Before accepting the Trump administration’s $1 billion taxpayer buyout, TotalEnergies fostered a campaign that its wind energy project off the coast of Brunswick County would eventually generate enough electricity to power 300,000 homes in the Carolinas.

“Our team is passionate about creating a clean energy economy and the new opportunities it brings to our local communities,” reads an excerpt from TotalEnergies Carolina Long Bay website. “Our partnerships in the Carolinas are making renewable energy a regional priority, building a stronger future for us all.”

TotalEnergies Carolina Long Bay, a wholly owned subsidiary of the France-based global energy company, “will harness the power of offshore wind to generate abundant energy and significant economic growth for the communities of the Southeast.”

The Interior Department’s announcement Monday that TotalEnergies had accepted a federal buyout of its wind energy leases off the New York and North Carolina coasts is a sharp pivot from the company’s previous narrative on offshore wind in the United States.

TotalEnergies’ chief executive officer and chair of the company’s board of directors said in a Department of Interior release that the decision to relinquish offshore wind development in the United States was made because such projects are “not in the country’s interest.”

Instead, TotalEnergies will invest the refunded money in a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Texas and other fossil fuel projects.

The Trump administration lauded it as an “innovative agreement,” one that is a major win for President Donald Trump, who has made offshore wind the biggest bullseye in his target to dismantle renewable energy projects and replace them with fossil fuel and nuclear power.

“Offshore wind is one of the most expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive, and subsidy-dependent schemes ever forced on American ratepayers and taxpayers,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a release. “We welcome TotalEnergies’ commitment to developing projects that produce dependable, affordable power to lower Americans’ monthly bills while providing secure U.S. baseload power today – and in the future.”

Shortly after taking office in January 2025, Trump issued an executive order barring new offshore wind leases and requiring reviews of existing and permitted wind projects.

Last December, the Trump administration, citing risks to national security, ordered work to stop in five offshore wind energy areas on the East Coast, including Dominion Energy’s 2.6-gigawatt project based in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

Courts have since allowed all five of the projects to operate for the time being until final judgments are rendered in those cases.

Monday’s announcement drew immediate rebuke from opponents who argue the deal sets a dangerous precedent and limits alternative energy production as Americans face rising electricity bills and concerns mount about the amount of power artificial intelligence data centers use.

“Donald Trump truly can’t leave a good thing alone,” BlueGreen Alliance Vice President of Federal Affairs Katie Harris said in a release. “His never-ending vendetta against offshore wind shows that he either doesn’t understand the affordable energy crisis or that he just doesn’t care. Either way, it’s clear he’s never paid his own electricity bill, and he’s determined to raise bills for working people.”

Southeastern Wind Coalition Senior Program Manager Karly Brownfield said that the agreement “feels really counterproductive” at a time when people are closely watching their energy costs at home and at the pump.

“The whole thing is unprecedented and it’s also completely unprecedented to take a lease payment and then refund it in exchange for investment in the natural gas industry. That has never happened before,” she said in a telephone interview earlier this week. “Whether you’re investing in offshore wind or you’re investing in solar or whatever it might be, it’s not a great feeling to know that just because you have a project that’s permitted or a project that’s received all the stamps of approval that it still runs the risk of the plug being pulled halfway down the line. Certainty is what drives business and the more uncertain we make our energy market the more complicated this is all going to become in the long term.”

North Carolina is investing in natural gas, but the gas turbine industry is facing years-out backlogs on turbine orders. Nuclear power, from permitting to production, can take upwards of 15 years to build.

“And the leg up we had with offshore wind was that these projects were leased. Permitting had started. The sites were secured. There was some sort of headway that was made on those projects,” Brownfield said.

The Carolina Long Bay wind energy area spans a little more than 110,000 acres roughly 22 miles offshore, south of Bald Head Island.

The area is split into two leases.

In May 2022, Duke Energy paid $155 million for what equates to a little more than half of the total wind energy area.

In June of that same year, TotalEnergies Renewable USA paid more than $133 million for the adjacent lease.

Projects in the Carolina Long Bay area were anticipated to generate up to 3 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power about 675,000 homes, and estimated to provide more than $4 billion in net economic impacts.

According to information on its website, Duke Energy was collaborating with TotalEnergies on “early development activities.”

When asked for comment, Duke Energy spokesperson Bill Norton responded to Coastal Review by email, writing in part, “Large offshore wind projects involve substantial capital investments and extensive development timelines. It’s reasonable that policy makers question cost-exposure of such projects to customers. We continue to evaluate next steps as it relates to the Carolina Long Bay lease, which is currently maintained by Duke Energy’s nonregulated subsidiary, Cinergy.”

Duke Energy prioritizes energy sources “proven to be the most cost-effective while meeting the growing needs of our customers,” he wrote. “A diversified energy mix is essential to meeting the moment of high demand under all conditions.”

Offshore wind, Brownfield said, offers just that.

“What offshore wind is really, really good at is providing that really stable and predictable energy during extreme weather, and especially at nighttime, when solar is not really working, or when either gas is really constrained or you’re looking at scarcity pricing,” she said. “And, with wind being a free resource, yes, it’s an upfront investment, but it’s a very predictable cost of the project.”

There are still active leases for a wind project off Kitty Hawk that’s owned by Avangrid Renewables and Dominion Energy.

“As far as I know, Avangrid is still very much firm on engaging in North Carolina and they’re still looking at a longer-term future for their lease,” Brownfield said.

As she sees it, the Interior Department’s agreement with TotalEnergies is perhaps less of a setback to offshore wind energy production in the U.S. but rather increases the need for other energy resources.

“Not saying that we don’t need natural gas. SEWC is a very technology-neutral organization,” Brownfield said. “We don’t want to shoot down other resources by any means. But your grid is a lot more balanced when you’ve got a little bit of everything on it. And, right now, we’re on track for our grid to be about 50% gas by 2034, and that’s a lot of gas.”

The University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Blue Economy Index (Bloomberg Ticker: BLUEECO) saw gains during February, outperforming broader, global benchmarks that suffered weaker performance.

The Blue Economy Index rose 8.66% from 2,882.49 to 3,132.02. At the same time, the S&P Industrials rose 5.64%, the MSCI All World Index increased 1.24%, and the S&P 500 fell 1.40%.

The index trackers said in a news release Thursday that the comparatively strong performance “showcases” the blue economy’s “concentrated exposure to ocean-related industries and balanced sector allocation.”

“This month’s returns were defined by strong expectations in infrastructure demand and international economic activity, as well as a sharp decline in large technology and growth stocks.”

The UNC Wilmington Blue Economy Index tracks the economic activity of companies operating on or in oceans and waterways, with a focus on environmental sustainability. The index was developed through a collaboration between UNC Wilmington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Alliance for the Blue Economy, or AllBlue, the Cameron School of Business, and it relies on data from FactSet.

The index aligns with the World Bank’s definition of the Blue Economy: “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of the ocean ecosystem.”

“The index represents a fusion of academic insight, environmental science, and financial market expertise,” according to the university.

February’s performance was supported by strong gains in industrial and utilities sectors, which benefited from rising expectations for global infrastructure spending and energy demand. Sector rotation also played a key factor as investors transitioned from technology to industrial sectors.

Industrials climbed 16.61% after investors rotated into companies tied to infrastructure, heavy manufacturing and energy systems. A large wave of AI storage and network demand helped prop up the sector’s performance, which signaled higher future revenue and earnings, according to the release.

Consumer staples, supported by increased expected demand and improved profitability in the global seafood and animal feed markets, increased 8.06%. The sector also gained from higher aquaculture prices in Asian and North American markets, which improved margins for fishing and processing companies.

Utilities rose 5.60%, driven by expanding economies and the rapid build-out of data centers, AI computing, and renewable energy systems. Furthermore, many utility companies are expanding renewable energy projects which investors view as long-term growth opportunities, the analysts said.

Consumer discretionary spending gained 3.12%, supported by steady continued growth in travel and tourism spending.

Doosan Corp. saw a 50.65% gain and topped the index for February thanks to new legislation that provided a regulatory framework for modular reactor development and export.

Harbin Electric Corp. saw a 41.88% gain thanks to an increase in Chinese gas turbine demand and the company’s financials, which forecast a 57% increase year-over-year net profit and 33% revenue growth.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd. Realized a 40.31% gain based on increased submarine and defense systems production after Japan planned to increase defense spending to 2% of its GDP.

More information about the Alliance for the Blue Economy is online at https://uncw.edu/research/centers/innovation-entrepreneurship/events-programs/programs/all-blue.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality State Energy Office has set a public hearing next month on a state program that provides free weatherization services for income-eligible households.

Comments will be accepted on the proposed adoption of the New North Carolina Project, a nonprofit founded to increase civic engagement among underserved communities and to act as the service provider to a regional territory that includes Brunswick, Carteret, Craven, Duplin, Greene, Jones, Lenoir, New Hanover, Onslow, Pamlico, Pender and Wayne counties. 

The N.C. Weatherization Assistance Program, funded under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, aims to reduce energy bills and increase home comfort and safety by providing free weatherization services for eligible households.

The state program in 2021 was appropriated $89 million for enhancing energy efficiency in income-eligible households throughout the state. In March 2023, DEQ held a hearing on the proposed plan, which was approved by the U.S. Department of Energy in August of that same year.

DEQ has conditionally approved the New North Carolina Project to be the region’s service. The organization will be awarded about $5 million to be the regional service providers until 2029 or funds are depleted.

The hearing is scheduled for 4 p.m. April 8 at the DEQ Green Square Office Building, training room No. 1210, 217 West Jones St. in Raleigh.

To join the hearing by Webex link to https://ncgov.webex.com/ncgov/j.php?MTID=m21fb07102030a6f681df2f99a5537f0c and use meeting number/access code 2438 254 6635. You may also join by phone at  +1-415-655-0003 with meeting password ncwap (62927 when dialing from a phone).

The hearing officer may limit speaking times to accommodate all speakers.

The agency is also accepting public comments by mail to DEQ Weatherization Assistance Program, 1613 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, North Carolina 27699-1613, or by email to seo.publiccomments@deq.nc.gov, with “2026 NNCP Comment” in the subject line.  

All comments must be postmarked, emailed or hand-delivered no later than April 10.

Additional hearing documentation is available at www.deq.nc.gov/wap-hearings. 

This report has been updated for clarification.

Dominion Energy’s 2.6-gigawatt offshore wind project based in Hampton Roads, Virginia, which was ordered by the Trump administration to stop work right before Christmas, has resumed the project and is now on track for completion by early 2027.

But the 26-day shutdown of Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, also known as CVOW, came at considerable cost to the company, its customers and the nation’s energy needs. 

According to its Jan. 30 project update, Dominion tallied the current total project cost at $11.5 billion, reflecting $228 million for increases associated with the suspension, as well as $580 million related to actual/estimated tariffs. Dominion’s update in May 2025 had the project cost at $10.8 billion.

“It’s a terrible time to be restricting any source of new energy and especially sources of new clean energy that can be constructed in places that otherwise have limited ability to add new generation, whether that might be a new gas plant or a new coal plant,” Katharine Kollins, president of the Southeastern Wind Coalition, told Coastal Review.

When fully operational, CVOW’s 176 wind turbines will generate enough energy to power up to 660,000 homes, making it the largest offshore wind farm in the U.S and one of the largest wind energy production facilities in the world. Dominion, which provides electricity to 3.6 million homes and businesses in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina and natural gas service to 500,000 customers in South Carolina, said the wind project is critical to its “diverse energy supply strategy” to meet growing regional demand.

“I think from the wind industry’s perspective, this is an industry that has been operating for over 20 years and has shown that there’s an ability to put a significant amount of new clean energy on the grid every year — when the free market is at play and when they are able to construct in areas where it makes sense to have wind,” Kollins said.

Citing risks to national security, the U.S. Department of Interior issued the suspension order on Dec. 22 to CVOW and four other offshore wind projects in varied stages of development on the East Coast. The following day, Dominion sued the federal government.

In the action, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Dominion argued, in part, that it had worked extensively with military interests while developing the project to ensure that any concerns about radar, training or operational readiness were addressed. Not only did the agency director lack the “generalized authority” under the lease regulations to order the suspension “at whim,” the lawsuit said, the government did not cite an “applicable trigger” to halt construction.

“Our nation is governed by laws, and a stable legal and regulatory environment is essential to allow regulated public utilities like (Dominion)  as well as other businesses, contractors, suppliers, and workers, to invest and support our nation’s energy needs and associated jobs,” according to the lawsuit.

“Sudden and baseless withdrawal of regulatory approvals by government officials cannot be reconciled with the predictability needed to support the exceptionally large capital investments required for large-scale energy development projects like CVOW critical to domestic energy security, continues the legal document. “That is true regardless of the source of energy.”

Based on a 2022 agreement with regulators on cost-sharing, for project costs beyond $10.3 billion up to $11.3 billion, the company and the customers each pay 50%, and from $11.3 billion to $13.7 billion, the company pays 100%, according to Dominion’s Jan. 30 project update.

Customers in Virginia, but not North Carolina, currently pay about $11 a month to cover CVOW costs, said Jeremy Slayton with Dominion media relations in a Feb. 10 email response to Coastal Review. Cost recovery, which influences rates, is updated annually, he added, and the October 2025 filing is still before the Virginia State Corporation Commission.

On Jan. 16, the court granted Dominion’s request for a preliminary injunction that allowed construction at CVOW to resume while the lawsuit is resolved. Courts have now allowed all five stalled offshore projects to operate for the time being.

“While our legal challenge proceeds, we will continue seeking a durable resolution of this matter through cooperation with the federal government”, Dominion Energy said in a press release.

The company didn’t waste time getting back to work. According to information provided by Slayton, project construction was by late January about 70% complete, with the facility expected to deliver its first power to the grid by the end of the first quarter of this year.

“Our U.S-flagged wind turbine installation vessel Charybdis completed the first turbine installation today,” Slayton wrote in the Jan 27 email. 

So far, he added, all 176 monopole foundations have been installed, and 119 of the 176 transition pieces — the yellow parts that connect the foundations to the turbine towers — are in place.

Also, two of the three offshore substations have been installed, the deepwater offshore export cables installation has been completed and the nearshore export cables installation is about 60% completed. And about 67 miles of an estimated 231 miles of inter-array cables, which carry energy created by the wind turbines to the offshore substations, has been installed.

Onshore electric transmission construction is expected to be completed in early 2026. Before the abrupt stop-work order, CVOW, which started construction in 2024, had expected to flip the power switch on by that date, and be fully operational by the end of 2026.

In addition to the obvious benefit of clean, plentiful energy, the project has brought millions in economic value to the region, including many jobs and dollars while under construction.

“Offshore wind, in particular, provides the United States with a generational opportunity to supply large amounts of affordable, reliable power while spurring investment and creating U.S. jobs,” Dominion argued in its filing.

According to Dominion, the completed project will create 1,100 direct and indirect jobs annually in Hampton Roads, equaling about $82 million in pay and benefits, $210 million in economic output, $6 million in revenues for local governments and $5 million in state tax revenue.

Since Donald Trump’s reelection, the president has focused on dismantling renewable energy-related projects — solar, wind, battery storage, even grid modernization —  in the U.S, and replacing it with fossil fuel and nuclear power. But he has reserved his strongest animus for offshore wind, apparently based on his objection to 11 wind turbines in the water off his Aberdeenshire, Scotland golf course.

Shortly after he purchased an estate there in 2006, according to a July 29, 2025, article published online by the BBC,  Trump “soon became infuriated at plans to construct an offshore wind farm nearby, arguing that the ‘windmills’ — as he prefers to call the structures — would ruin the view.”

He also insisted that the turbine blades killed “all” the birds, but surveys at the site have to date not found a single bird strike. In addition to calling wind energy “a scam,” as quoted in the article, the president regards wind power as “very expensive, very ugly energy”.

Despite Trump fighting the plans through the Scottish courts and ultimately the UK’s Supreme Court, construction of the “monsters” went ahead in 2018.

“It clearly left him smarting and he’s not had a good word to say about wind power since,” the article said.

According to an Audubon study, most bird deaths are caused by striking buildings, especially tall ones with large windows, and cats eating them. On land, building collisions alone are estimated to kill over a billion birds each year in the U.S., the report said.

“On the open ocean, birds can be killed or injured when they collide with ships or offshore oil platforms,” the report stated. “Similarly, offshore wind infrastructure — including turbine blades, towers, electrical platforms, and construction equipment on boats — all pose potential threats.”

The report goes into much detail, but best practices were summed up as “Avoid, Minimize, Offset and Monitor.”

Dominion states on its website that it uses the latest technologies to protect birds and other wildlife, such as time-of-year restrictions, installation of anti-perching devices and acoustic monitoring.

Typically, offshore wind production is generated by three-bladed rotors attached to a ocean-worthy structure that houses a generator insider turbines attached to elevated platforms. Cables from the generator deliver the energy to the bottom of the tower to the underwater transmission cables to onshore power stations. 

But technology has evolved considerably since the first offshore turbine was built in Denmark in 1991.

“As turbine technology continues its rapid evolution — with units now reaching 26 (megawatts) — and floating wind advances toward commercial scale, the industry finds itself at a critical juncture that will shape its trajectory for years to come,” Power magazine reported in a Feb. 9, 2026, article published online.

Global offshore wind capacity reached 83 gigawatts at the end of 2024, the article said, and it appears that the 2025 report will show it was another banner year for the industry, with new construction “positioning the sector for accelerated growth through the decade.”

Significant projects have been constructed or are planned in European and Asia-Pacific regions, the magazine said. Meanwhile, the U.S. offshore wind industry is sputtering, resulting in a severe impact to the market. The International Energy Agency, according to the article, forecasts a 60% downward revision from 2025-2030 for U.S. wind energy, equaling 57 GW of both onshore and offshore capacity “that is now unlikely to be built.”

It appears the U.S, for now, may be left in the dust.

“Offshore wind technology continues its relentless march toward larger, more powerful machines,” according to the article. “The average capacity of turbines installed offshore in 2024 reached 10 MW, according to (the Global Wind Energy Council), a figure that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Yet, the frontier has already moved well beyond that threshold.”

Still, in the long run, the realities of market forces and the limitations of dirty or destructive energy resources can make an unlimited, clean energy such as wind an unavoidable choice. Offshore projects may be a younger industry in the U.S., but it is considered a powerful renewable resource to tap. While land-based wind projects are less costly, wind speeds are generally higher and more constant offshore, allowing turbines to generate more electricity for longer periods.

In the U.S., solar and wind have often been the most affordable energy resource, but they are also compatible grid partners, Kollins said, with wind at its peak when the sun is not.

“Generally, wind turbines have higher generation factors in the winter and in evenings, and those are two times when solar has less output,” she said, “So if you have a lot of solar on the grid, you can add a lot of wind before you really need storage.”

Once all five of the offshore projects are operating at full capacity, she said, that’s when people will see the benefits of having more electricity produced, when they need it — such as the recent weekend deep freezes along the East Coast.

“These things are going to be generating their full output all weekend when everybody’s got their heat turned on and is using max electricity load,” Kollins said, adding: “Offshore wind is highly correlated with winter storms.”

There is an increasing demand overall for electricity, Kollins noted. And construction of gas turbines and nuclear power is many years down the road.

“These electrons are needed so badly,” she said.  “We are in a period of rapid economic growth, and in order to continue fueling that growth, we need every resource available.

“And offshore wind provides one of the only ways to build a significant amount of new energy generation in the near term.”

North Carolina has more than $200 million available for residents who qualify for home energy rebates in all 100 of the state’s counties.

Under the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality’s Energy Saver North Carolina program, an eligible household may receive up to $16,000 in rebates for making energy-efficient improvements, including installing heat pump heating and cooling systems and insulation.

The program also offers additional rebates of up to $14,000 for high-efficiency electrical appliances like water heaters and electric cooktops.

North Carolina is the first in the nation to fully launch both types of rebates at the same time, according to a DEQ release.

“Electricity bills are too high, and I am committed to doing everything I can to lower your costs,” Gov. Josh Stein stated in the release. “Now, eligible families across the state will be able to lower their energy bills about $1,000 a year on average and improve the comfort and safety of their homes. These upgrades also strengthen our energy system, help our environment, and support good-paying jobs in communities statewide.”

DEQ launched Energy Save NC in January 2025, adding counties to the program throughout the year.

More than 4,800 applications have been submitted to the program and more than 1,700 have been approved and working through the rebate reservation process, according to the release.

Estimates show that, since it was initiated, the program has installed $777,000 worth of rebate-eligible projects in 51 households.

Last year, the program generated an estimated 293,000 kilowatt-hours. Energy upgrades supported through the program make homes resilient, improve home comfort and safety, reduces energy demand and strain on the state’s power grid, and invests in local jobs.

Energy Saver NC is funded through two U.S. Department of Energy rebate programs that aim to help families make their homes more energy efficient and lower their utility bills.

Those programs are the Homeowners Managing Efficiency Savings, or HOMES, which offers eligible households up to $16,000 for upgrades such as air sealing or energy-efficient HVAC unites, and Home Electrician and Appliance Rebates, or HEAR, which provides up to $14,000 for high-efficiency electrical appliances. 

“Now that the program is available across the state, eligible North Carolina families can lower their utility bills by up to $80 per month, and their homes will be more comfortable,” DEQ Secretary Reid Wilson stated in the release. “These energy-saving steps will also reduce carbon emissions and improve air quality while supporting more than 2,000 jobs for the contractors doing the installations. That’s a win all the way around for North Carolina.” 

Residents eligible for full rebates include single-family homeowners and renters who earn less than 80% of their area median income, or AMI, as determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Qualifying residents of partial rebates are moderate-income homeowners or renters who earn 80% to 150% of the AMI.

Rebates also depend on upgrade types, including the following:

• $8,000 for a space heating and cooling heat pump.
• $4,000 for an electric load service center (electric panel).
• $2,500 for electric wiring.
• $1,750 for a heat pump water heater.
• $1,600 for insulation, air sealing, and ventilation.
• $840 for a heat pump clothes dryer and/or electric stove, cooktop, range, or oven.

Rebates are paid to contractors after a project is complete, leaving resident responsible only for any remaining costs after a rebate has been applied.

Once a household qualifies for the program, a certified assessor will conduct a free assessment of the home’s energy use and recommend money-saving improvements.

Energy Save NC-approved contractors, who are registered, licensed professionals specially trained in energy-efficient installations, must complete all upgrades.

Once a household reviews a contractor’s quotes, that household may approve the projects and pricing with the rebate applied.

A group of North Carolina State University researchers has created a model that simulates wind, waves, tides and currents to help pinpoint areas that are likely best to install offshore energy facilities.

The model, called a portfolio optimization framework, also identifies what combination of wind and marine hydrokinetic technologies, which capture energy through water flow, may work together in an area to produce the greatest amount of power.

“It’s not about only one type, but multiple sources of generation that can somehow work together to generate a more stable output of your portfolio,” explained Dr. Anderson de Queiroz, co-author of the study and associate professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering. “For example, if you think about the single source, let’s say offshore wind or wave energy, they have lots of variability with respect to their supply because it depends on natural conditions. It depends on wind speed or the ocean heights and in periods, so it’s variable.”

By locating areas where different offshore energy technologies can work together, a phenomenon researchers refer to as “complementary behavior,” power companies can get the most bang for their buck.

For context, picture an offshore field of 50 wind turbines. Within that field are marine hydrokinetic devices such as wave energy converters or underwater kite turbines that generate electricity from ocean currents and tidal streams.

“When you’re collecting the electricity, instead of collecting only from wind with transmission lines, you can also collect electricity from this other source. So, the electricity that you’re bringing to shore in that situation will be more stable because of the complementary behavior between the sources,” de Querioz said.

For the developer trying to explore and analyze where they can get the most power output possible, this model could help reduce their financial risk.

“For government analysts and planners, they can also see strategically where there are regions that would be beneficial in terms of most electricity that they are able to get to at a reasonable cost and that’s away from, for example, protected habitat areas or away from strategic areas” used by military forces, de Querioz said.

The team of researchers, with support from the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program, conducted an analysis for the North Carolina coast, focused on wind turbines and marine hydrokinetic kites.

But de Querioz points out that the model they have developed can be used globally and with any combination of technologies. And, he said, it may be applied onshore.

The research team is in the process of expanding its analysis to other regions, including the coasts of New Jersey and Virginia.

The project, which is through the Atlantic Marine Energy Center and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, will use the portfolio optimization model to support bringing electricity to the East Coast through the Eastern Interconnection.

The Eastern Interconnection spans from central Canada east to the Atlantic Coast, south to Florida and west to the foot of the Rockies. It is one of two major power grids.

Researchers will pair the portfolio optimization framework with another model known as Tools for Energy Model Optimization and Analysis, commonly referred to as Temoa, which produces long-term analyses of energy systems.

“We are going to combine analysis from this offshore portfolio with the long-term energy planning for the Eastern Interconnection,” de Querioz said. “Basically, we’re looking at the entirety of the Eastern Interconnection, and then deploying not only offshore energy, but also looking at natural gas potential, new nuclear or the potential to have energy storage, onshore solar, and things like that.”

The team is also working with the North Carolina Renewable Energy Program this year to develop an adapted design for a wave power buoy called Reference Model 3, or RM3, that converts wave energy into electrical power.

“On these, we’re going to do more specific and detailed analysis for the North Carolina coast with this new design of wave energy converters,” de Queiroz said.

He is extending an invitation to collaborate with industry, government and other scientists with an interest in the model. The model is expected to be released sometime this year. Anyone interested may contact de Queiroz by email at ardequei@ncsu.edu.

“Fused Portfolio Optimization for Harnessing Marine Renewable Energy Resources” was published in the journal Energy earlier this month.

N.C. State doctoral student Mary Maceda is a corresponding author of the study. Co-authors of the paper include Rob Miller, a doctoral student, Victor de Faria, a recent doctoral graduate, Dr. Matthew Bryant, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the university, and Dr. Chris Vermillion with the University of Michigan.

The Department of the Interior released Thursday a draft program that proposes over the next five years almost three dozen offshore lease sales, none of which is in the Atlantic, but instead are around Alaska and in the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico.

The secretary of the Interior directed Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, to draft the 11th National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program to replace the 2024–2029 National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program put in place during the Biden administration, according to a press release.

A 60-day public comment period opens when the draft program is published in the Federal Register, which is expected to happen Monday.

The draft program proposes up to 34 potential offshore lease sales across 21 of 27 existing outer continental shelf planning areas, with 21 areas off the coast of Alaska, seven in the Gulf of Mexico, and six along the Pacific Coast, totaling around 1.27 billion acres.

The sites selected in the proposed program are not restricted by presidential memorandum, unlike much of the Atlantic Coast. The North Carolina section of the Atlantic Coast is unavailable for oil and gas leasing until 2032 per a presidential memorandum.

The draft is the first of three proposals that will be developed before final approval of the 2026-2031 program, and is a directive in the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act that requires the secretary of the Interior to prepare a national program that identifies the size, timing, and location of potential lease sales.

Duke Energy’s Brunswick Nuclear Plant will be testing outdoor warning sirens during a one-hour period on Oct. 8.

The testing is scheduled to occur 10-11 a.m. and may run up to three minutes.

All 38 sirens within 10 miles of the plant will sound at full volume. Some sirens may be tested more than once to ensure they are properly functioning, and follow-up testing may occur after 11 a.m. following siren maintenance, according to a release.

Testing is coordinated with emergency management officials in Brunswick and New Hanover counties, which are responsible for sounding the sirens.

Local broadcasting stations do not interrupt regular programming to broadcast emergency alert system messages during siren tests. If sirens were to be sounded in a real emergency, local radio and television stations would broadcast information and instructions to the public.

Additional information about the plant’s outdoor warning sirens are available at duke-energy.com/NuclearEP.

Second in a series on a recent visit to Louisiana’s bayous, a trip sponsored by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, to start a conversation between people there who are being flooded out and those in the Down East communities of Carteret County who face similar threats.

BAYOU LAFOURCHE, La. – Eric Verdin clearly knew where he was going. These waters are like family, after all, but his GPS plotter was frantic. Using the latest marine charts, its line tracing our path on the screen in front of us blinked red, warning us that we were about to plow into dry land. It was a good time, it seemed to suggest, to ABANDON SHIP. But we had open seas ahead of us and 8 feet of water under our keel.

“There used to be an orange grove here,” our captain conceded with a shrug.

Not a hundred years ago. Not 50. Not even 20. “Not that long ago, really,” Verdin said, as he looked out the window of the shrimp boat’s pilot house across the placid water of the bayou to the glimmering Gulf of Mexico on the horizon. “Just about all that water you see in front of us was all marsh.”

His native people, the Biloxi-Chitimacha, have lived on the fringes of this watery world along the southwestern tip of Louisiana for many generations. Verdin, 58, has known these waters since boyhood. He makes his living here, first running big boats to supply the oil rigs out in the Gulf and now chasing brown and white shrimp. He’s witnessed changes he never thought possible. “I’ve seen the absolute devastation of our coast during my lifetime,” he said with a sigh. “Miles and miles of marsh are now open waters.”

Nowhere on Earth does land disappear as quickly as it does here in southern Louisiana. According to one fantastic estimate, the water covers, on average, a chunk of marsh the size of a football field every hour or so. Or is it 15 minutes? No matter. The change is so rapid that not even online navigation charts can keep up. Brought about by a catastrophic combination of human engineering, ignorance and hubris, it’s been going on, though more slowly, for at least a century. During that time, an area of marshland the size of Delaware vanished. Now, add another human-induced insult — rising seas triggered by the warming climate — and a similar-sized piece is expected to disappear in just 25 years.

This is ground zero for sea level rise and wetland loss in the world. We, of course, had to see it ourselves.

A group of North Carolinians, on a 10-day trip sponsored by Duke University, toured coastal Louisiana in June looking for connections, for people at the water’s edge who are facing the perils wrought by a rapidly changing environment. They have weathered the frequent storms, survived the destructive aftermaths, and found ways to accommodate the rising seas as the familiar natural world transforms in the blink of their lifetimes. Some of their communities have been displaced, and their cultures are threatened.

