This article is part of a series called North Carolina’s Gas Blow Out. See the rest of this series as well as other resources on SACE’s Fossil Gas Hub.
Duke’s second gas plant in Person County would be too expensive and isn’t needed to retire Roxboro coal units 2 and 3 because those units do not run very often, as you’ll recall from Part 1 of this series.
In this installment, we switch to the Duke Energy Progress fuel cost adjustment docket. Fuel costs (uranium, coal, diesel, and fossil methane gas) are passed directly through to Duke Energy’s customers in these dockets, and SACE and SELC engaged Michael Goggin, Vice President of Grid Strategies, LLC, to take a look at how Duke Energy Progress dispatches its coal units. Mr. Goggin’s direct testimony was filed on September 2 in advance of the September 29, 2025 hearing before the North Carolina Utilities Commission.
Barring any grid or supply issues that complicate matters, utilities are supposed to use “economic dispatch” to efficiently operate a complex fleet of different generation types to ensure that the cheapest resources (such as solar and batteries) are dispatched to the grid first, followed by the second-cheapest, etc. If this approach is reliably followed by the utility, ratepayers are assured that the fuel portion of their bills (which unfortunately is not disclosed to ratepayers on the bill) is as low as possible. Goggin found multiple problems, including that 1) Duke dispatches the coal units when they are not the least cost resource (i.e. “uneconomic dispatch”), 2) gas price volatility and extraction industry consolidation are risks to ratepayers, and 3) Duke has little skin in the game with respect to fuel costs as those costs are passed onto its customers (called a moral hazard).
In the DEP CPCN docket, SACE introduced evidence establishing that the Roxboro coal units, pictured above, aren’t dispatched very often and argued in its post hearing brief that to the extent energy from Roxboro coal units 2 and 3 must be replaced, it is not necessary to build a second gas giant plant to do so. There are lower cost, cleaner dispatchable resources available that are compatible with Duke’s requirement to reach net-zero by 2050. In the DEP fuel cost docket, Michael Goggin found that the coal fleet should be dispatched even less, given how costly these units are to operate. So the coal units don’t run often, and they should be run even less.
Between these two dockets, we find that Duke is over-estimating the amount of energy that would be needed to support its coal retirements, including those of the Roxboro coal units that have been polluting the citizens of Person County since 1966. The proposed, replacement gas plants – one has been approved by the NCUC and one is pending – would sit across the street from Woodland Elementary School. SACE maintains that neither plant is needed and that the energy needed to both support the closure of the coal plants and meet increasingly uncertain load growth should be supplied by solar, wind, and battery storage and by improving transmission interconnections to neighboring states. These gas plants, their related pipeline projects, and the gas to run them will be far more expensive and less reliable than renewables, battery storage, energy efficiency, demand response, distributed energy resources, and better interconnections.
The next article in this series will focus on pipelines and recent safety developments.
