Duke Energy operates coal-fired power plants across North Carolina that together produce thousands of megawatts of electricity and, on some days, visible haze. State regulators have ordered the company to shut those plants down by the mid-2030s. Now lawmakers in Raleigh want to make sure not a single one closes until a new nuclear reactor is approved and built to replace every lost megawatt.
The proposal, contained in PCS 957, a draft bill circulating through the North Carolina General Assembly as of June 2026, would prohibit Duke from retiring any subcritical coal-fired generating unit until its designated replacement resource has been placed in service. The only exception is narrow: a coal plant could close early if keeping it running would itself threaten grid reliability. In every other scenario, the coal stays on.
The problem is timing. The replacement resource lawmakers have in mind is nuclear power, and Duke’s nuclear plans are barely off the starting line.
A nuclear timeline that doesn’t match the coal deadline
The North Carolina Utilities Commission’s Carbon Plan directs Duke to retire more than 8,000 MW of coal capacity by the mid-2030s. That order covers plants scattered across the state, including the Belews Creek Steam Station in Stokes County, the Marshall plant on Lake Norman, the Cliffside and Allen facilities in the western foothills, and the Roxboro and Mayo plants in Person County. Together, these aging stations represent the backbone of Duke’s remaining coal fleet in the Carolinas.
For the first proposed nuclear replacement, Duke submitted an Early Site Permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the Belews Creek site on December 30, 2025. The NRC accepted the application for docketing on February 8, 2026, and the review is underway with no finalized timeline. But an Early Site Permit only confirms that a location is suitable for a nuclear plant. It does not authorize construction or operation. Actual reactor licensing, construction, and commissioning would follow as separate steps, each spanning years and each carrying its own risk of delay.
That gap between the coal retirement schedule and the nuclear licensing calendar is where PCS 957 lands. If the bill becomes law, Duke cannot close a coal plant until the nuclear replacement is not just approved but physically operational and generating power. Given that no reactor technology has been publicly selected for the Belews Creek site, no construction license has been sought, and no projected in-service date has been disclosed, the practical effect could be to keep coal plants running well past the mid-2030s retirement window the Utilities Commission set.
The financial architecture already favors nuclear spending
PCS 957 does not exist in isolation. The General Assembly has already enacted Session Law 2025-78, known as the Power Bill Reduction Act, which reshapes the financial landscape for Duke’s energy transition in three significant ways.
First, the law removed the interim 2030 carbon-dioxide reduction target that had applied to Duke’s North Carolina utilities. That target had been one of the primary drivers behind the Utilities Commission’s coal retirement schedule. Without it, there is no near-term statutory deadline pushing coal plants offline.
Second, the law authorized construction-work-in-progress, or CWIP, cost recovery for baseload generating facilities, including nuclear projects. In plain terms, that means Duke can begin charging ratepayers for the cost of building a nuclear plant years before that plant generates a single kilowatt-hour of electricity. CWIP financing reduces the utility’s borrowing costs and financial risk but shifts that risk onto customers, who start paying higher bills during the construction period.
Third, the law created a securitization mechanism for coal-plant retirement costs, allowing Duke to issue ratepayer-backed bonds to cover the remaining book value of closed coal units. That provision was designed to smooth the financial transition away from coal, but if PCS 957 delays retirements indefinitely, the securitization tool sits unused while the coal plants continue accumulating fuel, maintenance, and environmental compliance costs.
The combined effect is a financial structure that lets Duke collect money from customers for nuclear construction while also billing them for the continued operation of coal plants the company was supposed to be closing. No publicly available analysis quantifies what that overlap would cost residential, commercial, or industrial ratepayers.
The legal foundation PCS 957 builds on
The draft bill extends a framework established by House Bill 951, the 2021 energy law that first defined subcritical coal-fired generating facilities for Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress. That law required Duke to file coal retirement and replacement plans and allowed the Utilities Commission to delay retirements when grid reliability demanded it.
PCS 957 converts that flexible planning requirement into a hard legal precondition. Under the 2021 law, the Commission could weigh reliability concerns and adjust timelines. Under the proposed language, retirement is flatly prohibited until replacement nuclear capacity is in service, with only the narrow reliability exception allowing earlier closure. The shift moves decision-making authority away from the Commission’s case-by-case judgment and toward a blanket legislative rule.
It is worth noting that PCS 957 has not been enacted. The document has been circulated through the General Assembly, but it has not completed the full legislative process. It could be amended, combined with other measures, or stalled before reaching the governor’s desk. Readers should treat it as a concrete legislative effort reflecting the priorities of its sponsors, not as settled law.
What no one has answered yet
Several questions sit unanswered in the public record, and they are the questions North Carolina electricity customers are most likely to ask.
No primary docket filings or commissioner statements address how the PCS 957 prohibition would alter the Carbon Plan’s retirement schedule. The Commission’s existing order assumed a phased drawdown of coal through the mid-2030s. If nuclear construction slips or federal licensing milestones arrive later than projected, the draft bill could freeze that sequence indefinitely.
Duke has not publicly disclosed cost estimates, projected in-service dates, or reactor technology selections for replacement nuclear capacity tied to specific coal units. The NRC’s Belews Creek docket contains the application and acceptance letter but nothing resembling a construction timeline or cost projection. Whether Duke is pursuing large conventional reactors or small modular reactors matters enormously for both cost and schedule, and that choice has not been made public.
Official records also lack quantified reliability assessments showing which coal units, if any, would qualify for the bill’s limited early-closure exception. Without those assessments, it is impossible to know whether the exception functions as a genuine safety valve or as language that exists on paper while every plant stays open.
Environmental outcomes are similarly unresolved. With the 2030 carbon target gone, there is no statutory mechanism ensuring that delayed coal retirements are offset by faster deployment of other low-carbon resources. If nuclear projects encounter the kind of cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued recent U.S. nuclear construction, North Carolina could see prolonged coal reliance with no clear replacement timeline and no emissions guardrail.
Where this leaves North Carolina ratepayers
The verified facts support a specific and uncomfortable conclusion. North Carolina lawmakers have drafted language that would legally tether coal retirements to the successful deployment of new nuclear capacity. They have already enacted financial tools that make early nuclear spending recoverable from ratepayers. And state regulators have approved a coal phaseout schedule that assumes substantial retirements by the mid-2030s, even though the first proposed nuclear site has only cleared the earliest procedural step in a federal review process that historically takes years.
How those tracks converge depends on decisions not yet made: whether PCS 957 becomes law, how the Utilities Commission revises its Carbon Plan in response, what timeline the NRC sets for Belews Creek and any subsequent sites, and how Duke sequences its investments across a fleet of aging coal plants and a nuclear program that exists, for now, only on paper.
Until those decisions move from draft language and docket numbers into binding orders and construction crews on-site, North Carolina’s coal-to-nuclear transition remains a set of legal conditions rather than a concrete building schedule. The people paying the electric bills are left navigating that uncertainty with partial information about the costs, risks, and timelines being written into statute on their behalf.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
