On April 23, 2026, North Carolina Utility Commission (NCUC) Commissioner Brawley issued an order pausing Duke Energy’s 2026 solar and battery storage request for proposal (RFP) — the competitive procurement required under the Commission’s own 2024 Carbon Plan/Integrated Resource Plan (CPIRP) order. Four months, three formal filings, one lawsuit, and one oral argument later, the RFP still hasn’t opened, and the parties are now waiting on an NCUC ruling.
Here’s how we got here, why the fight is really about a technical interconnection process as much as it is about solar, and why the outcome matters well beyond this one procurement cycle.
The Order and the Pushback
The April 23 order didn’t just delay paperwork, it froze a procurement that clean energy advocates, developers, and even some large customers had been planning around for over a year. Within a week, opposition began mounting.
Carolinas Clean Energy Business Association (CCEBA), Southern Alliance for Clean Energy et al. (SACE, Sierra Club, Vote Solar, and EJCAN), and North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association (NCSEA) filed arguments centered around not receiving due process and the 2024 CPIRP order still being active. All stated the 2026 RFP should continue on schedule.
On May 14, 2026, the NCUC responded and requested comments by May 22, 2026. SACE et al., NCSEA, and Carolina Industrial Group for Fair Utility Rates (CIGFUR) filed comments. SACE and NCSEA comments echoed the previous filings; CIGFUR is the only intervenor to support the suspension of the RFP.
The Commission did none of those things by the requested dates, which pushed the dispute out of the regulatory process and into court.
The Lawsuit
On June 18, 2026, SACE and its co-parties sued the NCUC directly. The core argument: the deferral order violated multiple statutes governing the Commission’s actions, as well as the North Carolina Constitution’s due process and access-to-judicial-review guarantees — and there was no ordinary route to challenge those violations in time to save this year’s procurement cycle. When a constitutional wrong has no other remedy, the suit argues, the state constitution allows a direct action against the state actor responsible. The plaintiffs also asked the court for a preliminary injunction to allow the procurement process to move forward while the case proceeds.
On July 9, the NCUC filed an order scheduling oral arguments for August 3, 2026. Those arguments were held as scheduled, and the case is now delayed to October 5, 2026 while the parties await the NCUC’s ruling.
Procedural vs. Substantive
At issue is whether the original order halting the solar RFP was “procedural,” which is generally allowed without a Commission vote, or “substantive,” which requires a notice and hearing. It is substantive because it challenges Duke’s ability to procure solar over the timeline required by the Commission’s 2024 CPIRP order. The Deferral Order was substantive because it removed the decision on the target volume for the 2026 competitive procurement from the 2024 CPIRP proceeding and placed that decision in the 2026 CPIRP proceeding. This has modified the 2024 CPIRP final order and changed the substance of the 2024 CPIRP proceeding AND the 2026 RFP proceeding.
The Commissioners spent real time at the August 3 hearing trying to draw that line, and for good reason: if the order is substantive, it needed the notice and hearing it never got, and the due-process arguments from CCEBA, SACE et al., and NCSEA carry the day. The case for “substantive” is straightforward — the order doesn’t just adjust a filing deadline, it challenges Duke’s ability to procure solar on the timeline the Commission itself required in the 2024 CPIRP order. That’s a change in direction, not a scheduling tweak.
The Clock the Lawyers Can’t Argue Around
Even if you set the legal question aside, there’s a hard scheduling problem underneath all of this, and it’s the part of the story that’s easy to miss in a filing-by-filing recap.
Duke’s interconnection process for solar and storage projects is governed by its FERC-approved Open Access Transmission Tariff (OATT). Projects bid into the RFP go through a Resource Solicitation Cluster (RSC) study, and that RSC has to line up with Duke’s annual cluster study or DISIS. Because the two feed each other: the annual cluster’s results become the base case for the RSC, and the RSC’s results become the base case for the next annual cluster.
Duke’s own proposed schedule put the 2026 RSC study at December 2026 through February 2027. For that to happen, Duke needs to open and close the RFP bid window and complete its initial bid evaluations well before December. Duke’s original schedule called for a bid window of July 2 through August 5, 2026, followed by roughly 13 weeks of bid evaluation and a two-week buffer before the RSC needed to begin.
As of this writing, the bid window hasn’t opened — and the August 3 hearing where all of this was debated fell just two days before that window was originally supposed to close. The math no longer works: with the RFP itself still not issued, the delay ordered on April 23 doesn’t leave room for the RSC to begin on the timeline Duke’s own regulatory obligations require.
That timeline dependency isn’t a minor technicality, either. Under the OATT, the annual cluster window opens every November 1 and runs 45 days; the customer engagement window then runs another 60 days; and the cluster study itself must be completed within 150 calendar days of the close of that engagement window. Chain all of it together — cluster study, report and restudy determination, facilities study, comment period, and large generator interconnection agreement (LGIA) negotiation — and the minimum time from a closed cluster window to a signed interconnection agreement runs 405 to 420 calendar days, and closer to 19 months if a restudy is required. There is not a lot of slack in that process for an open-ended delay at the front end.
What the Commissioners Asked
The August 3 hearing gave a good window into where each Commissioner’s head was. Brawley pressed on whether there are specific legal or regulatory deadlines constraining the RSC and DISIS timelines, pointing to Duke’s own filed schedule. He also asked how this year’s delay differs from a lag in the 2023 solar procurement, when industry conditions pushed part of the process later than planned. The 2023 delay occurred later in the process and did not adversely affect the RFP schedule.
Commissioner McKissick asked counsel to tie the due-process argument to specific statutory provisions, citing N.C. Gen. Stat. §§ 62-13, 62-23, 62-60, 62-65, 62-80, and 62-94. Other questions explored whether the “procedural vs. substantive” line turns on whether an action supersedes a prior order of the full Commission. While this is a legal distinction more than a technical one, it shapes everything else in the case.
Commissioners also raised the South Carolina Public Service Commission’s subsequent decision to delay its own RFP. That comparison cuts the other way: South Carolina’s regulators acted in response to the NCUC Chairman’s order, not because of independent problems with the procurement, so it cannot be used to justify the North Carolina order in the first place.
Duke and the Public Staff did not speak at the hearing even though the NCUC order scheduling the oral argument asked them to attend to be available to answer questions. Duke has separately indicated it could increase the next two years’ RFP volumes to make up for a smaller or delayed 2026 round. While Duke could have answered some of the Commissioners’ questions directly in the oral arguments, the Commissioners chose not to call on Duke at all.
Why This Matters Beyond One RFP
This dispute is, at its core, about whether a Commission-approved resource plan can be quietly redirected without the process the law requires for changing it. But it is also about what happens to the grid if it can.
Solar remains one of the lowest-cost resources available to add to Duke’s system, at a moment when Duke is forecasting significant load growth driven mostly by large loads and moving quickly to build new gas generation to meet it. Every megawatt of solar that gets delayed, shrunk, or rolled into a future, and possibly capped, procurement is a megawatt of gas that takes its place instead. That has two consequences for customers: it raises the system’s exposure to volatile gas prices, and it works against the least-cost planning standard the Commission is statutorily required to apply. A delay framed as a scheduling matter, in other words, has real consequences for what North Carolina’s future grid looks like, and what customers pay for it, for years to come.
For now, the RFP remains paused, the bid window that was supposed to have closed by early August still hasn’t opened, as we await an NCUC ruling. Whatever the Commission decides, the interconnection clock is still running.
