North Carolina’s Progress on Clean Energy

Today, December 13, 2024, Governor Roy Cooper and North Carolina Commerce Secretary Machelle Baker Sanders celebrated the progress made under the Governor’s leadership to grow the state’s clean energy economy.

This is the fourth in a series of events highlighting the Governor’s major accomplishments and progress made for North Carolina during his time in office.

Remarks as prepared:

Good morning. Thank you, Secretary Sanders. Thank you to Jed and Kempower for hosting us, and President Scott Ralls and your team for your work. And thanks to all of you for being here today and with us these last few years as we transformed North Carolina into the epicenter of the clean energy economy.

When I took office as CEO of our great state, I had a mission. I wanted a North Carolina where people are better educated, healthier and with more money in their pockets with the opportunity to have lives of purpose and abundance. As I come to the end of my time as Governor, I’ve had a chance to reflect on that mission and the work we’ve done over the last 8 years to advance it.

Today, we’re highlighting an area that’s helped us achieve these goals. Clean Energy. It helps protect our planet and boost our economy. Folks, North Carolina is now a clean energy leader.

Going back centuries, the hallmark of North Carolina’s success has been our innovative spirit. It’s how 240 years ago we started the first public university in the nation to open its doors. How 121 years ago we were first in flight. And how seventy years ago, a forward-looking group of North Carolinians recognized an urgent need to diversify our state’s economy and ended up creating Research Triangle Park. How about 40 years ago we leveraged our medical research and university partners to form the North Carolina Biotechnology Center and then later, the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina and the list goes on and on.

So what is a legacy of this generation of North Carolina? I believe it is becoming the epicenter of the clean energy economy. And like any great story, it started with a few seeds of good ideas.

Back in 2018, I told my team I wanted to grow our economy while protecting our environment and the best way to do both was to prioritize clean energy. We went to work assembling stakeholders and experts and ultimately developed Executive Order 80, reaffirming our commitment to fight climate change and leading our transition to clean energy. The order called for the creation of a North Carolina Clean Energy Plan. This was good work that had an immediate positive effect with business recruitment.

It created for us a roadmap and charted a positive course for our planet, people and pocketbooks.

But we needed more. We needed to put that roadmap into law and we did it with the passage of House Bill 951, which made North Carolina just the second state in the southeast to put into law a carbon reduction requirement for our power sector.

To pass a bipartisan law like this was critical for our economy and our environment. And we did it because we had a roadmap ready to go. We had done the work. We knew where we wanted to go and we knew how to get there when the time came.

So House Bill 951 moved us forward and sent the strong signal that North Carolina was invested in clean energy. But we needed more to bring and keep the jobs that followed.

So we super charged our progress with the work of our community colleges and people like Dr. Scott Ralls and his team.

As I’ve talked with CEOs across our country and world explaining North Carolina’s strengths, I’ve learned that our workers and the community colleges that train them are our not-so-secret weapon. Few if any other states in the country have a community college system as well-coordinated and robust as ours along with the greatest workforce in the world- the people of North Carolina. Our community colleges understand the power and pay of clean energy jobs. They are ready.

And when I tell that CEO that we can connect them with a local community college that will help them develop a tailor-made training program, that helps seal the deal.

And we’ve seen the fruits of our labor. Natron Energy will bring 1,000 jobs to Edgecombe County to build sodium-ion batteries for industrial customers. Boviet Solar chose Greenville for its first North American production facility, creating 900 jobs. ABB expanded its operations in Orange County, creating more than 400 jobs. Siemens expanded its operations in Mecklenburg County to make our electric grid more resilient, creating more than 550 jobs.

And from there, it has only snowballed. Once you become known as a hub for clean energy, everyone wants to be a part of it.

Look at where we’re going with electric vehicles. My Executive Order 80 also directed a goal of 80 thousand EVs on our highways and the development of a Clean Transportation Plan to get there. Well, we blew past the 80 thousand, so I went further, setting an even more ambitious goal of 1.25 million EVs and directing the development of a plan to deploy the charging infrastructure necessary to accommodate them. That has helped North Carolina attract many of these manufacturers in the EV supply chain.

Epsilon Advanced Materials, a global EV battery component supplier, chose Brunswick County for its first manufacturing facility, creating 500 jobs. Toyota is investing $13.9 billion and creating 5,100 jobs for their electric battery manufacturing plant in Randolph County.

And think about where we are right now. Kempower is making charging stations for electric vehicles, creating more than 300 good-paying manufacturing jobs right here in Durham. Kempower will help boost our economy by more than $725 million over the next 10 years. And they’re helping to solidify our grasp on every link in the electric vehicle supply chain, from the semiconductors to the batteries to the charging stations themselves.

But clean transportation is about more than just electric vehicles, it’s about other changes that reduce emissions. Trains are a reliable and convenient way to travel. We received a historic $1 billion federal grant to better connect passenger rail from North Carolina and Virginia. And the North Carolina Railroad Company secured a $105 million grant to enhance its rail infrastructure.

We received tens of millions in funds to buy more than 180 electric school buses, many of which will be built by Thomas Built Buses in North Carolina! Not only is this investment good for our planet — it’s also good for our economy and our students’ health.

From trains to electric school buses, we’re leading the way in the transition to clean transportation. We’re putting North Carolinians into good paying jobs and we’re protecting our environment. Who can ask for more?

But as I remind people — progress isn’t promised. We have to work for it. We have to earn it.

The urgency of the climate crisis is real, and we in North Carolina have had a front-row seat to its devastating impact. Storms continue to hit our state faster and with more ferocity. Doing nothing is not an option. Protecting the law of House Bill 951 and bringing online more solar, more wind, and more zero-emission power is critically important. Ensuring that our utilities commission is balanced and impartial is essential.

The gains we’ve made on clean energy these last 8 years — they’ve helped make us healthier and better educated with more money in the pockets of North Carolina families. And as we look to the future, I know these achievements, if we nurture them, can take us further than we ever thought possible.