美国国家公共电台 NPR North Carolina Tries To Clean Up Its Electricity（在线收听）

SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:

Let's say you want to help stop global warming by using less gasoline. You get an electric car. You go charge it up. And then you think, wait, where's this electricity coming from? Nationwide, 60% of it comes from power plants burning coal and natural gas, which produce carbon dioxide. So can the companies that provide our electricity change that? NPR's Dan Charles went to North Carolina to find out.

DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: North Carolina's governor, Roy Cooper, made a big announcement last fall.

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ROY COOPER: Today, I will sign an unprecedented executive order that sets the goal for our state to achieve a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2025.

CHARLES: The place where the state can do that most quickly and easily is at power plants - replace coal and gas with wind and solar, which is controversial, but it's not as much a partisan issue as it used to be. Because wind and solar are so much cheaper now, it changed the mind of John Szoka, a state legislator.

JOHN SZOKA: I would describe myself as a conservative Republican who has come to believe in renewable energy based on the economic facts behind it.

CHARLES: There are big companies pushing clean power now. Ivan Urlaub from the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association represents some of them.

IVAN URLAUB: We've got low-cost clean energy that's like fruit that's falling off the tree, it's laying on the ground, it's been rotting for 10 years. And let's just pick it up.

CHARLES: And there are people saying we've got to stop climate change, like Democratic state legislator Pricey Harrison.

PRICEY HARRISON: I would like to see us move away from fossil fuel dependency completely.

CHARLES: And all this pressure is aimed at one company - Duke Energy. It's the electricity provider in most of North Carolina, owned by shareholders, regulated by the state utilities commission. This is a very common arrangement across the country. So I went to meet Duke Energy in an office tower in downtown Charlotte, the second-highest building in North Carolina.

I mean, look at this view - just...

RANDY WHEELESS: Yeah, so this is the convention center there. And there's the NASCAR Hall of Fame there.

CHARLES: Randy Wheeless is a spokesman for the company.

WHEELESS: Duke Energy's one of the largest electric utilities in the nation. We cover six states, a little over 7 million customers.

CHARLES: As for how much carbon dioxide the company releases every year...

WHEELESS: We are 105 million tons.

CHARLES: Of CO2.

WHEELESS: Right.

CHARLES: That's more than the total emissions of a small country, like Greece or Chile. Now, about a third of the company's electricity comes without any greenhouse emissions at all. It's from nuclear plants. And carbon emissions from its other power plants have been falling. It's been shutting down the ones that burn coal, mainly switching over to natural gas, which is cheaper and releases less carbon. It plans to keep doing this, reducing emissions by 40% over the next 15 years. But even natural gas still releases a lot of heat-trapping carbon dioxide.

What would it take for Duke Energy to cut that number by 90%?

WHEELESS: That's going to be tough. I think what you're looking there is you're going to have to have some sort of carbon capture, some sort of new technology that's not really on the table right now.

CHARLES: I press him on this. Could they do more with the technology that's available now? Wheeless says no, going faster would make electricity more expensive.

WHEELESS: You know, I think a lot of environmentalists talk about the end of the world, but there a lot of people still worried about the end of the month and how to pay bills.

CHARLES: For everybody in the state who's been pushing for a big, quick shift to clean energy, this is frustrating. Dozens of North Carolinians showed up at a meeting of the state utilities commission in February, demanding that the regulators step in and reject Duke Energy's plans. Here's Karen Bearden from Raleigh.

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KAREN BEARDEN: It is critical to move to a just transition to 100% renewable energy fast, y'all, with the urgency of the crisis that we are in.

CHARLES: But it's not clear what regulators will do. Under North Carolina law, they're supposed to make sure that Duke Energy delivers reliable power at the lowest possible cost, and that's cost to consumers, not cost to the environment. It's a puzzle that people are trying to figure out all over the country. How do you get electric utilities to go green?

States in the Northeast are forcing them to, making it steadily more expensive to burn fossil fuels. In North Carolina, some people are saying let's bring in competition, like Jim Warren, director of an environmental justice organization called NC WARN - warn as in warning. He thinks if other companies had a chance to offer Duke Energy's customers a better deal, they'd prove clean energy is cheaper.

JIM WARREN: What we really would like to see is that, you know, the monopoly be restructured and we have a situation where we have competition. And then let's let the marketplace figure it out.

CHARLES: Others, though, say a regulated monopoly can do a great job cutting carbon emissions. Cara Goldenberg, a senior associate at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit energy consulting group, says it's just a matter of giving those utilities the right incentives.

CARA GOLDENBERG: You don't necessarily need to use sticks all the time, but there's also carrots, right? There's also these new business model incentives that can bring the utility along in this transition.

CHARLES: For instance, she says, regulators can change the rules so utilities don't just earn money selling electricity. They can get paid for cutting their greenhouse emissions.

GOLDENBERG: Give the utility a goal. If you meet that goal, we're going to reward you. If you don't meet that goal, there could be a penalty.

CHARLES: Regulators could also let a utility charge higher rates for upgrading its electrical grid so it's ready to handle electricity generated by solar arrays on millions of people's homes. Or you could let utilities charge customers for the costs of managing the demand for power.

Conceivably, a utility could control its customer's hot water heaters or electric car chargers, turn them on and off, so the demand for electricity always matches what's being generated by the wind and the sun, hour by hour. Goldenberg says some states, like Colorado and Massachusetts, are already using these tools, and it's turning some electric utilities into partisans of clean power. Dan Charles, NPR News.