The deep freeze on Christmas weekend exposed major flaws in their approach:

The first domino fell in Duke Energy Carolinas territory, which serves 2.5 million residential, commercial and industrial customers. Starting at midnight on Christmas Eve, utility officials cut back power at the Dan River combined cycle plant, which runs largely on natural gas, to 360 MW, roughly half of its capacity, said Sam Holeman, vice president of transmission. (This is also known as derating.) Some of the plant’s instrumentation had frozen, and to prevent the facility from failing altogether, operators had to reduce the strain. The Buck plant in Salisbury encountered low pressure issues and had to be derated after peak energy usage had passed.

Solar energy “performed as expected,” Duke officials said, although it was not available overnight during the peak hours of 2 to 6 a.m.

It could have been available to ease that burden if Duke had dedicated more resources to battery storage in NC:

Hopefully ratepayers won't get bitten in the process:

Elliott has not yet released any letters or presentations on the company, but based on past investments in this area and the level of engagement, we expect that they have a $1B+ investment in Duke. With the annual meeting recently passing, director nominations for next year are not due until January 2022, so management has time to prove itself.

However, we do not expect Elliott to sit by quietly during that time. We expect them to become vocal and engaged shareholders putting pressure on management to create value. The right plan could create tens of billions of dollars of value for shareholders.

I'm not even going to try to analyze this just yet, no amount or strength of coffee will aid me in interpreting Stock Talk. But that "creating value" thing has the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. That being said, this could also signal a quicker end to coal-burning power plants and a more aggressive move to renewables:

There are 2.9 Billion reasons this settlement falls short:

It finally seems to be reaching an end of sorts — though the actual cleanup is not expected to be completed until 2029. But with a recently reached settlement, we at least know now who is going to pay for the cleanup. We are. On Monday, Stein and Duke Energy announced a settlement under which customers are expected to bear about 75% of the projected $4 billion clean-up costs through 2030.

"This settlement settles this dispute for the next 10 years that is fair to customers,” Stein said. “It is a win for every single Duke Energy customer." But it also seems like a win for Duke Energy, which will not have to sacrifice much in the way of profits or payments to shareholders.

I knew there had to be some sort of compromise, although it is tempting to stamp one's foot and demand that Duke pay for all of it. It is their mess, and if you took your family to a restaurant, but the manager said you had to go back in the kitchen and scrub the pots and pans at the end of the meal, you would laugh at him. It's no different. They sold us that power, and made enough of a profit to give shareholders a hefty dividend every quarter. A 50/50 cost share would have been hard to swallow, but making us pay 3/4 of the cost? That's a choker.

Because exposure to coal ash can be devastating to them:

Experimental research has demonstrated that fine and ultrafine particulate matter can pass directly through the nasal olfactory pathway into the circulatory system to the brain.18,19 In addition, research has shown when air pollution is cleared from the lungs it can enter the gut and exit the body via the gastrointestinal tract.20

Chronic exposure to air pollution and particulate matter has been found to cause chronic inflammation and elevated levels of cytokines throughout the body and brain.18,19 In addition, some of the metals in fly ash are neurotoxins,21-24 and exposure to neurotoxic heavy metals during rapid growth in the early stages of life can disrupt developmental processes and result in neurological dysfunction.17,24

Normally I would remove those reference numbers to make the reading easier, but it's good to occasionally give a nod to legitimate research. There's so much industry-funded nonsense out there (a lot of) people can't tell the difference anymore. Prior to the Clean Smokestacks Act of 2002, a heinous amount of the fly ash produced by coal combustion was escaping into the air, literally blanketing the state. But even with the new scrubbers in place these days, particulate matter from coal burning is still polluting our skies. And children are especially vulnerable:

Continuing to profit from negligent behavior is wrong:

The Public Staff recommends denying Duke’s request to bill customers for $161 million in ash-related costs at its power plants. The agency also recommends collecting remaining expenses over 26 years instead of the five years that Duke proposes. Those steps, the agency says, would have the effect of evenly splitting the costs between shareholders and customers.

Duke “had a duty to comply with long-standing North Carolina environmental regulations, and it failed that duty many times over many years at every coal-fired power plant it owns in North Carolina,” a Public Staff official said in written testimony.

This has become an annual (if not semi-annual) battle, and frankly the NCUC needs to put its foot down. Duke Energy is a financial monster, the single largest utility in the Western Hemisphere. It pays healthy dividends to stockholders every quarter, and plans to spend about $37 Billion over the next four years on new acquisitions alone: