The Hickory Hound: Economic Relevance

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Saturday, October 18, 2025

Hickory, NC News & Views | October 19, 2025 | Hickory Hound

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HKYNC News & Views Oct 19, 2025 – Executive Summary

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📤This Week:

Monday - (Substack) - Part VI - the Narrative & Chapter 22: Branding the Corridor - The Foothills Corridor has long been misunderstood—by outsiders, by media, and sometimes even by itself. Branded as past tense. Talked about as if decline were destiny. Seen through the lens of what left, not what’s being built... The Foothills Corridor doesn’t need a slick rebrand—it needs a story that reflects its truth. For too long, the narrative around this region has been shaped by outsiders: developers pitching lifestyle fantasy, politicians romanticizing the past, or marketers slapping on slogans that sound nice but say nothing.

Tuesday - Dear Rachel – Episode 8: Recovery, Redemption, Risk - The eighth episode of Dear Rachel turns to lives lived at the edge of stability: the recovering addict, the immigrant worker, and the LGBTQ+ neighbor. Together, their voices highlight how survival, identity, and belonging intersect in the Shrinking Center. Yet this episode also acknowledges the other side of the public debate: the desire for boundaries, for balance, for a civic life where tolerance does not spill into capitulation.

Thursday - 🧱Factions of Self‑Preservation 7: Fading from the Map - How Cultural Amnesia Is Quietly Undermining Hickory’s Civic Future - When churches close, libraries move, and local storytellers vanish—Hickory loses its memory, allowing its identity to slip away.

Friday - (Substack) - The Foothills Corridor - Chapter 23: Making the Case to Funders, Investors, and Talent - For the Foothills Corridor to complete its transformation, it must do more than survive—it must attract belief from those who have the power to amplify what’s working. That means making a compelling, confident, and unapologetically local case to funders, investors, and mobile talent who are deciding where to place their money, their energy, or their lives.

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📤Next Week:

Monday - (Substack) - The Foothills Corridor - Chapter 24: Reclaiming Control from Charlotte and Raleigh - For decades, the narrative—and the capital—have flowed east and south. Charlotte and Raleigh have dominated political agendas, media attention, and economic development pipelines. The Foothills Corridor has often been treated as an afterthought: too rural to prioritize, too fragmented to organize, too slow to invest in.

Tuesday - 🌐⭐Toward a Healthier Hickory: A Community Investment Perspective⭐️🌐 - "This Feature Report examines the health and cultural landscape of Hickory and Catawba County. It builds on earlier News and Views segments to ask: how strong is our community’s foundation of well-being, and what must be done to secure it for the future?"

Thursday - 🧱 Factions of Self-Preservation 8 (Summary Conclusion): Walls Within - How Hickory Built Defenses Instead of Solutions - Hickory isn’t declining from a single crisis. It’s retreating in slow motion—system by system, choice by choice.

Friday - (Substack) - Chapter 25: The Future Isn’t a Revival—It’s a Reinvention -For all the talk of comebacks and revivals, here’s the truth: the Foothills Corridor is not going back to what it was. The furniture mills aren’t reopening. The textile plants aren’t restaffing. The industrial rhythms of the past century have ended.

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🧠Opening Reflection:

For most households, the electric bill arrives with the rhythm of the clock—steady, expected, and impossible to ignore. Some months it hovers near ninety dollars; other months it passes one hundred eighty, depending on how hot the air feels or how cold the nights turn. For a two-thousand-square-foot home with an aging HVAC system and the discipline to keep the thermostat at eighty in July, it still hurts. Electricity is not a luxury; it is the invisible current that holds a household together. Yet in Catawba County, the cost of keeping that current flowing has become one of the defining burdens separating the comfortable from the strained, the anchored from the exposed.

The first current is financial. Across North Carolina, energy costs have outpaced wages. Duke Energy’s filings show that residential rates have climbed nearly forty percent since 2000—with the sharpest rise in the past three years as fuel costs, storm recovery, and grid upgrades compound. Hickory follows the same trajectory, but the squeeze here is harder because median incomes sit roughly a quarter below the national average. For many, the light bill now competes with the mortgage, the grocery cart, and the insurance premium. It is no longer a utility line; it is a stress line.

The second current is structural. The Carolinas’ power grid was built for another generation—one before data centers, battery plants, and the twenty-four-hour appetite of the digital economy. Duke Energy’s own plans project load growth of twenty-two to twenty-five percent by 2030, much of it driven by industrial expansion and the arrival of large data campuses, Microsoft among them. Each new substation, turbine, or transmission line built to meet that demand carries costs that eventually flow into household bills. The infrastructure is modernizing, but its burden is still socialized: the ordinary ratepayer becomes the quiet investor in every corporate upgrade.

