Home Care In Belews Creek, NC

Duke Energy would be permitted to burn coal and gas until 2040 at the company’s Belews Creek Steam Station in Stokes County under a proposal submitted to state regulators Wednesday.

That would be four years later than the current timeline filed with the North Carolina Utilities Commission in 2023.

A revised schedule is significant because Belews Creek is one of the state’s largest power plants — and its biggest single source of climate-warming pollution, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Duke plans to neutralize the facility’s carbon footprint by replacing fossil fuel combustion there with emissions-free power from what would be the state’s first new nuclear reactor in nearly four decades.

The question now is, when?

Duke submitted its latest Carolinas Resource Plan Wednesday. The document, which maps out the company’s future energy mix in the two states, would also push back activation of a potential reactor at Belews Creek by two years, to 2036.

The company proposes adding a small modular reactor, or SMR.

SMRs generate about one-third as much power as traditional nuclear reactors but are cheaper and easier to deploy because they can be assembled in a factory then transported for on-site installation.

The company says its proposed reactor at Belews Creek will be capable of producing about 300 megawatts. The station currently has a total capacity of 2,200 megawatts.

Road to net-zero

Delaying the transition away from coal and gas ultimately will help spread the costs of reaching so-called net-zero status for carbon dioxide pollution by 2050, the company said Wednesday.

Carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, including coal and natural gas, is the leading cause of climate change.

Because Duke is North Carolina’s largest utility, its transition to clean energy will have an outsized impact on a state mandate to be carbon neutral by mid-century.

The resulting net-zero status would mean carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is offset by an equivalent amount that is removed or avoided through clean-energy projects, including the installation of solar arrays and wind turbines, or mitigation projects such as the large-scale planting of trees.

In an interview Wednesday with the Winston-Salem Journal and Greensboro News & Record, company officials said shifts in state and federal policies prompted Duke to propose delaying some elements of its clean-energy transition.

Those political developments included the North Carolina General Assembly scrapping an interim goal to slash the state’s carbon emissions by 70% from 2005 levels by 2030, and incentives by President Donald Trump’s administration that encourage the mining and use of coal and natural gas.

“We're still on a trajectory for carbon neutrality by 2050,” said Glen Snider, Duke’s managing director of integrated resource planning. “But having the interim (state) target removed and then the flexibility afforded at the federal level both in the exact timing of coal (plant) retirements as well as how gas plants are allowed to operate when they replace those coal units, that flexibility has helped with the affordability of the plan.”

The resulting savings will translate to smaller future rate increases for customers, added Kendal Bowman, Duke Energy’s North Carolina president.

“We are really trying to squeeze every megawatt we can out of our existing fleet of assets,” Bowman told the newspapers. “We're also taking advantage of tax incentives, and we're planning to defer dates for some of our longer-range resources in favor of some technologies that can more quickly serve near-term growth.”

Under the proposal, rates for Duke customers in the Carolinas would increase by an average of 2.1% annually over the course of a decade, the company projected — though it noted that’s just related to the plan itself, not other grid upgrades.

In the same period, the typical bill would rise about $30 per month compared to $54 monthly under the existing timeline.

“By expanding our diverse generation portfolio and maximizing our existing power plants to meet growth needs, we will ensure reliable energy while saving all our customers money,” Bowman said.

Surging demand

The latest plan includes 4,000 megawatts of solar capacity and 5,600 megawatts of battery storage by 2034, but critics also noted that it includes up to seven new plants powered by natural gas and would extend the life of several existing gas-fired units, including at Belews Creek.

“Duke’s proposal to delay coal retirements is a disappointing and unsettling departure from the utility’s previous commitments,” said Mikaela Curry, manager of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. “Duke Energy has an obligation to deliver clean, reliable and affordable energy for North Carolinians.”

Energy needs of Duke customers in the Carolinas over the next 15 years are expected to surge eight times faster than in the previous decade-and-a-half, the company said. That’s more than double the projected increase when the 2023 Carolinas Resource Plan was initially filed.

That demand will be driven largely by growth in population and manufacturing, as well as the continued expansion of artificial intelligence, which relies on information storage in data centers that require extraordinary amounts of electricity, the company said.

David Neal, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, questioned Duke’s strategy of adding natural gas capacity as a bridge to emissions-free energy generation.

Burning natural gas produces about half the carbon pollution of coal combustion but still contributes to climate change.

“We’re concerned that regulated monopoly Duke Energy is continuing to rely on expensive new gas power plants, leaving North Carolina families on the hook for escalating fuel costs and making it harder to reach the 2050 carbon neutrality requirement,” Neal said. “Duke yet again appears to have fallen short of taking full advantage of energy efficiency, load flexibility, renewables and storage, which remain the cheapest and fastest suite of options for meeting rising demand.”

What’s next?

The North Carolina Utilities Commission will hold a series of public hearings across the state to get input on the proposed plan, then hear evidence from experts, advocates and opponents next summer before likely issuing an order in late 2026, said Bowman.

When Duke Power. created Belews Lake in 1973, fishermen had high expectations about the bass fishery, since new fisheries typically explode with large numbers of fish, though they may be small in size.

One year later, those expectations disappeared when selenium, a wastewater by-product of the Belews Creek Steam Station, leaked into the lake. The undetected spills occurred from 1974 through 1984, raising havoc with the fishery from mid-lake near the steam station to the dam, while leaving the southern portion of the lake largely uncontaminated.

In 1986, scientists discovered that selenium toxicity was the culprit. The selenium poisoning caused deformities to the spine, head, fins and eyes of fish; it also caused reproductive failure that decimated 19 of the 20 species in the lake.

Dennis Lemly, a U.S. Forest Service research biologist at the Southern Research Station, spent 20 years studying the effects of selenium on the Belews Lake fishery.

“Belews Lake represents one of the most-extensive and prolonged cases of selenium poisoning of freshwater fish in the United States,” Lemly was quoted as saying. “It provides an excellent case study of the insidious and persistent toxicity of selenium to aquatic ecosystems.

“Selenium poisoning in fish can be invisible for a time because the primary impact is on the egg, which receives the toxin from the mother’s diet. When the eggs are hatched, the developing fish metabolize the selenium. Some fish are visibly deformed, but others grow into adult fish that appear healthy yet fail to reproduce. Because there is no apparent fish kill, species can disappear before you can do anything about it.”

Once the effects of selenium became known, Duke Power rerouted the selenium-tainted wastewater from its steam station.

Though some selenium remains in the sediment, its impact has diminished.

“One indication of this is that the fish-consumption advisory on the lake has been removed for some 15 years,” said Kinnon Hodges, a fisheries biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.

Another indication relates to fish-density samplings conducted by Hodges.

“The densities of fish we collect during our electrofishing surveys in the main body of the lake and the upstream end of the lake are nearly identical,” he said. “If selenium was still having significant impact, you’d expect to see a lot higher density of fish in the upstream end of the lake than you would in the main body of the lake where the selenium contamination occurred.”

A 2007-2009 study by Hodges attributed the difference in bass growth rates from one end of the lake to the other to the warmer water temperatures of the northern section, though further study of the cooler southern portion is needed.

“The fish in the warm section exhibit faster growth rates during their first three years, but they don’t live very long,” he said. “That’s why there’s an abundance of 10- to 15-inch fish in Belews, but not many larger fish. That’s not an unexpected finding; it’s typical of heated lakes.”

Kinnon said Belews is a nutrient-poor lake, which accounts for its clear waters and its low productivity.

“The bass in Belews are long and lean, not pot-bellied like Lake Jordan bass, because of the lake’s limited food supply,” he said.