Duke Energy has announced it will include take-or-pay provisions in its agreements for 2GW of US data centers across its coverage area.
Under the new provisions, contracts for data centers and other customers with more than 100MW of power demand will require payments for a minimum amount of electricity, regardless of usage. In addition, agreements will need to be approved directly by regulators.
The data center customers have signed agreements and identified land they will use but have not finalized power contracts with Duke.
Duke has also discussed with data center operators whether they would co-invest in the energy infrastructure needed for the centers and whether a special tariff rate would be established to safeguard the general public from rising power bills.
In its latest earnings call, the company also cited “significant economic development from data centers and advanced manufacturing” as drivers of long-term growth. It forecasts that data center load will grow to 10 percent of total commercial sales in 2028 from 3 percent in 2023.
Duke Energy is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and owns 54.8GW of baseload and peak generation in the US. It provides energy to approximately 7.4 million customers in the Carolinas, Florida, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.
In October, it signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Nucor to develop renewable energy in North and South Carolina.
Before this, new rates were introduced for data centers to ensure that digital infrastructure providers were paying their fair share. This involves so-called “minimum take” clauses, which require data centers to pay for a certain amount of power, regardless of how much they consume.
