As hospitals fight cost-cutting reforms to the State Health Plan, State Treasurer Dale Folwell remains undaunted. The treasurer’s fight to overhaul the state health plan has pitted state employees and taxpayers against the hospital industry. Folwell promises to save taxpayers $258 million and plan members almost $57 million by tethering payments to Medicare prices. That...
Meredith Cooper, Gov. Roy Cooper’s sister-in-law, has been listed since April as manager of the company that owns the Cooper family’s Nash County solar farm property. That’s when Meredith filed an annual report with the N.C. Secretary of State. Meredith Cooper’s husband is Pell Cooper, a District Court judge. Pell and Roy Cooper are brothers....
The House Energy and Public Utilities Committee on Tuesday, June, 25, approved a version of a bill to restrict new wind turbines near military bases, eliminating a proposed ban that was part of the original bill. Under a proposed committee substitute of Senate Bill 377, the “Military Base Protection Act,” the N.C. Department of Environmental...
Just days after warning of the need to regulate solar panel disposal, Sen. Paul Newton, R-Cabarrus, scrapped his bill for a relaxed version. Facing opposition from solar-friendly senators and the renewable energy lobby, Newton gave regulators until Jan. 1, 2022, to study environmental impacts and adopt final rules. The original bill set a September deadline...
Andrew Ross, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Afghanistan, in January was working private security for a cross-country delivery of hemp. Ross’s task was simple: Guard a truckload of state-approved industrial hemp, grown in Kentucky, and bound for Colorado. Ross was pulled over by police in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, after the delivery truck he was...
A Senate bill establishing a disposal plan for solar energy panels cleared its first hurdle. The Senate Committee on Agriculture and Natural and Economic Resources voted Thursday, June 13, to send Senate Bill 568 to the Finance Committee amid protests from some committee members. They said environmental protection regulations are premature. Bill sponsor Sen. Paul...
If all the solar panels from industrial-scale electric plants in North Carolina were laid end to end, they would stretch from Raleigh to San Francisco and back nearly four times. Yet the state has no plan to handle the 475,000 tons of panels once they wear out and become waste. Sen. Paul Newton, R-Cabarrus, a...
Benefit or boondoggle? That’s the billion-dollar question. North Carolina surpassed the $1 billion mark in renewable energy investment tax credits issued in 2018 — three years after the lucrative subsidy program to stimulate solar development expired. Taxpayers have picked up the bill, and could be on the hook for hundreds of millions of more tax...
Proponents of the Durham-Orange Light Rail Project were issued a crushing blow by the GoTriangle Board of Trustees, which terminated the project in early April. But a recent study says termination was a good thing. (See update at the end of this story.) The study’s author, Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole, describes the influence of...
UPDATED, 4:55 p.m. to include statement from House Speaker Tim Moore. Co-chairmen of the House Select Committee on Disaster Relief panned sluggish hurricane relief efforts by the Cooper administration. They want renewed oversight authority. “The people of eastern and southeastern North Carolina deserve better. They cannot afford any more delays and missteps,” House Majority Leader...
In its application to build a solar facility on Gov. Roy Cooper’s Nash County property, Durham-based Strata Solar said its generating capacity would be about 5 megawatts. Enough energy to power continuously about 3,750 homes. But the plant won’t generate 5 MW of energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Much of the time...