The third current is technological. The same AI revolution that promises progress is consuming power at an unprecedented scale. Former Google executive Eric Schmidt warned this year that artificial-intelligence computing could outpace U.S. generation capacity within a decade. Hickory sits inside that transformation. The region benefits from jobs and tax base, yet it also shoulders the collateral cost of demand—higher usage, higher rates, and greater vulnerability when the grid strains. The glow from a distant data center is, in part, the household’s own bill reflected back.

The final current is environmental. Every degree of heat and every hour of storm recovery now echoes through the meter. Hurricanes, ice events, and extreme summers test the system, and each repair, fuel adjustment, and reliability investment cycles through as a “rider” on the next statement. Solar and wind are expanding, but the transition is uneven, and low-income households rarely own the panels or batteries that hedge against volatility. The weather changes first; the invoice follows.

Together, these forces form another gear train. Rising rates meet stagnant wages; industrial expansion accelerates demand; aging infrastructure struggles to keep up; and climate swings push costs higher still. The middle that once measured security by home and table now measures it by voltage—by whether the meter can keep spinning without draining the paycheck that powers it.

This week’s Feature applies the Household Comfort Index to energy itself. It traces how much of each income tier’s take-home pay is consumed by the cost of light, heat, and power, and how new industries, technologies, and weather patterns are reshaping that arithmetic. If Hickory wishes to preserve its center, it must plan for energy not only as a commodity but as a covenant. Because when keeping the lights on becomes uncertain, so does everything built beneath their glow.

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⭐ Feature Story ⭐

The Cost of Keeping the Lights On

Electricity has always been the hidden rent of the South — cheap enough to keep industry humming, steady enough that households budgeted without thinking. That era is closing.

Bills & Benchmarks. In 2000, a typical Hickory household paid around $80 a month for electricity. By 2025, that same home can see bills cresting $180, even when consumption is carefully managed. For small businesses, bills once in the $400–$600 range now frequently run closer to $1,000 in summer months. Government facilities and schools face the same pressures, with energy costs consuming larger shares of operating budgets.

Energy costs do not fall evenly across households — they weigh heaviest on those with the least margin. This table shows how the burden of “keeping the lights on” shifts across income tiers, linking the October 19 feature to the broader series on household survival costs.

Household Energy Burden by Status in Hickory

Status	Scale (1–10)	Approx % of Population	Energy Burden (Share of Income)	Typical Monthly Bill (Range)	Energy Realities
Well Off	9–10	~5%	~2–3% of income	$150–$250	Households in newer or energy-efficient homes. Bills manageable, often using smart thermostats, solar panels, or efficient HVAC. Energy costs don’t affect lifestyle; discretionary spending intact.
Comfortable	7–8	~15%	~4–5% of income	$130–$220	Own homes or secure rentals with decent insulation. Cover bills steadily but notice seasonal spikes (summer A/C, winter heat). Can absorb costs, but high surges (fuel, Duke rate hikes) reduce discretionary spending.
Average / Solidly Middle	5–6	~40%	~6–8% of income	$120–$200	Median-income households feel energy costs as a consistent squeeze. Older housing stock and inefficient HVAC common. Bills often rival grocery budgets in winter. Limited ability to invest in upgrades, making them vulnerable to price shocks.
Struggling	3–4	~25%	~10–12% of income	$110–$180	Renters or owners of aging homes. Energy burdens exceed national “affordable” threshold (6%). Choices emerge: heat vs. medicine, A/C vs. groceries. Late payments, arrears, or disconnections common. Reliant on assistance or nonprofits during peaks.
Poverty / Deeply Vulnerable	1–2	~15%	~15–20% of income	$90–$160	Below-poverty households in inefficient rentals or trailers. Bills consume a fifth of monthly income. Little insulation, reliance on space heaters or window A/C. Disconnection risk high; survival strategies include cutting off rooms, using unsafe heating, or turning to shelters.

Table Note: Energy burden is shown as a share of household income across five tiers, from Well Off to Deeply Vulnerable. The same $150 bill can be routine for one household but destabilizing for another, illustrating how utility costs shape the broader architecture of survival in Hickory and Catawba County.

🔑 Key Takeaways

· Well Off (5%): Energy is a minor line-item.

· Comfortable (15%): Noticeable but not destabilizing.

· Middle (40%): Bills create trade-offs and erode cushion.

· Struggling (25%): Bills are a constant stress, often requiring help.

· Poverty (15%): Energy is survival-level—any spike or arrearage risks displacement.

