Energy in the News

The city of New Bern was among the first towns of its size in the country to fire up its own electric power plant in May 1902.

The plant provided the power for 16 arc lights on Pollock Street with 1,000 candlepower each and residential electric lights that cost less than a dollar a month.

Residential power bills are much higher now but still a deal by most standards considering the conveniences and opportunities electric power allows.

But the cry for alternate electric power, unlike the impetus for a petroleum substitute to power transportation, is not about the dollar bill. It is the overall price to the environment that concerns most of those looking for alternatives.

The search for other ways to generate power is being pushed in North Carolina with a 10-year plan by the state that calls for renewable energy standards for commercial, municipal and cooperative utility companies.

Those include Progress Energy, New Bern Electric, Tideland Electric Membership, Carteret Craven Electric Membership, and Jones-Onslow Membership corporations, with Progress Energy the major generating company.

"It begins in 2012," said Mike Hughes of Progress Energy. "By then 3 percent of our electricity must come from renewable energy sources. A compilation of renewable and energy efficiency increases the percentage to 12.5 percent by 2021."

Hughes said Progress Energy is supportive of the plan, "but we do view our role as one to help insure that we do this responsibly as a state and understand not only the benefits of renewable energy but their limitations as well."

A study by La Capra Associates, a Boston consulting firm that prepared a report for N.C. Utilities, noted limited opportunities available in time to prevent large power companies from needing some new generating plants. But the report said there could be room for as much as 10 percent of the state's energy coming from renewable sources.

NC GreenPower is the first green energy program in the country to gain the support of electric utilities in the state and a look at display maps on its Web site shows big patches of solar power across the state. But the amount of renewable energy sources in the state is less than 1 percent now by the state's own study.

The alternative power sources experts now feel offer most quick and sure promise are solar, water, wind, landfill methane, and biomass. All are already contributing a relatively small amount of energy into North Carolina's power grid, though without the consistency the public has come to expect from electric power providers and at a higher cost.

Hughes said the cost to generate solar is about 25 cents a kilowatt hour, compared with 5 cents a kilowatt hour from conventional power generation.

Despite tax credits to stimulate use and courses in solar power as close as Pamlico Community College three decades ago, solar generators in the region are rare.

Tryon Palace plans a green building for the N.C. History Education Center in 2010, and it will be the first state building built to certified environment and energy efficiency standards.

Craven County may be ahead of most counties in the renewable energy it produces, with Craven Wood Energy producing electricity from wood at the Craven County Industrial Park and Ingenco buying methane from the Coastal Regional Solid Waste Authority's landfill. But the generation is a fraction of what will be required to meet the goals.

Progress Energy applied in February for permission build two more nuclear reactors at its Shearon Harris Plant in Wake County, Hughes said. If the reactors are permitted, they will be the first in two decades.

They would take five to eight years to build and be ready for need expected by 2018, Hughes said. "In the meantime, the company is building natural-gas-fueled generation to meet incremental growth in customer need," he said. The company has natural gas generators near Hamlet with a pipeline from the Gulf of Mexico.

"Nuclear waste is an issue we need to address as a company but we would be able to store it at each of our plants and have done so since 1971 very, very safely," Hughes said. The long-term solution is probably a central repository such as those proposed in sparsely populated western states.

While "transportation is a huge component for developing storage," Hughes said, the company has transported nuclear material from Robinson and Brunswick to Harris over the last several years by rail without incident.

Earlier this month Progress Energy submitted an energy-efficiency plan to the state utilities commission aimed at helping customers use energy more wisely and in an effort to meet the new requirements.

The company put out a request for proposals to comply with the new law. "We did our best to make sure it was generated far and wide," Hughes said.

The company is evaluating 40 submissions, which Hughes said "run the gamut from upstart entrepreneurial to established companies."

They included one wind-generation project in Carteret County that has been approved by the utilities commission but awaits a determination by the county government. Carteret has a moratorium in place until it can consider local concerns and regulation.

"Clearly there are a number of innovative technologies that we will develop over the next several years," Hughes said. "We would expect to sign some agreements with some solar larger generators, one megawatt, not large by utility company measures.

"But it appears that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. We are not displeased with the response but it is a small dose of reality to realize there are not thousands and thousands of megawatts of renewable energy in the ground and ready to generate energy. The energy system 20 years from now may be very different than the one we know today. We will have to evolve the technology, the economics in a transformation over a period of years."