Coastal people back home will soon increasingly confront the same dangers, knows Karen Amspacher, a native of Harkers Island in Carteret County, the director of a cultural museum there and the group’s inspirational leader. “We’re all living on the edge,” she told Verdin after he welcomed us aboard his 55-foot shrimper, Lil’E. “I’ve been trying to find common ties with people who are going through what we will.”

After the bayous of Louisiana and Florida’s Gold Coast, the uniformly flat North Carolina coastal plain is the most-endangered landscape in America. The small fishing and farming villages of low-lying eastern Carteret County, Amspacher’s beloved Down East, face a grim future of increasing storms and flooding. Many of the homes will become uninhabitable by century’s end.

Jerrica Cheramie understands all too well the fears that the people there will have to confront. “I’m just 36 and I’ve seen all this change,” said the local high school teacher who joined us on the boat. “It’s terrifying.”

Taming A River

Since its beginning, the Mississippi River has deposited the silt of a continent to build the Louisiana coastline. Its delta, a water-logged labyrinth of bayous, marsh grasses and ancient cypress trees, fans out like a swampy snout into the Gulf. The first European settlers along the lower Mississippi in the 18^th century started throwing up dirt walls along the river’s banks to protect themselves from the frequent floods. The effort intensified a century later after a series of devastating deluges. Congress got involved after the Great Flood in 1927 killed 500 people and inundated 27,000 square miles. It authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to begin digging. That old river man, Mark Twain, once scoffed at the notion of containing the mighty Mississippi. “Ten thousand River Commissions …,” he wrote, “cannot tame that lawless stream … cannot say to it, ‘Go here,’ or ‘Go there,’ and make it obey.”

By God, they tried, and they came damn close. Close enough, anyway, to make southern Louisiana disappear.

Today, massive levees line the river for about half of its 2,400-mile-long route to the sea. Along the very southern leg of its journey, the Mississippi is little more than a big canal, hemmed in place by huge earthen walls.

We followed it one day for its last 75 miles. Down Louisiana Highway 23 we went, through Bohemia and Port Sulfur, past Home Place and Triumph, to Venice, population 164. It’s as far as you can go by car. The river was on our left the entire way, but it flowed unseen behind its wall. The smokestacks of the ships we passed were the only hints that the river was actually there. At the end of the road, we had hoped to watch the great Mississippi make its last, lumbering lurch to the Gulf. Alas, there was nothing to see but more marsh, the wall and assorted bits of industrial detritus – cranes, barges, pipes, barrels and such. More on that shortly.

As we stood at the end of the road expressing our disappointment, a set of eyes popped up through the murky water of a lagoon that wasn’t 20 feet away. Then, another. Soon, it was a dozen. Then, more. I had never seen so many alligators in one place at a time, and I once lived in Miami and fished the Everglades in a canoe. They all came toward us, gliding silently through the water, leaving gentle wakes behind them. Our presence clearly triggered this conclave. Other gawkers, we surmised, had also come this way and had fed the native wildlife. The approaching gators were expecting a handout. What tidbits do you toss to giant reptiles? I wondered as we quickly headed back to the cars. A bucket of Col. Sanders? A Big Mac? Chick-fil-A nuggets, we agreed. Everything likes them.

After that meander worthy of the old Mississippi, let’s get back on course. The point of all this is that the river now heads straight to the Gulf. No more oxbow cutoffs, no twists, no turns. With it, goes all that muck. Very little now leaks into the surrounding bays. Without sediment to nourish them, the marshes have been sinking for a long time. They are drowning more quickly now as sea level rise accelerates.

Big, Big Oil

Verdin killed the engine and dropped anchor. We bobbed under a scorching sun in languid Lake Raccourci. A lot of open water bodies on the Gulf’s fringes in Louisiana are called lakes because they were surrounded by marsh when the mapmakers named them. To Verdin, these are sacred waters. His son, Eric Jr., died in a car wreck five years ago. He was only 34. His family spread his ashes here, one of his “honey holes.” Verdin named his boat after Eric and put a picture of his smiling son in a frame on the bulkhead behind the ship’s wheel. “He always used to stand behind me and say go this way or that way,” his father explained. Verdin comes back often, especially on the anniversary of his son’s death in December when he places flowers in the water. He couldn’t think of a better place to take visitors. We were honored.

We were also surrounded by an odd array of pipes, pumps and iron platforms that rose out of the water everywhere. Rust was their primary color. Each one marked an oil or natural gas well, Verdin explained, and most are still producing, though some are approaching 100 years old. They are relics, really, of simpler times, when the Gulf was just becoming America’s great oilfield.

Like the deltas of many of the world’s great rivers, the Mississippi’s is full of oil and gas. All that muck that the river deposited for millions of years contained the organic ingredients — ancient plants, algae, bacteria – of oil and gas. They’re called fossil fuels for a reason. Time and heat did the rest.

I sat one night on the beach at Grand Isle, one of the few sandy beaches in the lower bayous, and counted the lights of 22 offshore oil rigs blinking on the horizon. There are more than 600 out there, making the Gulf of Mexico America’s primary source for offshore oil and natural gas.

Big Oil is really big here. Its presence is almost everywhere: Refineries with their fiery tails of methane, mountains of pipeline stacked in neat pyramids, natural gas liquification plants, petrochemical complexes, miles of storage tanks, acres of stacked barrels. All in industrial grimy gray with splashes of white. It ain’t pretty and there’s likely no way to make it so.

From Lake Raccourci, we could see the outline of Port Fourchon, maybe 8 miles away. It is Big Oil’s most important port. More than 400 ships leave it every day to supply the rigs. More than 15,000 people fly out of there every month to work on them. It’s the operational base for almost 300 companies. The port is perched at the tail end of LA1, a vital road so threatened that it’s being raised on a causeway to keep it from slipping under the Gulf.

Before all that, there were these pipes now sticking out of the water. The reservoirs closest to shore were, naturally, the first to be tapped, starting in the 1930s. The companies dug canals through the dense marshland to dig the wells. The channels ended up becoming pathways for water, accelerating the marsh’s demise. Many of the wells are now miles from the nearest dry land.

Everybody understands the role the oil and gas industry played in destroying the marshes, Verdin explained as the shrimp were almost ready for lunch. “In hindsight, it ruined our environment, but you won’t find fishermen around here who are anti-oil.” he said. “We know how much we’ve benefitted. When the fishing was good, we fished. When oil was booming, we worked in oil.”

The Diversion

Verdin spilled the pot of boiled shrimp, corn on the cob and potatoes onto one of the hatch covers, and we dug in. The lunchtime conversation turned to The Diversion, the first step of a grand ecosystem experiment that would have taken 50 years to complete and would have cost more than $50 billion. Officially known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, the controversial project intended to divert some of the Mississippi’s flow to allow sediment to once again nourish portions of the marsh. “We need to do something,” Verdin said. “This can’t go on.”

That was the state’s conclusion after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region 25 years ago last month. Healthy marshes, scientists said, would have lessened the damage. In response, the state legislature in 2007 passed the first coastal master plan, a 50-year initiative to blunt the forces eating away at the coastline: sinking land, rising seas, and the channels dug by the oil and gas industry. Barrier islands would be rebuilt, levees bulked up, and structures raised. The plan also endorsed 11 river-diversion projects. The biggest was in Barataria Bay, about 30 miles east of our lunchtime anchorage. Engineers planned to poke a hole into the levee near Ironton in Plaquemines Parish and release 75,000 cubic feet of sediment every second. They estimated that doing so every day for six months a year would create 21 square miles of new marsh in 50 years. “It gives us a fighting chance to win this battle,” Chip Kline, the chairman of the state authority charged with the task, said in 2021.

Others weren’t so sure. Fishermen worried that the sudden influx of freshwater would push oysters and brown shrimp, mainstays of the local fishing industry, out of their current ranges. Federal scientists feared that the salinity drop could cause skin diseases in the bay’s dolphins, killing maybe a third of them. Opponents noted that even if it completes everything in the plan, the state will still lose more wetlands – 2,300 square miles — than it saves or creates – 1,200 square miles.

The scheme went on life support the day voters sent Jeff Landry to the governor’s mansion in 2023. He had been a staunch opponent of the project as attorney general, questioning its ballooning cost — $3.1 billion — and claiming it would kill fisheries important to Cajun culture. A month after our visit, Landry canceled the project.

Its demise didn’t likely lessen Charamie’s resolve “People ask why do I live here?” she said before we said our goodbyes back at the dock. “Where am I to go? This is home.”

It would be a sentiment we would hear again and again.

Next: Life on the edge.

Updated at 11 a.m. Friday, Aug. 29, to include link for public comment.

The Trump administration’s move to repeal a federal rule that prohibits logging within large swaths of U.S. national forests would strip protections for tens of thousands of acres of public lands in North Carolina.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced earlier this summer the department’s intentions to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, one the administration calls outdated, saying it restricts the Forest Service from being able to properly manage for fire risk, and that it suppresses the country’s economic development in the forestry sector.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday that it will publish the notice in the Federal Register on Friday, beginning a public comment period on the potential environmental effects that ends Sept. 19.

“For nearly 25 years, the Roadless Rule has frustrated land managers and served as a barrier to action – prohibiting road construction, which has limited wildfire suppression and active forest management,” Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said in a release. “The forests we know today are not the same as the forests of 2001. They are dangerously overstocked and increasingly threatened by drought, mortality, insect-borne disease, and wildfire. It’s time to return land management decisions where they belong – with local Forest Service experts who best understand their forests and communities.”

Lifting the rule, commonly referred to as the “Roadless Rule,” would align with President Trump’s initiatives to expand U.S. timber production and boost energy production on federal lands.

In North Carolina alone, more than 170,000 acres of the National Forest System are designated “roadless areas” under the rule.

Logging, mining, energy development, and road construction are, with a few exceptions, largely prohibited in these areas because they have been identified as possessing at least some of a number of natural features the forest service classifies as “roadless area characteristics.”

Those include attributes such as high-quality or undisturbed soil and water, diverse plant and animal communities, habitat for threatened and endangered species and species dependent on large, undisturbed areas of land, recreation, and traditional cultural properties and sacred sites.

In all, there are more than 58 million acres of inventoried roadless areas in the national forest system, one that includes 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands covering more than 190 million acres in 43 states, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico.

More than 1.2 million acres of national forestland fall within North Carolina’s borders.

The two largest national forests, Nantahala and Pisgah, make up an overwhelming majority of those lands in the state’s mountain region. Uwharrie National Forest, the smallest in the state, sits in the south-central part of the state.

And then there’s the Croatan National Forest, one the Forest Service refers to as the “only true coastal forest in the East.”

The 160,000-acre forest is bordered on three sides by tidal rivers and Bogue Sound. The land there is peppered with pine forests, saltwater estuaries, bogs, swamps and pocosin.

Within those swamps lies all of the more than 20,000 roadless acres designated in the Croatan, which means those areas are not conducive to road construction, according to Adam Rondeau, public affairs officer for the National Forest Service in North Carolina. 

“Whether it’s next month, or 10 years from now, the moment something of value is worth extracting from that forest, roads will be built, pocosin or no,” Erin Carey, state conservation policy director of the North Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club, said in an email response to Coastal Review. “The only way to ensure the Croatan is protected for future generations is to keep the Roadless Rule in place.”

Environment North Carolina Research & Policy Center Advocate Emily Mason in a statement Wednesday urged that national forests be naturally maintained.

“It is more important to protect these areas than to get a little more wood or to build one more mine or one more road,” she said. “Let’s keep our wild forests wild.”

During a telephone interview last week, Carey said the Croatan is a place of escape for residents who live in the region around it.

“The folks in that region have a very close connection to that forest, at least the ones I’ve worked with, and I think the idea of their forest being cut in two will motivate folks in the area to try and stand up and protect it,” she said.

The Sierra Club has launched a campaign of sorts to inform the public of the administration’s aim and what’s at stake if the rule is rescinded – the fragmentation of natural habitat, the prospect of fewer open, wild areas for people to enjoy, and the harvest of land that is increasingly crucial in combating the effects of global warming.

“Americans love their national forests,” Carey said. “They love their parks. They love these open spaces and they’re very protective of them. That is what’s at risk is the ability for not only us, but for future generations to be able to wander out into the wild and really experience wilderness and experience wildness.”

She also argues that national forests offer a line of defense against floods.

“In the coastal plain, we’re experiencing a lot of flooding and we’ve developed so much land that the water can’t sink in, and the water does sink in (in) forests,” Carey said. “Trees hold water. Trees hold carbon. So, the idea that we can go into these forests and cut roads and cut down trees is just, it’s horrifying for me on a personal level, but also it just doesn’t make any sense from a public safety standpoint, from an economic standpoint, from a habitat-preservation standpoint.”

In her June announcement, Rollins argued that revoking the rule will open “a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation’s forests.”

Nearly 30 million acres of inventoried roadless areas in the forest service system are in areas at high or very high risk of wildlife, according to the USDA.

“Rescinding this rule will allow this land to be managed at the local forest level, with more flexibility to take swift action to reduce wildfire risk and help protect surrounding communities and infrastructure,” according to an agency release.

But some question how the Forest Service, which already faces a lengthy backlog in maintaining existing roads within the forest system, will be able to adequately manage additional roads.

Limited resources, aging infrastructure and increased public use have delayed the Forest Service in regularly maintaining its roads, bridges, buildings and dams. The agency faces an estimated $8.6 billion in deferred maintenance costs.

Critics of the plan to erase the rule also point out that more roads could lead to more fires.

Nearly 85% of wildland fires in the U.S. are caused by humans, according to the Forest Service.

“Easier access to these places is not going to prevent fires,” Carey said. “It’s probably going to make it worse. In fact, fires are 90% more likely to be started within a half-mile of a road, so we probably should not be punching roads into places where we don’t want fire.”

Sooner than two months after announcing plans to rescind the Roadless Rule, Rollins issued a memorandum directing the Forest Service to prioritize energy projects on national forestlands based on output per acre.

“America has the resources and ingenuity to power our future without depending on foreign adversaries,” Rollins said in an Aug. 21 statement. “Under this memorandum, we are putting America First, ensuring that every acre of federally managed land is used wisely, balancing the needs for energy security with our responsibility to safeguard natural resources. We will no longer allow foreign-made solar panels or inefficient energy projects to undermine our national security.”

Environmental groups argue that paving the way for oil and gas production on national forestlands would unnecessarily put rich, biologically diverse forest areas at risk and create the potential for pollution and oil spills.

It was the massive scale of destruction in the North Carolina mountains after Hurricane Helene last year that spotlighted how advantageous microgrids — small independent power grids — can be to communities that have suffered disasters.

After horrific flash floods from the storm that hit Sept. 27 inundated many of Asheville’s roads and buildings — and nearly all of its vital utility infrastructure — critical help soon arrived from the New Orleans-based nonprofit disaster service Footprint Project in the form of mobile renewable power.

An estimated 1 million western North Carolinians lost power in the storm. Many were also left without running water, food and shelter.

“We saw the value in what they were doing, in deploying small-scale solar and battery storage to help communities that lacked access to power, water and telecommunications,” North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association Executive Director Matt Abele told Coastal Review. “And so we jumped in right away and helped to fundraise for them to be able to expand the amount of work that they were doing in that part of the state.”

Apparently, the practicality and flexibility of the technology also impressed officials with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality State Energy Office, which on Aug. 12 announced a $5 million investment to provide accessible post-disaster emergency power with permanent and mobile microgrids.

“Hurricane Helene showed us that we need to be prepared to withstand severe weather emergencies,” Gov. Josh Stein said in a press release announcing the plan. “That means rebuilding our energy infrastructure with resilience in mind.”

Along with NCSEA and the Footprint Project, the state energy office will collaborate in the project with Land of Sky Regional Council, as well as a network of regional partners.

With as many as 24 stationary microgrids that would be installed across six western counties affected by Helene and two mobile Beehive microgrid hubs, one on the coast, the other in the mountains, the project is intended to fill critical needs in communities statewide.

Essentially four large shipping containers with solar panels on top of the outside and battery storage systems inside, each Beehive — the “Hive” — operates independent of the stationary power grid. Smaller mobile solar-equipped trailers — the “Bees” — are dispatched to affected areas to provide power for essential services such as water filtration stations, charging stations for phones and other devices and hotspots for internet through cellular or satellite connections.

Abele said that NCSEA became familiar with Footprint through its relationship with Green Tech Renewables, a nationwide distributor of solar and battery storage that had partnered with the Hawaii Solar Energy Association and Footprint in responding to Maui wildfires.

Abele said his organization reached out via email to Footprint as Helene was approaching the mountains. As it turned out, the large scale of the damage and the randomness of impacts from the storm really highlighted the value of the Beehives being able to go where needed.

“I think that’s the beauty of having a setup like these Beehive microgrids, where you can charge mobile equipment,” Abele said. “Because only investing in permanent infrastructure, it’s like trying to essentially find a needle in a haystack and predict exactly where the next storm is going to hit, versus having the equipment on hand and ready to go, to be deployed to where that next storm is.”

Green Tech’s Raleigh location had solicited donations of solar panels and other supplies, as well as raised funds to purchase products such as photovoltaic wire and batteries, and trucked it to western North Carolina to support Footprint Project’s work, as described in an article published by Elizabeth Ouzts for the nonprofit news site Energy News Network in October 2024.

According to the article, by late December the group had built about 50 microgrids throughout mountain communities. That was the most ever since it started in 2018 in response to founder Will Heegaard’s experience two years earlier working as a paramedic in New Guinea and struggling to find power to refrigerate blood supplies.

Heegaard, today operations director for the Footprint Project, which he founded with partners Jamie Swezey and Nate Heegaard, said the group is working toward replacing the fossil-fuel-powered generators that have long been serving communities after disasters with battery-charged solar panels. Not only are Beehives and Bees not dependent on fuel supplies, they’re quiet and clean.

“Responders use what they know works, and our job is to get them stuff that works better than single-use fossil fuels do,” he told Energy News Network. “And then, they can start asking for that. It trickles up to a systems change.”

Even if the microgrids don’t outright replace those generators, Heegaard added, they can supplement them, helping fuel supplies last longer.

The state’s grant will provide about two beehives with mobile equipment and permanent installations with fixed solar and battery storage that would be attached to either local government buildings or nonprofit center or other location where people congregate after a storm, Abele said. 

“And so those are all really important decisions in terms of where that investment is being made, to ensure that it is being made in a place that people will go and serve the community appropriately,” he said.

“Because the worst-case scenario is, you walk down a path of investing, and then deploying infrastructure, and then that infrastructure sits unutilized during a natural disaster because it’s inaccessible,” he said.

According to the state, the Land of Sky Regional Council, part of the Appalachian Regional Commission, will soon begin purchasing the Beehive microgrids, and site selection for the microgrids is to begin this fall. The stakeholder engagement for the installation will take place in September, and project completion is anticipated in June 2027.

One of the most significant reasons that solar-powered microgrids like the Beehive hadn’t  found much traction in the U.S. is because of the high cost of batteries, Abele explained.  But now, he said, the price of batteries — similar to what happened earlier to solar panels — has decreased about 92% in the last 15 years, making the much-improved technology affordable.

“We’ve seen sort of a smattering of these projects on an ad hoc basis, but not a comprehensive strategy around deploying this equipment,” he said.

In addition to the proposed Beehives, there have been other smaller microgrid projects in the state, including on Ocracoke and plans in Charlotte.  

“But aside from that, there aren’t a ton of examples that you can point to in other states,” Abele said. “And so I think North Carolina really is going to be a leader in setting the example for recovery after a natural disaster.”

The North Carolina Solar for All (EnergizeNC) Community Advisory Board is scheduled to meet virtually Wednesday.

Board members are expected to discuss program design details, including workforce development, consumer protection, outreach and communication, financial incentive design, and program eligibility, according to a N.C. Department of Environmental Quality release. The full agenda is available on the Solar for All Community Advisory Board webpage.

EnergizeNC in April 2024 was awarded $156 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to expand access to residential and community solar in low-income and disadvantaged communities in the state. The aim of the program is to lower energy costs for participating residents, create jobs, and provide access to reliable, affordable energy to families.

The coalition anticipates launching services to households later this year.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s State Energy Office, in collaboration with the NC Clean Energy Technology Center, the NC Clean Energy Fund, and Advanced Energy, lead the coalition.

The meeting is set to begin at 10 a.m. The public may join via Webex, meeting number/access code 2435 088 7195, password SFACAB2025 (73222220 when dialing from a phone). To join by phone dial +1-415-655-0003 US Toll, +1-904-900-2303 United States Toll.

An in-person listening location will also be open in Green Square, 217 West Jones St., Raleigh.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality State Energy Office has opened the public comment period for the Weatherization Assistance Program’s annual state plan.

The program serves residents in low-income and disadvantaged communities save energy, reduce their utility bills and stay safe in their homes.

The public comment period opened Monday and ends April 21.

In addition to the plan, the public may also comment on the accompanying revised proposed Training & Technical Assistance Plan, Health & Safety Plan and Weatherization Installation Standard Work Specifications, all of which are being considered for adoption.

A public hearing has been scheduled for 1 p.m. April 17 at the DEQ Green Square Office Building on Jones Street in Raleigh, as well as virtually.

The hearing officer may limit the amount of time a speaker may comment to accommodate the total number of speakers.

Written comments can be sent by mail to the NCDEQ Weatherization Assistance Program, 1613 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-1613, or by email to seo.publiccomments@deq.nc.gov, with “2025 Weatherization Comment” in subject line. 

Public comments must be postmarked, emailed or delivered in person to the State Energy Office by April 21.

The plans are available for review at www.deq.nc.gov/wap-hearings. Physical copies of the plan are also available for viewing at any of DEQ’s regional offices.

Duke Energy’s Brunswick Nuclear Plant officials announced this week that they plan to test the outdoor warning sirens on Wednesday morning.

The quarterly test is scheduled to be conducted between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.

All 38 sirens within 10 miles of the plant outside of Southport will sound at full-volume between 5 and 30 seconds.

Some sirens may need to be tested more than once to ensure they are functioning properly and and follow-up testing post siren maintenance may be required after 11 a.m.

Officials with Brunswick and New Hanover counties, who are responsible for sounding the sirens, cooperate in the testing.

Routine siren testing does not include interruption of regular programming to broadcast Emergency Alert System, or EAS, messages.

In the event of a real emergency at the plant when sirens would be sounded, information and instructions would be broadcast to the public through local radio and television stations.

Additional information about the outdoor warning sirens is available at duke-energy.com/NuclearEP.

The N.C. Department of Environmental Quality’s State Energy Office wants to hear your ideas on how the state can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Beginning later this month, the department will kick off a series of public engagement meetings where participants will be provided information and may give feedback on DEQ’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction initiatives.

Those initiatives are going to be part of the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant’s Comprehensive Climate Action Plan.

The state received a $3 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency for the planning phase of the plan, which will target reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful air pollutants.

North Carolina’s planning project is a collective effort being led by DEQ that also includes the Department of Transportation, Department of Commerce and Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Last year, the state submitted its Priority Climate Action Plan in which it identified North Carolina’s highest priority greenhouse gas reduction measures. Discussion at the upcoming meetings will be based on the measures identified in that plan.

The plan is to be used in updating and expanding existing climate strategies in the state, “ensuring that these policies align with the latest available science, modeling and best practices,” according to a DEQ release.

That plan is due to the EPA later this year.

Public engagement meetings will run through March and will be provided both in-person and virtually.

Register for the sessions using this form.

The first meeting will be held virtually on Feb. 25 at 6 p.m. To join online go to: https://ncgov.webex.com/ncgov/j.php?MTID=ma5fde5df2dec2c062946bf9fc374d93a

The meeting number is 2432 204 2273 and the password is CPRG2025.

To join by telephone dial +1-415-655-0003 or U.S. toll +1-904-900-2303 and enter access code 2432 204 2273

The first in-person meeting will be hosted Feb. 27 at 6 p.m. at the Lumbee River Electric Membership Corporation, 6090 NC Hwy 711, Pembroke.

The following meetings will be held next month:

• 5 p.m. March 6 at the Cumberland County North Regional Public Library, 855 Mcarthur Road, Fayetteville.
• 6 p.m. March 13 at Western Piedmont Community College, 1001 Burkemont Ave., Morganton.

Meetings in northeastern and southeastern North Carolina are also planned, but dates were not announced.

A formal public comment period on the draft plan will open in August.

Members of the public may also provide feedback via email to cprg@deq.nc.gov with “CPRG Comment” in the subject line, or via voicemail by calling (919) 707-8672.

For additional information about the grant program and to view previous public information sessions visit the CPRG webpage.

Less than two weeks after Inauguration Day, the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Blue Economy Index plummeted to almost 10% of its historical high.

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, where on Day 1 he immediately began firing off a slew of executive orders unraveling those of his predecessor, clearly spooked investors of ocean-related economic activities.

But that’s not an atypical reaction when a newly seated president is certain to create upheaval in terms of policy changes, according to Dr. Miran Hossain, UNCW’s associate professor of finance.

Hossain doesn’t suspect it will last because, as he puts it, “you can’t deny the ocean.”

“Policy uncertainty does affect the market volatility,” Hossain said. “I totally believe that the underperformance that the index is showing, it’s definitely because of investors panicking and not knowing what’s going to happen for the next four years, at least in terms of the policies.”

The UNCW Blue Economy Index went live a year ago, debuting as a first-of-its kind benchmark that tracks companies that earn revenue through the use of ocean resources. This can be anything from cruise lines to offshore energy companies — oil, gas or wind — to container shipping, marine equipment and construction.

The index was developed in collaboration with the UNCW Cameron School of Business, UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or CIE, and CIE’s Alliance for the Blue Economy.

The index, ticker: BLUEECO for those of you who check the Bloomberg terminals, specifically focuses on companies that use sustainable practices.

Last September, the index hit a historical high with better than 7% growth.

After screening thousands of companies from around the globe, the UNCW Blue Economy Index’s creators pared down the number to about 90. The index gauges how these companies are performing by combing their stock prices into a single number, which tracks their combined daily value.

The index essentially tells us about the health of blue economy, whether good or bad, and in which direction it’s going, Hossain explained.

“Why it’s going in a certain direction, that’s something to look at even more because it could be because of some policy. It could be because the companies are really not doing well because of some reason that we don’t know,” such as a company’s earnings, he said.

For that reason, it’s too early to conclude why the UNCW Blue Economy Index has been a low performer compared to some of the typical, larger indexes like the MSCI All World Index, S&P 500, and S&P 500 Industrials, since Trump’s election.

Yet there’s no doubt Trump’s second term is having an effect.

Hossain recently provided a snapshot of the index’s performance in pockets of time between Election Day and Trump’s first week back at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

The S&P 500, which is a kind of measure of the overall U.S. economy, earned about a 4 to 4.5% gain during the week of Nov. 5, 2024. The MSCI All World Index, one that’s more representative of the university’s Blue Economy Index because it, too, includes the stocks of companies from around the world, had about a 2.3% gain.

UNCW’s Blue Economy Index’s performance that same week eked out at only about 1.5%, making it the worst performer of out of any of its comparable benchmarks.

“It’s just a short time period, I agree, but it is also good to just zoom in and see what happened during that period of time,” Hossain said.

Fast-forward to Trump’s first week back in office, where he signed dozens of executive orders impacting policy on everything from immigration and climate change to offshore energy, the Blue Economy Index showed a return of around 0.6%, compared to the other benchmarks, Hossain said.

“So, certainly not a good picture for the blue economy,” he said. “I’m expecting this policy shift is the major reason, but still not coming to a conclusion before looking deeper at these companies.”

This is where UNCW students enrolled in the Blue Economy Index course come in. They’re being tasked with analyzing and researching individual companies in the index to determine what’s been happening with them during the last two to three months.

Hossain was asked what advice he might have for blue economy investors.

“That’s a tough question,” he said.

The blue economy is not strictly clean energy-producing companies. It’s not purely green.

So the fact that sustainability isn’t expected to be promoted under the Trump administration will not have as much of an effect on the blue economy as, say, a solar company.

“We do need this huge marine transportation system,” Hossain said. “We do need the ports. If we look at in long-term perspective, you can’t deny the ocean. You can’t do business without keeping the ocean and the waterways in your equation. When these uncertainties ease up and we have a better idea about the tariff situation, where the Trump administration is going in that regard, I think we’ll have a better idea and the index would probably start going back to where it was.”

NAGS HEAD — Imagine that a hurricane skirted the coast, causing the power to go out. You wait for the green light to blink on your backup power. Getting the all-clear, you flip on the switch connected to the community’s wave-powered alternate generator, and your refrigerator is humming again.

That creative concept is still a distant fantasy in 2024, but it’s the kind of need-inspired brainstorming that a new $3.6 million National Science Foundation community-oriented wave energy project encourages. Launched on Sept. 27, scientists at the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese will be seeking input from folks around Nags Head to use toward developing and deploying practical wave-energy technology on the Outer Banks before the end of the five-year project.

“The goal is to present two or three potential technologies and get (community) inputs to really see whether or not this meets their need,” Eric Wade, assistant professor in the Department of Coastal Studies at East Carolina University, which includes the CSI campus, told Coastal Review recently.

Researchers from ECU will partner with the University of Michigan, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Virginia Tech on the project, with focal communities chosen in Michigan at Beaver Island and in North Carolina at Nags Head.

While Wade said it’s not yet likely that alternate sources of energy could be produced in Nags Head, other marine energy could be more conceivable for the Outer Banks at this stage. Some examples he cited were use in desalination, powering autonomous underwater vehicles and marine aquaculture.

“The introduction of this technology will not lower the electricity bill,” he said. “It will not have this massive transformation. It may be at a very small scale.”

In a substantive way, the new National Science Foundation project builds on two ongoing research projects that CSI is part of: the NC Renewable Ocean Energy Program and the Atlantic Marine Energy Center. The important difference, Wade explained, is that the main objective of the new project is to converge different components of the community — engineering, sociological and environmental — so they can “speak” with each other.

“The local context will drive the extent, and in my opinion, will drive the feasibility of convergence, because we need to be able to design technologies that meet the needs of communities,” he said.

“And so, what this project is trying to do is see how can we get them to be on the same page, to be able to move marine energy, and specifically wave energy, forward,” Wade said.

