Federal policy and tax credits hinder North Carolina’s wind energy growth

CHARLOTTE — North Carolina is fifth in the nation for solar power but has been slow to adopt other forms of renewable energy, including wind power.

The state’s second wind farm opened last year, which was the newest addition providing power to 28,000 homes while providing an economic boost to Chowan County.

On Tuesday, Timbermill Wind’s developers, Apex Clean Energy, presented local leaders with its first property tax payment, nearly $750,000.

“We’re paying as much in property taxes this year as the top nine taxpayers combined in 2024,” said spokesman Brian O’Shea.

The project includes 45 wind turbines operating on land shared with a soybean, corn and cotton farm as well as forested property for timber harvest. O’Shea explains the turbines are tall enough most of the land can still be used for agricultural purposes while it’s leased out to Apex.

“You know, with commodity prices and trade policy has really, you know, made life difficult for for American farmers, and wind energy is just one other lifeline for those farmers to be able to have some income they can depend on regardless of what’s going on in the global economy.”

Last year, Channel 9 was at the event as a bipartisan group of state leaders celebrated the construction of North Carolina’s second wind farm, Timbermill Wind.

It took nearly 11 years to permit and build Timbermill Wind. The only previous wind development, Amazon Wind in Edenton, was built nearly 10 years earlier.

O’Shea said new permitting rules allowed Timbermill to get off the ground and set the stage for further projects, hopefully with a quicker timeline.

“We were the first project ever to go through that new state process and navigate it,” he said then. “So, now there’s at least a roadmap for a future developer.”

However, the winds shifted a year later.

Federal policy has made it harder to get the permits necessary to build new wind power and expiring tax credits mean new projects would be more expensive.

In its 2024 iteration of its long term plan, Duke Energy planned to have wind generation on its grid by 2033. In the edition of the plan released this year, the utility is not expecting to add any wind projects to the grid for the next 15 years.

“It’s not economically viable to at least the 2040s,” said Bill Norton, a Duke Energy spokesman.

Karly Brownfield with the Southeastern Wind Coalition said this plan misses out on the potential the state has on and offshore to develop clean power while relying too heavily on coal and gas power.

“We see natural gas prices go up and down. We see utilities become more dependent on natural gas,” she said. “There’s a really great opportunity for wind to provide kind of a natural hedge against those prices.”

As evidence, Brownfield points to other southeastern utilities still moving forward on wind development, including neighboring Dominion Energy, which recently released a request for proposals for wind in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina.

“It’s kind of a very sharp contrast between how different utilities are are kind of digesting all this uncertainty,” she said.

As the Carolinas face steep increases in energy demand over the next decade, Brownfield believes it’s not time to rule out a home-grown source of power.

“Whether you’re approaching that from an energy security perspective, if you’re thinking about the economic benefit for rural landowners or communities just meeting energy demand and load growth,” Brownfield said. “there are a lot of ways that wind is still applicable.”

VIDEO: NC cuts ribbon on 2nd wind farm