Many of you know that I have a separate career (some would say it’s my primary) in clean energy. Recently that career took a turn in a new direction and I accepted a position with the main investor owned utility in my state, Duke Energy, on their Regulated Renewables Development team. In a nutshell my job is to develop and oversee the construction of utility scale solar power plants in the Carolinas. I really like this work (it’s not the first time I’ve worked in solar), and my supervisor is kind and fair and hardworking, and I am grateful, as someone who cares passionately about the clean energy transition, to be able to see, up close and personal, the utility side of our energy ecosystem.
This moment in history is pivotal for this field for a number of reasons. The rapid growth of energy demand created by the increasing use of artificial intelligence is unprecedented in the history of our power sector. It’s literally a whole other essay and I can’t emphasize enough how challenging the next five years will be. I’ll quickly list some of the “ands” so readers can see where my head is at- the rise in power demand is going to drive up electric rates AND market forces in that context will drive innovation in technology efficiency, finance, development strategies AND rate making which will shatter the current paradigm and usher in… some new order. So many good AND bad things could happen. AND, AI itself is both the source of this challenge, AND may hold some number of the solutions as well.
And, the opinions in this essay are mine and not those of Duke Energy.
As long time readers might remember I previously published a blog that mentioned Duke Energy in the context of (formerly) prominent NC art gallery Hodges Taylor getting 3 commissions contracted and completed for the opening of Duke Energy’s newest building in uptown Charlotte. The work looks ah-mazing (yes, I’ve been in the building at this point). And to be clear for the record before we dig in, I don’t know the owners of Hodges Taylor personally and I do know they’ve got a real track record of picking art. Going to Hodges Taylor during Art crawls when I was in art school at UNC Charlotte (when it was downtown) was a real treat- it was the “big time” gallery, the place we art students would gawk at our elders and (hopefully, eventually) peers who had “made it.” And in the case of these commissions, the owners got their artists paid which makes my heart happy. IE, this blog is not a drag on them.
The work, according to the post above, was commissioned to celebrate the city of Charlotte and Duke Energy’s “clean energy mission.” Even prior to this current role, I’ve spent a lot of time in close contact with the impacts of how Duke Energy approaches meeting their regulatory obligations in the context of being an investor owned utility (IOU). Duke almost certainly moved into building renewable generation due to mandates from our state legislature (not any “clean energy mission”). I was on the staff of the North Carolina Energy Office in the early ‘oughts when a bipartisan coalition of stakeholders worked to pass our state’s first Renewable Portfolio Standard under Senate Bill 3. This law requires a specific amount of the electrical generation in the state to come from renewable energy. I was also fortunate to be involved in the stakeholder process behind former Governor Cooper’s Executive Order 80, which really created our state’s carbon obligations. Most of the good stuff in this bill became part of a 2021 piece of legislation, HB 951 and eventually the integrated resource planning process run by the state’s Utility Commission which (very simplistically) gives Duke the chance to negotiate what assets it gets to build and what costs it can put into electric rates (again, this is very simplistic).
One of the big “and”s that came out of those two processes for me was the realization that Duke was (always) going to fight to get the full value of investments in their fossil fuel fleet realized. That continues today, with Duke joining Electric Generation for a Sensible Transition which has been actively lobbying to overturn the US EPA’s Section 111 standards for the regulation of greenhouse gases, among other actions (there’s a lot of detail in this recent article at Desmog). The “and” here, the two things that are true, is that many of us want companies to address climate change and we want companies to be able to make investments and not have the government overreach and impact them (yeah, that sentence is definitely a reference to the impact across the US clean energy sector of the current Administration’s attempts to gut the Inflation Reduction Act and claw back greenhouse gas mitigation investment funds).
The other big “and” is the very real need for electric rates to be reasonable for businesses and citizens. This one is really complicated too because while technology solutions like carbon capture and sequestration add cost to “clean up” our power, the truth (the “and”) is that clean energy can be built quicker than any other resource right now, which will figure into choices about what gets built, including at IOUs. And tax credits for this tech aside, its long term economics are better than fossil fuels, and the private sector frickin’ knows it, too. This is part of that wild context I mentioned several paragraphs ago- market forces are not exclusively the enemy of progress in this moment.
So yeah, I’m swimming in contradiction. The biggest one being, you can’t make change in an organization from the outside, AND, being on the inside means I’ve agreed to a set of economic constraints on the total impact my work can have.
When I talk about contradiction- about two seemingly contradictory concepts being simultaneously true- I mean these types of conflict. To come back to the top and tie this essay back to Art, “the world is far better with these commissioned art works in it” and “the source of the check that paid for it is an entity often leverages its economic power to advance an agenda that I don’t agree with at all” are most definitely both true and I doubt I have much work to do to convince the reader that they appear to have or be in conflict. We get ourselves into trouble, often, by framing concepts in ways that make two facts cancel or negate each other, and not as an observation of facts. Most importantly, the honesty to see contradiction this way allows us to figure out how to live inside of it (if we choose to).
BTW, if you have an interest in the impact IOUs have on the clean energy transition, you should check out the Feb 10 2023 episode of Volts podcast by David Roberts who is easily one of the most important active climate journalists in the US.
Painting After Art is Dead 