Each of the components communicate in different “languages” and have different requirements for their disciplines, he added. “The difficulty and what is unique for this project is that bringing those together requires a lot of work and a lot of intentional talk.”

Wade said the goal in the next two years is to have community sessions that will bring together representatives from different sectors of the communities to share their perspectives and priorities.

“We’ll then take all of that information, go back to the community, consolidate, do some analysis,” he said.

The building and deployment work on the selected technology will be done for remaining three years. The big picture, ultimately, is all part of the what marine energy scientists call “powering the blue economy.”

The blue economy is broadly defined as economic activity driven by or based on the world’s oceans. And as Wade noted, the U.S. is hustling to catch up with the more advanced blue technology of Europe.

Lindsay Dubbs, a UNC research associate professor based at the institute, is collaborating with Wade on the project. She is focused on environmental and ecological assessments. That work, she said, involves devising frameworks for analyzing environmental impacts of potential marine energy developments, as well as best practices for reducing negative impacts.

Dubbs, who also serves as associate director of the NC Renewable Ocean Energy Program and the Atlantic Marine Energy Center, said their project team includes student researchers, as well as colleagues from Virginia and Michigan.

“We’re also communicating a good deal with communities in Alaska who are already implementing wave energy technologies in their communities,” she said. “We have this community advisory group that is comprised of people from all of those different communities, and the two study sites that we’re focusing this convergent research on are Beaver Island and Nags Head.”

Waves on the Outer Banks are powerful, but they’re not as big as waves on the West Coast, Dubbs said. That’s mainly because of differences in the water depths approaching the coasts. “The power density of the wave resource — how much energy can be harnessed — within an area on the West Coast is much greater.”

But, she countered, a large area of the North Carolina coast has untapped wave energy resources that could at least provide energy for niche markets. And that could include backup power. But on the East Coast and the Outer Banks, generation would be more likely occur at a community scale, not at utility scale like on the West Coast.

The project team is just starting conversations with the community groups to understand their perspectives, wants and needs for a wave-energy source, Dubbs said. But rather than advocate for a particular technology, the team’s intent is to help the community decide on the type of technology that meets their needs. Part of that process has to consider trade-offs, she said, and whether it’s worth harnessing the available energy, and if it can be done “in a manner that our community supports” that poses the least environmental risk.

“It’s so abstract and theoretical that it’s sometimes hard to really imagine what’s possible,” she said. “The exciting thing about wave energy right now, is just about everything is being imagined. But as far as coming to convergence on something that will make it more economically viable and less abstract — that’s difficult.”

The federal agency that identifies offshore wind energy areas is in the early stages of siting another possible commercial lease sale for the East Coast.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management held an open house last week at the Crystal Coast Civic Center in Morehead City, the first in the multiyear, multistep planning process for Central Atlantic 2. BOEM manages development of the U.S. outer continental shelf energy, mineral and geological resources.

BOEM Project Coordinator Seth Theuerkauf explained that the agency has just begun the work to identify lease areas in the Central Atlantic region.

“We’re at the call area stage, the first step of our process,” Theuerkauf said, adding that what’s really driving the effort is the remaining offshore wind energy needs for North Carolina and Maryland.

Officials on Aug. 22 published in the federal register the call area, which is 13 million acres off the coasts of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, and launched the 60-day public comment period that ends Oct. 21.

BOEM has scheduled open houses over the coming weeks in the other states plus a virtual meeting from 6 to 8 p.m. Oct. 2. Register for the Zoom meeting online. This meeting will feature presentations and offer a chance to comment.

North Carolina has a goal for 8 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2040 and need 3 more gigawatts of lease area to meet that goal. This process is intended to try to identify those lease areas – about 185,000 acres — that would help North Carolina meet its goals. Gov. Roy Cooper’s office established the goal in 2021 with executive order 218.

The call stage looks at a broad area, between 3 nautical miles offshore, where state and federal waters meet, “all the way out to 60 meters, which is basically as deep as you can go and have fixed foundations for offshore wind turbines,” Theuerkauf said.

The intent of this stage is to gather as much information as possible to help identify resource or use conflicts in the call area, Theuerkauf said.

BOEM is building the project on the momentum of the wind energy lease sale that took place in August and included two areas, one off Virginia and one off of Maryland and Delaware. The call area for that sale included offshore Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, between the Virginia line and Cape Hatteras.

For the second round, Theuerkauf said the boundaries are being extended.

“The state of North Carolina indicated interest in looking at areas further south from Cape Hatteras, down to that South Carolina, North Carolina border. Again, we’re really looking for enough lease area to meet those state goals. We know there’s a lot of conflict, there’s a lot of usage, military activities, vessel traffic, natural resource considerations. And that’s really the information we’re trying to gain to identify and narrow.”

Some of the activity in the ocean that could conflict with an offshore wind energy area are military training activities and are areas that are important to vessel traffic, called fairways. The Coast Guard is working through the process to identify fairways and once those are established, these paths will be “no-go zones for offshore wind energy.”

Theuerkauf said other conflicts include fisheries, in terms of avoiding areas where there’s higher levels of fishing activity.

In all, “there’s really a whole lot that goes into the process” of determining an offshore wind area, Theuerkauf added. “We’re partnering with NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science to basically build a spatial model that takes all that information into account and is able to tell us on this sort of red-yellow- green scale, where are those areas that are best or worst based on all of that information.”

He said there’s also an expert focused on viewshed considerations. “We typically have applied coastal setback” for viewshed, Theuerkauf said, which is basically establishing a distance that wind energy areas had to be from land. “The state of North Carolina shared that 20 nautical miles is their recommended coastal setback.”

Theuerkauf said the next stage in the process is to identify draft wind energy areas. That process is essentially to narrow down the call area to smaller, less-conflicted areas. Those draft wind energy areas would go back out for public comment.

Along with Theuerkauf to explain the spatial modeling were Bryce O’Brien and Alyssa Randall with NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science. Randall said they gather lots of data on all possible conflicting uses and categorize that information into submodels to run a suitability model to determine the best spot is to site a lease.

O’Brien said the submodels — constraints, national security, industry, fisheries, wind, and natural and cultural resources — are combined and that’s how they determine the area with the lowest number of conflicts.

Mid-Atlantic Regional Council on the Ocean, or Marco, Communications Director Karl Vilacoba, said while gesturing to a map of the Central Atlantic region that MARCO has online a free, publicly accessible mapping site that shows “pretty much anything you can imagine at sea, including where vessel concentrations are, fishing grounds, sensitive habitat, real life distributions. People can use the portal to see how all these things relate to each other, and in some cases, conflict with one another, so that people in ocean management worlds can make better informed decisions.”

He said that the portal “gives the public a chance to look at a lot of the same information that the agencies are using to make their decisions.”

MARCO Executive Director Avalon Bristow added that while MARCO is not a program of BOEM, it works in partnership with BOEM and other federal agencies, states and other stakeholders “who are interested in the ocean to present information that might be useful to understand how decision making is made offshore.”

From a fisheries perspective, Thomas Moorman, a scientist with BOEM, said that different types of fisheries-related information is taken into consideration that would affect the suitability for a potential site.

For instance, data from the National Marine Fisheries Service that illustrates where commercial fishermen are going for specific species is incorporated.

“We look at like density of areas where fishing is occurring, and we do that by species,” which helps inform siting an area. “If we think about siting this area, what are the main fisheries that would occur here? And how does a potential sale interact with the fisheries that occur here?” Moorman continued. They take that information to form the question “is this an area where we should or shouldn’t consider for a lease sale?”

BOEM Marine Biologist Jeri Wisman said that when it comes to how offshore wind projects affect endangered species, she spends a lot of time explaining the impacts to marine mammals, particularly the related noise and vessel traffic, and mitigation strategies.

Another consideration, BOEM environmental specialist Lisa Landers explained, that is taken into consideration is how an offshore wind energy lease could impact cultural resources.

With the open houses and public comment period, “We’re looking for information, any recommendations regarding areas that we should avoid — or should we provide consideration to specific setbacks or buffers — anything that should be taken into consideration,” and that includes known shipwrecks, archeological sites “anything that is culturally significant,” Landers said. “Also, we are taking into consideration the visual impacts to historic properties. So, there are national historic landmarks, lighthouses, historic districts along the coast that could be visually adversely impacted future offshore wind energy development.”

To give an idea of what the viewshed would be like, John McCarty, a landscape architect with BOEM, had designed simulations of what the viewshed would look like for wind turbines at different offshore distances. By illustrating the potential visual impacts, McCarty said it gives the public an opportunity to comment on what distance is acceptable for them from a visual standpoint.

Getting the power generated by wind turbines to the shore is another part of the puzzle, particularly what uses exist between a possible lease area and land.

BOEM Renewable Energy Program Specialist Josh Gange said the wind turbines produce energy that is then transferred to an offshore substation. The power is transmitted from there by an export cable buried under the sea floor to a point of interconnection onshore, which is typically another substation, and that’s where that power is then distributed throughout the existing grid.

BOEM economist Jayson Pollock said that overtime as technology evolves, there’s bigger output and more efficiencies are created but, like with anything, there’s tradeoffs. The further away from shore that a project is developed, the higher the cost will be and “I think that’s a very important point.” It costs more money for boats to go the distance, to manufacture longer cables, for example.

Vessel traffic is another conflict taken into consideration. BOEM oceanographer Will Waskes said that the Coast Guard is in the process of codifying fairways offshore for large ships, especially those traveling to and from ports. Once the fairways are formalized through the rulemaking process, the highways for ships will be considered conflicts for wind energy areas.

Jennifer Mundt, the assistant secretary for Clean Energy Economic Development under the North Carolina Department of Commerce, was on hand to answer questions from the state level.

Mundt amplified that the state is appreciative of the “collaborative spirit that BOEM brings” and the effort to solicit feedback from the public. “I think this is really important for a transparent process.”

In a follow-up call, Brian Walch with BOEM’s communication office told Coastal Review that the reception was positive from the 40 or so that attended. They seemed interested in the information and wanted to know more about the lease siting process.

It can take as long as a decade to develop a wind project from when there’s the first review of a possible lease area to when there could be any project actually in operation.

“BOEM is meticulous,” and thoroughly looks through the public comments, Walch said. Adding the team puts a great deal of effort in public outreach, like the open houses. There are four more for this round and “it’s a pretty significant undertaking” to get the staff and representatives in one place but BOEM feels that it is a responsibility to communities and to individuals.

Comments can be submitted until 11:59 p.m. Oct. 21 in writing by using the portal at regulations.gov or by mail to Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Office of Renewable Energy Programs, 45600 Woodland Road, Mailstop: VAM-OREP, Sterling, VA 20166.

EDENTON — No ribbon-cutting or silver shovels wielded by a few politicians would represent the scale of North Carolina’s second land-based wind energy operation. Instead, Apex Clean Energy invited hundreds of community members, landowners and government officials to join them Wednesday morning on Chowan County farmland to a sign a prone, 242-foot-long silver turbine blade to kick off Timbermill Wind, a project to generate 189 megawatts of electricity with 45 three-bladed turbines.

After being shuttled in buses to the 6,300-acre site from Edenton United Methodist Church, where a breakfast event was held, folks lined up, chatting amiably while waiting to scribble their names on the blade.

First up, a man in a slate-blue suit and green tie strode up to the blade with a fat blue marking pen in his right hand. Reaching up while contractors watched, he wrote his name in large, looping cursive letters: Roy Cooper. Then, under his name he added “governor” and turned to the crowd, grinning widely. Everyone cheered and the signing commenced. Before long, about 250 different signatures covered the length of the blade.

One name, Sadie B. Eure, stood out just to the right of Cooper’s signature. That’s his mother-in-law’s name, said Donald “Randy” Park, pointing at the blade.

Eure and her late husband, Garland, who had three daughters, operated Eure Seed Farms in Perquimans County, Park said. Sadie Eure owns 300 hundred acres at the Timbermill site and has a lease agreement with the company for the turbines on her land.

Park, a retired farmer who lives in Belhaven, said that most of the farmers who grow crops such as soybeans, corn, cotton or wheat at the site are pleased with the project because they can still farm around the turbines, while also collecting regular payments.

“The majority are,” he said. “There are a few that are unhappy.”

Some don’t like the way the turbines look, he said.

“I don’t think they’re an eyesore,” Park said. And the payments enable farmers to be profitable, especially when the weather is not cooperating.

Eure, who is 93, started leasing her land to Apex about 8 to 10 years ago, Park said, collecting $1,587 a month. He doesn’t know what the monthly rent will be once the facility is operational, “But it’ll be a whole lot more than that.”

“It helps to have an extra income,” he said. “She’ll be passing this on to her heirs, too.”

Chowan County has also benefited from the project and will continue to for its operational life, which is expected to be about 30 years.

“We are in effect greatly expanding our tax base in one fell swoop,” Gene Jordan, chair of the Chowan County Board of Education, told the audience at the earlier event at the Edenton church.

Jordan, who is a farmer, said that the wind energy helps diversify their resources while supporting the community and the landowners.

“My family will be able to host seven turbines,” he said. “I’m optimistic we will be able to farm for years to come.”

In addition to creating 200 jobs and generating about $25 million spent with North Carolina businesses during its construction, the project is expected to provide up to $33 million in tax revenue over its lifetime.

The project, delayed by numerous glitches including the COVID-19 pandemic, took 11 years to complete, which Apex CEO Ken Young said is about twice the time it typically takes to build a large wind farm.

“It’s coming back to life,” he said, comparing it to a cat’s nine lives.

Sprinkling his description of the project during his speech at the church with words like “fortitude” and “blood, sweat and tears,” Young credited his team and its partners. “That spirit and dedication is why we’re here today with a $500 million facility, fully developed, financed and well under construction,” he told the audience.

Apex will own and operate the facility when it is completed later this year, the company said in a press release. Last year, Timbermill announced a power-purchase agreement with Google, which will contribute to the clean energy needs to offset energy usage at its data centers.

“Google is buying the output from this project,” Young clarified in a later interview.

Most of the project’s difficulties, besides the pandemic, were to be expected, said Richard Bunch, Apex project representative and retired director of the Edenton-Chowan Chamber of Commerce. “It was all permitting issues,” he said, adding that there were lots of discussions with the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. military that were worked through.

But whatever the bumps in the road, Bunch said Timbermill Wind is an asset for the county.

“It’s tremendous,” he said in an interview after the signing. “The occupancy tax this year is probably going to its highest ever,” he said, citing revenue related to construction. “Fuel sales, rooms, food — it just goes on and on.”

Even after the project is completed, Bunch said there will six or seven full-time staff employed locally by Timbermill.

Dr. Ellis Lawrence, who has served on the Chowan County Board of Commissioners for 14 years, said after the signing that the revenue created by the project is already being reflected in the county’s plan to build a new high school. And the county’s tax base will continue to have an annual infusion of $1.3 million from the project.

“We have watched it go full circle,” he said. “We have dealt with the ups and downs.”

In the beginning, a lot of people were calling in opposition, he said. But now most residents seem to have come around to be in favor of it.

“I was there when it started. I’ve heard it all,” he said. “In the beginning, they were talking about the bird killings, the noise that it would make. This is nothing like that. And the science is behind it. It’s more efficient. This is an alternate source of energy and we need to take advantage of it.”

Cooper applauded local, state and federal efforts working together for the success of the project.

 “When you talk about clean energy, a lot of times people think about climate change,” he said at the church event. “But what it’s really about is great-paying jobs and a cleaner environment.”

WILMINGTON — The N.C. Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Air Quality said Wednesday it had granted a Title V air quality permit to CTI of North Carolina Inc. for its newly acquired Wilmington Terminal.

On Dec. 1, Colonial Terminals Inc., a division of Savannah-based Colonial Group Inc., acquired the Buckeye Terminal at 1312 S. Front St. on the Cape Fear River. The terminal, which has about 550,000 barrels of storage capacity, is next to an existing bulk terminal that CTI owns and operates.

The new air quality permit increases the permit class for the facility from synthetic minor to Title V, which the division said was required due to the ownership change. CTI of North Carolina’s neighboring major source bulk chemical terminal with its own Title V air quality permit at 1002 S. Front St., and the former Buckeye Terminal are now considered a single entity for permitting purposes.

The division said the new permit does not include any physical or operational changes. CTI plans to continue operating the Wilmington Terminal facility with the existing throughput limits and existing control devices, including vapor combustion units that reduce emissions of volatile organic compounds. Emissions will not increase, officials said.

As a major source Title V facility, the Wilmington Terminal, according to the division, is now subject to more frequent inspections and more stringent reporting and recordkeeping requirements. The final permit includes conditions that ensure ambient levels of all pollutants beyond the facility’s fence line comply with emission standards, including applicable health-based standards.

CTI said in December that the deal increased its storage infrastructure in Wilmington to more than a million barrels, 70 acres and over a half mile of river frontage. The terminals store products including industrial and specialty chemicals and petroleum.

“Wilmington is a gateway to the growing Southeastern US market, and we believe this acquisition strongly positions our team to support current and new customer growth far into the future,” said CTI President Ryan Chandler, in the December announcement.

With the addition of the new facility, CTI now operates seven terminals, five in Georgia and two in Wilmington, with a total liquid capacity of approximately eight million barrels and a total dry capacity of approximately 200,000 tons of vertical storage, 400,000 square feet of covered flat storage, and significant outside storage acreage. Each terminal is strategically located in close proximity to a world-class container port and provides access to ocean and landside (road and rail) logistics networks, as well as global and regional sourcing and distribution pathways.

The division said it conducted enhanced public engagement to solicit comments on a draft of the air permit, sharing project information in English and Spanish with local governments, health departments, places of worship, schools, day cares and community organizations.

Division staff thoroughly reviewed the comments received and addressed all comments in the final permit review, according to the announcement.

Copies of the final permit, final permit review, final environmental justice report, permit application, and a one-page project fact sheet are available online.

Residents near the Brunswick Nuclear Plant by Southport will likely hear the outdoor warning sirens scheduled to be tested starting at 10 a.m. Wednesday.

The 38 sirens within 10 miles of the plant will sound for 5 to 30 seconds.

To ensure they are functioning properly it may be necessary to test some sirens more than once, officials with Duke Energy and Brunswick and New Hanover counties, who are responsible for sounding the sirens, announced Friday.

Because this is a test, local broadcasting stations will not interrupt regular programming to broadcast Emergency Alert System messages. “If there was ever a real emergency at the plant requiring the sirens to be sounded, local radio and television stations would broadcast information and instructions to the public,” officials said.

For more information about the outdoor warning sirens, residents can refer to information available at duke-energy.com/NuclearEP.

PBS North Carolina is holding a special screening of a film featuring residents who are adapting to the changing climate.

“State of Change: Seeds of Hope” will be shown at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 4. There is no charge to attend the event to be held in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh and virtually, but registration is required.

Part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative, the film set to premier on PBS NC April 22 shows how “these innovators are facing the challenges of climate change with perseverance and ingenuity,” the release states.

Frank Graff, producer and host of PBS North Carolina’s “Sci NC,” is to moderate a discussion with the following panelists to provide an up close look at climate change issues after the screening:

• Michelle Lotker, executive producer, “State of Change: Seeds of Hope.”
• Kathie Dello, director, NC State Climate Office, co-director, NOAA’s Carolinas Climate Adaptation Partnership.
• Mary Alice Holley, director of community innovation, Conservation Trust of North Carolina.
• Steve Kalland, executive director, NC Energy Collaborative.
• Ajulo Othow, founder and CEO of EnerWealth Solutions, attorney and board member, Center for Progressive Reform.
• Jacob Rutz, lecturer of agroecology, Department of Environmental Studies, Elon University.

The showing is being supported by the North Carolina Science Festival and in partnership with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Enviva, a wood pellet producer with a huge economic and environmental footprint in North Carolina, is teetering on the edge of financial collapse.

In a continuation of months of bad financial news for the multinational corporation, Fitch Ratings, a global credit-rating agency, last week downgraded Enviva Inc.’s default rating and unsecured debt rating, reflecting a missed interest payment on Jan. 16 of $24.4 million.

“This development follows worsening operating losses and Enviva’s announcement last fall of substantial doubt regarding its ability to continue as a going concern,” Fitch said in its Jan. 19 report. “Considerable uncertainty exists regarding Enviva’s ability to renegotiate uneconomic customer contracts entered into 4Q22 and the company’s related $300 million liability.”

Enviva is now in a 30-day grace period, the report said. If the interest is not “cured” next month, it said, the company is at risk of default and also is vulnerable to further rating downgrades. 

“Obviously, they are in dire straits,” Scot Quaranda, communications director with Dogwood Alliance, an Asheville-based environmental group and major critic of Enviva, said in a recent interview. “They bet on their own future in the futures market and they failed.”

But it’s not yet known what the impact of the Maryland-based company’s fiscal woes could be to the state and the rural communities where thousands of workers are employed.

Bryant Buck, executive director of the Mid-East Commission, which provides support to local governments in Hertford, Bertie, Martin, Beaufort and Pitt counties, said he had not heard that Enviva was having financial difficulty, but he said the potential of job cuts or operation downsizing is a concern.

“Any business loss in Hertford County certainly sparks my interest,” he said. “We want to do everything we can from our role in helping them. We really want to keep our economy going in all of our regions.”

An Enviva spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the company’s situation.

“At this time, we have no further comment beyond the information that is already publicly available on our IR website,” Maria Moreno, Enviva’s vice president of communications and public affairs, said in an emailed response to Coastal Review.

According to Enviva’s website, manufacturing plants in North Carolina, which are operated around the clock, seven days a week, are located in Ahoskie, Hertford County, where the permitted annual production capacity is 410,000 metric tons; in Garysburg, Northampton County, with 750,000 metric tons of permitted capacity per year; and in Faison, Sampson County, with 600,000 metrics tons permitted per year. Each of those sites store and ship the wood pellets from the Port of Chesapeake, Virginia.

An additional site in Hamlet, Richmond County, is permitted to produce 600,000 metric tons per year, but those pellets are stored and shipped from the Port of Wilmington.

Other Enviva plants in the Southeast are in Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina and Virginia.

Elly Cosgrove, communications manager at North Carolina Ports, redirected questions about the business’s shipping to the company.

“Enviva has been a long-standing tenant at the Port of Wilmington and remains current on all their payments,” she said in an email response to Coastal Review. “We can only speak to the lease as we are the lease holder.”

As a result of the European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive issued in 2009, biomass — such as wood pellets — was classified as a renewable energy. That decision spurred rapid growth of the pellet industry in the U.S., largely in the Southeast.

Enviva describes itself as “the world’s largest producer of sustainable wood pellets, a renewable alternative to coal,” and a “global energy company specializing in sustainable wood bioenergy.” It also characterizes burning wood pellets as “a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels.”

But the global environmental community contends the industry is, if anything, a prime example of greenwashing, with its practice of clearcutting forests and creating air pollution.

“I can’t think of anything that harms nature more than cutting down trees and burning them,” William Moomaw, professor emeritus of international environmental policy at Tufts University, said in a July 2021 CNN article.

A November 2022 class action lawsuit against Enviva filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland by stockholders accuses the company of misrepresenting the environmental impact of its business as well as its financial integrity.

“Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) Enviva had misrepresented the environmental sustainability of its wood pellet production and procurement; (ii) Enviva had similarly overstated the true measure of cash flow generated by the Company’s platform; (iii) accordingly, Enviva had misrepresented its business model and the Company’s ability to achieve the level of growth that Defendants had represented to investors; and (iv) as a result, the Company’s public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.”

Despite the legal challenge, the company had around the same time announced plans to expand its footprint in the Southeast.

In 2022, Enviva applied to the state to expand production at its Ahoskie site by a third, to 630,000 tons a year.

Environmental justice advocates fought the proposal, saying that the facility was already polluting the air of the small community, which has a large population of Black residents.

In Feb. 2023, the state Department of Environmental Quality issued a modified permit to the facility that made expansion dependent on installation of new air pollution control devices to “substantially reduce emissions of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, and hazardous air pollutants, or HAPs. This equipment includes a regenerative thermal oxidizer and a regenerative catalytic/thermal oxidizer.

Ahoskie, which was Enviva’s flagship site, has been operating since 2011. Over the years, the state has provided incentive funds, including grants, to several of the sites.

The most recent report Enviva filed in 2022 with the North Carolina Department of Commerce, a requirement of businesses that receive incentive funds, did not reveal any compliance issues, said communications director David Rhoades.

Still, the department is concerned, he said, with “any employer” and its workers in the state.

“We’re aware of the press reports and we monitor performance on a regular basis,” Rhoades said about Enviva.

Kevin Patterson, interim Hertford County manager, said that the county had not received a required notification of any layoffs at the Ahoskie plant, making it difficult to anticipate potential impacts to the community.

“Until we have an idea of what may or may not happen, it’s hard to know what a projection would be,” he said.

But for the time-being, Enviva’s standing, is on shaky ground.

According to a recent USA Today Network article, the company’s stock price has plummeted from about $87 a share in April 2022 to about 80 cents a share in January 2024. Quaranda, with Dogwood Alliance, said it’s possible that Enviva could completely shut down, or the company could find a way to renegotiate its contracts, among other adjustments.

“Without any kind of regulatory pressure to do things right, it’s hard to believe that they’ll not do whatever it takes to remain solvent,” he said.

But the industry has always been “a house of cards,” Quaranda said.

“It’s a false premise to cut down a bunch of trees, burn it, and call it renewable energy,” he said.

The North Carolina Oil and Gas Commission meets 1 to 3 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7, in Raleigh.

The meeting will take place in the ground floor training room of the Green Square building, 217 W. Jones St.

Members of the public may attend in-person or online. Register to attend virtually or call 984-204-1487 to listen by phone. Use access code 206 481 881#.

An agenda and supporting documents will be posted before the meeting on the commission website.

Among its duties, the commission has the authority to regulate the spacing of wells for oil and gas exploration, establish areas where oil and gas drilling can occur, and limit the production of oil and gas exploration. The commission is required to submit annual progress reports to the Joint Legislative Commission on Energy Policy and the Environmental Review Commission.

Employees with state Department of Environmental Quality serve as staff to the commission and enforce rules that the commission adopts.

Note to our regular readers: Coastal Review will not publish Dec. 23-27. Our next edition will be Dec. 28.

Pender County commissioners have narrowed the areas where solar farms may be developed, a move county officials say is not intended to be unsupportive of the alternative energy source, but gives them time to “properly regulate” it.

Commissioners unanimously amended a portion of Pender’s zoning text Dec. 5, less than a week after a California-based solar company filed a lawsuit against the county for turning down the company’s request for a special-use permit to build a 2,360-acre facility in the western part of the county.

Coastal Pine Solar LLC sought the permit to develop a proposed 200-megawatt farm on timberland within an area of the county zoned rural agricultural, or RA.

The freshly adopted text amendments to the county’s unified development ordinance no longer allow “other electric power generation” to be developed by way of a special use permit in RA, residential performance and planned development zoning districts. “Other electric power generation” includes solar, wind and tidal-generated power.

“Since there’s no special-use permit their only option as far as pursuing a sight plan approval for solar would be to go through the conditional rezoning process,” Justin Brantley, Pender’s interim planning and community development director, said during the board’s Dec. 5 meeting. “At that point the planning board and board of commissioners have far more flexibility approving or denying those projects or requiring specific conditions.”

The amendments also stripped large-scale commercial alternative power generation as a use allowed by right within the county’s industrial transitional and general industrial zoning districts. A special-use permit must now be obtained to develop in those districts.

Brantley said the county’s land use plan “strongly supports” the adoption of specific standards for alternative energy development within the county.

Such standards could include requiring setbacks, buffers, maintenance plans and decommissioning plans. A majority of Pender’s neighboring counties have at least some combination of those special standards in place.

Brantley said Pender residents who’ve spent their lifetimes living in rural parts of the county may not be ready for “that type of change,” or what a large-scale solar farm might bring.

“That’s why we want to explore text amendments that support stronger buffers, requiring a vegetative buffer, nondisturbed, around the perimeter, preservation of wetlands, setbacks from wetlands, that sort of thing,” he said. “Pender County highly values its agricultural heritage here and while we may encourage solar farms to some extent we want to find a balance there to balance those existing agriculture uses and new forms of energy.”

“This is not saying that Pender County does not support solar farms,” said Commissioner Chairwoman Jackie Newton. “It’s just properly regulating” it.

In a court petition filed Nov. 30 in Pender County Superior Court by Coastal Pine’s attorneys, the company states it presented “voluminous written materials, expert reports, and the testimony of five expert witnesses” to show all of the county’s standards had been met to obtain a special-use permit.

That evidence was presented during a Sept. 19 hearing before the board of commissioners.

In the end, commissioners disregarded the evidence, did not base its findings on the county’s special-use permit standards, and misapplied a provision in the county’s zoning ordinance, according to the lawsuit. Coastal Pine presented the county with a decommissioning plan.

The suit also states that one county commissioner, through his own admission during the September hearing, said he’d spoken with farmers “and those conversations had an impact on him.” Coastal Pine’s attorneys call those conversations, which the commissioner disclosed after the public hearing, “improper” and caused him to pre-form an opinion.

“Evidence in zoning quasi-judicial matters is defined and treated the same as evidence in court,” Tom Terrell Jr., an attorney representing Coastal Pine, wrote in an email responding to questions earlier this week. “Opinions are not considered evidence, and judges are not allowed to base their decision on unsworn testimony from the man on the street who has not heard the evidence and whose statements are not subject to cross-examination.”

Terrell, a Greensboro-based attorney and partner with Fox Rothschild LLP, said in a Dec. 19 email he was not aware commissioners had adopted the zoning text amendments.

Coastal Pines asks the court to reverse the board of commissioner’s decision and remand with instructions to issue the special-use permit.

Pender County hosts several solar farms, including a 675-acre, 105-megawatt facility that generates energy to international pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk.

According to the Solar Energies Industry Association latest published data, North Carolina is ranked fourth nationally in solar power with more than 8,000 megawatts of solar installed, enough to power more than 955,000 homes.

The total solar investment in the state is $11 billion.

