Orange County Commissioners and the Carrboro Town Council both took action on climate change Tuesday night, stepping up the local effort to respond to new forces that threaten to drive up the use of greenhouse gas.
“Governor (Josh) Stein should match Carrboro’s courage,” Carrboro Mayor Barbara Foushee said during the council’s Tuesday meeting, “by breaking through the deception and helping the public understand that North Carolina is on the wrong course, and that Duke Energy must finally begin a genuine transition to clean energy if this state is ever going to help slow the climate crisis.”
Foushee’s statement was part of a resolution urging Gov. Josh Stein to put pressure on Duke Energy to move away from fossil fuels.
“We urge Gov. Stein to become a national climate champion,” the resolution continued, “by using every tool available to him to persuade or require Duke Energy executives to phase out deadly and dangerous fuel sources and transition to affordable, resilient, and renewable energy.”
Carrboro officials are turning their attention to the governor’s office after getting an unfavorable ruling in their attempt to get action through the courts. Late last year, Carrboro filed a lawsuit against Duke Energy, alleging the company deliberately undercut the push for renewable energy by knowingly deceiving customers about the environmental risks of fossil fuels — leaving local governments stuck with the bill for all the resulting impacts. Last month, a judge dismissed that lawsuit, ruling in part that the issue was a “political question,” not a legal one.
So in this week’s resolution, the town moved its focus to the political branches.
“We urge Gov. Stein, as an initial step, to lead the installation of solar and batteries to make critical public facilities resilient during outages, and (to) further require data centers to include maximum onsite renewables and battery storage to provide their own clean power when investing in new facilities,” Foushee said.
The specific reference to data centers is part of a larger concern that the rise of AI could end up reversing a lot of the progress that’s already been made toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That topic also came up at this week’s meeting of the Orange County Board of Commissioners.
“Data centers require a high amount, a large amount of power,” said county planning and inspections director Cy Stober at Tuesday’s board meeting, as county commissioners considered a proposal to impose a moratorium on approving any new data centers — following Chatham County’s decision to impose its own moratorium last month. The high energy use at AI data centers has already led some energy companies to slow down efforts to reduce their fossil fuel reliance — and, in some cases, even reopen coal plants that had been shut down.
“There are a number of data centers that use solar energy, (and) also use some wind turbines, depending on the state you’re in… (but I’m) unaware of that occurring yet in North Carolina,” Stober said. “There is some solar installation, but by and large (AI data centers) consume (energy) from the grid and use carbon-based sources.”
County commissioners also considered other worries about AI data centers, including concerns about noise pollution, higher energy bills for nearby residents — and the fact that data centers also use a lot of water as well as power. Stober says that’s something AI companies are trying to address, but it’s still a very big issue.
“Data centers are learning to use less water, but they still consume a lot of water,” he said Tuesday. “They are looking at water recycling as well as lower consumption technologies, but they are known to use the equivalent of water of 50,000 (or even) 80,000 people per day. That’s larger than all the (individual) municipalities in Orange County, for example.”
With that in mind, county commissioners took up a resolution this week to set a public hearing on a possible moratorium for April 21 and to begin the process of amending the county’s unified development ordinance to regulate data centers directly. That resolution passed unanimously — as did Carrboro’s resolution to urge Gov. Stein to lobby Duke Energy.
Featured photo via the Town of Carrboro.
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