North Carolina, and Duke Energy’s Vision for Distributed Energy

North Carolina shares many characteristics of its fellow Southeastern U.S. states. Like most of them, it’s a vertically integrated market, without competitive generation or federally regulated wholesale energy markets. And like most of its neighbors, it’s dominated by a large investor-owned utility covering large swaths of territory interspersed by municipal utilities and electric cooperatives, with a big say in state energy policy.

But North Carolina also differs from its neighbors in some key ways. While Republicans hold a majority in the state legislature, North Carolina has a Democratic governor, who’s pushing for the state to adopt a clean energy and decarbonization standard. It also has a lot more solar, the second-most of any state behind California. Finally, North Carolina has Duke Energy, its flagship utility, which has set its own net-zero carbon by 2050 goals, and taken some innovative approaches to distributed energy resources (DERs).