WANCHESE – The federal government recently announced new offshore wind energy lease areas off the North Carolina coast, but for Dr. Mike Muglia, assistant director for science and research with the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Program at the Coastal Studies Institute, there is tremendous additional potential for power generation in the ocean’s waters.

Much of Muglia’s research focus has been on how ocean currents can be harnessed, and he said the potential is huge, and while the obstacles are big too, the Gulf Stream could be the largest single focused source of renewable energy identified to date.

“That’s all the water in the Atlantic Ocean that’s flowing north on the surface layer,” explained Muglia, who spoke during a recent Science on the Sound lecture. “Drive the rest of the way across the Atlantic Ocean and the water’s coming back south. You’re moving about 30 times the flow of all the rivers on Earth off Cape Hatteras in the Gulf Stream, an immense amount of energy and volume of water.”

The monthly lecture series at the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus examines coastal topics and issues relevant to the state’s northern coast. Each lecture is also livestreamed and archived on the institute’s YouTube channel.

Standing in front of a map showing the confluence of the Gulf Stream, Labrador Current and the boundary waters, Muglia said the Outer Banks is an outstanding location for ocean studies.

“We happen to live in one of the best places in the world for oceanography and the coolest, most exciting place ever,” Muglia said. “We have this huge confluence of all these different water masses occurring right off of Cape Hatteras in our backyard.”

There is an extraordinary amount of energy in those water masses, he said, and ocean energy in general is a resource of almost extraordinary potential that could represent a significant third renewable energy resource joining wind and solar. But the technology is still in its infancy, Muglia noted.

“It’s a pretty new industry, which is why it’s not necessarily cost-competitive with wind and solar that have been around for 50 or 100 years,” he said.

Research to bring down the cost of generating ocean energy is moving forward. One of the advantages ocean energy offers is the range of options.

Muglia said it appears straightforward, but it’s not that simple. 

“I’m a physics guy. I work with engineers, and we all think the same, which means, ‘All right, let’s see how much we have out there. Where’s the best wave resource? Where should we go put this thing and then how can we build something to get that energy?’ We think that’s all there is to get energy. And that’s totally wrong,” he said.

A big obstacle is developing mechanisms to capture and convert ocean energy and transmit it to the power grid.

“This is a really new endeavor,” he said. “There aren’t people building wave energy converters. We need to bring those people up to speed on what we’re actually doing and teach them, and then they’ll surpass us. “

If grid-level ocean energy production is still years in the future, there are already smaller devices that Muglia is working on that may have commercial application. Two devices in particular, a tethered coaxial turbine and an ocean kite may have commercial potential, and prototypes are being tested.

Developed by a North Carolina State University team, the coaxial turbine looks like a torpedo that is tapered at both tips. It features two rotors, one at each end. When deployed, the turbine will be tethered and operate at an angle — yawed — to the current. The rotors counterrotate to eliminate the torque that would occur if both rotors were to turn in the same direction.

“The reason that it’s yawed is that you can get fresh flow on both rotors,” Muglia said. “If you had a line with the current the second rotor would be in the turbulence of the first. This way it gets clean flow on both rotors.”

The device was recently tested at Lake Norman, a hydroelectric dam reservoir that covers nearly 1,800 square miles, where it was towed behind a boat to simulate an ocean current.

“Lake Norman has these long fetches of very deep water where we can tow for a long time and simulate the current on them,” Muglia said, explaining why the devices were tested at that location.

The Lake Norman prototype was equipped with a generator. The next deployment of the coaxial turbine is planned to take place in waters near the Coastal Studies Institute and will test the device’s ability to desalinate the water.

“The one we’re going to test in our backyard has a pump, so it can do reverse osmosis by pumping water from the device up the line to a reverse-osmosis system,” Muglia said.

The other device, the underwater kite, may be closer to actual application than the coaxial turbine, although it’s not clear whether the public will be seeing it in use any time soon.

With primary design work done by Chris Vermillion at NC State, the Ocean Kite System for Marine Hydrokinetic Energy Harvesting, as it is officially known, will move through the water in in a figure-eight motion, collecting and transmitting energy along its tether.

The ocean kite may be the first of the ocean current-harvesting systems to be deployed. Muglia explained that the kite is part of a project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which is looking for ways to power an unmanned submarine. The submarine, called the Manta Ray, is designed for stealth movement and minimal drag as it maneuvers beneath the surface.

Desalination technology

Although much of the research Muglia described is focused on how to harness the ocean’s power for energy production, there are other areas of research that use wave action without necessarily generating or storing electricity.

Waves to Water, held at Jennette’s Pier in April, was a National Renewable Energy Lab-sponsored competition calling for relatively lightweight, easily assembled systems that can produce clean drinking water using only wave energy. The lab’s overview described the devices as, “small, modular, wave-powered desalination systems capable of providing potable drinking water in disaster relief scenarios and remote coastal locations.”

Muglia and his team at the Coastal Studies Institute organized the deployment of the four systems during the competition, and all produced fresh water. The winning entry, from Canadian company Oneka Technologies, was able to produce 1,000 liters of water per day.

What may be most remarkable though, is the Oneka system used only the power of the waves to pump water through a membrane. There was no electric-powered pump onboard.

“This device pressurizes water and forces it through a semi permeable membrane so it’s not making electricity,” Muglia explained. “It’s just using this giant device as a pump. And when Trip (Taylor, a research assistant at the institute) got on this to activate it. He said it was incredible because as soon as a little wave hit it, it was like these big lungs just going and just pumping.”

While the applications of ocean energy are still in their infancy, especially for generating power to light homes and businesses, George Bonner, director of the Renewable Ocean Energy Program, has been pushing the microgrid possibilities of ocean energy since he joined the institute in 2019.

Muglia, responding to a question about that technology, expressed support for his colleague’s goal.

“Ultimately, what we’d like to do is to take the energy that we’re getting from these devices and put them in charging stations for cars in the parking lot. That’s what George is hellbent to do and we’re all with him.”

North Carolina’s environmental regulatory agency should require large-scale hog farms to use cleaner technologies when storing the animals’ waste so it can be converted to energy, according to environmental groups legally challenging the state’s new general biogas permits.

The Environmental Justice Community Action Network and Cape Fear River Watch are taking to task the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, challenging the agency’s digester waste management system general permits, which allow concentrated feeding animal operations, or CAFOs, to use what the groups call “outdated” lagoon-and-sprayfield systems.

The groups argue that storing untreated hog feces and urine in capped pits then spraying the waste onto fields produce more harmful emissions, polluting air, waterways and groundwater, a drinking water source for rural communities in which these operations occur.

DEQ’s general biogas permit, which went into effect July 1, lacks protections to account for that additional anticipated pollution, strips residents of the rural, largely Black, Hispanic and low-income communities where the hog farms are located from being able to engage in public input, and fails to comply with state law requiring cleaner technology, opponents argue.

“We think it’s DEQ’s obligation under the law to require whatever cleaner technology is best for a particular hog operation because the scale and size of these hog operations that may apply for the biogas general permit vary significantly,” said Blakely Hildebrand, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, or SELC.

As of Sept. 27, 2021, 15 out of more than 2,083 permitted swine facilities in the state have one or more animal waste digester systems, according to information on DEQ’s website. A little more than half of those are in Duplin County, where pork giant Smithfield Foods and Dominion Energy have plans to build a biogas facility.

Digesters are used to convert manure into biogas, which produces naturally when microorganisms break down organic matter in an oxygen-free, or anaerobic process.

According to the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center, biogas created through the anaerobic process consists of about 60% methane gas.

Methane-based biogas can be converted to renewable natural gas through a process that increases the methane concentration from about 60% to 96% while reducing the gasses’ moisture and carbon dioxide content, according to the center’s website.

Environmental and community groups say the lagoon-and-sprayfield system offers the least environmental protection because the ammonia and other gases trapped in covered lagoons will produce higher amounts of nitrogen, which gets sprayed onto farm fields when the lagoon-and-sprayfield system is used.

Covered lagoons can contain up to 3.5 times the amount of nitrogen as uncovered lagoons, according to the Colorado State University Extension.

“Because this permit could apply to numerous hog operations it raises a lot of concern among community members and the conservation community around additional pollution that will result from this permit,” Hildebrand said.

She made clear that the groups are not recommending one specific technology.

“There is certainly room for an anaerobic digester in an overall waste management system that addresses both the climate crisis as well as the underlying pollution and sickness that is caused by storing billions of gallons of hog waste in giant pits in the ground and then spraying it on fields,” Hildebrand said.

Take, for example, Premium Standard Farms Inc., a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, which operates a CAFO in northwest Missouri that uses an advanced nitrification and denitrification system.

This system is designed to reduce odor, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide air emissions from wastewater treatment sources and the amount of nitrogen sprayed onto the land by at least 50%.

Sherri White-Williamson, cofounder of the Environmental Justice Community Action Network, pushed back against suggestions the group wants to put an industry out of business. Rather, she said, they want the industry to be more responsible for the environment in which the residents they represent live.

“A general permit is a one-size fits all system, regardless of the number of animals you have,” she said. “That doesn’t seem to make good environmental sense. At the very minimum we would like to see the denitrification system that has shown to be better for taking care of the toxins that come out of this process. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.”

DEQ also should step up its monitoring requirements from once a year to at least quarterly, she said.

DEQ’s own Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board in written comments to the agency called for monitoring.

The four individual biogas permits the state issued to hog farm operators last year, “do not require any regular air or water monitoring to assess the nature or volume of any emissions or discharges or the impact thereof on public health or the local environment,” according to the board.

Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette did not return a call seeking comment, but he stated in a news release that the North Carolina General Assembly’s passage of the Farm Act of 2021 and DEQ’s general permit, “are just the latest in a long line of decisions that ignore the devastating effect that the hog industry has on our environment. Far from a solution to our climate crisis, this permit gives industry a rubber stamp to keep polluting our air and water rather than holding them accountable to the law.”

Related: New laws: Biogas, clean water funds in budget; rule tweaks

Smithfield Foods has partnered with Dominion Energy to invest more than $500 million in biogas development in North Carolina, Virginia and Utah.

The companies have formed Align Renewable Natural Gas LLC, which is proposing to link 19 farms in Duplin and Sampson counties through a pipeline to a facility in Duplin County.

The Southern Environmental Law Center filed the legal challenge on behalf of the groups July 29 in the North Carolina Office of Administrative Hearings.

This is the latest challenge against the state’s biogas permits, which apply to swine, cattle and wet poultry operations. The general permit for swine may be obtained by existing operations of 250 or more hogs.

In January, the SELC filed a complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of the Duplin County branch of the NAACP and North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign, launching an investigation into whether the state’s issuance of four biogas permits violated civil rights.

Hildebrand said the EPA has not made an announcement, but she hopes to hear something soon.

“It’s easy to talk about these abstract contexts of biogas making pollution worse, but I think what’s also really important to remember in all of this is that people live near these hog operations,” Hildebrand said. “They have dealt with this noxious odor and polluted water and dirty air for decades. There’s a real human cost to this permit and to industry’s insistence on doubling down on the very harmful lagoon-and-sprayfield system. This is a significant environmental justice issue in eastern North Carolina and one that demands and deserves the attention of our elected officials and the agency that is charged with protecting the environment and the health of people who live in the state.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to address climate change will not stop North Carolina’s law that requires power-generating facilities to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

But the highest court’s ruling has broader national implications that will be felt most certainly in the Tar Heel State, environmental law experts say.

In a 6 to 3 ruling last month in the case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the court found Congress did not give the agency authority to cap carbon dioxide, or CO2, emissions to the point that it would force electric utilities to shut down coal-fired power plants and move to renewable energy alternatives, including wind and solar.

The authority that the ruling stripped from EPA was granted to the North Carolina Utilities Commission last year under House Bill 951.

The measure, which Gov. Roy Cooper signed into law in October 2021, requires the North Carolina Utilities Commission “take all reasonable steps” to reduce CO2 emissions emitted in the state from electricity-generating facilities owned or operated by electric public utilities from 2005 levels by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

The law allows the commission, at a minimum, to consider power generation, transmission distribution, grid modernization, storage energy efficiency measures and technology breakthroughs to achieve compliance.

The legislation gives the commission a wide variety of ways to achieve emissions reductions, explained Ryke Longest, clinical professor of law at Duke University School of Law and co-director of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic.

“That section of that bill is doing a lot of work that was objected to by the majority of the Supreme Court opinion of West Virginia versus EPA,” he said. “That includes things like moving from coal fire to solar and saying that you’re going to have to retire some coal plants and you’re going to have to increase solar. That’s all authorized under this law.”

The commission has until Dec. 31 to develop a plan to achieve those CO2-reduction goals.

Don Hornstein, law professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Law in Chapel Hill, responded in an email saying the Supreme Court’s decision does not affect the EPA’s ability to continue regulating coal- and gas-fired power plant emissions of conventional pollutants.

“These power plants are incredibly dirty, forgetting about GHG (greenhouse gases) altogether,” he wrote.

Hornstein referenced the 2006 public nuisance lawsuit then-N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper brought against the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, which owned coal-fired power plants in Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama.

Cooper filed the lawsuit after EPA denied the state’s petition to use the Clean Air Act to force the utility to reduce its air pollution.

A federal judge in North Carolina in 2009 ruled that emissions from three of TVA’s plants in Tennessee and one in Alabama were public nuisances. TVA appealed, and the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the lawsuit.

North Carolina asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the appellate court’s decision, but withdrew the petition for review after TVA agreed to settlement with the EPA in 2011.

The settlement required the company to invest in pollution controls at 11 of its coal-fired plants and $350 million in clean energy and efficiency projects.

“Although that lawsuit was based largely on nuisance law, EPA has huge amounts of power to continue to regulate fossil-fuel plants’ emission of mercury, particulates, other ‘criteria’ and toxic emissions and my understanding is that EPA is already well along that path of forcing such power plants to comply with the existing law, all of which will only increase the price of power from such plants and amplify the cost savings that come from a utility’s switch to solar, wind, and possibly other non-GHG sources of electricity,” Hornstein said. “There’s also nothing in the Court’s opinion that impedes more and more North Carolinians taking a second look at rooftop solar themselves, a round of second-looks that recent changes in NC law has only underscored.”

But the North Carolina law, in Longest’s view, falls short because it does not take into account environmental justice, particularly when it comes to the public participation process.

“The process itself needs to be inclusive and intentionally inclusive and the process the utilities commission uses is none of those things,” he said. “It’s a secure docket that you have to register with the state to have the opportunity to participate on. The orders are written in fairly complicated legalese. You basically have to be a lawyer with some expertise in utilities law even to be able to understand what’s going on, and so I think there is a problem from an environmental justice standpoint, which is that the process itself is not in line with environmental justice in mind.”

In a Jan. 24 letter to the North Carolina Department of Administration, Longest and William Barber, III, a board member of the Department of Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board and director of climate and environmental justice at The Climate Reality Project, noted that 17 people had signed up to the docket since it was opened in October 2021.

Those who signed up were either state officials, electricity producers or large industrial users, according to the letter.

“It is absurd and circular logic to solicit people’s feedback about involvement using a subscription-based docket mechanism,” the letter states. “The only folks who got notice of this request for feedback about the process were those few who were already subscribed.”

Longest said he does not believe the letter has had much of an impact in the process.

Whatever plan the Utilities Commission devises to reach the state’s carbon emission reductions goal, the state cannot avoid the effects of climate change on a broader scale.

Hornstein concluded his email stating that, for North Carolina, “at the coast especially, on the front lines of climate change, our continued vulnerability to unprecedented rainfall storms, hurricanes, sea-level rise, will remain, after West Va v. EPA, only as good as the GHG-reduction efforts of OTHER states, no matter how successful we are within our own borders at GHG reductions. That is the real handicap that West Va v EPA imposed on everyone.”

As weather-related disasters impact shorelines throughout the world, there is an increasing need to know how to respond. The physical devastation, the loss of power, communication — all of it is part of the recovery process.

But nothing happens without clean water, something George Bonner, director of the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program at the Coastal Studies Institute in Wanchese learned in 1998 when he was serving with the Coast Guard.

“I was in Puerto Rico after Hurricane George back in ’98. We lost power and water. You realize that power is important but maybe more important is to go the toilet and take a shower. It’s kind of like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — water’s way out there in my mind, above electricity.”

But how can fresh water be produced if there is no energy in the power grid.

Addressing that problem was at the heart of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Waves to Water Prize, the final phase of which was held April 3-6 at Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head. Four competitors took to the waters off the pier, deploying wave-powered desalination devices. The devices worked as expected, producing fresh water from seawater, and provided much-needed insight into how to improve systems, said Scott Jenne, the National Renewable Energy Lab principal investigator for the Waves to Water Prize.

“This competition shows that wave-powered desalination systems are capable of supplying clean water to people in coastal locations, including in disaster-recovery situations,” he said in a statement from the lab after the event.

“These teams deserve a lot of recognition for doing something that very few people in wave energy have ever achieved. They all built functioning in-water prototypes,” he wrote about the competition in an email response to Coastal Review. “There’s still a long road to go before we understand every challenge, but we learn a lot every step of the way.”

The CSI team was responsible for deploying the devices. Dr. Mike Muglia and Dr. Lindsay Dubbs, both working with the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program, were lead investigators for the project and handled getting the devices in the water. According to Muglia, there were numerous challenges involved with that.

“There was the logistics of getting all the equipment and for a project that we haven’t done before,” he said. “There was lots of different delays with supply chain issues for the competitors, as well as some of the companies that rent us the cranes and deliver the cranes and set up the fence (for the deployment area at the end of Jennette’s Pier).”

The biggest challenge, though, may have been the weather. The devices were placed in the water April 3, and that night and into the next day the winds gusted to more than 30 knots with waves breaking in the deployment zone at the end of Jennette’s Pier. For the competitors, it was the first time in the water experiencing conditions so harsh, and all four devices broke from their moorings and had to be retrieved.

“Figuring out how to build a mooring for the whack in a breaking wave, which is what we experienced, I think was a surprise for them,” Muglia said.

The devices were retrieved — two on land and two at sea but accessible.

Regardless of the weather, what the competitors accomplished was what the National Renewable Energy Lab had hoped would happen.

“Every team was able to produce drinkable water from the ocean using nothing but wave energy,” Jenne wrote, adding, “Very few individuals have ever done that outside of a lab environment.”

Competitors were vying for several awards, including a grand prize of $500,000 that went to the Canada-based Oneka Technologies Snowflake. The design also was awarded an additional $125,000 prize for producing the most water: 1,000 liters per day. If used only as drinking water, that would be enough to sustain 400-450 people per day.

Perhaps most remarkably, all the units that were put into the ocean used readily available parts.

“Operationally, you don’t want to have really fancy, complex parts,” said Dragan Tutic, CEO and founder of Oneka Technologies. “So, the whole system is made with a readily available things you can buy at the hardware store.”

Oneka has been working with wave-powered desalination since 2017 and was the company with the most experience in building and deploying the units, and most with much larger capacities. The Snowflake, however, has an important role.

“It’s our small-scale unit that’s intended for emergency relief, that’s easy to ship and deploy with really minimal equipment,” Tutic said.

The harsh conditions at Jennette’s Pier were a test for improvements that had been made earlier in the year on an earlier version of the Snowflake.

“Snowflake 2 that was deployed in North Carolina, that one has a much stiffer float which, even in the very harsh condition — the system itself is still pretty intact,” Tutic said. “There are some minor things that we corrected, but the device itself as a whole, it was very resistant to even the very harsh conditions.”

Originally scheduled for five days, the Jennette’s Pier completion had to be shortened because of weather conditions. However, Muglia was quick to note that the information learned will be invaluable.

“It was definitely not a failure,” he said. “We’re going to learn how we could make these better and move forward.”

Jenne with the National Renewable Energy Lab echoed the point in his email, saying the conditions were something they knew they would eventually have to face. “The conditions we saw have already informed NREL and the Water Power Technology Office at DOE what research we need to focus on next,” he wrote. “There’s still a long road to go, but we learn a lot every step of the way.”

Prize winners

The Oneka Snowflake took home the $500,000 grand prize, and the team received an additional $125,000 for producing the most water with their device.

Another $125,000 was awarded to Team Water Bros, whose members hail from the University of North Carolina Charlotte, for delivering the lightest device.

And $125,000 was disbursed among the four teams for the Simplest Assembly award. The amounts awarded, based on the time taken it took each team to assemble its device, were as follows:

• Oneka: $80,000
• Mark Zero Prototypes, LLC: $20,000
• Water Bros: $17,000
• Project 816: $9,000

Finally, $125,000 was also distributed among the teams based on the ease of deployment and retrieval for each device. The awards were as follows:

• Mark Zero Prototypes LLC: $38,000
• WATER BROS: $36,000
• Project 816: $26,000
• Oneka: $24,000

Since the teams were unable to test their devices for the full five-day window because of foul weather, each will have the opportunity individually test their own device again in North Carolina this summer.

Guest commentary

This is the second in a commentary series by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.

The most recent International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report made clear that we are running out of time to stymie the worst impacts of climate change. The report demonstrates that harmful climate impacts — such as worsening storms, extreme heat, and rising sea levels that threaten North Carolina’s iconic coast, to name a few — will worsen faster than we have time to adapt. But there is still hope — a small window of time left to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and invest in resilience to avoid the worst impacts of our warming climate.

Thankfully, North Carolina has committed to do its part in combating climate change by reducing climate warming pollution, but a new report from Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) shows a substantial gap between the state’s pledges and policy results. Gov. Roy Cooper will need to take decisive action, or North Carolina risks falling short of reaching its own climate goals. 

Gov. Cooper has taken steps to signal North Carolina’s leadership on climate policy by joining the U.S. Climate Alliance and issuing Executive Order 80 in 2018 and Executive Order 246 in 2022. These orders established important climate targets for the state — committing to reduce emissions across the economy by 40% by 2025 and achieve at least 50% reduction by 2030, respectively. Gov. Cooper’s orders also set targets for zero-emission vehicle sales, and called on the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality to develop a Clean Energy Plan (CEP), which recommended that the state reduce carbon pollution from the electric power sector 70% from 2005 levels by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. In late 2021, these power-sector targets were codified in House Bill 951, which requires the North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC) to take all reasonable steps to reduce power sector carbon pollution in line with the CEP recommendations. A process to chart the pathway to achieving that goal is currently underway, and will be adopted at the end of this year.

North Carolina has kicked off a series of important pledges and plans, but the true test of climate leadership is found not in plans and pledges, but in delivering results. Success requires moving from setting targets to deploying policies that drive down pollution. EDF’s new analysis shows that with current policies in place, North Carolina will not reduce emissions at the pace and scale necessary to meet EO 80’s 2025 or EO 246’s 2030 goals. In fact, after 2025, climate pollution levels are projected to remain flat or potentially rise in the long-term. With the policies in place as of May 2021, North Carolina is projected to reduce emissions 27% from 2005 levels by 2025, short of EO 80’s 40% reduction target. Depending on future costs and economic trends, emissions will stay at that level, or potentially increase, bumping the state back to just 16% emissions reductions from 2005 levels by 2030, and leaving a sizable gap to reaching the state’s climate goals. Even if North Carolina achieves the power sector carbon reduction targets set by HB 951 without delays, the state could only achieve a 28% to 38% reduction across the economy by 2030, still well short of EO 246’s 2030 target of cutting emissions in half.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) own projections for 2030 shows a comparable gap between projected climate pollution levels and the state’s targets. These two analyses demonstrate that even while there is some uncertainty in future emissions trajectories, it is evident the state is not on track to achieve its targets. 

Coupled with the recent warnings from the IPCC, these reports underscore the urgent need for swift policy action to close the emissions gap. Because greenhouse gas emissions remain in the atmosphere and continue to warm the planet for decades after they are emitted, early cuts in pollution will be essential to averting the most harmful climate impacts. 

To build upon the foundation of the state’s climate goals, Gov. Cooper should swiftly implement policies that curb emissions in line with his Executive Orders. Since clean electricity is key to cleaning up other sectors, like transportation and buildings, implementing a strong Carbon Plan and complementary policies that consistently drive out fossil fuels and expand clean energy will be a “make or break” factor in achieving both power-sector and economy-wide goals. And while EO 246 takes an important step in setting a goal to reach over 1.2 million registered zero-emission vehicles by 2030, North Carolina will need to act on policy solutions that can achieve those targets while simultaneously driving down pollution from existing fleets. Another plan coming out of EO 246, the “Deep Decarbonization Pathways Analysis,” due in January 2023, will also be important for identifying pathways to decarbonize sectors across the economy. Once this new information is made available, the Cooper administration should swiftly turn this plan into concrete action. 

Gov. Cooper has the opportunity over the next three years to use all the tools available to him to place the state firmly on the path to reduce climate pollution by at least 50% by 2030. Doing so would cement the state as a critical leader on climate action in the U.S. and globally; and, more importantly, would result in a cleaner, more climate-safe future for North Carolinians to live, work and play in for generations to come. 

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. See our guidelines for submitting guest columns. Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or the North Carolina Coastal Federation. Submissions may be edited for clarity.

Guest commentary

This is the first in a commentary series by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.

North Carolina’s coastal communities have a front-row seat to many of the most visible signs of climate change. As sea level rise threatens our coastal communities, and as storms and flooding become more frequent and intense across the state, it’s clear climate change isn’t something that’s coming — it’s something that’s already here.

When North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper signed Executive Order 246 (EO246) on Jan. 7, he sent an important signal that North Carolina is sharpening its focus on addressing climate change and creating a more equitable future. The directives of EO246 align the state’s climate ambitions with what the international scientific consensus tells us is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and seeks to better address environmental inequities that have long plagued the state, many of which are exacerbated by climate change.

While these goals are a critical first step for North Carolina to do its part to address the causes and effects of climate change, achieving these targets requires swift, tangible action to secure a healthier and more equitable future for North Carolinians.

Executive Order 246 is not the governor’s first venture into the climate space. Executive Order 80 (EO80), signed in October 2018, was Gov. Cooper’s first order committing the state to important climate pollution goals: reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 40% from 2005 levels by 2025.

Over three years later, EO246 builds upon the goals of EO80 by committing the state to reducing GHG emissions at least 50% from 2005 levels by 2030, and reaching net-zero GHG emissions as soon as possible, no later than 2050. The most recent order also adds complementary goals of getting 1.25 million zero-emissions vehicles (ZEVs) on the road by 2030, and for 50% of new vehicle sales to be ZEVs by the same year.

Raising the state’s ambition to tackle climate pollution economy-wide, EO246 sets the stage for action to complement the ongoing work to reduce pollution from the state’s electric power sector with the added focus on transportation. This expanded focus makes perfect sense, as the state’s recent GHG inventory affirms that electric power and transportation remain North Carolina’s top two sources of GHGs, together accounting for nearly 70% of the state’s total emissions. The GHG inventory demonstrates that there is much work to do to reduce the state’s current emissions levels in line with the goals for the new executive order. New policies and programs will need to be implemented quickly to accelerate pollution reductions and put the state firmly on a trajectory to reach these important goals. 

In addition to expanding upon emissions goals, EO246 aims to better incorporate environmental justice (EJ) and equity into the administration’s processes and decisions, striving to address disparate environmental and public health impacts among historically marginalized communities. Conversations regarding equity and climate are too often siloed, when in reality these issues deeply intersect, as communities of color, low-income and indigenous communities bear a disproportionate burden of pollution and are often on the frontlines of increasingly harmful climate impacts. EO246 provides a structure to consider these issues in tandem by directing cabinet agencies to consider environmental justice and equity in decision making related to climate change, resilience, and clean energy. 

To operationalize this goal, each agency is directed to designate an “EJ Lead” to spearhead these efforts, and to develop annual public participation plans, laying out how the agency will solicit and incorporate public input, particularly from frontline communities, into agency decisions. Agencies are also instructed to prioritize distribution of state and federal funds to invest in historically underserved communities and to advance health and economic equity. EO246 directs the convening of a third-party facilitated dialogue among state agencies and community leaders to ensure a trusted and holistic dialogue in order to identify opportunities to address the disproportionately harmful outcomes faced by impacted communities.

All of these proposals are an important step toward addressing environmental and public health challenges that will be exacerbated by the increasingly acute impacts of climate change. While these processes are important, the ultimate measure of success for EO246’s equity provisions will be the institutionalization of new behaviors, processes, and funding priorities to benefit impacted communities across all agencies – changing the way our state does business.  

Gov. Cooper has laid the foundation to leave a lasting impact on North Carolina communities through the goals and directives of EO80 and EO246. Now it’s time to make sure North Carolina gets there by listening to the most impacted communities, tracking progress and acknowledging shortcomings, and implementing new solutions to close the gap between where we are and where we are going.

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. See our guidelines for submitting guest columns. Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or the North Carolina Coastal Federation. Submissions may be edited for clarity.

This is part of a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held in November.

WANCHESE — At the start of year two of the United Nations’ Decade of the Ocean, the Coastal Studies Institute on the Outer Banks has merged into the emerging blue economy as part of a global scientific collaborative to harness the power of waves, currents and tides.

The Coastal Studies Institute, an outpost of the North Carolina university system renowned for its innovative coastal science, is partnered with three other East Coast academic institutions in the new Atlantic Marine Energy Center, or AMEC, one of only four National Marine Renewable Energy Centers in the country.

Although the new center is still being organized, it was officially announced in November. That’s about the same time that Scotland was hosting the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties, better known as the U.N. climate conference or COP26, which included the blue economy as a critical approach towards mitigating climate change impacts.

With its mission to support and expand sustainable renewable ocean energy, AMEC will focus on research and development.

“Us being part of that group, I think, really identifies us as a leader in the U.S. with advancing marine energy,” George Bonner, director of the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program at the Coastal Studies Institute, said in a recent interview.

Led by the University of New Hampshire, the partnership was awarded $9.7 million over four years from the U.S. Department of Energy. The institute, which is administered by East Carolina University, is also partnering with Stony Brook University in New York and Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

“Really it’s about increasing collaboration on the East Coast, and the focus of the Atlantic Marine Center is on the blue economy,” Bonner said.

Blue economy is a term that broadly describes the sustainable use of marine resources to promote economic growth and social equity while reducing environmental harm.