Drivers. Several factors converge here: (1) higher natural gas prices, which feed into generation costs; (2) capital expenditures for storm-hardening and new lines; (3) insurance and debt costs pushed onto utilities and passed through to ratepayers; and (4) the accelerating demand of data centers and AI clusters, which require around-the-clock power.

Housing Link. For households already stretched, energy is the “new rent.” A Solidly Middle family in Catawba County, earning roughly $60,000, may see 10–12 percent of gross income consumed by electricity, gas, and water combined — double the federal “affordable energy” threshold. Struggling households fall even deeper, facing arrears or choosing between running air in a heat wave and buying groceries.

Capacity Crunch. Eric Schmidt’s testimony laid the problem bare: America is building transmission lines too slowly. In the Carolinas, major high-voltage projects take 15–18 years from plan to completion. AI-driven load growth is arriving in five. The mismatch is stark, and ratepayers are caught in the middle. The explainer chart captures the cycle: AI demand → utility planning → capacity and wires → regulatory rate case → your bill.

Resilience. Communities adapt in small ways — weatherization programs, space heaters instead of central systems, nonprofits helping with arrears — but the structural issue remains. Without expanded capacity and smarter planning, costs will keep drifting upward, and households will keep absorbing the shock.

Information

· Residential rates in Duke Energy Carolinas: up ~40% since 2000.

· Median household income, Hickory MSA: ~25% below national median.

· Household energy burden: 10–12% of income for Solidly Middle, higher for Struggling tiers.

· Duke IRP (2023): 22–25% load growth projected by 2030–35, much from data centers.

· Transmission buildout: ~18 years average completion vs. 5-year demand window.

· Local household bills: $90–$180/month range, depending on season.

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Solutions Matrix: Who Holds the Levers of Energy Costs and Efficiency

Party	Cost Levers	Technology Options	Efficiency Measures	Policy / Regulatory Tools
Households	Monthly bills, choices about upgrades vs. deferral	Smart thermostats, efficient HVAC, rooftop solar	Weatherization, appliance swaps, reduced phantom load	Access to LIHEAP, PACE financing, utility rebate programs
Small Businesses	Utility overhead, operating costs	Smart meters, efficient lighting, heat pumps	Energy audits, cooperative purchasing	Chamber-backed grants, state tax credits for retrofits
Large Enterprises & Data Centers	Infrastructure cost-sharing, long-term power contracts	Onsite solar, microgrids, battery storage	High-efficiency servers, cooling optimization	Transparent agreements with utilities; negotiated rate structures
Government / Public Sector	Public building energy bills, emergency shelter costs	Public solar installations, backup generators	Retrofits in schools/courthouses, efficiency standards	Rate design (tiered/time-of-use), weatherization funding, municipal co-ops
Utility (Duke Energy, etc.)	Rate cases, capacity investment	Grid-scale renewables, flexible peaker plants, storage	Demand response programs, incentivized customer efficiency	State Utilities Commission oversight; integrated resource planning
Regional / Civic	Shared tax base, community reinvestment	Community solar gardens, microgrids	Cooperative neighborhood weatherization	Civic boards, watchdog engagement, nonprofit advocacy

Together, these three things are crystal clear:

1. Energy is not equal in impact – a $150 bill means stability for a Comfortable household but crisis for someone in the Struggling tier.

2. The shrinking middle shows up twice – first in wages and wealth, then again in the disproportionate bite utilities take out of their check.

3. Household reality is more instructive than averages – national or even state statistics blur this out, but these tiered tables reveal the survival math families are actually doing.

It also strengthens the civic argument: when you put this table beside the Cost-of-Home Index or the Cost of the Table (food) piece, readers will see the mapping of the full architecture of household burden. That makes these “News & Views” not just commentary, but a framework ordinary people can plug themselves into.

Summary: The Cost of Keeping the Lights On

Hickory has entered a new energy era. What once was the “hidden rent” of the South — cheap, steady power — has become a defining burden for households, small businesses, and public institutions. Bills that once ran $80 are now $180, and in a county where median incomes lag a quarter below the national average, that doubling cuts deep. Energy costs now sort households into tiers of comfort or crisis, as the Household Energy Burden table makes plain: what a Comfortable family absorbs without disruption becomes destabilizing for those living on the edge .

We arrived here through a convergence of forces: steady rate hikes tied to fuel and storm costs, slow but relentless grid upgrades, and now a surge of demand from data centers and AI clusters that utilities admit will outpace generation. Duke Energy’s filings show 22–25 percent load growth in the Carolinas, and Eric Schmidt’s testimony warned of a national mismatch between five-year demand windows and 18-year transmission timelines . These aren’t abstractions — they are the mechanics behind why a local bill keeps rising.

