Dive Brief:
- Duke Energy expects to spend up to $5.5 billion to meet environmental rules through 2023, company officials said during an earnings conference call with analysts.
- Overall, Duke expects to spend up to $22 billion on capital projects in the next three years, with about $9 billion slated for “system maintenance” projects.
- Duke expects to spend about $1.2 billion on unregulated renewable projects, with a growing focus on solar projects.
- Like other utilities, Duke sees a major shift in its power plant fleet. Duke expects coal plants to produce about 38% of its overall generation in 2015, down from 55% in 2005. Duke expects to retire about 6,700 MW of coal and oil capacity by 2016.
- Duke's “weather-adjusted” electric sales grew 0.6% last year and the company expects them to grow about 0.5% this year.
Dive Insight:
Duke is planning major changes at its coal ash ponds, according to company officials.
"I'll speak first of all about Dan River, we have been very focused over the last two weeks with a 24/7 operation to put a permanent solution in place and to begin remediation [at the Dan River spill],” Lynn Good, Duke president and CEO, said. “We will take the learning from this experience and look for ways that we can improve overall management of our ash ponds and we are very focused on ensuring the integrity of our basins throughout our system and so that effort will continue.”
Duke's planned environmental investments include closing ash ponds and switching some to “dry handling,” Good said.
Duke expects the Environmental Protection Agency to designate coal ash a non-hazardous substance when it reaches a final rulemaking decision in December, Keith Trent, Duke chief operating officer, said.
