Duke rate case freezes 2024 sales forecast as data center costs rise

Duke Energy’s North Carolina rate request would raise customer bills more than 15% over two years while holding the sales forecast at 2024 levels, according to an analysis in Utility Dive. Correcting that denominator to Duke’s own planning assumptions would erase 54% of the increase, about $1 billion a year, writes Edward Burgess, a partner at Current Energy Group who testified before the North Carolina Utilities Commission for the state attorney general’s office.

Burgess writes that several recent cases added data-center-driven costs without raising the sales figure in the denominator. In Duke’s filing, he says, the denominator stayed essentially at 2024 levels even though Duke had already contracted hundreds of megawatts of new data center load and included the costs that load triggers.

For a data center tenant signing a large-load contract, a fund holding utility equity, or a lender to the campus, the filed kWh sales figure determines whether new load pushes unit rates down or up. Burgess puts the two treatments about $1 billion a year apart, making that number a diligence item rather than boilerplate.

Duke’s stake in that question is large. Its signed large-load agreements reached 7.8 GW as of Nov. 6, up 200 MW, alongside a $103 billion capital plan, as Private Infrastructure Daily previously reported. The North Carolina Utilities Commission has already tested who a given load serves: in September it refused a 255 MW Duke gas plant on that question, as Private Infrastructure Daily reported.