Fight the power: Residents oppose Duke rate hike
Senior counsel for Duke Energy Kathleen Richard (left) and Jennifer Herrod, an attorney from NC Public Staff representing customers, await the start of a North Carolina Utilities Commission hearing in Waynesville on April 14.
Cory Vaillancourt photo
The question before the North Carolina Utilities Commission is simple — should residential customers on fixed incomes continue to subsidize commercial and industrial customers, AI data centers owned by globalist juggernauts, environmentally unfriendly generation practices, industrial accidents and the astronomical corporate salaries of millionaires who run a monopoly, or not?
Speaker after speaker rose in the Haywood County Justice Center April 14 to describe rising bills, climate anxiety and the lingering trauma of Hurricane Helene — only to watch two of Western North Carolina’s most respected institutional voices step forward and thank the company asking for more.
The public witness hearing, held by the North Carolina Utilities Commission, was one of several statewide sessions convened to gather testimony on Duke Energy’s latest rate request. The proceeding stems from a formal application filed in November 2025 seeking to increase electric rates, implement performance-based regulation and adjust how the utility recovers costs from customers.
According to the commission’s own scheduling order, the case could ultimately raise Duke’s North Carolina retail revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars, with a cumulative increase approaching $728.6 million over a two-year period — about a 15% jump. For a typical residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt-hours per month, that translates to roughly $28 more per month in the first year, with an additional $6.59 monthly in year two.
Duke generated roughly $32 billion in revenue and $4.9 billion in profit in 2025, reflecting steady growth driven by rising demand — largely by data centers and AI-related load — and increasing rate structures. According to BusinessNC, Duke’s rates in North Carolina increased “by an average of about 7% in 2023-24, 3.4% in 2024 and about 3.2% in 2025.” What cost $140 in 2023 will cost $190 by 2029.
For 2025, the CEO of Duke Energy — Harry Sideris — earned about $14 million in total compensation.
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Duke argues the rate increases are necessary to fund grid modernization, maintain reliability and comply with environmental regulations, including coal ash cleanup and infrastructure upgrades. Jennifer Bennett, Duke’s district manager for Haywood County, said that as the region continues to grow, Duke is trying to keep up by bolstering local infrastructure, including 15 miles of overhead cables and substation improvements.
“People want to live and work here, and the investments that we propose are designed to protect reliability and keep costs as low as possible for our customers in the region,” Bennett said during the hearing.
Attorney Jennifer Herrod represented the North Carolina Public Staff, an independent state agency charged with representing the interests of utility customers in proceedings before the North Carolina Utilities Commission, reviewing rate requests, analyzing utility filings and presenting testimony to advocate for fair rates on behalf of the public. Herrod said that her colleagues had been reviewing Duke’s request and would file their testimony on July 9.
The hearing itself was part of a broader quasi-judicial process overseen by the commission, a regulatory body tasked with setting “just and reasonable” rates for utility monopolies. Acting much like a court, the commission does not debate policy in real time but instead builds a formal evidentiary record through sworn testimony, filings and expert analysis.
After Democrat Josh Stein beat Republican Mark Robinson in the 2024 gubernatorial election, the Republican-led General Assembly stripped Stein of the ability to appoint a member to the commission, giving that power to the Republican state treasurer and effectively sidestepping the will of voters by creating a Republican majority on the commission. Bill Brawley, formerly a Republican House represenatitve from Union County, chaired the meeting. Durham Democrat Floyd McKissick, formerly a senator in the General Assembly, was also in attendance in his role as a commissioner.
Over 31 years, Duke has contributed about $6 million to Democrats, including more than $22,000 to McKissick, but more than $21 million to Republicans, including more than $26,000 to Brawley, according to opensecrets.com.
Brawley’s role as chair was strictly procedural, and he reminded attendees that testimony, not argument, would guide the outcome. That distinction mattered little to the dozens of residents who spoke. They came with bills, with stories and with grievances that stretched well beyond line items.
Concerns ranged from what many described as an imbalance between rate structure increases — 18% to 20% for residential customers, less than half that for commercial and industrial customers — to frustration over Duke’s profit margins and monopoly status. Several speakers pointed to environmental liabilities, particularly radioactive coal ash contamination, arguing that customers were being asked to absorb costs tied to past corporate decisions. Others raised broader anxieties about climate change, grid resilience and the long-term direction of the state’s energy mix.
The theme was consistent — affordability versus accountability.
Waynesville’s Maggie Rowe, speaking on behalf of AARP North Carolina, framed the issue in stark terms, emphasizing the impact on seniors and fixed-income households.
“AARP respectfully urges the commission to scale back these increases, remove uneconomic costs, reject higher fixed charges and new riders and prioritize affordability for the people who depend on this service every day,” Rowe said. “From a consumer perspective, this is simply too much, too fast.”
Rowe warned that layered increases, higher fixed charges and new billing riders would compound financial strain while shifting risk away from the utility and onto customers least able to absorb it.
Chelsea White-Hoglen, a social worker and Helene survivor from Waynesville, widened the lens, tying the rate proposal to broader economic and environmental pressures facing the region.
