Duke Energy announced that it will give NC State $2.5 million to be used toward researching renewable energy and attracting and retaining underrepresented groups within the College of Engineering.
The announcement came Wednesday hours before a speech by Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good to several hundred students at a Nelson Hall lecture was interrupted by more than 20 protesters.
“We greatly appreciate our university’s long-term relationship with Duke Energy and its ongoing support of NC State,” Chancellor Randy Woodson said in a University statement. “This generous grant further advances NC State’s leadership role in developing the critical technologies and diverse workforce needed to drive the engineering and energy industries of the future.”
Distributed by the Duke Energy Foundation, the grant allocates $1.5 million of the total gift to establish of an endowment for a center within the College of Engineering called the Future Renewable Electric Energy Distribution and Management (FREEDM) Systems Center.
The FREEDM Systems Center is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. It will host a collaboration of research, industry and education leaders working to develop and implement new technologies in renewable electric-energy.
“The donation will be used to try and find ways to use cleaner energy so that people can make less of an environmental impact and will allow flow of energy to be reversed,” said Mick Kulikowski, the assistant director for news and national media coordinator within University Relations.
The other $1 million is set to be used toward supporting programs and scholarships to help attract and retain underrepresented groups within the College of Engineering. It will also include outreach programs to help attract K-12 students to the prospect of a career in engineering.
Duke Energy has committed $4 billion for current renewable energy contracts in the state, and it has announced that it is on track to meet 12.5 percent of its total retail sales by renewable energy or energy efficiency by 2021.
Good announced the grant at a luncheon on Centennial Campus Wednesday. Later that day, Good spoke at a lecture in Nelson Hall where she was interrupted by more than 20 student protesters who denounced the company’s blockage of the Energy Freedom Act and claimed the company’s renewable energy commitments were not sufficient.
The Energy Freedom Act would open up North Carolina energy markets to the third-party sale of electricity. The bill would also allow renewable-energy companies to build solar or wind-power systems on customers’ own property and bill customers directly for the electricity, even though they aren’t utilities.
Several businesses, including Wal-Mart, Cargill, Target, Lowe’s and Family Dollar have expressed support for the legislation and wrote to the bill’s author, Rep. John Szoka (R-Cumberland), the bill’s author, asking him to introduce it.
Duke Energy has since opposed the bill and has set up a lobbying team to stop the bill from passing.
