RALEIGH, N.C.—The Ratepayer Protection Act, wending its way through the North Carolina legislature, conjoins two opposing ideas: rein in data centers and their power consumption but liberate Duke Energy from limits on fossil fuels.
The first section of Senate Bill 730 would forbid data center developers from using eminent domain to seize land for their projects. It would prohibit local governments from extending economic incentives to data center developers, who have ravenous appetites for water, electricity and tax breaks. And it would shield North Carolinians from paying higher electric bills as a result of data centers’ operations.
“I couldn’t ask for more in this political climate than what is in part one,” said state Rep. Pricey Harrison, a progressive Democrat from Guilford County. “It’s great.”
Yet like many bills, Harrison said, it includes “a bunch of bad stuff” to persuade conservative Republicans to support it.
Part two of the measure would upend key aspects of state energy policy and in some respects, reverse nearly 20 years’ of painstaking work on climate change: fast-tracking environmental permits for fossil fuel projects, further delaying the retirement of coal-fired power plants and potentially eliminating Duke Energy’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.
“It’s the terrible combined with the good,” said Shelley Robbins, senior decarbonization manager at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “They should be two separate bills.”
SB 730 is so new that many lawmakers, environmental advocates and even Duke Energy are trying to fully grasp its implications.
The utility didn’t answer specific questions about the bill, but issued a statement:
“Duke Energy is committed to its customers and communities and will continue working with policymakers and regulators to deliver reliable and increasingly clean energy while keeping rates as low as possible,” a utility spokesperson said.
On a Wednesday afternoon in late May, Rep. Harrison rushed to her seat in Room 643 of the Legislative Office Building, where the House Energy Policy and Utilities Committee was discussing the bill. The Republican committee co-chairman, Dean Arp, had distributed the draft at 9 p.m. the prior evening. Accounting for a full night’s sleep and back-to-back meetings, Harrison and many of her colleagues had only skimmed the legislation.
Harrison felt encouraged by the data center provisions. In April 2025, she and two colleagues, Rep. Cervania and Rep. Donnie Loftis, a Republican from Gaston County, had introduced a bill, also named the Ratepayer Protection Act, that would have prohibited passing onto ratepayers any grid or energy costs incurred solely for serving data centers.
The bill never made it out of committee.
“We didn’t expect it to move,” Harrison told Inside Climate News, “but it was just getting to be such a big issue.”
A year later, lawmakers of both parties are feeling pressured by their constituents to regulate these projects. Dozens of local governments have passed, or are drafting, temporary moratoria on data centers.
“I think that Republicans have been genuinely interested in pulling together what they see as being like best practices,” Harrison said of data center regulation.
SB 730 empowers local governments to require data center developers to conduct and submit a site assessment that considers the impacts of noise on homes and schools within 500 feet of the facility’s property boundary. The assessment also would include effects on groundwater and surface water, air quality, heat plumes, farms, parks, historic sites and forests on site or on adjacent land.
The bill applies only to data centers that are 100 megawatts or more.
Cyndie Roberson, of the National Coalition Against Cryptomining, moved with her husband from Cherokee County, N.C., to Georgia to escape several cryptomines and data centers, including one that had been built a half-mile away from their cabin.
“North Carolina’s bill is so good,” Roberson said, “better legislatively than Georgia. Even if it doesn’t get fully adopted, it is a good start.”
Roberson recommended expanding the definition of data centers to specifically include cryptomines. She suggested extending the noise study to one mile from the property line; depending on an area’s topography, sound, especially low frequencies, can travel that far. And the bill should lower the threshold for regulated data centers to 50 megawatts, which would align with North Carolina’s definition of a large-load customer, she said.
“The data center near my cabin was 50 megawatts and it drove people crazy,” Roberson said.
The bill’s water protections, though, are weak, said Amy Adams, deputy and programs director for Southeast Climate & Energy Network. She worked for a decade at the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality before resigning her post as a regional supervisor during Republican Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration.
Closed-loop cooling systems, like those the bill requires, use significantly less water than open-loop types. Yet like a car radiator, closed-loop systems still need to be flushed, and the water evaporates.
“No closed-loop system is 100 percent closed,” Adams said. “Every loop has an entry point. Every loop has its losses. It has chemicals, it’s not magic, it’s not creating water, it’s not purifying water.”
There should be a prohibition on potable water use, as well as a numeric cap on water withdrawals, consumption and discharges, Adams said, not ill-defined terms like “de minimis” and “maximum extent possible” that are in the bill.
