What happened to Duke’s clean transition tariff?

Duke Energy has dropped plans for a "clean transition tariff" in the Carolinas, at least for now. The idea, first floated in 2024 with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Nucor, would have let large customers like data centers pay to fund new, not-yet-common clean energy technology (think long-duration battery storage or geothermal) without spreading those costs to regular households. Despite two years of talks, Duke never filed a formal proposal, and this week it submitted its final large-load tariff — a rate structure for the huge amounts of power data centers use — without any clean transition tariff included.

Duke told regulators that no one has provided enough detail on pricing, credits, or program design to prove such a tariff would be safe for other ratepayers. Instead, the utility pointed to its existing "green tariff" program, which lets big companies pay to speed up solar and storage projects, as something that should be tested further before adding anything new. Critics have argued that program mostly pays for renewable projects Duke was going to build anyway under North Carolina's carbon-neutrality rules, rather than funding genuinely new technology.

For homeowners, this mainly affects how the costs of new data centers and other large power users get divided up. Duke's large-load tariff requires those big customers to cover the cost of new infrastructure built for them and sign long-term contracts, which is meant to keep those costs off everyday electric bills. Similar clean transition tariff ideas are moving forward in Nevada, Colorado, and Minnesota, so this is not necessarily dead everywhere.