Featured Report
Investing in Failure: How Large Power Companies Are Undermining Their Decarbonization Targets
Duke, Dominion, and Southern, three of the US’s largest electric power companies, recently announced varying commitments to decarbonization by 2050. However, a new analysis of their regulatory filings finds these three companies' power plant fleets are all heading to emit roughly double the quantity of CO2 emissions required to decarbonize by 2050.
The three major power companies featured in the report own over 12.7 percent of U.S. generation capacity and are directly responsible for 4.2 percent of total U.S. CO2 emissions and 12.4 percent of U.S. power sector CO2 emissions—a significant percentage of the emissions that need to be cut to net-zero by 2050 to curb catastrophic climate change, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 report. The three power companies combined serve over 15 million U.S. customers, making them the largest providers across the Southeast region of the United States.
Approximately two thirds of the coal capacity the companies had online in 2012 is still online today, and the vast majority (75 percent) of the companies’ remaining coal capacity is planned to still be online beyond 2030, while the majority of the coal that is to be retired will be replaced with new gas-fired capacity, not renewables.
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The report concludes by calling on the companies to take at minimum the following steps to put the companies on the path to decarbonization by 2050: (1) Develop science-based CO2 trajectories upon which all future plans and actions should be rooted; (2) Conduct robust retirement and replacement analysis to determine the least cost path to retire each company’s existing fossil fleet and replace it with alternative zero-carbon portfolios; (3) Invest in renewables and demand-side resources to meet future resource needs; (4) Invest in grid-modernization solutions in tandem with retirement of existing resources and development of renewables; (5) And finally, evaluate and plan for changing system needs, including load growth driven by electrification instead of traditional steady demand.