Dive Brief:

• Duke Energy has scaled back its Western Carolinas Modernization Project, responding to environmentalists and residents who flooded the company with comments opposed to plans for a 45-mile transmission line and large gas-fired plant to replace coal generation.
• Duke says the western Carolinas region is growing quickly, and the new generation is necessary, but will now consider more renewables and demand-side management, as well as two smaller, combined-cycle gas units with a combined capacity of 280 MW.
• The new plan obviates the transmission line as well as a planned substation, but also includes the option for a simple-cycle 190-MW unit to come online in 2023. The original proposal called for a 650 MW gas plant to replace a retiring 376 MW coal plant in Asheville. 

Dive Insight:

After being flooded by 9,000 comments on the Western Carolinas project, Duke took it back to the drawing board and has returned with a plan it hopes will satisfy environmentalists. It still needs the gas-fired generation, but said it can use two smaller plants to reduce impacts and will look to more demand-side technology as well.

"We believe the process worked," Lloyd Yates, Duke's executive vice president for market solutions and president of the Carolinas region, said in a statement.

"We have been committed to developing a plan to maintain the region's power reliability with the least possible impact on communities, property owners and the environment from the start of this effort, and we believe our revised plans accomplish those goals," said Yates.

Duke said the new plan will require a "stepped-up effort to work with customers and interested groups" in order tp expand programs to reduce peak power demand and grow renewable energy. And it also includes a two-phased approach to reconfigure the Asheville Power Plant site that Duke believes will provide the same "significant environmental benefits as the original modernization plan."

The smaller combined cycle gas units Duke will use have efficiency ratings similar to the original plan, the company explained, which enables the units to be about 35% less expensive to operate than the existing coal units. Duke said costs remain largely unchanged, at about $1.1 billion.

"This region's economy is booming with 14 new hotels, two national craft breweries and more than $1 billion in new industrial investment in just the last five years," said Robert Sipes, Duke's general manager of delivery operations for the Western Carolinas. "So our challenge now is to support that growth while working with the community to reduce the region's peak power and ongoing demand through much more participation in energy efficiency programs, demand response and renewable energy and related technologies."