In opening a presentation during COP26 about funding the blue economy, Peter Thomson, the U.N. secretary general’s special envoy for the ocean, characterized marine energy and other sustainable uses of ocean resources as “part of the huge revolution in technology” on a scale comparable to moving from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.

“It’s just logic, folks,” said Thomson. “Seventy percent of the planet is covered by the ocean. Ninety-five percent of the biosphere of this planet is in the ocean.”

Thomson said it will take “trillions” to fund the blue economy, but he sees it as essential to transformation of consumption and production.

‘We’re at the cusp of that time when we move from linear exploitation of finite planetary resources into an age where everything is circular, where we recycle and understand that we have to live within harmony with nature,” he said.

In December 2017, the United Nations declared 2021-2030 “The Ocean Decade,” to ensure that ocean science can underpin the U.N’s climate goals and policies.

“The Ocean Decade provides a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity to create a new foundation across the science-policy interface to strengthen the management of the ocean and coasts for the benefit of humanity and to mitigate the impacts of climate change,” the U.N. said in a statement.

With its location alongside the Croatan Sound, a part of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary, the second-largest estuarine system in the nation behind the Chesapeake Bay, and within miles from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf Stream, the Coastal Studies Institute is poised to be a valuable partner to advancing the blue economy. 

Bonner said that he envisions the Outer Banks institutes’ focus with AMEC will include aquaculture, seawater desalination and increasing resiliency for coastal communities.

“Our main part of this new consortium is going to be to advance our testing capability that’s at Jennette’s Pier,” he said, referring to the state-owned ocean pier in Nags Head where the institute conducts some of its renewable energy studies. “We’re going to be installing a microgrid, which will allow us to connect scale devices to a microgrid so we can validate the energy production that they’re producing.”

An important gain for the institute from the new partnership will be obtaining accreditation for its marine energy program with the assistance of an AMEC partner, the European Marine Energy Centre, or EMEC, in Orkney, Scotland.

According to the European Marine Energy Centre’s website, the center, established in 2003, is the world’s first and leading facility for demonstrating and testing technologies that generate electricity from marine energy. It has also developed international standards for marine energy and works to promote a global marine renewables industry.

Once the Coastal Studies Institute and the University of New Hampshire’s programs are accredited, Bonner said, it will help innovators and developers, especially since there are still only a few accredited so far.

“If you’re testing in an accredited program, then that helps with advancing your technology and getting investment opportunities as well,” he said. 

In April, the Waves to Water competition, sponsored by the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Lab, is set to be hosted by the Coastal Studies Institute and Jennette’s Pier. The contest requires contestants to build wave-powered desalination systems that could be deployed during disasters.

Each of the four university AMEC partners have well-established marine energy programs, Martin Wosnik, associate professor of mechanical engineering and AMEC director, told Coastal Review.

“We’re going through establishing the center right now, developing the central structure, developing partnerships with industry and engaging with other marine energy efforts around the country,” he said.

Next, test sites for tidal energy conversion technologies and wave energy conversion technologies are to be established, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and off Jennette’s Pier on the Outer Banks, respectively. 

“Those facilities are key to really get technologies in the water in the correct environment at a fairly moderate cost,” Wosnik said.

For practical reasons, the locations in the ocean will allow testing at an intermediate scale, rather than full scale.

“You want to go in with something that has other meaningful scales, so you understand how it operates,” he said. “And then you can take development from there.”

The Atlantic center is also partnering with three national marine energy laboratories in the U.S., as well as the European center. While the European Marine Energy Centre is best known for its wave energy and tidal energy test sites, Wosnik said, the facility is now also getting more involved in the emerging hydrogen economy — hydrogen energy storage, fuel cell technologies — an example of how it’s looking at the bigger energy picture.

Powering the blue economy can be utility-scale marine energy, such as huge turbines deployed in arrays that produce energy that is fed to the grid, Wosnik said. But for now, it will be mostly reflected in smaller-scaled projects that provide energy to isolated communities or for emergency purposes.

“However, what we’re doing with EMEC, and at our test site, is we’re really researching all aspects of these technologies,” Wosnik said. “The center is not engaged in ‘OK, let’s find one thing that works and that’s it.’ There’s many things, many aspects of what type of technology, what type of rotors and what kind of blades work best.”

Then there are issues with corrosion, bio-fouling, operational maintenance, testing materials for resilience to the kind of loading that the ocean inflicts. What oils and lubricants are effective but not polluting?

“It’s a very turbulent environment,” he said. “There are many, many aspects that still need to be sorted out.”

But Wosnik said it’s worth remembering that wind energy, which is now cheaper than fossil fuels, was hardly on anyone’s radar 20 or 30 years ago.

The marine energy industry in the U.S. has been held back by the lack of test sites that allow inexpensive trials and provide in-water experience, he said. And that’s not including the costs for analytical and computer modeling and laboratory analysis and other work that’s required before the onsite testing.

“There’s a lot of work that leads up to maturing technologies to be ready to be tested in open water,” Wosnik said.

With the Department of Energy support, and a global network of researchers and scientists to collaborate with, the timing for diving into the blue economy may be fortuitous. 

“I would say that we are about to get serious about marine energy,” Wosnik said. “That’s really what’s happening right now.”

WILMINGTON – North Carolina is in a prime position to become a hub for offshore wind energy manufacturing and a major contributor to renewable power production on the East Coast, according to state officials and offshore wind energy experts.

The state’s potential to grab a big slice of the offshore wind manufacturing pie was highlighted last week during the inaugural meeting of the North Carolina Taskforce for Offshore Wind Economic Resource Strategies, or NC TOWERS.

Offshore wind manufacturing has the potential to bring an estimated $140 billion to the state and tens of thousands of new jobs by 2035, according to officials, who emphasized that, to make that happen, the time to act is now.

“Even if there were no (wind energy) activity off the coast of North Carolina there’s still a significant opportunity for North Carolina because of all the activity in all the other states,” said John Hardin, executive director of the N.C. Department of Commerce’s Office of Science, Technology and Innovation. “North Carolina is really well positioned to seize a lot of this activity and seize in a gentle, friendly sort of way and make sure we take advantage of the opportunity. North Carolina has the strongest manufacturing economy on the East Coast of the United States. It has the largest share of its GPD, gross domestic product, that comes from manufacturing of any other state.”

Hardin was one of several speakers at the meeting Thursday in Wilmington, home to the state’s largest port, which is poised to reap some of the potential economic benefits of offshore wind energy production.

North Carolina is currently the southernmost state on the East Coast for offshore wind development.

There are two federal offshore wind lease areas – the Wilmington East Wind Energy Area, or WEA, and Kitty Hawk WEA.

Development of the Kitty Hawk WEA, which could power upwards of 700,000 homes, is well underway.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is expected to lease the Wilmington WEA sometime this spring. This area could power more than 500,000 homes.

Both lease areas have the potential to generate upwards of 4 gigawatts of power. That’s the equivalent of four nuclear power plants.

Andy Geissbuehler, an advisory director with BVG Associates, a renewable energy strategic consulting firm based in the United Kingdom, said the state has an edge to managing a piece of future offshore leases.

“We’ve got approximately 20 gigawatts of projects which are active projects with lease areas,” Geissbuehler said, referring to all of the lease areas on the East Coast. “That is relative to a supply chain point of view. Twenty gigawatts, that’s really 20 nuclear power stations, totally clean with free fuel and I think that’s a fantastic opportunity.”

He explained to the task force that operational maintenance is nearly half of the lifetime cost of a typical 1-gigawatt windfarm.

The lifetime of a 1-gagawatt offshore wind farm is about 25 to 30 years, he said. At the end of that lifecycle, a wind farm can be repowered to operate another 25 to 30 years.

“This is a truly local business so I think this is an attractive opportunity,” Geissbuehler said. “Long-term jobs. Local jobs.”

Those jobs cross an array of fields from information technology, control and electrical systems to supplies like secondary steel, wind turbine foundations and the components needed to install those foundations.

Offshore wind manufacturing takes place largely in Europe, limiting currently the supply chain to developers in the U.S.

“Now the developers are saying, if we only had more suppliers, if we only had more ports, if we only had more shipyards,” Geissbuehler said. “It’s never balanced. It’s always a challenge. But I think for North Carolina, now’s really the time to fully engage and I think your task force is the right means to do that.”

NC TOWERS is a group of 30 stakeholders representing state and local governments; sectors of the fisheries, military and tourism industries; and universities that have been directed to advise Gov. Roy Cooper and state policymakers on advancing offshore wind energy projects with a focus on economic development and the creation of jobs.

The task force was established last June under Cooper’s Executive Order 218, which takes aim at addressing climate change through clean energy initiatives.

Cooper emphasized the offshore wind goals set forth in the order, which is to get the state to 70% reduction in carbon over 2005 levels by 2030 and to get to zero carbon emissions from the power sector by 2050.

“Why clean energy?” he said during the meeting. “It is essential to fighting climate change. We know that. It’s also essential because it’s going to put money in people’s pockets.”

He said that more than 100,000 clean energy jobs have been created and billions of dollars of investments have been made in the state.

In December, Toyota Motor North America announced it is locating a new $1.29 billion automotive battery manufacturing plant in Greensboro, where, beginning in 2025, it will be capable of delivering enough lithium-ion batteries for 200,000 vehicles, according to the company’s website.

Greensboro has also been picked as the new site of Boom Supersonic’s first full-scale manufacturing facility. Boom Supersonic, an aviation manufacturer that touts sustainable supersonic travel, is set to break ground at Piedmont Triad International Airport this year, with production beginning in 2024. The company has said it will add more than 2,400 local jobs by 2032.

Cooper noted that North Carolina is in the top five states in solar installed capacity.

“Now we need you in this room today to help us with the next steps, the next ideas, with the next opportunities and with advocacy at the end of the day because time is of the essence when we’re talking about offshore wind,” he said. “The earlier we can get into this the more we can reap the economic benefits from it. It is astounding the amount of clean energy we can produce and the amount of money that can go in the pockets of North Carolinians.”

The task force is to produce an annual report of its recommendations for policies and programs developing offshore wind energy projects; enhancing the state’s supply chain for offshore wind energy; creating and developing the work force to support offshore projects; and ensuring equitable access, particularly for underserved communities, to economic benefits created by offshore wind energy.

Members of the task force were asked to self-appoint themselves to one or more of four subcommittees: economic opportunity and business development; infrastructure and environmental justice and inclusion; outreach and engagement; and workforce, education and training opportunity development.

Department of Commerce Chief of Staff and NC TOWERS Chair Marqueta Welton said that money has not been allocated to the task force, but that the biggest resource of the task force is its members.

“We’re only limited by our imaginations because we can make some things happen,” she said.

The four-hour-long meeting last week ended with a question-and-answer session, one in which some task force members touched on topics that only scratch the surface of concerns raised by residents of coastal counties closest to the offshore wind energy lease areas.

One of those questions was about where energy produced from wind farms off the North Carolina coast will be connected to land.

“It’s a very prudent question,” Geissbuehler said. “We need to look forward and see where are the hurdles ahead of us. Some of these hurdles have a very long lead time to resolve because on the grid we always talk about the interconnection, per say, to be able to connect to a substation. I think that’s a well-known problem I’m sure that will be resolved, but the other challenge is how do we cross the beaches? How do we get under the bridges into the load centers?”

Other members of the taskforce briefly discussed how outreach will be particularly important to the fishing and tourism industries.

North Carolina Fisheries Association Executive Director Glenn Skinner touched on the concerns raised by fishermen about the potential impacts of offshore wind turbines to fish and other marine life.

Mike Blanch, an associate director with BVG Associates, said that concerns about fishery impacts are important to address, but said he is puzzled by such concerns because there is evidence from wind farms off the coast of England that suggest wind farms actually improve the environment.

“They stop dredging. They stop people fishing in unsustainable ways. They’ve actually created sporting areas for certain species,” he said.

Blanch emphasized a need for renewable energy’s impact on climate change.

“It’s important to realize that offshore wind is actually offering something very positive as well,” he said. “There is this wider issue of climate change. If you take one species like the right whale, you might be very concerned about that, but climate change is going to stress all of the species and offshore wind is one way, and there aren’t that many, of tackling the inherit problem of high carbon emissions and so there’s a bigger picture here that I think should help temper worries.”

NC TOWERS’ next meeting is scheduled for May 5.

This is part of a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held in November.

GLASGOW, Scotland — Until this year, methane hadn’t received the attention it deserved for being a huge source of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, despite being nearly as much to blame as carbon for overheating the planet.

Last month when the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Scotland elevated awareness of its danger to the global stage, the world was left wondering what to do about methane emitted not just from gas pipes, but also from landfills, food waste, agricultural operations and livestock.

“We’ve been working on methane for over a decade,” Fred Krupp, president of the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said in an interview at the “Methane Moment” pavilion at the climate summit, also known as COP26, shorthand for the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, nearly 200 nations that agreed to a climate pact in 1992. “This is the first time the issue has become prominent.”

Still, he said that the total amount of methane released in the atmosphere is only an estimate because of the difficulty not only capturing it, but measuring it. For instance, most of livestock-generated methane, a major global contributor, is dispersed from the mouths and intestines of cattle, not their manure, presenting an obvious challenge. But recent technological advances, he said, are now making it possible to precisely measure the gas detected in the air, and technology to enable its use as fuel in some conditions has become more affordable.

“Methane from the animals is basically the same as natural gas — biogas,” he said. “You can feed it into a pipeline, but it can also produce electricity on site.”

On Nov. 2, the Biden administration pledged numerous measures to address climate change impacts, including incentive-based approaches to reducing methane emissions with alternative manure management systems and expansion of on-farm generation and use of alternative energy. The U.S. and European Union had earlier announced a 90-nation pact to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030 from 2020 levels.

If methane emissions are stopped, there quickly would be positive results.

“Dollar for dollar,” Krupp said, “this is the most effective way to bring temperatures down.”

But it won’t be easy.

In North Carolina alone, mitigating a significant source of methane emissions — hog farms — by installation of biogas technology involves diving into longstanding social and environmental justice issues, multiple legal challenges, controversial permitting and accusations of broken agreements and lopsided financial benefits.

Hog waste from thousands of swine operations in the state is flushed from barns into what are essentially dirt pits, most of them unlined and uncovered. After sitting and “digesting” for a while, the slurry is sprayed onto nearby cropland. Depending on wind direction or whims of the sprayer, residents have complained that the residue has all too frequently coated their homes and filled the air they breathe with retched smells and toxic fumes that burn their eyes and create multiple health problems.

Municipal solid waste landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, about 15.1% of total emissions in 2019, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Climate scientists say that although methane accounts for about 10% of human-caused greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it accounts for 30% of climate change impacts. The gas has a disproportionate destructive effect: a ton of methane in the atmosphere creates about 80 times more warming than a ton of carbon dioxide emissions. But it doesn’t stick around as long as carbon.

“Methane dissipates,” Michelle Nowlin, co-director or the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Duke University School of Law, explained in a recent interview. “I think it’s like on a 20-year timescale, whereas carbon dioxide may take a 100-year timescale, but the power that it packs in that 20 years is significantly greater than what the carbon does over that longer timeframe. So it’s a much shorter term, much more intense contribution to global warming than the carbon dioxide itself.”

North Carolina has no fracking facilities, and limited natural gas pipeline infrastructure, but the waste from millions of pigs emits enormous amounts of methane — and it’s a lot more complicated to measure and capture than what leaks from a pipe.

The 2,300 or so swine concentrated animal feeding operations operating in North Carolina today are a big reason that the state is a “leading contributor” of methane emissions in the country, Nowlin said. In addition, the state’s industrial animal operations also include large numbers of turkey and chicken farms. 

Nowlin, who has worked on numerous hog waste management issues for close to 25 years, co-authored with Emily Spiegel a chapter in a research book published in 2017 on climate change and agricultural law, wrote that about 30% of agriculture’s total contribution to greenhouse gases is from the livestock sector.

“Despite the significant role the livestock industry plays in greenhouse gas emissions, it has thus far evaded regulation in the US,” the authors wrote. “Instead, approaches to reducing livestock greenhouse gas emissions have been voluntary, incentive-based, and wholly inadequate to the scale and urgency of the problem.

“As we seek ways to lower greenhouse gas emissions and forestall the effects of global climate change, we must remove the protections long afforded the agricultural industry and adapt existing regulatory tools to address its contributions,” they wrote.

Dominion Energy and Smithfield Foods Inc. are currently proposing to build what they call “North Carolina’s largest renewable natural gas project” through their joint venture, Align Renewable Natural Gas.

Planned in Duplin and Sampson counties, the project would generate enough energy to power more than 3,500 homes, according to an August 2019 press release on Smithfield’s website. The technology involves covering the lagoons to trap methane that is then processed and converted to biogas, which is injected into existing natural gas distribution pipes. The company is also proposing to create biogas from its hog slaughterhouse in Bladen County.

Swine waste-to-energy techniques have gained support from proponents who say they address the environmental concern with methane emissions while creating an additional revenue stream and saving and/or creating jobs.  

But Derb Carter, director of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s North Carolina office, which among other legal actions has challenged permits that the state Department of Environmental Quality issued for the project, said that capping the lagoons would increase the amount of harmful nutrients in the liquified waste, and have an even worse impact on water quality.

“Numerous studies have tied the lagoon and spray-field system to increased nutrient levels that plague our coastal waters, leading to periodic algal blooms and fish kills,” Carter wrote in a December 2020 editorial, adding that Smithfield has for two decades declined to install environmentally superior systems, despite an agreement with the state attorney general to do so.

“As Smithfield has requested,” he wrote, “the state can allow Smithfield to simply cover lagoons, capture and profit from biogas, and perpetuate the flawed lagoon and sprayfield system.”

For residents along coastal North Carolina, the hog lagoons and their methane emissions may seem like a distant concern. For those that remember Hurricane Floyd in 1999, when floodwaters inundated the open pits and drowned thousands of hogs and sent the pig filth and tons of putrid sediment and floating carcasses toward the sounds and ocean in a pink-purple swath of polluted water, the concern may seem valid.

“Because even though they’re not right there on the coast, a large number of those operations are present in the coastal counties and that coastal plain,” Nowlin said. “And of course, to the extent that it’s deposited on the lands and waters of eastern North Carolina along the coast, and at the coast’s back door, and all the waste that runs off into those waters gets carried to the coast and to the sounds.

“That’s why we have nutrient pollution in the Albemarle-Pamlico sounds,” she added. “So it’s a significant issue for people on the coast, even if they don’t recognize it being so because it’s not right in their backyard.”

Methane is just one of the pollutants from hog lagoons, and biogas production — so far — offers an imperfect and inadequate solution.

As far as global warming, Nowlin said that ammonia, another byproduct of hog waste, is also a problem because when that ammonia is emitted into the atmosphere it combines with nitrogen gas and oxygen to create nitrous oxide, which is an even more potent greenhouse gas.

According to a 2020 study “Reconciling Environmental Justice with Climate Change Mitigation: A Case Study of NC Swine CAFOs,” co-authored by Ryke Longest, clinical professor of law, Duke Law School, and co-director of the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, and D. Lee Miller, lecturing fellow of law at Duke Law School, the “confinement, consolidation and concentration” of hogs in the concentrated animal feeding operations, which are located in 10 counties in the coastal plain, has caused a multitude of negative impacts to the environment and the health of nearby communities. 

The state’s hog industry is one of the largest in the United States, and according to the report, the swine slaughter facility in Tar Heel, in Bladen County, is the world’s largest. To illustrate the dramatic change the industry has made in the state, the authors said that there were about 11,000 small swine farms throughout North Carolina in 1982.  Between 1989 and 1995, they said, 700 CAFOs housing as many as 8.2 million hogs were built, and 7,000 small hog farms went out of business.

“The new mega-facilities are concentrated in a handful of socially and environmentally vulnerable communities in the Coastal Plain where the most prominent geological features are sandy soils, high water tables, and proximity to the coast,” the report said.

The CAFOs, the Duke researchers say, have created pollution and diminished the quality of life of communities. Lagoons break down the contents of the waste and turn it into polluting gases, and the liquid waste seeps into groundwater and runs off into waterways.

“Now, as global concern over climate change drives corporate demand to decarbonize supply chains, market forces exert pressure for converting existing lagoon and spray field CAFOs into biogas factories,” Longest and Miller wrote. “Biogas mitigates greenhouse gas emissions by combusting methane into CO2 while generating revenue from electricity sales and carbon offset credits.

“Reconciling the interests of environmental justice, local natural resources, and the global climate requires agribusiness to reinvest some of this financial boon into the clean technologies they have promised — and shirked — for decades.”

Next in the series: A coastal North Carolina farmer’s perspective.

North Carolina’s ferry system has a fleet of 21 vehicle ferries, making it either tied with Washington as the largest state system in the country or the second largest — it really depends the measuring stick — and researchers are now looking at how to more sustainably power those vessels’ near-constant runs.

“(Washington is) the largest state-operated ferries because of the amount of people they move. We actually have the same number of vessels,” said Catherine Peele, the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Ferry Division planning and development manager.

All of North Carolina’s ferries have one thing in common: Their engines are powered by diesel fuel. While that isn’t going to change right away, the Ferry Division and the Coastal Studies Institute on Roanoke Island have studies underway that may lead to changes in how the state ferries are powered.

“The current administration and the IMO, the International Maritime Organization, are really focused on decarbonization of maritime transportation. Ferries, I think, are going to be a start in that direction,” George Bonner, director of Renewable Ocean Energy at the institute, recently told Coastal Review.

The project is part of the federal Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project, or ETIPP, Bonner added, explaining that the work he is doing with ferries and how they can be powered may at some point be applicable for isolated island communities like Ocracoke.

“For Ocracoke, what we’re helping with is how could the grid support electrification of ferries,” he said. “Our goal is to install a microgrid,”

In addition to the ETIPP research, the Ferry Division has its own project. As Peele explained, the ferry routes that Bonner is studying are long-haul routes, but many of the ferry crossings in the state are much shorter. The Knotts Island and Cherry Branch ferries are examples and are smaller vessels that use less energy.

“We have Western Carolina (University) doing our research project for us. It’s all about electrification of our short-haul route,” Peele said.

The electrification of ferry fleets has already begun. Not in the United States but internationally, especially in Europe.

“There’s a lot going on in Europe with electric ferries,” Bonner said.

For Bonner, electrifying ferries represents more than a way to recharge a battery using solar, wind, wave power or some yet-undiscovered source of alternative energy. The current research could pave the way for more reliable delivery of new energy sources.

“I’m excited about it because it opens up an opportunity. Maybe marine energy could play a part in supporting the shoreside energy needs,” he said.

An immediate priority is determining how that energy can be created, stored and ultimately transferred to the vessels. The work so far has yet to find a single, perfect solution.

“We’ve talked to several operators already,” Peele said, noting the British Columbia ferries and the Niagara Falls sightseeing boat, Maid of the Mist, that run on electric power. “People are moving toward electric, and we’re learning that one size doesn’t fit all. It depends on your boat, what you’re carrying, how many people or cars you’re carrying, how long that trip is.”

Yet some concepts are beginning to take shape. A form of stored hydrogen energy may be part of the solution, but for now, batteries appear to be the most likely way forward. What is still being explored is the best way to keep batteries charged, which is where the “one size doesn’t fit all” research is focused.

“What would be required on the grid side?” Bonner asked. “What kind of storage, would you need to have more capacity for the Ocracoke and Hatteras ferries?”

Unanswered questions also include how to generate that energy, Bonner noted.

“I don’t think you’re going to solve it with how much solar can you put in or how much wind can you put in. You’ve got to have other solutions,” he said.

That’s where sources such as tidal energy, wave energy and other forms of stored energy could come into play.

The propulsion systems that the Department of Transportation and Bonner at the institute are considering are electric motors and energy storage. Questions include the best ways to recharge the battery, or whether the battery should be recharged onboard the vessel or replaced between trips.

“You could have battery systems that you roll on and roll off. You have a concept where you have batteries, and you have a universal size for that ferry and that’s your power. It’s a quick operation. You can switch out these large batteries and roll a new one on. The advantage to that is you don’t have to worry about transferring the power from the shoreside to the vessel,” Bonner said.

It is still too early to estimate costs to convert to an all-electric fleet, or how that might be accomplished. Will it be gradual as boats age out and new ones are brought in? Will existing ferries be converted? There is also no clear idea on what the infrastructure will cost to support the conversion or what additional training or personnel will be needed.

But there is encouraging data available on the maintenance costs, something that Peele was quick to point out.

“In Europe, the motor vessel Ampere is world’s first all-electric (car) ferry in Norway. And they experienced an 80% reduction in operations and maintenance costs and a 95% reduction in emissions, compared to a diesel-powered vessel,” she said.

The United States Department of Energy has awarded Duke University a $7.5 million grant to research the impact that offshore wind development can have on wildlife and marine life.

The grant announced Oct. 13 is part of a larger sustainable energy development award package of $13.5 million by the Energy Department. The department distributed the funds among four different projects, all focused on wildlife and offshore wind.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced a goal of creating tens of thousands of jobs while deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by the year 2030. Meeting this goal can put the U.S. on a path to achieve 110 gigawatts by 2050. The ultimate intention is to create jobs while also creating opportunities for renewable energy, without endangering ecosystems as they currently exist.

To put these plans in motion, more offshore wind construction off the Atlantic coast will be beginning in the next several years. But there is uncertainty as to how offshore wind may affect fish, whales, birds and other marine life. Duke University’s project, Wildlife and Offshore Wind, or WOW, aims to answer some of these questions.

“There’s a fair few number of moving parts, and we’re going to try to figure out how to get those moving parts to move in harmony,” said Dr. Douglas Nowacek, a Repass-Rodgers University Distinguished Professor of Conservation Technology at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort. Nowacek will be leading WOW along with other researchers at Duke University. However, the consortium of researchers involved in the project will span 15 different institutions.

One of the first steps, said Nowacek, is to aggregate all the data that already exists in one place. This data comes from academic researchers, government agencies, as well as some of Europe’s experience with offshore wind. They also have letters of commitment from several wind energy developers, stating that they will share wildlife data with WOW.

“The next step then is going to be to create some tools, some models, (and) some frameworks to utilize those data,” Nowacek said.

The first year of this project will be focused on data aggregation, as well as creating frameworks, synthesis tools and data standards. After assessing what’s already out there, the team can identify gaps in knowledge and potential lines of inquiry. The following years will be spent deploying research efforts to address the questions identified in the first year.

Nowacek said that even though coordination across so many contributors is difficult, the collective expertise across institutions is likely the reason that they were selected for the grant in the first place. Formally, WOW has been in the works since January, when Nowacek and others started compiling their grant proposal. However, Nowacek said that the relationship building that goes into an expansive project like this has been in the works for years.

Dr. Patrick Halpin, director of Duke’s Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, will take the lead on the data synthesis component of the project. Halpin said the timing of the grant is especially important. As offshore wind is in the early stages of development in the region, beginning WOW work now means that they can do critical initial assessments before construction of turbines begins. This will be key later on, in that the researchers will have pre-construction data to refer to. Having pre- and post construction data will make it easier to evaluate how offshore wind interacts with marine wildlife. This project could set the stage for long-term, conscientious management of sustainable energy with regard to marine species.

“A big portion of this project is really to come up with a common framework for assessment, which will allow us to help develop monitoring protocols (and) help us be able to look at the interactions for many different taxa,” Halpin said, referring to biological groupings of species. “And then doing that at a regional scale so that the lessons learned can be applied across this rapidly developing field right now.”

Different wildlife may be affected at different stages of the process, said Halpin. Marine mammals, like the endangered North Atlantic right whale, may be most impacted during the noisy construction stage. Whereas avian interactions or displacement could occur after the turbines are built.

“I think people think about it as interactions are going to be one thing — a monolithic kind of issue,” Halpin said. “But really, interactions for different species are going to be very, very different in space and time.”

In addition to Duke University, the other partners on WOW include the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Rutgers University, the University of St. Andrews, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Syracuse University, the Pacific Northwest National Lab, TetraTech, Scientific Innovations, the New England Aquarium, Florida State University, the Biodiversity Research Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Southall Environmental Associates, and Cornell University.

The Interior Department announced Thursday a proposed lease sale for offshore wind development off North Carolina and South Carolina.

The proposed Carolina Long Bay lease area consists of about 128,000 acres and includes most of the Wilmington East Wind Energy Area, which officials said has the potential to generate enough electricity to power more than 500,000 homes.

The Bureau of Offshore Energy Management seeks public input on potentially dividing the proposed lease area into as many as three lease areas.

BOEM is set to publish a Proposed Sale Notice in the Federal Register on Monday, which will kick off a 60-day comment period ending at 11:59 p.m. Jan. 3, 2022.

Comments can be submitted following ways:

• Through Regulations.gov — search for Docket No. BOEM-2021-0078. Click on the blue “Comment” button in the upper left-hand corner of the page. Enter your information and comment, then click “Submit Comment.”
   
• In written form, delivered by hand or by mail, enclosed in an envelope labeled “Comments on Carolina Long Bay PSN” to: Office of Renewable Energy Programs, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, 45600 Woodland Road, VAM-OREP, Sterling, VA 20166.

BOEM does not consider anonymous comments. Include your name and address as part of your submittal. All comments submitted will be made part of the public record and will be posted publicly without change. Comments must be sent by or postmarked no later than 11:59 p.m. Dec. 28.

More information about the PSN, as well as information on the auction seminar and how to submit comments will be published on BOEM’s Carolina Long Bay website.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced Monday an agreement for Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy to build the nation’s first offshore wind turbine blade facility.

The company will lease more than 80 acres at the Portsmouth Marine Terminal to produce turbine blades supplying offshore wind projects. The $200 million project will create 310 jobs, of which roughly 50 will be service jobs to support the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project, Northam’s office said.

“Virginians want renewable energy, our employers want it, and Virginia is delivering it,” said Northam. “The Commonwealth is joining these leading companies to create the most important clean-energy partnership in the United States. This is good news for energy customers, the union workers who will bring this project to life, and our business partners. Make no mistake: Virginia is building a new industry in renewable energy, with more new jobs to follow, and that’s good news for our country.”

