Weekend reads: Duke’s rolling blackouts explained, the environmental impacts of a NC electric car factory, and the stories we’ll be closely watching in 2023
Jan 08, 2023 | 9:45 am ET
In this issue:
Three power plants malfunctioned when instrumentation lines froze. Frigid temperatures hampered the operation of several nuclear units. Energy demand forecasts failed. Nearby utilities in other states, struggling to keep their own customers warm, had no power to sell.
On Christmas Eve, a multiverse of mishaps prompted Duke Energy for the first time in state history to inflict rolling blackouts on thousands of North Carolinians. More than 1,300 megawatts, equivalent to 3.6% of Duke Energy’s generating power in North Carolina was subject to “load shedding,” as it’s known in utility speak.
Those outages snuffed out holiday lights, collapsed inflatable yard reindeer, and transformed hot, aromatic ovens into dark tombs. [Read more…]
2. The environmental impacts of the VinFast electric car factory in Chatham County
With stands of loblolly pine, rivers, creeks and expanses of farm fields, southeastern Chatham County feels like the country. But this neck of the woods is home to many polluting industries: Arauco, a wood products company with a history of air quality violations; the Shearon Harris nuclear plant; the former Brickhaven mine, where 7.3 million tons of coal ash is buried in lined cells; Duke Energy’s now-defunct Cape Fear coal-fired power plant and an associated STAR facility, which burns the old fly ash for use in cement.
Now a mega-project east of Moncure and near the Chatham-Wake County line would fill in wetlands and streams — in an area already prone to water pollution.
VinFast, an electric car manufacturer, plans to build a factory on 1,300 acres of forested land, currently used for timbering, near Old US Highway 1 and Corinth Road. It is expected to create 1,700 jobs and generate millions of dollars in tax revenue to the area.[Read more…]
Gov. Roy Cooper delivered some welcome holiday presents recently to a handful of people who had served long sentences in state prison. Six were granted clemency and an early release, while four others who’d previously served long sentences received full pardons.
All 10 appear to have turned their lives around and more than paid their debts to a state in which criminal penalties – particularly those that relate to drug possession and sales – are incredibly severe.
As welcome as the governor’s actions were, however, the hard fact remains that they don’t go anywhere close to far enough.
North Carolina doesn’t have the harshest or cruelest prison/criminal justice system in the world (or even in the United States), but as a 2021 report from the Prison Policy Initiative made clear, it’s much closer to the bottom than the top. [Read more…]
“It is difficult to make predictions,” Dutch politician Karl Kristian Steincke once wrote. “Especially about the future.”
But if you’re a reporter who carefully follows a few issues, you don’t need a crystal ball to have a fairly good idea of what to look for in the new year. Here are some stories we’re certain we’ll be following and reporting on in 2023:
1. Renewed legislative assaults on LGBTQ people
For LGBTQ people in North Carolina, 2022 was a year of tensions, tragedies, wins and losses.
Transgender North Carolinians saw two major legal victories — winning the right to change the gender marker on their birth certificates without undergoing medical transition and a lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s exclusion of gender-affirming health care for transgender state employee under the state health plan.
State Treasurer Dale Folwell, a potential Republican candidate for governor in 2024, is challenging the health care ruling. [Read more…]
5. The year ahead: Capital punishment and other criminal justice issues in North Carolina
One of the first things I did after starting at Policy Watch last summer was ask the Department of Public Safety to give me tours of a few of the state’s 53 prisons. I’d done the same thing at my last job, in Connecticut. My thinking is, if I’m going to write about a state’s prison system, I owe it to readers and those locked within to see some those places firsthand.
A guided tour is not the best way to get a sense of how incarcerated people are treated each day, but it has some advantages. While prison officials can present a sanitized version of their correctional facilities, they cannot change each building’s architecture, the layout of the housing units or the size of the cells in which the incarcerated live, locked away for years at a time.
I visited penitentiaries in Nash, Columbus and Orange counties. But it was the prison closest to my office — Central Prison, in Raleigh, just down the street from the vast green expanse of Dorothea Dix Park — that jolted me into a reckoning that I wasn’t in Connecticut anymore. [Read more…]
Lawsuit involves a disabled man sedated against his will after he complained his cell wasn’t compliant with federal law.
The system that allows people incarcerated in North Carolina’s prisons to register complaints about their treatment is a confusing and confounding process — so opaque it’s questionable whether they can even access it, according to a ruling issued last week by the U.S Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
The facts of the case, wrote Judge Robert B. King for a unanimous three-judge panel, suggest the incarcerated person at its center “faced ‘a real world ‘Catch 22,’ a dilemma from which there is no escape, one in which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem.’”
The suit deals with North Carolina’s “prison grievance procedure.” [Read more…]
7. D.C. nears Jan. 6 anniversary with warnings about extremism, awards for courage
WASHINGTON – On the eve of the second anniversary of the U.S. Capitol insurrection, congressional Democrats and dozens of veterans on Thursday in a press conference called on incoming House Republican leaders to condemn political violence and hold their members who supported the attack accountable for their actions.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is scheduled on Friday to host a ceremony where he will speak about the Jan. 6 attack, and award medals to a dozen people who “demonstrated courage and selflessness during a moment of peril for our nation,” according to a White House official.
They will include: [Read more…]
8. Voices that matter 2022: The year in stories of the marginalized and underrepresented
Policy Watch’s tagline is “Stories and Voices that Matter,” emphasizing our mission to bring you stories you don’t see elsewhere and to amplify the voices of those who might otherwise go unheard.
This year, we pursued that mission with a series of stories highlighting some of those voices, including:
- The work of the state’s historically Black colleges and universities to confront the nation’s racial history and today’s justice system.
- LGBTQ students documenting and preserving UNC’s queer history
- Graduate students struggling to make ends meet and using food banks as they provide low cost labor for their universities
- Communities struggling to address the opioid epidemic — and those who have lost loved ones to a little discussed or understood issue within that public health crisis [Read more…]
9. Weekly Radio Interviews and Daily Radio Commentaries:
Raleigh, NC
