energy

Click here to view and here to listen to Dr. Michael Sanera discussing this Policy Report. RALEIGH — Wake County commissioners should be wary of their environmental sustainability…

This Regional Brief critiques the process used by the Wake County Sustainability Task Force and its final report. The author was a member of the task force.

Over the last decade, North Carolina has led the way among southern states in advancing a more extreme environmentalist agenda. The General Assembly's new Republican majority should start anew on environmental issues. Legislators should put environmental policy into the context of the ideas of liberty, personal responsibility, and economic growth that the party ran on last fall.

Click here to view and here to listen to Dr. Roy Cordato discussing this Spotlight report. RALEIGH — The General Assembly’s new Republican majority should scrap state renewable…

This report highlights eleven action items that North Carolina’s new General Assembly should seek to implement in the first 100 days of the 2011 legislative session. These items touch upon a cross section of public policy areas, including education, economic development, property rights, energy and the environment, health care, the budget, and transparency. We at the John Locke Foundation believe that these items represent straightforward actions that would greatly enhance the liberty and prosperity of North Carolina’s citizens.

Click here to view and here to listen to Dr. Roy Cordato discussing this Spotlight report. RALEIGH — Government efforts to employ “demand-side management” in North Carolina energy,…

Over the past decade the “demand side management” (DSM) model of public policy has crept into the state of North Carolina’s approach to regulation. Advocates of DSM are clear in making explicit their goals of social engineering and the rearrangement of lifestyles. The language in their guiding documents are replete with references to “behavior modification” and “restraining and restricting” certain activities or lifestyle choices. DSM is inconsistent with a free society, where the role of government is to respond to constituent demands, not manage and control them.

RALEIGH — North Carolina would feel no more pressure to build commercial wind turbines along its mountain ridgelines if lawmakers scrapped their two-year-old renewable energy mandates. That’s the assessment a…

Wind power advocates are pushing for commercial wind turbines along the mountain ridgelines - the mountains and the coast are the only locations where wind is viable in North Carolina. These commercial wind turbines can be as tall as 500 feet or the height of 50-story skyscrapers. The Ridge Law generally prohibits most tall buildings over 40 feet from being built along the ridgelines.

In 2007, the passage of Senate Bill 3 (SB 3) in North Carolina required that all of the state's public electric utilities increase the percentage of electricity generated from new renewable energy sources. The Beacon Hill Institute in conjunction with the John Locke Foundation has set out to estimate the costs and benefits of SB 3 and its impact on the state's economy.