In late August, Virginia officials announced that the Port of Virginia had agreed to lease a portion of the Portsmouth Marine Terminal to Dominion Energy for infrastructure related to development of its proposed 2.6-megawatt wind energy project off Virginia Beach.

Dominion Energy is to lease 72 acres at the Portsmouth Marine Terminal for 10 years at about $4.4 million per year to use as a staging and preassembly area for foundations and turbines that are to be installed 27 miles off Virginia Beach. The company said the project will generate enough electricity to power as many as 660,000 homes during peak times.

Dominion is already operating two, 6-megawatt turbines as a demonstration project offshore of Cape Henry. The utility’s proposed project would span 112,799 acres.

Virginia created a law in 2020 that sets a target of 2034 for producing at least 5,200 megawatts of energy through offshore wind and a target of 2045 for achieving 100% carbon-free energy production.

Officials have cited a study showing the project could create about 900 jobs and $143 million in economic impact annually during construction and 1,100 jobs and almost $210 million in economic impact annually during operation of the turbines with as much as $11 million in annual local and state tax revenues once the project is commissioned and operational.

A new North Carolina law directs state regulators to “take all reasonable steps” to significantly reduce energy producers’ carbon emissions within the decade.

The recently passed bipartisan legislation that Gov. Roy Cooper signed Wednesday also requires the state Utilities Commission to work toward carbon neutrality by 2050. House Bill 951, Energy Solutions for North Carolina, calls for carbon emissions to be reduced 70% by 2030.

“Today, North Carolina moves strongly into a reliable and affordable clean energy future,” Cooper said in a statement.

“This new bipartisan law requires the North Carolina Utilities Commission to take steps needed to get North Carolina a 70% reduction in carbon emission by the year 2030 and to carbon neutrality by 2050,” Cooper continued. “Making transformative change is often controversial and never easy, especially when there are different points of view on big, complex issues. But coming to the table to find common ground is how government should work.”

The new law is the product of a yearslong back and forth between Duke Energy and other electricity providers, environmental groups, green energy companies, large-scale power consumers and, ultimately, the governor and legislative leaders, who announced a deal two weeks ago.

The carbon-reduction goal in the bill mirrors targets Cooper laid out in his 2018 energy policy plan.

An earlier version of the bill that set no carbon limits but would have put in place detailed rules around various fuel sources passed the House this summer. The bill underwent an extensive rewrite in the Senate, with the new version establishing the carbon targets and giving the utilities commission authority to set the rules to reach them as well as the phase out of Duke’s fleet of coal burning units.

Although the new law has won praise for the carbon-reduction goals, consumer and environmental advocates have said it still gives Duke Energy too much wiggle room in reaching the goals as well as the potential for costly, multi-year rate hikes. 

“While today’s signing puts into law admirable climate change goals, it requires yet another plan to reach goals that the governor set out three years ago,” Derb Carter, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement. “The Environmental Management Commission already has a plan underway that would result in carbon emissions reductions beginning next year and we can’t afford to wait on another plan with more delay.”

The law center, on behalf of Clean Air Carolina and the North Carolina Coastal Federation, filed a rulemaking petition to reduce heat-trapping carbon pollution from power plants, along with a proposed rule, that was approved July 13 by the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission and sent to the Department of Environmental Quality for rulemaking.

Kirk Ross contributed to this report.

SOUTHPORT – Duke Energy and Brunswick County officials announced Monday that the outdoor warning sirens around the Brunswick Nuclear Plant will be tested this week, but no action is required of area residents.

Officials said to expect testing between 10 and 11 a.m. Wednesday.

The 38 sirens within 10 miles of the Brunswick Nuclear Plant will sound at full-volume for three minutes. To ensure they are functioning properly, it may be necessary to test some sirens more than once. Testing is performed in cooperation with emergency officials in Brunswick and New Hanover counties, who are responsible for sounding the sirens.

Officials noted that the testing information is reflected in the 2021 Brunswick Nuclear Emergency Preparedness booklets sent to residents living within the 10-mile Brunswick Nuclear Plant emergency planning zone.

Because this is a test, local broadcasting stations will not interrupt regular programming to broadcast Emergency Alert System messages. If there were ever a real emergency at the plant requiring the sirens to be sounded, local radio and television stations would broadcast information and instructions to the public.

For more information about the outdoor warning sirens, residents can refer to information available at duke-energy.com/NuclearEP.

If even half of the funding and policy changes in the pursuit of resiliency, flood mitigation and land conservation make it through the budget process, it would be far and away the biggest effort in the state’s history to meet the challenge of a changing climate.

This year, there is broad consensus across party lines and between the legislature and the executive branch to make bold moves in these areas, spending as much as $1 billion in state money and putting plans in place to draw billions more in federal support.

But the consensus on flooding and resiliency could prove to be more exception than rule as lawmakers grapple with other strategies and policies that in one way or another address the impacts and causes of climate change.

Although with each year and with each new set of disasters, the risk of doing nothing becomes clearer, the job of putting together policies in an atmosphere in which even the phrase “climate change” is still viewed by many with suspicion remains one of the heavier lifts on Jones Street.

Mark Fleming, president and CEO of the Conservatives for Clean Energy, said polling indicates that while attitudes are shifting about clean energy, “climate change” is still a loaded term for some.

“I would say we are getting there as a state, we really are,” he said. “The problem is if you try to inject the phrase ‘climate change,’ everyone goes to their corners because of the politics of that phrase. It’s not even the policy as much as the phrase. But if you’re talking about sustainability, if you’re talking about lowering emissions, conservatives are there on that.”

There’s no doubt attitudes are changing in the legislature as well, Fleming said. “Ten years ago, this was all viewed as a partisan issue. Today it’s really not.”

A decade ago, clean energy was only backed by a couple of Republican members, Fleming said, compared to 10 to 15 members today, a number that’s likely to grow with each new class of legislators.

“We’ve come a long way,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done on these issues, but we see a growing number of conservatives that are championing these issues. I think you’ll continue to see that and a lot of it is generational.”

Fleming said this year’s resilience and flooding legislation is a good sign that bipartisan consensus is possible. He still expects to see policy battles on how to approach solutions going forward, but the legislature appears more and more willing to take action.

“The need to do something is the driving thing,” he said. “I think we’ll see more and more consensus on that, bipartisan consensus.”

Rep. John Ager, D-Buncombe, said that consensus can’t happen soon enough. Ager, a farmer and small farm proponent, has been trying to pass a bill that would encourage no-till techniques, better use of cover crops and other practices that improve carbon sequestration in soils. It’s the kind of bill that’s passed in other states but he can’t get traction among his GOP colleagues in Raleigh.

“It’s been frustrating,” he said. “We had to be careful to use the right words because it felt like if they heard the wrong words they’d just turn their minds off and I don’t know what the right words are to turn them back on.”

Sen. Natalie Murdock, D-Durham, said she has reason hope that the legislature is moving in the right direction despite language barriers.

“I think a lot of people don’t want to call it climate change, they don’t want to talk about global warming, but they may focus more on ‘we need more renewables’ or ‘we need more diversity in our energy portfolio.’ They may call it something different, but I definitely think that we can achieve that goal even if they don’t have my belief that climate change is real,” she said. “I focus on what we agree on and kind of work from there.”

Murdock said ultimately the legislature’s hand will be forced by circumstances. The recent report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and natural disasters have made it clear that the state has to get serious about taking action.

“I think we’ll be forced to,” Murdock said. “I don’t think you can deny the science.”

Heated hearings

Although legislative leaders and Gov. Roy Cooper have found common ground on flooding and resilience, sharp differences remain around greenhouse gas reductions.

Cooper’s call early in his first term for the state to set carbon-reduction targets and to sign on to the Paris Agreement received a cool reception in the North Carolina General Assembly.

This session, opposition to the governor’s carbon-reduction goals heated up during confirmation hearings in the Senate Agriculture, Energy and Environment Committee for Cooper’s two choices to lead the Department of Environmental Quality, former secretary Dionne Delli-Gatti, who the Senate rejected, and DEQ Secretary Elizabeth Biser, who was confirmed last month.

At both sets of hearings, Sen. Paul Newton, R-Cabbarus, and former president of Duke Energy North Carolina, took aim at Cooper’s carbon reduction strategy, making the case that reductions by North Carolina would be costly and ultimately futile given increases in emission in places like China and India.

“Would you agree with me that if North Carolina is the only one that reduces carbon, and everybody else around the world is increasing carbon, North Carolina’s contribution to improving the climate is actually zero?” Newton asked Biser Aug. 17 during her confirmation hearing.

Biser, a former legislative liaison, agreed, but said the state won’t be going it alone. 

“If we were the only ones doing it, I think we would get lost in that bucket,” she replied. “Fortunately, we’re joined by a lot of other folks. It’s not everyone, as you point out, but I think this is top of mind for a lot of leaders worldwide.”

Legislators have also recently criticized a move by the Environmental Management Commission in July to accept a petition calling for the commission to begin a process for drafting carbon-reduction rules.

Last week, the House added an amendment to a comprehensive energy reform bill that would prevent the administration from joining a regional greenhouse gas compact without explicit legislative approval.

In a response to Coastal Review on Monday, Cooper spokesperson Jordan Monaghan said the governor would continue to push for emission reductions and that the state would reap the benefits of a clean-energy strategy.

“Climate change poses an existential threat and we must do our part to reduce carbon emissions, but just as important is the economic boost and high paying jobs that North Carolina gets if we lead the way on the inevitable move to renewable energy,” Monaghan said.

Although it’s not spelled out entirely, a major reduction in the state’s overall carbon output is built into major energy legislation now in the hands of the Senate.

The legislation, House Bill 951, Modernize Energy Generation, would accelerate the decommissioning of Duke Energy’s fleet of coal-fired units, streamline solar rules and revamp the state’s energy infrastructure. Hammered out in closed-door negotiations earlier this session, the 47-page bill passed the House 57-49 in mid-July but only after sponsors acknowledged its imperfections and assured their colleagues it would likely undergo substantial changes during the back and forth between the two chambers.

Rep. John Szoka, a Cumberland County Republican and one of the bill’s three main sponsors, said it’s unclear what direction the legislation will take.

He said Senate leaders and the governor have an interest in moving the bill forward. “I don’t know what they’re going to do, they could throw the whole thing away and start from scratch, they could take pieces of it,” he said. The most beneficial thing about House Bill 951 wasn’t the end product. It was the discussions that were raised.”

He said policymakers are trying to strike a balance between increasing renewable energy production, achieving carbon reductions and keeping costs down. 

“It’s one of those things where everyone has to give up something,” he said.

Monaghan said Cooper wants to see ideas on renewable energy, ratepayer protection and clean-energy jobs from Executive Order 80, the governor’s 2018 clean energy initiative, incorporated into the bill.

Szoka said that while he’s not sure where the Senate is going on the legislation, he expects that it will likely include fewer mandates and rely more heavily on the state Utilities Commission than the House version.

“I think there’s a path ahead,” he said, “but it’s a process and energy issues are incredibly complex.”

Murdock, who serves on the Senate’s Agriculture Energy and Environment Committee, said she doesn’t support the House version of the energy bill and expects the Senate to make considerable changes, like putting the Utilities Commission back in the driver’s seat on some of the decisions.

The result for the legislation may not be exactly the kind of sweeping change initially promised, she said, but there’s a real chance at progress.

“I know that it still has a long way to go,” she said. “But I think that we’re moving in the right direction. I couldn’t support the initial version of it, but the fact that we’re having serious talks about more coal plant retirements is definitely a step in the right direction.”

Like Fleming, Szoka, who has been in the legislature since 2012, says despite the disagreements over details, attitudes are changing in both chambers and policy is likely to follow.

He said it’s true that the legislature has been generally slower to accept carbon reduction than Congress and other states, but he recalled a similar skepticism about renewable energy.

“When I first got here the view was that it wouldn’t exist without tax credits. Now, it’s a generally more acceptable form of energy by people in both parties,” he said. “Sometimes ideas evolve over time and it takes a period of time to get to where an idea really gets some legs under it.”

RALEIGH – The North Carolina House has approved an energy bill that would require the legislature’s approval for the state to join a regional initiative to limit carbon dioxide pollution from energy producers.

The action comes just two days after the state Environmental Management Commission agreed to begin the rule-making process for the Department of Environmental Quality to participate in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

House Bill 951, which now goes to the Senate, would prohibit “unauthorized executive branch actions” to participate in the initiative.

According to the bill’s text, “Until such time as the General Assembly enacts legislation to authorize the State’s participation in RGGI, and implementation of emissions limitations and cap and trade requirements attendant with the RGGI program, the executive branch shall be prohibited from taking such action.”

The measure was approved in two votes as required per House rules with the second coming just after midnight Thursday to in response to Democrats’ objections about back-to-back votes on the bill.

Gov. Roy Cooper hasn’t said outright that he would veto the bill if it reaches his desk, but he urged legislators to oppose the measure “unless important changes are made” to fix what he called “significant problems.”

“The House Republican energy legislation as currently written weakens the Utilities Commission’s ability to prevent unfair, higher electricity rates on consumers in the short run. And in the long run, this bill falls short on clean energy, which will create jobs and contain costs,” Cooper said Wednesday in a statement.

Renewable energy production from wind and solar is often faulted for its gaps: Winds are inconsistent and skies aren’t always sunny. Unfortunately, battery storage has lagged in making up the difference.

But a deceptively simple-sounding adjustment could increase their combined capacity during hours of peak demand by as much as 40%, even without the technologies being located at the same site, researchers at North Carolina State University and North Carolina Central University have detailed in a recently released report.

“Our work here suggests that solar power can offer greater benefits to reliability than sustainable energy skeptics suggest,” Jeremiah Johnson, an associate professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State and corresponding author of the paper, said in a June 17 press release. “Investing in both solar power and energy storage systems can unlock reliability value that neither technology would provide on its own.”

When used in tandem rather than deployed separately, the researchers found solar energy and battery storage interact in a symbiotic manner.

“So, what really matters from the system perspective is that you have solar and storage somewhere on the grid and that you’re able to operate them in a way where they sort of mutually benefit each other,” Joseph DeCarolis, a professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State, said in an interview.

The paper, “The Symbiotic Relationship of Solar Power and Energy Storage in Providing Capacity Value, is one of the first analysis that has looked at the advantage of having the technologies working simultaneously, he said. 

“I think a big, big challenge here is utilities system operators, they have to make sure that demand is always met,” DeCarolis said. “The thing that keeps them up at night is what happens during these peak demand periods when everybody wants to stay cool or everybody’s trying to warm up and demand goes really high.”

In the decades before renewables entered the picture, he said, the power grid was supplied by a variety of dispatchable capacity, including nuclear, coal and natural gas. All were fairly easy to control. With wind and solar, it’s more challenging.

“So, trying to characterize the capacity credit of renewable technologies and storage, taking into account these peak periods is really critical because it helps us understand to what degree we can rely on renewables and storage to help meet those peak demands,” DeCarolis said. “And what this study finds is that there’s actually a lot of mutual benefit to operating these technologies together, in unison.”

Researchers studied reliability of renewable energy in North and South Carolina power systems, working with data on power demand and generation sources, according to the press release. Digital models were built to assess power production from the sources during peak demand, with researchers testing varied amounts of solar energy and storage capacity.

DeCarolis, a co-author of the report, explained that utilities such as Charlotte-based Duke Energy typically create a “demand profile” for their customers’ energy daily usage, and then determine how to match that demand in real time with their energy supply. While there is a lot of predictability in demand — when people wake up they turn everything on — and seasonal variabilities that matches output of renewables, the question has been its reliability in meeting spikes during peak demand.

Independent of each other, solar energy and battery storage have their own value in the system, DeCarolis said. Each is assigned a “capacity credit,” which is essentially the fraction of installed power capacity that can be relied on during peak demand. What the researchers found is that the combined capacity credit for solar and storage on the system together is greater than the sum of their parts.

“The good thing about solar is that it matches, particularly the summer peaks, pretty well,” he said. “But it’s not a perfect match. For example, those winter morning peaks, sometimes the electricity is peaking just as the sun is rising.”

It’s a given that no one can control when the wind blows and the sun shines, but what the new research shows is that the utilities can control the efficiency of the technology by synchronizing the output.

Typically, DeCarolis said, system operators will look at the hourly demand for electricity, and then look at the hourly output of solar, and then subtract the output from the demand, resulting in a net demand profile.

“It’s basically factoring in the solar production, and then they’re saying, ‘Okay, now this is the net demand that we need to meet with all the other generating assets that we have on the system,’” he said.

If the demand peak is envisioned as an inverted “U,” he explained, energy production from solar photovoltaics, or PVs, generally corresponds with the peak, in the process making the “U” lower and narrower. But under that scenario, known informally as the “duck curve,” DeCarolis said, adding excess megawatts of solar would be firing at the same place in the curve.

“It doesn’t matter if you have 5 terawatts of solar, you will never affect the demand curve when the sun isn’t shining and all you have is solar,” he said.

A terawatt is equal to 1 trillion watts.

Dispatching energy from battery storage during peak periods, however, is controllable, he said. The downside is it is limited: Its use cannot exceed its capacity. Comparing it to the way people keep track of the power on their cellphones, DeCarolis said that operators take care to make sure that batteries have enough charge available to meet the demand.

And here is where tweaking the same ingredients of the power system recipe can make a greater capacity cake. As the report explained, “the presence of solar PV decreases the duration of daily peak demands, thereby allowing energy-limited storage capacity to dispatch electricity during peak demand hours … storage can be dispatched during hours when solar exhibits diminished output, and solar helps to shorten the durations of peak load that must be shaved by energy-limited storage systems.” That is, by deploying solar and storage at the same time, more dispatched stored energy can be accommodated when needed. 

“Remember, solar is going to reduce the peak but also narrow the peak,” DeCarolis said. “And when it narrows the peak, it actually makes it easier for storage to basically meet the rest of that peak demand.”

 Although the research, which was done with support from the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory, focused on solar energy, power grids function similarly with wind energy, which also is not dispatchable.

The report concluded that the research demonstrated the important distinction between winter and summer peaking systems, showing “significantly different” seasonal capacity values for solar energy.

“These findings are timely as utilities replace their aging peaking plants and are taking energy storage into consideration as part of a low carbon pathway,” the report said.

But will the study change the way the companies use renewable energy on the grid?

“I hope so,” DeCarolis said. “I think the key here is that there should be a coordinated strategy among utilities and policy makers to think about the deployment of these technologies … that could help them maximize their mutual benefit, instead of just treating them independently.

“It’s helpful to think about the advantages they offer when you operate them together.”

Reprinted from the Carteret County News-Times

MOREHEAD CITY — Carteret County Economic Development Director Don Kirkman is making the rounds pitching officials on a potential development opportunity for Radio Island related to offshore wind energy he says could generate high-paying jobs and boost the local economy.

Kirkman appeared before the Morehead City Council Tuesday during a workshop meeting to share information about the nation’s burgeoning offshore wind industry and upcoming grant opportunities that could help kickstart development on Radio Island.

He posed the opportunity, which could see Radio Island used as a staging or fabrication port for manufacturing parts used in offshore wind farms, as a “win-win-win-win” for Morehead City and surrounding areas.

“Offshore wind exploration is a high priority for this (presidential) administration and one that already we’re seeing significant funding associated with in the form of a grant program,” Kirkman said.

He was quick to add there are no current plans to develop a wind energy farm off Radio Island or anywhere else off the Crystal Coast, citing proximity to military bases and sensitive environmental areas as two key reasons it looks unlikely.

There are, however, such plans in more than a dozen other locations along the East Coast, and Kirkman said Radio Island could be well-positioned to supply manufacturing capabilities to those eventual facilities.

Because of the massive size of the parts involved in offshore wind farms – a turbine blade can clock in at more 300 feet in length – the pieces can only be transported by water, requiring they be manufactured and staged at deep-water ports.

Kirkman said there are several options for a facility on Radio Island, including as a staging area for parts manufactured elsewhere and shipped to the U.S. or as a manufacturing port where the pieces are fabricated and shipped away.

The North Carolina Department of Commerce released a report, Building North Carolina’s Offshore Wind Supply Chain, in March detailing a “roadmap for leveraging manufacturing and infrastructure advantages” related to offshore wind. The report specifically names Radio Island as a potential location for developing the state’s offshore wind manufacturing capabilities.

The North Carolina State Port Authority currently owns about 200 acres of mostly undeveloped land on Radio Island, about 150 acres of which is set aside for future port development. The land is situated within the limits of Morehead City and is zoned for port-maritime use.

“Radio Island is uniquely positioned on the East Coast of the United States for this type of project related to port development,” Kirkman said. “…The property is already publicly owned, it’s on deep water, there’s a minimal amount of dredging required, the infrastructure is all in place, including Morehead City water and sewer utilities, the zoning is in place.”

Despite the opportunity presented, Kirkman said Radio Island is far from being ready to support the industry as it’s still largely undeveloped. To that end, he hopes North Carolina Ports applies for a federal grant announced by the U.S. Maritime Administration March 30 making $230 million available for ports to prepare for offshore wind development.

“Radio Island is literally years away from being ready, and we’ve got to start that process with master planning, engineering, looking at the design for the rail extensions and working with (the N.C. Department of Transportation) on the Newport River Bridge replacement and other highway infrastructure to position Radio Island to successfully compete,” he said. “…(The grant) is really a key first step, the grant application deadline is (Friday) July 30 so there’s a sense of urgency.”

In a follow-up email, Kirkman said he went before the Morehead City Council Tuesday not necessarily for permission to pursue the project, but to share information about it and hopefully garner some support from local leaders. The MARAD grant program doesn’t require letters of support, but he said N.C. Ports could request them for its application, if it materializes.

“I am confident that both the Town of Morehead City and Carteret County Board of Commissioners would enthusiastically support the grant application given the economic development, port and environmental benefits associated with the project and the growth of this clean, renewable energy sector,” he wrote. “As I noted during my presentation, the main port facility in downtown Morehead City is at full capacity, and the future growth of the Port of Morehead City will occur at Radio Island. Without infrastructure, however, including bulkheads and berths for vessels, ships are unable to call on Radio Island for any port-related activity, including offshore wind energy.”

If the plan comes to fruition, depending on the scope of the facility, Kirkman estimates it could bring 500 to 1,000 new, high-paying jobs to Carteret County.

This story is provided courtesy of the Carteret County News-Times, a twice weekly newspaper published in Morehead City. Coastal Review Online partners with the News-Times to provide our readers with news of the North Carolina coast. 

Piedmont Natural Gas said it will perform routine pipeline maintenance in Newport this week.

The work, which was set to take place near 5871 U.S. 70, was set to begin Monday and continue through April 20, barring any weather events.

The operations will include the use of a flare stack, which is a large vertical pipe, and could produce a loud noise and result in a tall flame being visible to nearby neighborhoods and businesses. People in the area also may notice a whistling sound or the smell of natural gas.

The company, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, said flare stack operation is a controlled process that will be managed and monitored by Piedmont Natural Gas personnel in cooperation with local fire departments.

The electric power sector is changing, and North Carolina is in the position to shift to cleaner, cost-effective energy production that can reduce pollution, according to a report released earlier this month.

Prompted by the North Carolina Clean Energy Plan, the report, Power Sector Carbon Reduction: An Evaluation of Policies for North Carolina, is the study of carbon reduction policies for the state’s power sector.

Under Gov. Roy Cooper’s Executive Order No. 80 signed October 2018, the Clean Energy Plan, or CEP, — the state’s plan to reduce the amount of carbon pollution from the electricity generated and used released September 2019 — sets for the state a goal of 70% reduction compared to 2005 carbon dioxide, or CO2, emissions levels by 2030, and reach carbon neutrality by 2050. These targets include emissions from in-state electricity generation and electricity imports, according to the report.

“Well-designed policies can accelerate pollution reduction, make change more affordable for state residents and business, and stimulate job growth,” which is why the clean energy plan recommended the power sector study, according to the document.

The state Department of Environmental Quality approached researchers at Duke University Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and the University of North Carolina’s Center for Climate, Energy, Environment and Economics to conduct the study.

Kate Konschnik, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University, led the research.

She told Coastal Review Online that the one takeaway from the report is, “How we make and use electricity is changing, and with that change comes an enormous opportunity to shift into cleaner sources of power, to protect our watersheds, air quality and public health. I hope the report conveys that we have options at this moment – there is no one cost-effective way to reduce pollution from the electric power sector.”

The state has options for meeting the CO2 reduction targets detailed in the clean energy plan. With the rapid shifts happening on the grid and the merging of cost between types of electricity generation, “even modest policies could drive large changes in the North Carolina power sector, with positive emissions and economic impacts,” according to the report. The report does not make specific recommendations but does outline different policies and offers options for decarbonizing the grid.

Past state air quality and clean energy policies as well as climate policies implemented in other states were studied to refine the list of policies to study. Then, the policies were run through two power-sector capacity planning models to compare cost, emissions and energy mix outcomes.

Konschnik explained that the power sector in this case means the electric utility industry, or “the power plants and the wires that deliver power to our homes and businesses.”

Since the carbon pollution goals in the state Clean Energy Plan relate to the electricity used in the state, “I suppose we mean, how do we cut pollution from the power plants that are located in North Carolina or that serve us from across state lines?” Konschnik added.

The state Clean Energy Plan proposed four potential policy pathways to achieve its targets: accelerated coal retirements; market-based policies that put downward pressure on CO2 emissions from the power sector; clean energy policies; and combinations of these policies.

The power sector policies study used these pathways as a launching point and defined specific policies to study for possible use.

“The electricity system appears to be at a ‘tipping point’ where small changes in gas prices or renewables costs can sway the balance between new capacity (i.e., gas turbines, renewables, and battery installations),” the report lists as the first key finding.

The report also finds that CO2 emissions from the state’s electric power sector will continue to decline as coal plants are retired, though new policies are needed to reach the Clean Energy Plan’s targets.

“If carefully designed, these policies can make emissions reductions more cost-effective and affordable, and drive positive economic development across the state,” the report states.

A third key finding is that coal retirement, carbon market and what’s known as carbon adder policies achieve reductions by lowering in-state fossil fuel generation, while clean energy standard policies increase in-state renewable generation, pulling in new resources to the grid. A combination of these policies can accomplish both outcomes more efficiently. Carbon adders are a market-based policy that account for the costs to society imposed by a power plant that emits CO2 that are not paid by the utility but used in the decision-making process.

Konschnik said in an interview that in recent years, a lot of aging coal-fired power plants have been retired in North Carolina and around the country.

“Utilities are making decisions about what to build in their place — decisions that will stay with us for 30 to 50 years. Public policy can help prioritize cleaner substitutes while ensuring affordable bills and a reliable system that works when you need it,” she explained.

Another key finding is that offshore wind requirements are projected to increase the cost of clean energy standards but could drive economic development in supply chains and maritime trades. Economic opportunities related to offshore wind were not studied for this report. However, another recent study projects nearly $100 billion in economic value for North Carolina, based on forecasts of East Coast offshore wind installed capacity.

The power sector report also finds that some policies can achieve significant reductions in local air pollutants, including coal retirements or clean energy standards combined with another market-based policy studied in the report, joining a carbon market like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, or other policies. Each state that participates in the RGGI market sets a budget of CO2 allowances that shrink every year.

The Environmental Defense Fund supports the state joining RGGI. RGGI is the first mandatory market-based program in the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a cooperative effort off Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia to cap and reduce CO2 emissions from the power sector, according to RGGI’s website.

“The evidence presented in the Clean Energy Plan is clear: North Carolina can make critical progress on its climate goals by joining RGGI. Governor Cooper should act on these strong findings to move the state toward a clean energy future, while seizing meaningful opportunities to improve health and equity across the state,” said David Kelly, Senior Manager for North Carolina Political Affairs at EDF, in a statement.

Drew Stilson, policy analyst for Environmental Defense Fund, said that by placing a declining limit on carbon emissions from the power sector through RGGI, the state can guarantee that emissions fall on a timeline consistent with the state’s climate goals.

“RGGI is designed with the flexibility to implement it in a way that makes the most sense for the state’s unique needs, and it’s highly compatible with a variety of other complementary clean energy policies in order to maximize the environmental and economic benefits for North Carolina,” he continued.

Policies that achieve the 2030 Clean Energy Plan target in at least one of the models include: carbon adders on generation; clean energy standards, with or without an offshore wind requirement; and combination policies that start with clean energy standards and also include either accelerated coal retirements, RGGI, or a carbon adder, according to a clean energy fact sheet.

Konschnik said the group studied how policies might result in different levels of air pollution but one type of data that they did not get to publish in the report, though they hope to on the website, is the effect of different climate and clean energy policies on mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants.

“In most cases the policies reduced mercury emissions by tons per year over business as usual – but some worked faster than others to get this neurotoxin out of the air,” she said. “One modeling run showed that if we increase our use of electricity in North Carolina without policies to clean up our power plants, we might run the risk of increasing mercury emissions.”

In a few instances, the group considered policies that might generate revenue for coastal resilience and storm recovery. “Specifically, by joining a regional ‘carbon market’ where utilities buy and sell allowances to emit carbon pollution, North Carolina could generate nearly $1 billion over the next 10 years,” Konschnik said.

Other states that participate in RGGI use the resulting funds for these types of projects, as well as energy efficiency and residential bill assistance.

“We also mention that Clean Energy Standards could include a fee system where a utility would pay into a fund if they were otherwise unable to meet the required amount of clean energy on their system – and those funds could also be used for coastal resilience projects,” she said.

Konschnik told Coastal Review she was excited to lead the research. “It was intellectually challenging and a lot of fun.”

She said the researchers worked with a group of North Carolina stakeholders who represented the views of their constituencies while also coming to the table with open minds.

“Together we studied what other states have done, and what North Carolina has done in the past to encourage clean energy and create jobs while improving air quality,” she said, adding that the team then defined specific policies to model and study and discussed key values such as affordability and equity.

Gudrun Thompson, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, pointed out the basketball rivalry between the two universities didn’t interfere on their work.

“They may be rivals on the basketball court, but this report shows that even during March Madness, there is one thing that Duke and UNC can agree on: limiting carbon pollution from power plants and joining other states in a cooperative effort is an effective—and cost-effective—way to reduce carbon pollution from power plants in North Carolina,” said Thompson. “It’s a slam dunk.”