The bill does nothing to lift the veil on data centers. Current state law and local ordinances allow data centers to keep secret many aspects of their operations, including the amount of tax exemptions they receive. They would still be shielded from public disclosures of water and energy usage, as well as the chemicals used in the coolant.
“There is zero requirement that says that the public gets to know that the data center won’t impair the water supply,” Adams said. “This should not be a private business decision. It’s a public resource.”
The House committee passed the bill. The next stop: the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee, where it met resistance Tuesday from the data center industry.
Cara Bunder is director of state policy at the Data Center Coalition, which represents companies including Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. She told the Commerce committee that the industry group has “concerns” about several aspects of the bill, namely mandates on specific cooling technologies and restrictions on local government incentives “that could reduce North Carolina’s competitiveness.”
Duke’s Net-Zero Carbon Goal in Jeopardy
Since March, when Duke Energy announced plans to raise rates between 15 percent and 18 percent, North Carolinians have packed public hearings to testify how the increases, $30 or more a month, would force them to choose between electricity and food or electricity and medicine.
The answer, state Rep. Dean Arp, a Union County Republican, said at the May committee meeting, is SB 730. “The whole bill is about reducing rate payer cost for energy—they’re getting squeezed,” he said.
What Arp didn’t say is that the price of fuel, such as natural gas, and the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure are largely behind the rate hikes. Yet SB 730 would incentivize additional fossil fuel plants and nuclear facilities, whose construction costs can run in the billions.
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The bill would spur faster fossil fuel construction by requiring state environmental regulators to offer expedited permitting—for a fee—for projects involving the “generation, distribution or transmission of energy or fuel, including natural gas, diesel, petroleum or electricity.”
This is similar to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s recent proposal to expand the types of interstate natural gas projects that could qualify for a blanket permit and bypass a case-by-case approval.
“Expediting a permitting process is usually code for minimizing public input while simultaneously increasing burden on agency staff,” Robbins of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy said.
The bill language fails to distinguish between types of energy infrastructure eligible for the fast track. “A solar farm on private property doesn’t involve eminent domain and isn’t at risk of exploding or emitting pollution,” Robbins said.
“But a gas pipeline impacts miles and miles of landowners, requires eminent domain for private companies benefiting shareholders, and carries safety and pollution risks. They should not be lumping all of these together. You’ll wind up with bad permitting decisions made for dangerous projects.”
Beyond expediting the process for permitting gas plants, SB 730 would prohibit the N.C. Utilities Commission from authorizing Duke Energy to retire coal-fired and natural gas power plants before issuing a certificate of public convenience and necessity for at least one nuclear facility providing 1 gigawatt or more.
This power threshold would exclude small modular reactors, which range from 70 to 350 megawatts. Duke has submitted an
early site permit application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for several nuclear technologies, including an SMR, at its Belews Creek plant in Stokes County. Belews Creek currently burns coal.
Rep. Brandon Lofton, a Mecklenburg County Democrat who sits on the House Commerce committee, questioned whether the expense of prolonging the life of aging coal plants would save ratepayers money.
“Help me get nuclear going then,” Rep. Arp replied. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”
Lawmakers in favor of nuclear power claim it is the cheapest form of energy when measured by a return on investment.
Yet the costs of advanced nuclear power—construction and fuel costs,maintenance and operations—is estimated at $110 per megawatt hour, according to 2023 figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The EIA estimated solar photovoltaic energy costs at $55 per megawatt hour.
The EIA based its figures on Levelized Costs of Electricity, which calculates the present costs of power over the lifetime of the generating facility.
Last year, the legislature passed a bill, now law, that eliminated Duke Energy’s interim goal of a 70 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 but kept the utility’s net-zero benchmark by 2050. At the time, bill supporters rationalized the move by claiming it would save ratepayers money. That hasn’t happened.
SB 730 could dispense of the 2050 decarbonization goal altogether. The measure calls for the Legislative Services Office, led by conservative Republican Paul Coble, to hire an outside contractor to study the rate impacts of achieving net zero. The state Utilities Commission and Public Staff would participate in the selection process.
“Once we receive that data, then we can have these other discussions about how that information will change our energy policy,” Arp said.
Doing another study “is a big waste of taxpayer money,” Harrison told Inside Climate News. Climate change is altering the planet, she said, but “the urgency of that is not apparently hitting my colleagues on the other side of the aisle.”
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