Hunton & Williams Helps Secure NC Supreme Court Victory for Duke Energy in Groundwater Case

Hunton & Williams LLP was on brief in securing for Duke Energy a favorable opinion from the North Carolina Supreme Court. The decision overturned a lower court decision regarding the application of the state’s groundwater rules to the remediation of groundwater contamination from the company’s coal ash impoundments in North Carolina.

The state’s principal environmental decision-making body, the NC Environmental Management Commission (EMC), had issued a declaratory ruling rejecting a series of requests from environmental groups to change the state’s interpretation of the groundwater rules’ provisions on remediation, following the interpretation that the agency had followed for several years. Duke Energy had intervened before the EMC, and Hunton & Williams partner Charles Case had successfully urged the EMC to continue to follow its prior interpretation of those groundwater rules and their application to groundwater contamination.