Piedmont Natural Gas is performing routine natural gas pipeline maintenance this week in Newport.

The subsidiary of Duke Energy said the safety and reliability work began Monday near 5871 U.S. 70 and will continue through Tuesday, but bad weather could affect the project timetable.

Operations include the use of a flare stack, or large vertical pipe, which could produce a loud noise and result in a tall flame being visible to nearby neighborhoods and businesses. People in the area also may notice a whistling sound or the smell of natural gas.

Flare stack operation is a controlled process that will be managed and monitored by Piedmont Natural Gas personnel in cooperation with local fire department resources.

RALEIGH – The state is well positioned to attract a significant portion of the growing offshore wind energy industry, according to a report released Wednesday by the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

The report by BVG Associates, a consulting company with extensive wind energy experience, and N.C. State’s Clean Energy Technology Center, forecasts East Coast offshore capacity exceeding 40 gigawatts by 2035. North Carolina stands to benefit from a more than $100 billion market opportunity, officials said.

The forecast includes industry investment of $140 billion in supply chain, equipment and operational costs related to wind facilities. The report finds that North Carolina manufacturers can address and supply equipment for the entire East Coast market, not just for projects directly off the state’s coast.

The report looks at state-owned and private ports, which the department said would inform investment decisions to accommodate the construction, operation and manufacturing of offshore wind farms and their components. It also identifies the state’s existing wind energy suppliers, manufacturing strengths and adjacent industries that are positioned to accommodate varying elements of the offshore wind supply chain.

“These assessments will facilitate North Carolina’s efforts in securing as much of the $140 billion offshore wind opportunity as possible,” said Katharine Kollins, president of the Southeastern Wind Coalition, in a statement. “As recognized in the report, North Carolina has the largest manufacturing sector in the Southeast and ranks among the highest in the country. Many of these companies are already supplying the land-based wind industry. This work highlights how that advantage will translate into opportunity for those companies to expand, while also creating a new industry for many other North Carolina businesses.”

The department said the report follows the recent announcement of a partnership among North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland called the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic Regional Transformative Partnership for Offshore Wind Energy Resources, or SMART-POWER, an effort toward collaboration in developing the offshore wind industry.

The Department of Commerce has created an offshore wind supply chain database, coordinated with SEWC’s supply chain map to serve as a resource for turbine suppliers and developers seeking to contract with North Carolina companies. Companies interested in joining the registries can do so through the Department of Commerce’s website or SEWC’s website.

A group of representatives from local government, utilities, universities and environmental groups presented their recommendations Wednesday to the Climate Change Interagency Council on how to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector.

The presentation was a step outlined in the North Carolina Clean Energy Plan developed in 2019.

Gov. Roy Cooper created the council in October 2018 as part of his Executive Order No. 80, which among other things directed the state Department of Environmental Quality to develop the clean energy plan.

In that plan were goals, recommendations and actions, including a recommendation to “launch a North Carolina energy process with representatives from key stakeholder groups to design policies that align regulatory incentives and processes with 21st century public policy goals, customer expectations, utility needs, and technology innovation.”

A workgroup of representatives from 30 organizations was formed to tackle the recommendation. The workgroup stakeholders represent state and local government, electricity utilities, clean energy owners and advocates, environmental organizations, ratepayer representatives and university researchers.

The workgroup collaborated from February to December through the North Carolina Energy Regulatory Process, or NERP, on the updates to utility regulations and electricity market structures. The NERP document was released in December.

Stakeholders identified as a key priority the need to create ways or incentives to reduce electricity sector greenhouse gas emissions of 50-70% below 2005 levels by 2030. Another key priority is to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

NERP participants also recommended that the North Carolina General Assembly work with the North Carolina Utilities Commission to pursue a package of performance-based regulation reforms, including a multi-year rate plan, revenue decoupling, or separating utility profits from total electric or gas sales, and performance incentive mechanisms. It also recommended that the General Assembly direct the commission to study the benefits and costs of wholesale market reform and implications for the state’s electricity system.

The reform package has been submitted to the governor’s office and is to be delivered to the General Assembly and the commission.

Electricity policy experts from the Regulatory Assistance Project and the Rocky Mountain Institute assisted in the process and stakeholders were responsible for identifying, researching, discussing and developing reform options.

Those interested in installing zero-emission vehicle, or ZEV, charging units through Phase 1 of the North Carolina Volkswagen Mitigation Settlement Program can attend a webinar next week to learn more about the application process.

The Request for Proposals (RFP) for the Level 2 ZEV Charging Infrastructure Program will help applicants apply for funding to install light-duty Level 2 charging projects as described in the North Carolina VW Mitigation Plans.

During the webinar set for 1-2:30 p.m. Jan. 13, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Air Quality staff will answer questions about new user access to the DAQ Grant Management System, request for proposals, Level 2 application and required documentation. Register to attend through the form.

Level 2 is one of three types of charging unit for ZEVs. An hour charge for Level 1 is 2 to 5 miles of range and 10 to 20 miles of range for Level 2. For DC Fast Charging 20 minutes of charge is a 60 to 80 miles of range.

Applications, which will be accepted in the grant management system the starting at noon Jan. 25, will be approved on a first-come, first-served basis until funds are exhausted.

DEQ anticipates awarding the allocated 25% of the Phase 1 ZEV infrastructure allocation, or about $1.1 million, to these Level 2 charging infrastructure projects. Increasing the use of ZEVs in place of gas-powered cars is to mitigate nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and greenhouse gas emissions in the state.

The Volkswagen Mitigation Settlement is the result of Volkswagen admitting that it violated the Clean Air Act in 2015 by installing illegal software on some of its diesel vehicles. The vehicles with the illegal software emit up to 40 times the allowable levels of nitrogen oxides. Settlement agreements of $14.7 billion nationally were agreed upon to resolve matters related to the violations.

North Carolina has been allocated $92 million in Volkswagen settlement money and is seeking public input on how to use the funds. The Department of Environmental Quality manages the state’s share of the national settlement. More than $27 million in potential funding is available in the first round of funding, according to DEQ.

For additional information and documents regarding the RFP, please visit: https://deq.nc.gov/volkswagen-settlement/level-2.

On Sept. 8, President Trump signed an order prohibiting offshore leasing for energy exploration, development or production off the coast of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. Trump said Sept. 25 during an event he would add North Carolina and Virginia to the moratorium.

Though not explicitly stated in the executive orders, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has confirmed that wind energy is included in the withdrawal.

“The withdrawal includes all energy leasing, including conventional and renewable energy, beginning on July 1, 2022. No new leases will be issued offshore North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, for a 10-year period beginning July 1, 2022,” Stephen Boutwell, BOEM spokesperson, told Coastal Review Online Wednesday.

Trump signed the memorandum Sept. 25 that states, “I hereby withdraw from disposition by leasing for 10 years, beginning on July 1, 2022, and ending on June 30, 2032: The portion of the area designated by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management as the Mid Atlantic Planning Area that lies south of the northern administrative boundary of North Carolina,” as that administrative boundary depicted on the Atlantic NAD 83 Federal Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Administrative Boundaries map. The memorandum does not appear to include Virginia.

The memorandum also states, “This withdrawal prevents consideration of this area for any leasing for purposes of exploration, development, or production during the 10-year period beginning on July 1, 2022, and ending on June 30, 2032.”

The move to prohibit renewable energy is counter to a June 2017 proclamation from the White House. “Today, our offshore areas remain underutilized and often unexplored.  We have yet to fully leverage new technologies and unleash the forces of economic innovation to more fully develop and explore our ocean economy. In the field of energy, we have just begun to tap the potential of our oceans’ oil and gas, wind, wave, and tidal resources to power the Nation,” according to the proclamation.

The president announced Sept. 8 in Jupiter, Florida, the order to extend an earlier moratorium on offshore drilling on Florida’s Gulf Coast and expand it to Florida’s Atlantic Coast, as well as the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. North Carolina and Virginia were not included.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., announced Sept. 21 that he had spoken with Trump who agreed North Carolina would be included in the presidential memorandum withdrawing new leasing for offshore oil and gas developments. Trump did not immediately confirm Tillis’ announcement.

National Ocean Industries Association, or NOIA, President Erik Milito told Coastal Review Online Wednesday that the interest and optimism in Atlantic offshore wind projects cannot be understated, and this includes opportunities offshore of the Carolinas.

“BOEM previously identified three proposed wind areas, not to mention one active lease offshore North Carolina, and four call areas offshore South Carolina. Wood Mackenzie published a report last month on the impact of expected near-term offshore wind leases, and a lease block offshore the Carolinas was included. That lease sale was predicted to support 37,000 jobs annually and $44.9 billion in total capital investment. The market is ready, it is just a matter of access,” he said.

Andrew Hutson, Audubon North Carolina executive director and National Audubon Society vice president, said in a statement Tuesday that “Banning offshore wind despite growing demand makes no sense and will be devastating for North Carolina’s clean energy economy, businesses, and workers. It’s bad news for birds too. When properly sited, wind power not only coexists with birds — it makes wildlife populations and local communities more resilient by cutting down on harmful carbon pollution.”

Sharon Martin, spokesperson for the state Department of Environmental Quality, told Coastal Review Online Wednesday that North Carolina will continue to implement and remains committed to Executive Order 80 and transitioning the state to a clean energy economy, which includes achieving a 70% reduction in power sector GHG emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050.

“The NC Clean Energy Plan is a roadmap of actions to help NC achieve those goals. The state continues to implement the NC Clean Energy Plan, NC Zero-Emission Vehicle Plan, and other aspects of EO 80 and we will continue working to take advantage of the economic and environmental benefits of clean energy, while protecting coastal communities from the threat of offshore drilling,” she said.

According to the Sept. 25 memorandum, “nothing in this withdrawal affects the rights under existing leases in the withdrawn areas,” which would include Avangrid Renewables’ Kitty Hawk Offshore Wind project that will be developed more than 27 miles from the Outer Banks.

Kitty Hawk Offshore Wind is a proposed offshore wind energy project to be built in the Kitty Hawk Wind Energy Area, designated by BOEM. The commercial lease for the 122,405-acre area was awarded to Avangrid Renewables by BOEM in 2017. The company, which has been studying the area since, launched in July an advanced meteorological buoy, according to the clean energy company headquartered in Portland, Oregon.

Once complete, Kitty Hawk Offshore Wind is projected to have a generation capacity of up to 2,500 megawatts, or enough to power about 700,000 homes.

BOEM since 2009 has been responsible for offshore renewable energy development in federal waters. The program began when the Department of the Interior, or DOI, announced the final regulations for the Outer Continental Shelf Renewable Energy Program authorized by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. These regulations provide a framework for all of the activities needed to support production and transmission of energy from sources other than oil and natural gas, according to BOEM. These include offshore wind energy, ocean wave energy, ocean current energy and offshore solar.

This isn’t the first roadblock for offshore wind energy production.

In August 2019, the Department of the Interior formally decided to delay Vineyard Wind, the first large-scale offshore wind energy project in the U.S. planned for 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, to conduct a supplemental study.

The decision contrasts with bipartisan support for offshore wind from federal and state officials, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

“The Department of the Interior’s regrettable decision to further delay the review of the Vineyard Wind project undermines the Trump administration’s American energy dominance agenda and a major U.S. economic growth opportunity. Offshore wind development is expected to result in a $70 billion investment into the American energy supply chain,” said Tom Kiernan, AWEA CEO, in a statement at the time.

In February of this year, the Trump administration provided a revised Vineyard Wind Offshore Wind Facility permitting timeline. The permits will be issued by the EPA in March of 2021, pushing completion well past the intended 2022 date.

Trump has made false statements about wind turbines in the past, particularly about those on land, stating that if the wind stops blowing, your power will turn off. He has said that turbines kill birds including Bald Eagles and that production of the turbines in China and Germany creates “tremendous fumes.” He said few are made in the United States.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, wind energy is fed into the U.S. power grid via transmission lines that connect a variety of energy sources. “Grid operators use the interconnected power system to access other forms of generation when contingencies occur and continually turn generators on and off when needed to meet the overall grid demand.”

The EPA also states that birds and bats are only occasionally killed in collisions with wind turbines and that bird kills are limited to less than 0.02% of the total populations of songbird species, “and orders of magnitude less than other causes.”

Also, most components of wind turbines installed in the United States are manufactured in the county, according to the EPA.

The Department of Energy did not respond to Coastal Review Online’s request for comment for this report.

The American Wind Energy Association declined to comment.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., announced this week that President Trump had agreed to prevent drilling for oil and natural gas off the North Carolina coast, but the president has yet to speak publicly on the matter, and his administration says it is still moving forward with permitting for seismic exploration in the Atlantic.

Tillis, whom polls show trailing his Democratic Party challenger Cal Cunningham, announced Monday that Trump had agreed to add North Carolina to a multistate moratorium on Atlantic offshore drilling announced earlier this month.

The president announced Sept. 8 during an event in Jupiter, Florida, an order to extend the moratorium on offshore drilling on Florida’s Gulf Coast and expand it to Florida’s Atlantic Coast, as well as the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. North Carolina was not included at the time.

Tillis said Monday that he had spoken with Trump who agreed North Carolina would be included in the presidential memorandum withdrawing new leasing for offshore oil and gas developments for the next 12 years.

Also on Monday, the Department of Justice filed a document with the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, Charleston Division, stating that Trump’s memorandum “has no legal effect” on the status of the applications to conduct seismic surveys in the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf that are pending before the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

“If Trump were remotely serious about protecting Florida and the Carolinas from offshore drilling, he wouldn’t be allowing oil exploration along the coast,” Kristen Monsell of the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund said in a statement. “This Justice Department filing underscores the appalling emptiness of Trump’s election-year effort to hoodwink voters. Seismic testing’s sonic blasts harm whales and other marine life, and they set the stage for future drilling and devastating oil spills.”

The process for the pending seismic permits requires two sets of approvals, one from the National Marine Fisheries Service for incidental harassment authorizations, or IHAs, under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the BOEM permits allowing the companies to conduct the seismic surveys.

The ongoing challenge, which is a consolidation of two previously separate cases, claims that the National Marine Fisheries Service violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act when it issued Incidental Harassment Authorizations, or IHAs, in November 2018. The permits authorizing five companies to harm or harass marine mammals while conducting seismic surveys in waters from Cape May, New Jersey, to Cape Canaveral, Florida, are set to expire in November.

The court has scheduled a status conference for Oct, 1, Monsell told Coastal Review Online in an interview Thursday.

“The agency has been issued a process by which they can extend the effectiveness of IHAs for a year. And so, it’s possible the agency could try and invoke that extension here to have the permits effective for another year, but they haven’t yet done so and their filing was silent on that piece and what their what their intentions are,” said Monsell.

She said the status conference set for next month will include discussion of documents the government is trying to keep from becoming public that point to political interference by officials in Washington, D.C., especially regarding measures that government scientists wanted to include help ensure additional productions were in place for critically endangered North Atlantic right whales.

“So, the rest of the briefing schedule on the case is sort of tied off of when the court rules on whether or not those documents can can come in,” Monsell said.

The groups suing the federal government contend that seismic testing could harm dolphins, whales and other animals. The plaintiffs contend that the seismic testing will occur around the “world’s densest population of acoustically sensitive beaked whales off North Carolina’s Outer Banks.”

Drilling opponents welcomed Tillis’ announcement earlier this week.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation on Wednesday thanked those who had spoken out against offshore drilling.

“Offshore drilling and seismic surveying for oil and gas exploration are not the types of activities that are compatible with our vibrant coastal environment and economy. Thank you to everyone that contacted their local, state, and federal representatives to request they pursue action that expands the moratorium for North Carolina and the entire Atlantic Coast,” the federation said in a statement.

Tom Kies of the Business Alliance for Protecting the Atlantic Coast, which opposes seismic testing and oil exploration off the Atlantic Coast and supports offshore wind, told Coastal Review Online Wednesday that earlier this year he had a virtual visit to Tillis’ office to discuss offshore oil and seismic testing. Kies also serves as president of the Carteret County Chamber of Commerce.

“At the time, we were pleasantly surprised to see the positive response. I’m gratified that both Thom Tillis and Gov. Cooper have the best interests of the North Carolina coast in mind. I’m disappointed, however, that the moratorium doesn’t stop seismic testing,” he said. “And I have a concern that because this is a moratorium by presidential memo, it could rescinded as quickly as it was agreed to. Tourism is the driver in our economy here on the coast and the last thing we need is anything that might affect that.”

He added that he would feel better once Trump confirms the announcement.

On Tuesday, Gov. Roy Cooper noted the lack of confirmation from the Trump administration that it will extend the offshore drilling moratorium to North Carolina’s waters, as stated in Tillis’ announcement.

“It’s good the President finally appears to have listened to the bipartisan voices of North Carolinians who for years have been fighting this administration to stop oil drilling off our coast. I will stay vigilant and ready to resume the fight in the event the federal government makes any move toward offshore drilling,” Cooper said.

The Cooper administration also emphasized that there have been repeated attempts to get the president to protect the state’s coast and economy from the dangers of drilling and oil exploration.

Cooper had urged in a letter dated Sept. 15 that the Trump administration include North Carolina in the moratorium.

In 2018, Trump announced plans to open nearly all federal waters to offshore drilling in his draft five-year program for oil and gas development on the Outer Continental Shelf. He later granted Florida an exemption from that program after objections from Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

In early September, a Texas-based company withdrew its permit application to conduct seismic surveys for oil and natural gas off the coast of the Carolinas.

The Sept. 4 letter from WesternGeco LLC Vice President Adil Mukhitov to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, served as formal notice of company’s withdrawal of its application.

The letter was made public before Trump’s Sept. 8 announcement to expand the moratorium on offshore drilling.

The proposed survey area spanned from the northern border of Virginia to the southern border of South Carolina, including the entire coast of North Carolina, per a state Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management document.

DCM denied in June 2019 permits for the company to conduct geological and geophysical surveys in the Atlantic. The state agency determined that the proposal was incomplete, inconsistent with the state’s enforceable coastal management policies, and would harm fish and other marine life and put at risk coastal habitats and the coastal marine economy, according to DCM.

The Commerce Department overruled the state’s objection to WesternGeco’s permit in June.

The merging of 2020’s climate, economic and health calamities has exposed North Carolina’s vulnerabilities to rising seas and rural poverty.

But the multiple crises also clarified that the state’s recovery and its future lie in its proven strengths: clean energy and natural resources.

“I think in North Carolina, there’s a lot of opportunity for clean energy to be an economic driver for the state,” Locke Raper of GridBridge, a Raleigh-based company focused on enhancing reliability, resilience and stability of the electrical grid, said during the virtual North Carolina Clean Economy Summit on Aug. 20.

The event was a kickoff of sorts for the new Southeast chapter of E2, a national, nonpartisan group of pro-environmental business leaders from every sector of the economy.

With its focus on building back “a better, cleaner, more equitable and more resilient economy,” breakout sessions during the summit featured Energy Planning for NC’s Clean Energy Future, Electrifying Transportation, and Building a Resilient NC and Growing our Outdoor Industry.

Founded in 2000, E2 — short for Environmental Entrepreneurs — has 8,000 members in nine regional chapters, centered on the credo that smart climate policy is smart economic policy.

North Carolina has had impressive success in growing green jobs. According to a new report, Clean Jobs North Carolina 2020, produced by E2 and the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, or NCSEA, clean energy jobs in North Carolina — solar, wind, energy efficiency, grid modernization, energy storage, electric vehicles — grew for at least five years in a row and were growing nearly 50% faster than overall statewide employment.

The state ranks No. 2 in the country for installed solar energy, and is exploring increased investment in wind.

At the end of 2019, the clean energy workforce numbered about 130,000, 11 times larger than those employed in fossil fuels, and more than the numbers who work as teachers, farmers or bankers, the report says.

North Carolina ranked among the top 10 states in the country across a variety of clean energy workforce categories and had the ninth largest total number of clean energy jobs among all 50 states.

Although about 19% of clean jobs had been lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the report shows that they have been returning at a steady rate, going from a low of 85,500 workers in May to 91,340 employed at the end of June, and even more in July.

Ethan Blumenthal, a 2018 graduate of University of North Carolina School of Law and a post-graduate scholar at the law school’s Center for Climate, Energy, Environment and Economics, said that the renewable energy industries lifted North Carolina out of the Great Recession that began in 2007.

“Not only do we need it from a climate change standpoint, and just from a social standpoint, but we could use it from an economic standpoint, as well,” he told Coastal Review Online, referring to clean industries. “And so that’s why I absolutely see the renewable energy industry in North Carolina, and the country, only blowing up from here. I really think the sky’s the limit.”

Blumenthal took the leap into entrepreneurial enterprise after analyzing House Bill 589, the 2017 energy bill that completely reset solar regulation in North Carolina.

“And part of that I recognized after talking with advisers and friends,” he said in an interview, “is what I believe to be a niche for a nonprofit solar development company geared towards developing solar for other nonprofits and low and moderate income communities.”

Along with cofounder and law school friend Miles Wobbleton, Blumenthal launched his nonprofit company, Good Solar, in Charlotte in September 2018 with the idea to be the intermediary between the financing industry, the solar development industry and nonprofits, and connecting all of them.

“Part of the challenge, but part of the reason why we thought we could be successful and have a leg up as attorneys is just how complicated the regulatory world is for solar,” he said.

“And personally, I think we’ve done far too little in this country to support small businesses,” Blumenthal added, “and a lot of the solar industry are small businesses that are built in communities.”

Meanwhile, he’s one of six directors in E2’s Southeast chapter, which is focused on work in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia.

“I’m a significant amount younger than most of the other directors,” Blumenthal, 28, said. “A lot of them have a lot of experience in their space and everyone I’ve talked to knows their stuff. I think there’s a breadth of experience.”

Blumenthal said the diverse range of interests and expertise of participants in the Clean Economy Summit shows how E2 can leverage its strength in a broad range of issues.

“Yeah, it’s very different than most nonprofits,” he said. “As a young entrepreneur, I saw a great value in joining what is effectively a network of like minds, whether to get them onboard with Good Solar and what sort of resources I might be able to get from that perspective, or just the sort of experience of learning from them and people that have been there and done that, and been in this space for a long time.”

Another chapter director, Dave Petri, owner and principal consultant with Cynosura Consulting in Mount Airy, has been involved with the outdoor recreation industry for a decade.

With the outdoor industry contributing $20 billion to the state’s economy, he said, there is a lot of new attention on the intersection of “clean tech” and outdoor recreation and their mutual interests.

“I see a huge opportunity helping E2 collaborate with outdoor industries to grow a clean economy,” Petri said in a recent interview. “We both have a common goal to battle the risks of climate change.”

North Carolina is fifth in the nation in outdoor recreational spending, he said.  At the same time, the state is also vulnerable to environmental damage and hazards caused by climate change.

Petri explained that an economy driven by renewable energy and a secure power grid will be more resilient to threats such as extreme flooding, intense storms and heat spikes.

“What we would like to see is less use of extractive energies,” he said, referring to oil and gas and mining industries.

In turn, public lands would be preserved into the future, benefitting its animal and plant inhabitants and opportunities for outdoor recreation.

“Protecting the environment is obviously a goal of the industry and E2 as well,” he said. “We are blessed with such outdoor opportunities. We can be on the beach one day and on the mountains the next day.”

According to the most recent report on the Outdoor Industry Association website, North Carolina’s outdoor recreational industry employed 260,000 people, paying a total of $8.3 billion in wages and salaries.

It also generated $28 billion in consumer spending — more than for financial services and insurance combined — and $1.3 billion in state and local tax revenue.

When Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act this summer, billions of dollars suddenly became available for land conservation and projects in federal parks and refuges, making it possible for the first time in many years to improve and expand outdoor recreational assets.

Devising nature-based solutions to sea level rise, erosion and flooding, Petri said, needs to be a priority to protect outdoor spaces and build resiliency, including in often overlooked areas with less wealth that never recovered from lost industries and closed businesses.

“Some of these underserved communities don’t have the resources to go after these funds,” he said. “Outdoor recreation can help build an economic engine in some of these communities.”

With its focus on a sustainable economy and smart climate policy, E2’s Southeast network can be supportive in growing of outdoor recreational places, he said.

“I think the biggest thing I would like to accomplish is to raise awareness of what we have in North Carolina,” Petri said, “and how it relates to a thriving economy.”

Access for the pubic to North Carolina’s bounty of outdoor recreational offerings is nearly as important as knowing the sites are there, and what’s available when they get there.

“They go hand-in-hand,” he said. “That’s our infrastructure. That’s where our customers go play.”

Perhaps it’s because he’s too young for cynicism, Blumenthal confessed to be “crazy optimistic” about the clean economy’s future and a fair sharing of it, no matter what’s going on with politics.

“I think inevitably, it’s going to be thrown open, just the economics of it,” he said. “You can feel the momentum going towards this sort of socially just (investment) …

“There’s a way to do it that still benefits everyone,” he said, ”not just the few who have the economic capital to do it up front.”

And E2, he added, will have a role working with legislators in creating updated policies that promote a clean economy, which he said should include economic incentives.

“It’s just a little finger on the scales,” Blumenthal said. “And you can see huge economic results in jobs created. That’s the lesson that we need to keep in mind and we need to take forward as we now try to emerge from yet another recession.”

President Trump signed an order Tuesday to expand a moratorium on offshore drilling off Florida’s Gulf Coast.

The order takes the potential environmental threat off the table for 10 years for the Atlantic coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

Trump announced the action during an event in Jupiter, Florida.

In a statement released Tuesday, the White House said Trump had made promoting a clean and healthy environment a top priority.

“Every day of my presidency, we will fight for a cleaner environment and a better quality of life for every one of our great citizens,” Trump said in the statement.

Trump during his tenure has worked to reverse numerous environmental protections, including restrictions on offshore drilling put in place during the Obama administration. In 2018, Trump announced plans to open nearly all federal waters to offshore drilling in his draft five-year program for oil and gas development on the Outer Continental Shelf. He later granted Florida an exemption from that program after objections from Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

Environmental advocates said it remained unclear what the president’s latest decision means for North Carolina and other East Coast states.

“This is not a reason to celebrate because oil spills don’t stop at state lines,” said Sierra Weaver, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “As long as any part of the Atlantic coast is open to drilling, all Atlantic states are at risk. Keep the champagne corked until the entire Atlantic coast is protected.”

The SELC noted that oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster reached five states.

The National Ocean Industries Association also responded Tuesday, saying American offshore oil and gas production benefits every American.

“American offshore production produces energy with a comparatively smaller footprint than other producing regions, occurs under the highest level of regulations and standards and does not give rise to issues of environmental justice,” NOIA President Erik Milito said in a statement. “Furthermore, daily experience in the Western and Central Gulf of Mexico shows how offshore production goes hand-in-hand with environmental stewardship, national defense and other industries, including fishing and tourism.

“Our preference should always be to produce homegrown American energy, instead of deferring future production to countries like Russia and Iran, which do not share American values. Limiting access to our offshore energy resources only shortchanges America and dulls our national outlook.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Offshore drilling opponents are lauding the U.S. House’s approval of legislation that would block the expansion of offshore oil drilling activities, a measure that opponents say would cost American jobs and energy security.

In a 224-189 vote Friday, the House passed a package of four fiscal 2021 appropriations bills. The $36.8 billion Interior, Environment and Related Agencies funding bill includes a provision that restricts funding for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s offshore oil and gas activities to only those planning areas included in the current 2017–2022 Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing program, published in November 2016.

The restriction applies to the enabling steps prior to offshore leasing, including the issuance of permits for geological and geophysical, or seismic, exploration.

“Recent reporting, statements from administration officials and President Trump’s own statements make it alarmingly clear – absent congressional action – the president intends to radically expand offshore drilling. Today’s action by U.S. House of Representatives to block offshore drilling underscores the overwhelming opposition to dirty and dangerous offshore drilling. President Trump’s plan to expand offshore drilling to nearly all U.S. waters is completely at odds with the interests of coastal communities that have the most to lose from drilling disasters. The president has not wavered in his efforts to expand drilling at a time when the last thing our coastal communities and their economies need is the added threat of a drilling disaster,” said Oceana Campaign Director Diane Hoskins.

Oceana noted that opposition to new drilling includes every East and West Coast governor, alliances totaling more than 56,000 businesses and more than 380 coastal communities. More than 120 marine scientists and 80 military leaders have also spoken out in letters to Congress and the White House opposing drilling, citing the environmental and national security threat expanded drilling poses, according to Oceana.

The National Ocean Industries Association, which represents the offshore energy industry, said the bill’s language would outsource American energy security and jobs.

“Legislation that locks away U.S. offshore oil and natural gas production will only shift domestic energy production abroad,” said NOIA President Erik Milito in a statement after the bill’s passage. “We would be outsourcing U.S. national and energy security and the jobs of the 345,000 men and women who keep American offshore energy flowing through the strongest environmental and safety standards in the world. Foreign producers, such as Russia and China’s state-backed energy companies, will be more than happy to make up that gap in production.”

The four spending bills include numerous provisions that Republicans and the White House see as dealbreakers, including those that would require the National Park Service to remove statues and plaques commemorating the Confederacy.

The Interior-Environment bill “represents the largest investment in our environment and our communities since 2010,” said House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Chair Rep. Betty McCollum who is a member of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. “This bill moves us forward – by investing our resources in ways that keep our communities safe and healthy, investing in the protection and preservation of our landscapes and biodiversity, and investing in the arts and humanities. It also moves us in the right direction to meet the federal government’s trust and treaty responsibilities to our Native American brothers and sisters, increasing funding for Indian Health, education, and more. Finally, this bill takes steps to confront our nation’s legacy of racial injustice by removing hateful Confederate symbols from our national parks, because our public spaces must be open and inviting to all. With this bill, we are committed to investing in helping our nation combat the concurrent crises of climate change, tribal health disparities, and environmental justice. I’m proud that this bill reflects the priorities of the American people.”

Dominion Energy announced Friday the successful instillation of the first offshore wind farm to be approved by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, and installed in federal waters.

