Duke Energy Knew 40 Years Ago About Coal's Impact On Warming But Ohio Residents Still Pay For Duke's Aging Coal Plants
Duke Energy is among the companies enjoying massive subsidies from 2019’s corrupt-but-still-not-fully-repealed Ohio House Bill 6. And while ratepayers are propping up two aging, uncompetitive coal plants, a new report says Duke and its predecessor companies have known for 40 years that burning coal causes climate change. It said the companies then tried to misinform the public about the threat. Then they promoted unproven, likely impractical technologies as a workaround.
Now the utility giant acknowledges the overwhelming scientific consensus around climate change — while working behind the scenes to stifle competition from renewable sources such as solar, the report said. In “Duke Energy Knew: Documenting Duke Energy’s Early Knowledge and Ongoing Deception About Climate Change,” the Energy and Policy Institute traced how positions on whether fossil fuels caused global warming shifted over time at Duke and its predecessor companies — Cincinnati Gas & Electric, Public Service Indiana, Duke Power and Carolina Power & Light.
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As part of 2019’s scandal-plagued House Bill 6, Ohio ratepayers so far have been required to pay more than $400 million to subsidize the plants, prompting the observation that because of public corruption in Ohio, ratepayers are being forced to finance global warming. Akron-based FirstEnergy put up $60 million to be the biggest beneficiary of the $1.3 billion bailout that resulted from the bribery scheme that sent former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, R-Glenford, to federal prison for 20 years. Testimony during his 2023 trial indicated that the OVEC subsidies were meant to gain the support of utilities that were heavily invested in OVEC.
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According to the Energy and Policy Institute report, Duke and other utilities again shifted positions on climate change as the scientific consensus behind it became overwhelming in the early 2000s. They then began to promote unproven technologies such as “clean” coal and carbon sequestration, and to focus blame for greenhouse-gas emissions on other sectors. The real goal was to forestall the day they would have to retire their fossil fuel-fired generators, the report said. It cited a peer-reviewed study by researchers and the University of California at Santa Barbara. “After 2000, (climate-change-denying) front groups were largely shut down, and utility organizations shifted to arguing for delayed action on climate change, by highlighting the responsibility of other sectors and promoting actions other than cleaning up the electricity system,” the study said. “Overall, our results suggest that electric utility industry organizations have promoted messaging designed to avoid taking action on reducing pollution over multiple decades. Notably, many of the utilities most engaged in communicating climate doubt and denial in the past currently have the slowest plans to decarbonize their electricity mix.”
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https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2024/12/11/ohio-ratepayers-are-subsidizing-coal-plants-report-says-owners-long-knew-they-warmed-the-globe/
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As early as the 1960s and 1970s, the utilities that today form Duke Energy were members of industry associations like the Edison Electric Institute and Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) that communicated scientists’ early warnings about the serious long-term threat that emissions from burning fossil fuels for power could pose to the Earth’s climate stability. The utilities knew that the climate change problem described by scientists meant they would ultimately have to shift away from burning fossil fuels in order to prevent the kind of climate disruptions we’re now experiencing at an intensifying rate, from damaging extreme storms like Helene to deadly heat waves to rising sea levels.
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