Skip to content
The Ratepayer Protection Act, making its way through the North Carolina legislature, conjoins two opposing ideas.
On one side, the bill would rein in data centers and their ravenous power consumption, and shield North Carolinians from paying higher electric bills as a result of data centers’ operations.
On the other, the measure would liberate Duke Energy from limits on fossil fuel, upending key aspects of state energy policy and, in some respects, reversing nearly 20 years of painstaking work on climate change.
“It’s the terrible combined with the good,” a local advocate explained. “They should be two separate bills.”