Once the two-turbine, 12-megawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot project built 27 miles off Virginia Beach is energized later this summer, the offshore wind farm will produce enough renewable energy at peak output to power 3,000 Virginia homes.

The second built in the United States, the offshore wind farm was completed on schedule despite the worldwide effects from the coronavirus pandemic, according to officials.

The experience from the pilot project will be applied to the proposed 2,600-megawatt commercial project set to begin construction in 2024. The largest announced offshore wind project in North America, according to Dominion Energy, will, when complete, provide enough renewable electricity to power up to 650,000 homes.

“The construction of these two turbines is a major milestone not only for offshore wind in Virginia but also for offshore wind in the United States,” Dominion Energy Chairman, President and CEO Thomas F. Farrell II said in a statement. “Clean energy jobs have the potential to serve as a catalyst to re-ignite the economy following the impacts of the pandemic and continue driving down carbon emissions.”

The pilot project was announced three years ago and received Virginia State Corporation Commission approval in November 2018. Onshore construction of the electrical interconnection facilities and the half-mile conduit that holds the final stretch of cable connecting the turbines 27 miles off the coast to a company substation near Camp Pendleton State Military Reservation in Virginia Beach, Virginia, began last summer and was completed earlier this year.

Offshore wind developer Ørsted North America Offshore is heading up the project. The Denmark-based company has invested in the Port of Virginia. The L. E. Myers Co. with members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers performed the onshore construction work.

“We are immensely proud of the work our teams and suppliers were able to complete under unprecedented circumstances,” said Thomas Brostrøm, CEO of Ørsted North America Offshore. “These two turbines are another monumental step for offshore wind in the U.S. The future remains bright for this new American industry.”

Customers will see no increase in rates for the pilot project under the provisions of the Grid Transformation and Security Act of 2018.

More than 100 scientists, including several based in North Carolina, are urging the president and Congress to stop plans to expand offshore drilling.

The scientists in a letter call attention to offshore oil drilling fueling climate change, which threatens all human health and livelihoods.

“If we continue on our current path, the expected increases in temperature, increases in extreme weather, and rising sea levels will wreak havoc on coastal communities. These catastrophic impacts will displace people and create geopolitical instability,” the letter states.

Oceana, an ocean conservation advocacy group, announced the letter Monday on World Oceans Day following Trump reaffirming his plan to expand offshore drilling in a proclamation addressing National Ocean Month.

The scientists warn expanded drilling threatens marine life and coastal economies. The letter calls for all coasts to be protected from another catastrophe like the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, which spewed more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2018, President Trump announced plans to open nearly all U.S. federal waters to offshore drilling in his draft five-year program for oil and gas development on the Outer Continental Shelf.  In March, Dr. Walter Cruickshank, the acting director for Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, testified before Congress that the drilling plan is a “multi-year process that is still underway.”

The scientists join the growing bipartisan opposition to this plan, including every governor on the  East and West coasts, alliances totaling more than 56,000 businesses and more than 380 coastal communities.

Oceana campaign director Diane Hoskins said Monday that the fact that scientists are sounding the alarm on the threat of pollution, fueling climate change and catastrophic drilling disasters from offshore drilling should be a wake-up call.

“Opposition to President Trump’s offshore drilling plan is strong and growing. It’s time for President Trump to listen, instead of using World Oceans Month as an opportunity to double down on support for offshore drilling. These scientists highlight the immense risks that come with expanded drilling and are taking a stand against bringing these risks to new coastal communities,” she said. “The BP disaster caused unimaginable economic and environmental devastation. Instead of learning lessons from the BP disaster, President Trump is proposing to radically expand offshore drilling. It is not too late to reverse course. The president’s offshore drilling plan is still a preventable disaster.”

Commissioners in the Bogue Banks town of Indian Beach are now on record as opposing offshore oil and gas exploration and offshore seismic testing.

The town board, during its regular meeting Wednesday, unanimously adopted a resolution of opposition, the Carteret County News-Times reported.

With the passing of the resolution, the 45th in the state, all coastal municipalities now have passed resolutions opposing offshore oil and gas exploration and offshore seismic testing, according to Randy Sturgill, senior campaign organizer for Oceana’s southeast region.

Sturgill said in a statement that this is a big win for the state, “bringing the tally of coastal communities opposed to oil exploration off the state to 100 percent. It’s a true show of the hard work that folks on the ground have done to push this town council in the right direction. Thank you for protecting our coast.”

WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH – Drilling for oil off the North Carolina coast would pose a substantial threat to the environment onshore, according to a newly released study by an environmental research group.

Environment North Carolina Research & Policy Center’s Offshore Drilling, Onshore Damage delves into a series of possible adverse impacts offshore drilling would have on land well beyond state’s beaches.

The report released Wednesday highlights the infrastructure needed on land to support offshore drilling.

Construction of pipelines and potential ruptures of those lines, the possibility of spills at marine and port terminals, construction or expansion of oil refineries, and on-land disposal of offshore waste generated from drilling are “less known, but no less real,” according to the report.

“This report tells that lesser known piece of the story,” said Jean-Luc Duvall, Environment North Carolina’s campaign director.

Duvall spoke Wednesday at the Blockade Runner in Wrightsville Beach, where a small group of opponents to offshore oil and gas exploration and drilling gathered for a press conference launching the official release of the report.

The Trump administration wants to open much of the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans off the U.S. coast to offshore oil and gas drilling.

Plans to expand offshore drilling were placed on hold earlier this year after a federal judge ruled in late March that President Donald Trump’s 2017 order to revoke the Obama administration’s ban on oil and gas drilling in Atlantic and Arctic was illegal.

The Trump administration appealed the ruling.

Most governors, including North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts oppose the plan.

North Carolina’s Coastal Resources Commission in April unanimously passed a resolution opposing offshore oil and gas exploration and drilling off the state’s coast. Most coastal cities and towns in the state have adopted similar resolutions.

“There’s too much to risk on one drop of oil to land on our shores,” Rep. Deb Butler, D-New Hanover, said to reporters following Wednesday’s press conference.

Butler, who has been outspoken in her opposition to drilling for oil and gas off the North Carolina coast, spoke at the press conference.

“In North Carolina alone, offshore oil and gas development threatens nearly 57,000 jobs and over $2.5 billion in gross domestic product,” Butler said. “To date, more than 42,000 business owners, 500,000 fishing families, and countless elected officials along our coast as well as North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, have come together to reject the risks of offshore oil and gas development. We have seen how the movie ends, we have seen the damage that the BP oil spill had on communities in the Gulf Coast, and we want no part of it.”

Environment North Carolina’s report calls attention to real-life examples of failed pipelines, oil spills at port terminals and the release of oil from storm-damaged structures into the environment.

One such example is the 2015 release of more than 120,000 gallons of crude oil west of Santa Barbara, California, where an onshore, underground pipeline transporting oil from drilling platforms in the Santa Barbara Channel to inland refineries ruptured.

“Oil flowed into the ocean, coated birds and mammals, and forced the closure of two state beaches,” according to the report.

Pacific Ocean waves lapped oil onto beaches some 80 miles south of the spill site. Nearly 100 mammals and more than 200 birds were killed. Local fisheries closed.

Three years after the spill pipeline operator Plains All American Pipeline was found guilty of, among other violations, failing to maintain the pipeline and was fined more than $2 million, according to the report.

The company has applied for permits to replace the ruptured line.

Between 1999 and 2013, more than 40,000 gallons of oil spilled from tankers docked in port in U.S. waters, according to the report.

And, on Grand Bahama island, more than 2 million gallons of oil spilled from onshore oil storage facilities damaged during Hurricane Dorian last August, Duvall said as he displayed a photograph taken after the storm of storage tanks with missing roofs at the facility.

The changing climate, which is producing stronger, more frequent hurricanes, and rising seas, will only exacerbate the threat of spills from onshore energy infrastructure, opponents of offshore drilling say.

The report cites cases of air pollution created from oil refinery operations in states including Texas, which has the largest refinery in the country.

Environment North Carolina’s report concludes with a number of recommendations, including a national, permanent ban on expanding offshore drilling and closing existing offshore facilities and pursing public policies to reduce oil and gas dependence in the country.

“This will avoid the need for new or expanded onshore infrastructure to support increased production of oil and gas, as well as the risks to marine ecosystems and beaches posed by offshore drilling itself,” according to the report. “States should seek to protect coastal areas by blocking construction of new infrastructure or the expansion of existing infrastructure needed to support expanded offshore drilling. States, not the federal government, control permitting and siting decisions for onshore infrastructure. They should use this authority to help protect communities and ecosystems.”

Reprinted from the Outer Banks Voice

Nags Head Mayor Ben Cahoon is among around 30 leaders from 13 coastal states heading to Washington, D.C., this week to urge lawmakers on Capitol Hill to maintain offshore drilling protections passed this summer by the House of Representatives.

The effort, coordinated by the conservation organization Oceana, comes as Congress prepares to hammer out details of the 2020 Fiscal Year spending plan. And it’s another chapter in a longstanding battle over offshore drilling that was re-ignited in early 2017 when newly elected President Donald Trump signed an executive order restarting the process of opening the Atlantic, and other waters, to offshore energy exploration.

The protections include two amendments to the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies funding bill that would block offshore drilling expansion during Fiscal Year 2020 in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, along with the eastern Gulf of Mexico. A third amendment would block funding for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to issue permits for seismic air gun blasting in the Atlantic Ocean. The goal of the coastal delegation is to lobby lawmakers to protect those amendments as they wind their way through the federal budget process.

“We’re here to send a message to protect those provisions as they go through [the budget process],” Cahoon said during a Nov. 12 interview. “This is the message of Nags Head. Offshore drilling is bad for us … we have a wonderful economy that supports the community and protects the environment.”

Cahoon and others in the delegation, which includes business leaders, conservation advocates and local and state elected officials, are scheduled to meet with lawmakers Wednesday and Thursday in anticipation of upcoming federal budget negotiations. The federal budget year begins Oct. 1, however Congress passed a continuing resolution in September that was signed by Trump to fund the government through Nov. 21.

The delegation’s visit also comes after a federal judge’s ruling this spring that shut down the Trump Administration’s plans to lift a ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. The ruling caused Trump officials to sideline, at least temporarily, larger plans to expand drilling off the nation’s coasts.

Cahoon is joined on Capitol Hill by two other North Carolina officials – Beaufort Mayor Rett Newton and Carteret County Chamber of Commerce President Tom Kies, who also serves as president of the Business Alliance for Protecting the Atlantic Coast.

Cahoon said the group would be meeting with Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and also hoped to meet with Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., who recently won the special election to succeed the late Walter Jones Jr. and who represents the Outer Banks.

“It’s a priority for me to meet (Murphy) and bring him the message that the Outer Banks is unified in opposition to offshore drilling,” said Cahoon.

An outspoken opponent of offshore drilling, Cahoon co-hosted a Mayoral Roundtable to Protect Our North Carolina Coast in May in which nearly a dozen mayors attended to show solidarity in their opposition.

At the event, North Carolina Secretary of the Department of Environment Quality Michael Regan cautioned those at the meeting not to let their guard down when it came to the campaign against offshore drilling. “We have to remain vigilant in opposition to the drilling off our coast and we have to be prepared to protect our communities,” he said.

In a Nov. 12 press release, Oceana also emphasized that the battle is far from over.

“For decades, Congress upheld offshore drilling moratoriums through the Interior-Environment funding bill,” the release stated. “While the Trump administration delayed plans to expand offshore drilling to new areas, the January 2018 proposal to open over 90 percent of federal waters to offshore drilling remains on the table.”

In a related matter, another Dare County mayor was traveling last week as part of an effort to oppose offshore drilling. Outgoing Kill Devil Hills Mayor Sheila Davies was invited to Nova Scotia by the Council of Canadians to speak about the town’s and county’s fight to oppose offshore drilling. That group, along with Nova Scotia Offshore Alliance, announced that a dozen municipal governments there were requesting an inquiry into offshore drilling along with a moratorium.

This story is provided courtesy of the Outer Banks Voice, a digital newspaper covering the Outer Banks. Coastal Review Online is partnering with the Voice to provide readers with more environmental and lifestyle stories of interest about our coast.

A webinar planned for July 23 will offer insight into potential renewable energy leases and other initiatives off the coast of Kitty Hawk and Virginia Beach, Virginia.

The webinar, part of a meeting of the Joint Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Virginia and North Carolina Renewable Energy Task Force, is set for 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and can be accessed online or by calling in at 800-369-3378 and using the code: BOEM. The link to the meeting can also be found on the BOEM website.

The BOEM task force is an intergovernmental group made up federal officials and elected state, local and tribal officials and designated member representatives.

The public is invited to listen to the webinar, and there will be an opportunity for questions and comments during the meeting.

Additional details, including an agenda, are to be available at online.

Learn More

• BOEM North Carolina Activities
• BOEM Virginia Activities

GRANDY – After two years of legal action and an 18-month ban on solar farms in rural Currituck County, not only has a new facility now been permitted, the county is in the process of revising its zoning to allow solar projects under certain conditions.

San Francisco-based Ecoplexus plans to start construction in January of an 18-megawatt solar array on 58 acres in Grandy. Situated off U.S. 158 at the former Goose Creek Golf Course site, it will be the county’s third solar farm, in addition to those in Moyock and Shawboro.

In May 2016, although approved by the county planning board, the Currituck County Board of Commissioners denied Ecoplexus’ permit, in part over concerns from adjacent neighbors about noise, drainage and visual impacts. The company sued. During the interim, the board voted in February 2017 to ban any additional solar projects.

In December, after two appeals, a court ruled that the application met the standards of the land use plan and ordered the county to issue the permit.

Meanwhile, other solar companies, including Arizona-based First Solar and North Carolina-based Sun Energy, have contacted the county to inquire about the status of the text amendment to the unified development ordinance the county is working on that would again re-authorize solar farms, said Laurie LoCicero, Currituck County’s planning director.

Some of the conditions in the draft proposal would limit sites to 200 acres and include specific measures to control glare, noise, environmental safety, landscaping, drainage and visual attractiveness. The revised language is expected to go to the planning board this month, and then to county commissioners in October for a yes-or-no vote to adopt.

“I think in general there’s still some concerns about solar in the county about conversion of farmland to solar,” LoCicero said. “On the other hand, people are wanting to have the use on their land.”

Although a county spokesman had expressed “disappointment” in the court ruling, saying the site was not an appropriate location, county manager Dan Scanlon said this month that the commissioners’ position was not based on being “anti-solar.”

“They wanted to make sure we have language to protect the community and the landowner,” he said.

But Michael Wallace, Ecoplexus Vice President Southeast Development, said in an interview from his Durham office that the company has worked closely with the planning department to address concerns.

“The county has been great to work with,” he said.

Conditions in the use permit the county commission approved on July 23 include that the solar panels are rated to 150 mph wind speed and racking systems are engineered to withstand a 120 mph, 3-second wind gust.

Also, there must be a 300-foot setback from residential zones and a 100-foot setback from other property lines; a maximum height of 15 feet for fixtures and 24 inches for unwanted vegetation; monitoring wells installed for groundwater; a decommissioning plan in place; no chemicals used to control weeds; restriction of pile-driving to daytime hours during the week; and quiet pumps used for dewatering activities.

As to stated fears about the panels creating essentially a huge mirror at the site, Wallace said the technology is designed to absorb light, not reflect it. Although there may be a glint sometimes, he said in general the array is not bright and never creates heat or pollution.

Wallace said the facility, which is expected to be operational by late April or early May 2019, will produce enough energy to power 2,900 homes. It will have 55,000 silicon modules, which are typically 40 by 78 inches and blue in color. The electricity generated will go into the grid, he said, which doesn’t preclude – or guarantee – it being used locally.

“Electricity will take the path of least resistance,” Wallace explained. “The place where it’s needed first, it’s going to go in that direction.”

Lease agreements with the property owner are usually 30- to 40-year terms, he said, and the agreement with the utility that buys the power usually is for 10-20 years. Although the solar equipment is designed to last 40 years or so, it’s uncertain whether the technology at that point would be outmoded.

Wallace said that the Grandy solar farm is the company’s first project in Currituck, but Ecoplexus has more than 30 projects “in the development pipeline” in North Carolina, with a “handful” completed. It is ranked as the sixth largest solar project developer in the U.S., he said, totaling nearly 6 gigawatts in 146 projects.

According to the Solar Energy Industry Association, North Carolina in 2017 ranked second in the nation, behind California, with a total of 4,411.7 megawatts of installed solar – 1,220.7 of those megawatts installed just last year. Jobs in the industry numbered 7,622 last year, the seventh most in the country, with solar investment in North Carolina totaling about $6.5 million – $1.34 million of that just last year.

In the last five years, according to the association, the cost of solar has plummeted 53 percent, making it comparable to natural gas.

The state’s appeal to solar developers can be attributed in part to its regulatory support, particularly the Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard, or REPS, approved by the North Carolina General Assembly in 2007, said SEIA’s Southeast state affairs senior manager Maggie Clark.

The REPS required electric utilities to have increasing percentages of its power generated by renewable energy, including wind and solar, up to 12.5 percent in 2021, when the level is then maintained.

With energy produced by waste from swine and poultry operations later added to the mix of renewables, Clark said, the portfolio became one of the most unique in the nation.

Also, in 2008, legislators passed a law that exempted 80 percent of the appraised value of non-residential solar systems from local property taxes.

But there have been a few bumps since Republicans took control of state government in 2010, notably some “big fights” over rolling back REPS in 2013-2014.

“I would say that North Carolina policy makers and regulators have implemented transparent rules of the road for solar,” Clark said.

State Sen. Bill Cook, R-Beaufort, who represents Currituck County and other northeastern counties where solar has grown significantly, has proposed legislation that would repeal the solar tax exemption on the contention that the tax break is unfair to other businesses.

But Clark said that considering that solar projects are typically built on farmland, which also is tax exempted, a county that would collect, say, $200 to $300 per acre in annual property taxes for a farm would collect $600 to $800 an acre on that same land with solar.

And unlike most other development, she added, the county does not have to shell out for additional roads, municipal sewers or schools for solar farms. Plus it can’t be overlooked that the private property owner is being paid a regular fee for the leased land.

“I totally understand the local government’s desire to regulate,” she said.

But last year, she added, House Bill 589 put more control of solar projects in the hands of Duke Energy, including terms of the purchase and sale of the electricity. Dominion Power, which customer base is in the northeastern part of the state, was exempted from the law, she said.

Still, even regulated monopolies such as Duke and Dominion say they are open to adding more solar-generated power to the grid, she said. Leasing of rooftop solar, although a much smaller share of the market in North Carolina, was recently authorized, which will reflect savings in a customer’s monthly electric bill, rather than years down the road. Also, for the next few years, rebates are now available for rooftop solar investments.

“I think we’re seeing utilities become more innovative,” Clark said. “But there’s a lot they can do to become more progressive.”

Battery storage technology – long the holy grail with renewables because of its intermittent energy production – is advancing in leaps and bounds, Clark said, a development that will ensure the continued growth of solar power.

The coastal plain of North Carolina, however, may have already had its day in the sun. The flat, expansive land is ideal for solar, she said, but it’s not the only game in town.

“I think that part of the region is well developed, and you’ll see things transitioning to the western part of the state,” Clark said. “It’s not going to be very common to see many projects moving forward in the eastern part of the state. Everything is moving west.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, is inviting the public to comment on its recently published draft environmental assessment for surveys to identify, map, monitor and research sand resources in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico outer continental shelf regions.

The deadline to comment on the draft assessment is midnight, Sept. 10.

BOEM’s Marine Minerals Program is responsible for managing non-energy minerals, mainly sand and gravel, for use in coastal resiliency and storm damage reduction projects, including beach nourishment and coastal restoration. The agency says it must carefully manage sand and gravel resources used to replenish eroded beaches, conserve sensitive wildlife areas and restore barrier islands and wetlands that provide natural protection from storms, including protection for inland areas.

“This project is in response to the critical coastal and dune erosion that occurred due to effects from Hurricane Sandy,” according to the document released Friday. In the wake of the 2012 storm, BOEM received millions in disaster relief and coastal resiliency funding to conduct the proposed research.

The proposed offshore sand surveys would be part of a plan to provide compatible resources to multiple federal and state agencies and localities to help protect infrastructure, respond to emergencies and rebuild parkland, wildlife refuges and habitat.

The potential study area is from the state or federal boundary to about 164-foot depths offshore from Maine to Texas. Certain areas would be excluded, such as Cape Cod Bay and marine protected areas.

The sand surveys would generally examine the top 20 feet of the sea floor and do not involve the use of air guns. The technology includes sub-bottom profilers; multi-beam or interferometric swath bathymetry; side scan sonar or acoustic backscatter from multi-beam or interferometric bathymetry; magnetometers; and vibracore or grab sampling to collect sediment samples.

Submit Comments

Comments may be submitted in the following ways:

• Electronically, to Deena Hanson at: deena.hansen@boem.gov.
• Hand or mail delivery, in an envelope addressed to: Deena Hansen, Office of Environmental Programs, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, 760 Paseo Camarillo, Suite 102, Camarillo, CA 93010.

Learn More

• Read the environmental assessment
• BOEM’s Marine Minerals Program

WILMINGTON – Although ostensibly about offshore drilling, two speakers at a public forum held here Tuesday presented different views of the ocean itself.

For Jean-Michel Cousteau, environmentalist and son of legendary explorer Jacques Cousteau, the ocean is something that connects all humans. And for John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil Co. and founder of Citizens for Affordable Energy, the ocean is a natural resource that should be mapped to better understand where – and how many – oil deposits are underneath.

“To Drill or Not To Drill?” was the inaugural event hosted by The Public Square, a collaborative civic effort to educate locals about important issues. An estimated 950 people filled the lower level of the Wilson Center at Cape Fear Community College to hear the speakers who used their lifetimes of experience to discuss offshore drilling.

“Every time you drink water, you drink the ocean,” Cousteau said. “It is a part of all of us.”

Cousteau is the founder of the Ocean Futures Society, a nonprofit conservation and education organization that is meant to give a voice to the ocean. In his presentation, he said that there is still much we don’t know about the ocean.

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes, and we are just starting to understand the consequences of those mistakes,” he said, mentioning the effects of human activity on plants, animals and the climate. “We have to be sure to do everything we can to stop using the world’s oceans as a universal sewer.”

Citing the intense energy demands of the U.S. and the rest of the world, Hofmeister said that society shouldn’t remain unaware of what oil deposits are under the sea, including off North Carolina’s coast.

“We owe it to ourselves to explore what’s there, to better understand this resource,” Hofmeister said.

For decades, offshore drilling has been off-limits on the East Coast, largely because of environmental concerns and infamous oil industry accidents like 1989’s Exxon Valdez and at the Deepwater Horizon in 2010. Earlier this year, though, the Trump administration moved to expand offshore oil and gas drilling.

Those who support such efforts point to benefits such as greater energy independence for the country and more jobs for the coastal communities.

Gov. Roy Cooper has already stated his opposition to offshore drilling for North Carolina. And while some coastal county boards, such as Carteret and Brunswick, have passed resolutions in favor of offshore energy exploration, many coastal communities oppose it because of potential negative effects on tourism and fishing, which are vital to the coastal economy.

Both speakers at the forum discussed the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which resulted in almost 5 million barrels of oil being released into the Gulf of Mexico. Cousteau said he has seen the effects on marine life, such as dolphins. Hofmeister criticized the use of dispersants, which he said made the situation worse. While there are risks associated with the extraction of oil, he said, the lessons learned should be used to develop better practices in the industry.

“Every single aspect of our modern lives relies on energy. We need more, not less,” Hofmeister said. “We have to know what’s there. We, as a society, can’t remain ignorant. We have to pursue every possible source. In the future, it will remain critical to the economic well-being of society.”

Hofmeister acknowledged that the exploration of offshore oil resources would likely take at least a decade. The search will also be a costly endeavor. Shell Oil Co., for example, spent $7 billion on an exploratory well in the Arctic, and later abandoned the project. Cousteau argued that a better use of that money would be investing in sustainable and renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar and possibly harnessing the power of ocean currents.

“There is a point when there will be no more oil left,” Cousteau said. “What happens then?”

Hofmeister disputed the notion that there have been adequate advances in renewable energy to meet the world’s energy demands.

“Time is of the essence,” he said. “We need to think in terms of time and need, for the immediate term, near term and long term.”

Both speakers addressed the risks associated with seismic exploration, which is used to determine the best locations for test wells. Seismic technology in marine environments is controversial because of its negative effects on whales, dolphins and fish. Cousteau said that the seismic blasts can interrupt communications between migrating whales, which takes place over hundreds of miles. Hofmeister agreed that the process can be damaging to marine life.

“We are fully aware of the potential negative impacts,” Hofmeister said, adding that many concerns can be addressed in the environmental studies that must be completed before any of the exploration and drilling efforts begin.

“If we are to pursue this, we must take the time to do it right. But there are also trade-offs that have to be made. We have to make those decisions,” Hofmeister said.

Cousteau described the variety of ocean-related issues he’s seen and been a part of during his 75 years of marine exploration and scuba diving, including the problem of plastics in the ocean and the increased intensity of coastal storms. But, he said he has an optimistic vision of society’s ability to do better.

“We can work together. Every one of use breathes the same air. There are no politics here. We are talking about the future of our planet,” Cousteau said. “If you protect the ocean, you protect yourself.”

News anchor Jon Evans of WECT-TV moderated the event with the stated goal that every person there would learn something about the offshore drilling issue.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation helped underwrite the forum.

The Public Square, a collaboration between Cape Fear Community College, University of North Carolina Wilmington and Cape Fear Realtors, was founded to educate and foster civil discourse on issues with local ramifications. The group plans to offer another program next spring.

This solar farm in New Bern is one of about 100 solar farms developed by Strata Solar in North Carolina. The state is the second top producer of solar energy after California. Photo: Strata Solar

NEW BERN — As solar energy has taken a surprising leap nationally, North Carolina is sitting pretty as a top producer, behind California, of utility-scale solar energy in the country.  In 2013, the state overtook New Jersey and Arizona with the second largest increase in solar capacity.

Strata Solar, which will complete its farm in New Bern next month, is the No. 1 producer, as far as installed megawatts of solar energy, in North Carolina, with a total of about 100 solar farms.

But all is not sunny in the solar industry in North Carolina, with dark clouds hovering over the state Utilities Commission, the state legislature, the U.S. Congress and even on the international front.

Solar power, meanwhile, is literally transforming the landscape in North Carolina.

Until a few years ago, farmers leasing 45 acres of land Joe Thomas owns off N.C. 43 outside New Bern harvested cotton, beans and corn.  Now, those same acres will be harvesting enough energy from the sun to theoretically power 750 homes and remove 780 cars from the road.

“I think this is a resource for producing electricity that is good,” said Thomas, owner of Thomas Development Co. in New Bern, adding he has heard nothing negative from the community. “I think the construction has gone fine.”

Chapel Hill-based Strata Solar had approached him two or three years ago about leasing the land for a solar farm, and as a businessman, Thomas liked what he heard. The offer included a long-term lease – he declined to provide the details– that provided a bit more income than farmland and would be paid consistently.

“It’s a good income related to the farm,” Thomas said.

When the 6.4-megawatt project is completed, the land, just north of Bridgeton, will be covered with 22,556 slate-blue photovoltaic modules that will produce at its peak about 10,048 megawatt hours of electricity a year.

The Craven County site is about the same size as most of Strata’s projects that are built on land formerly used to farm. And once the lease is up, the land can be farmed again with minimal evidence of the solar project.

Blair Schooff

“We tend to, as a practice, try to do as little grading work as possible,” said Blair Schooff, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. “We like to be good stewards of the land, primarily.”

Schooff said that Strata, which has started expanding into other states, does not use gravel or cement at their projects, and fencing is minimal.

“We think this is a very good use of land, and farmers who have been active farmers agree with us,” he said. “You can pull all this stuff out of the ground, and be left with what you had before.”

Strata has a trained workforce that moves in teams from job to job in regional clusters, Schooff said, so jobs that are created are not necessarily from the area of the specific project. Last year, there were as many as 1,500 total workers on all the solar farms, he said, averaging about 60 to 90 per project.

Industry-wide, North Carolina last year employed 2,400 people in solar energy jobs, according to N.C. Sustainable Energy Association.

Craven County Manager Jack Veit said that the county has had little to no interaction with Strata – Craven has no zoning — and he is not aware of any specific benefit to the county. On the other hand, he said he has not heard any objection to the solar farm, which is about a 10-minute drive from New Bern, the county seat.

Whatever energy produced at Strata’s farms is sold to Duke Energy or Dominion North Carolina Power, Schooff said.

“Both utilities are fantastic to work with,” he said. “They’re very much embracing the new developments in solar.”

Growth in the solar industry coincided with passage of the state Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard in 2007, said Steve Kalland, executive director of the N.C. Solar Center. It really kicked into high gear about three years ago, he said.

These 45 acres of farmland in New Bern will be harvesting enough energy from the sun to theoretically power 750 homes and remove 780 cars from the road once the solar farm is completed. Photo: Strata Solar

The law required that by 2021 large utilities have 12.5 percent of their electric supply produced by clean energy sources.

“North Carolina suddenly became a very good place to do large-scale, utility-scale solar farms,” Kalland said. “The residential side in California is kind of driving the train there.”

An issue with net-metering that is being considered by the N.C. Utilities Commission is relevant in this state not because it would have an effect on the utility-scale solar projects, but because of its future potential, Kalland said.

Net metering allows people with residential roof-top solar to be credited for excess energy backed into the power grid. Because of regulatory strictures, there is very little residential solar power being produced in North Carolina.

From the utility company’s perspective, Kalland said, it’s a loss of revenue that was calculated to cover its infrastructure costs, despite the current miniscule scale of residential solar in the state.

“They’re looking out 30 years,” he said. “They’re worried about it.”

Kalland said that it would benefit the state to have a discussion about regulatory issues that could hinder the future of residential solar power, but it is premature to worry about its immediate impact on North Carolina’s solar industry.

Despite murmurs from legislatures of repealing the state’s renewables standard, Kalland said he is “reasonably” comfortable that it will remain in effect.

“I think the state would be foolish to kill the goose that laid the golden egg,” he said.