's not likely such a request will be successful in this case if its ash ponds are found to violate state standards. Duke has already been cited for violations at the Dan River plant in the wake of the coal ash spill there, and has also been slapped with violations at five other plants.
Even so, this is an unbelievably crass stance from Duke. Good has some nerve to even consider shifting the bill to Duke's customers after initially stonewalling on the safety of those ash stockpiles--one of which is only three miles upstream from Charlotte's water supply. Duke only turned over documents related to the safety of those ponds after state regulators demanded them earlier this week.
While the state utilities commission and McCrory's office are noncommittal about whether Duke will be allowed to make customers pay for cleanup, state attorney general Roy Cooper--who is all but certain to run for governor in 2016--rushed out with a burning statement that he will oppose any efforts to make customers pay cleanup costs. The way I'm reading this, Duke is already planning to eat the cost of cleaning up the Dan River. Basic decency says it should also eat the cost of cleaning up its ash ponds as well.
Tell Duke Energy what you think of this idea on their Facebook page.