Duke Energy CEO: Trump’s proposed $4 trillion energy plan ‘very expensive’
- October 22, 2021
The CEO of Duke Energy said the company will not sell or buy electricity from President Donald Trump’s energy plan unless it gets a boost from the president’s proposed 4 trillion-dollar pipeline to bring natural gas from Texas to Florida.
“The president’s energy strategy is very expensive,” David Strickland told Reuters in an interview in the company’s headquarters in the capital D.C. “The pipeline will get us nowhere in this price structure.
It will never get us anywhere near $4 billion in savings.”
Strickland said the pipeline was not going to get the job done and that Trump had said he wanted to buy up as much natural gas as he could before the 2020 presidential election.
He also said Trump’s administration was not making the right decisions on the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was scheduled to start delivering gas to Steele City, North Dakota in mid-September.
“I’m not a believer in Keystone XL,” Strickart said.
“I’m certainly not going forward with it.”
In the interview, Stricklards chief operating officer Brian McWilliams said the pipe was not on the table.
“We have never discussed that in the last couple of years,” McWilliams told Reuters.
“We are not talking about that pipeline in the pipeline discussion right now.”
Strackland, who was named chief executive of Duke in July, has come under criticism from environmentalists and the Democratic Party for not doing more to protect water from the Dakota Pipeline.
McWilliams said he would make the decision on whether to proceed with the pipeline, as the company is under a state of emergency in North Dakota and had to take a “very large number of precautions” to ensure the pipeline would not go forward.
McDonald said that Trump has not yet taken any action on the pipeline.
“He’s not taking a position,” McWilliam said.
McWilliam also said that while he did not expect the pipeline to get built, he expects the pipeline will eventually get built.
“When I said we would be looking at pipeline, he’s not even looking at it,” McWilliam said.
