(Carolina Journal) – Duke Energy rate hikes from 2023 challenged by the state attorney general have been affirmed by the North Carolina Supreme Court.
The case was one of 20 announced Friday. Others included the censure of a Wake County judge and siding with Currituck County in an occupancy tax dispute.
The state Supreme Court split, 5-2, in a pair of cases upholding Duke Energy rate increases state regulators approved in 2023. The state attorney general and outside intervenors challenged the rate hikes.
The court’s Republican majority upheld the North Carolina Utilities Commission’s decisions. Justices Anita Earls and Allison Riggs, the court’s two Democrats, dissented.
“Because the Commission construed the law correctly and made sufficient findings of fact supported by competent, material, and substantial evidence in view of the entire record, we affirm,” wrote Justice Trey Allen for the majority.
“While our dissenting colleagues accuse us of ‘burying [our] heads, ostrich-like in the sand, as to the actual evidence below,’ the real difference between their position and ours is that we are unwilling to usurp the role of the Commission and reweigh the evidence,” Allen added. “This Court may not ‘disturb an order of the Commission merely because [we] would have given [the evidence] a different weight.’”
“If the Commission followed the law and based its decision on competent, material, and substantial evidence, we must uphold its determination, regardless of whether we would prefer a different outcome,” according to the majority opinion. “To do otherwise would be to appropriate power that does not belong to us and transform this institution into something other than an appellate court.”
Earls focused on the different rate increases approved for Duke’s eastern and western North Carolina customers.
“Duke Energy will charge consumers in the western part of the state more than consumers in the eastern part of the state for identical electrical services,” she wrote. “I dissent from the majority’s decision to approve this disparate treatment. In my view, the Commission’s decision in the Duke Energy Carolinas rate case is quite plainly unlawful and arbitrary.”
The General Assembly changed state law earlier in this decade to allow utilities to seek rate changes covering more than one year.