“I can at least speak for myself and my people in Western North Carolina when I say that we don’t have anything left to give because we lost it all, and y’all are still asking for more,” White-Hoglen said.
Her testimony linked the proposed increase to what she described as a part of a painful pattern of extractive industries preying on Appalachians for centuries, even as communities continue to recover from repeated climate-related disasters. Others echoed those sentiments in more granular terms — rising monthly bills, low solar buyback rates and what they viewed as a disconnect between Duke’s reported profits and the lived experience of its customers.
Then came Nathan Ramsey.
A former state representative and Buncombe county commissioner from Fairview, Ramsey prefaced his remarks by stating he was speaking only in a personal capacity — a technical clarification that landed awkwardly, given his prominent public roles in economic and workforce development across the region as a staff member at the Land of Sky Regional Council. What followed was Ramsey’s defense of Duke’s position framed through competitiveness and partnership.
“I understand the many concerns about affordability and increasing electric rates, and it's important for our community, for our state, that we have very competitive electric rates, so you're going to hear a lot of testimony regarding the need to not raise rates, and I respect that, and I will defer to others to address those concerns, but I want to make it clear the reason I'm testifying that North Carolina electric rates today are about 30% lower than the national average, and that's very important so we can be competitive when we recruit business and industry to our communities,” Ramsey said, without acknowledging how a 20% rate increase would maintain that competitiveness.
David Francis struck a similar tone.
Francis also noted he was speaking for himself, despite serving as Haywood County’s economic development guru and as the President and CEO of the Haywood Chamber of Commerce — a business advocacy and support organization that represents, promotes and assists local businesses while trying to shape economic growth in a county where affordability issues are hitting consumers from the gas pump to the grocery store and nearly everywhere in between.
His remarks focused on the scale and speed of the company’s response, as well as its philanthropic contributions to struggling businesses. He leaned heavily on his experience working alongside Duke during past disasters, including Tropical Storm Fred and Hurricane Helene, and commended the company for doing essentially the same thing even the smallest of mom-and-pop businesses have to do — maintain their own ability to serve customers.
“Duke replaced 13,300 transformers, 16,200 poles and 11 million feet of wire,” Francis said. “Not everything's perfect, no response is. Some of us had to wait some time, to wait two weeks, but they got the job done.”
Francis acknowledged the burden of higher rates, but framed it as part of a larger, necessary system — one in which reliability and rapid response come at a cost.
“You know, this is a hard place to be. I appreciate the commission coming here, speaking, having us speak to them,” he said. “Gas prices [were] raised a couple of weeks ago — we didn't get to go see Exxon.”
Duke Energy’s role in Hurricane Helene recovery has been defined by a relatively small amount of direct philanthropy alongside a much larger, ongoing effort to recoup storm-related costs through regulators and ratepayers. Through its foundation, Duke provided targeted grants — including $500,000 to 20 Western North Carolina nonprofits supporting housing repair, debris removal and mental health services — as part of a broader, multi million-dollar charitable response to the storm.
But at the same time, the company has aggressively pursued mechanisms to recover the far greater costs of rebuilding its system. Duke has sought permission to finance “hundreds of millions” in Helene-related infrastructure repairs through state-approved bonds that would ultimately be repaid by customers, while also implementing or proposing storm recovery charges on monthly bills and using securitization tools to spread those costs over time. In other jurisdictions, filings show the same pattern — with the utility seeking to recover more than $1 billion in hurricane response costs through rate increases or dedicated charges approved by regulators.
Testimony by Ramsey and Francis stood in sharp contrast to that of Molly McDowell, who directly challenged both the premise of the rate hike and the framing offered by earlier speakers. McDowell, a Clyde resident who said she has a background in public administration and experience in emergency management and economic development, argued that disaster response, while commendable, is inherent to the utility’s role — not a justification for increased rates.
“I understand that the disaster response by Duke was quick, and you had a lot of people on site, but that is part of the job of a utilities corporation. That's part of the job. It's what you're supposed to do, and I'm asking Duke Energy now to step up and be a good citizen like the rest of the people in this room, because corporations are ‘people,’” she said, drawing laughs from the crowd in reference to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing companies like Duke to contribute to politicians like Brawley and McKissick.
She criticized the company for passing environmental and operational costs onto customers instead of absorbing them through profits or executive compensation.
“I am speaking from the heart, and I'm speaking to oppose Duke Energy's proposed rate hike for several reasons, and many of them have to do with the increasing economic uncertainty that's faced by the average American that, unfortunately, all of us in the room are all too familiar with,” McDowell said. “Frankly, after Helene’s devastation, the citizens of Western North Carolina need a break, not higher costs. I appreciate that you're talking about investing in the infrastructure, but there are ways to do it without raising costs by 20%.”
The hearing closed without resolution, as all such hearings do.
Next comes the slower, more technical phase of the process. Intervenors, including the state’s Public Staff and advocacy groups, will file expert testimony in July, followed by rebuttals from Duke. A formal evidentiary hearing is scheduled for August in Raleigh, where commissioners will weigh competing claims before issuing a final order on the rate request.
