It could have been much worse, but it's still not necessary:

Duke Energy Progress electric rates will increase by an average of 4.7% across all customer groups, effective June 1. The annualized bill for a typical residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per month will increase to $119.83 from the current $113.53 over the next two years.

The specific increase for individual customer groups will vary, depending on the rate they pay. The average rate increase will be 5.3% for residential customers, 4.7% for commercial customers and 3.6% for industrial customers.

Duke Energy pays out about 75% of its earnings in stockholder dividends, and those dividends have grown by almost 10% in the last 3 years. In actual dollars paid to investors, it's now roughly $2.8 Billion, per year. Which makes this almost laughable:

This was both predictable and preventable:

Several Enviva mills were soon processing material from logging sites and sawmills throughout the region. Environmental groups say they have documented truckloads of logs and whole trees, not just leftovers, entering pellet mills. Publicly available images show logs stacked at mills, and a reporter outside a pellet mill entrance saw trucks of logs entering.

Pellet makers’ pledges to rely on waste wood “painted them into a corner,” said Robert Abt, a forest economist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, because the wood-products industry already used its supplies relatively efficiently, leaving little waste.

Around 2009 or so I got into a protracted (online) debate with an NC State grad student about burning biomass as a replacement for coal. I could not get him to admit that, eventually, the industry would grow to the point it would need to consume whole trees instead of detritus. Which he stubbornly claimed would be "more than enough" to satisfy demands. But aside from the deforestation issues, the environmental justice impact of these plants is horrendous: