The towering plume of steam appears over the hills to the left as I’m driving south on I-26—a reminder that the biggest power plant in Western North Carolina sits deep in the next valley. Progress Energy withdraws an average of 224 million gallons a day from Lake Julian to make steam for driving turbines and […]

“Exceptional” is a deceptive term when used to describe the current drought in most of North Carolina. If it’s so unusual, we may feel we don’t need to plan for a repeat of such conditions in the future. But most climate-change scenarios predict that we’ll probably have more periods of extended drought in the Southeast. […]