Where we are going depends on how each party acts: households weatherizing, businesses auditing, governments investing, utilities planning honestly, and civic groups pushing for fair agreements. The Solutions Matrix shows the levers available. Yet the larger context is clear: energy is no longer background noise but a front-and-center line item that will shape survival, equity, and growth. Hickory’s story is part of a wider map — the architecture of household burden that will soon tie electricity, food, housing, and healthcare together in one unavoidable ledger.

Implications: The Consequences of Rising Energy Burdens

The rising cost of electricity is not a side issue — it is a fulcrum point for household survival, local business viability, and public trust. If current trajectories hold, Hickory and Catawba County will feel the following effects:

Households
Rising bills erode disposable income, forcing trade-offs between food, rent, and heat. Vulnerable families already spend up to 15–20% of income on utilities. Continued increases will accelerate utility shutoffs, unsafe coping practices, and displacement risks for renters.

Local Economy
Small businesses face energy as a second rent, squeezing margins in already tight markets. The city’s competitive edge as a low-cost place to live and invest weakens if electricity rates rise faster than incomes, deterring new employers and pushing prices up for consumers.

Public Sector
Government facilities, schools, and public safety agencies absorb higher utility costs, diverting resources from staffing and programs. Slow capacity expansion heightens the risk of outages and service interruptions, especially during seasonal peaks.

Civic and Generational Cohesion
As energy burdens compound with food and housing pressures, household stability frays. Younger families may leave, older residents will struggle to age in place, and inequities deepen between those who can afford efficiency upgrades and those who cannot.

Summary
The cost of keeping the lights on is not just a budget line. It is a dividing line that shapes whether Hickory can hold its families, sustain its businesses, and trust its institutions — or whether rising bills fracture the community further.

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My Own Time Ω

Power and the Price of Living:

The hum of electricity has followed me my whole life — at home, in kitchens, the sound of the hood, the drone in the walk-ins, the quiet rhythm of an air-conditioning current cutting through a hot, humid Southern night. When I was young, power was the one thing we never worried much about. You flipped a switch, and it worked. The bill got paid, and it stayed that way. Stability was measured by what stayed on — the lights, the job, the faith that tomorrow would more or less look like today. Even through hard times, when you looked back, things somehow found a way to get better.

Now, sometimes, that hum feels different. It sounds like the clock ticking on another bill, another climb, another trade-off — a payment that relentlessly comes due. The electric bill has become a mirror reflecting the strain on everything else — the grocery total, the mortgage, the doctor or dental visit we delay because of the budget. The same current that keeps the fridge cold also powers the data centers that make this computer work possible. Rising in our modern background, we exist somewhere between this strange new world and the reality of a household being priced out of its stability.

What does this mean here, in Hickory? This was a city that prided itself on not being wasteful. That was our ingenuity. We were efficient. That’s what small manufacturers did in the twentieth century. They had a “make it happen” mindset.

This community has weathered hard times before — recessions and layoffs — patchworking what it couldn’t afford to fix at the moment and running the air sparingly in the summer heat when necessary. But this new kind of strain represents a new normal. It’s quieter, more persistent, and harder to fight. This isn’t the old business cycle where you knew business would eventually pick up. That doesn’t happen when the company is gone. We’ve spoken about the middle drifting, treading water — and that is exhausting and eventually overwhelming.

In my own life, I’ve learned that every bill carries two numbers: the amount owed, and the time in hours it takes to pay it. When those two drift apart and the bank account tightens, the center of a person’s life starts to wobble. You see it in the faces of workers coming off a double shift, in the parents figuring out how to stretch the food budget when the utility bills run high. That’s not just inflation — that’s erosion.

Power used to be a utility. Now it’s a test of endurance and tolerance. The electric bill has become another form of rent. The dynamics I’ve been addressing have direct effects on one another, and all are necessities. The cost of shelter, the cost of food, now the cost of energy — and next, the cost of health. Which of these is optional? Shelter? Food? Electricity? Healthcare?

Because what happens when the strain that starts in the wallet works its way into the body? When the cost of living becomes the cost of being? These are the truest and most personal existential crises — the kind that can push a person over the edge. And these are issues that I will make proposals to address.

Saturday, September 27, 2025

Hickory, NC News & Views | September 28, 2025 | Hickory Hound

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Executive Summary and Key Points

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🧠Opening Reflection:

A year can pass in the blink of an eye, or it can stretch into a slow march of days that feel unending. For those who lived through Hurricane Helene last September, the last twelve months have carried both sensations. My personal experience started in the early morning hours when the storm arrived . I have been in the middle of Hurricanes and this wasn’t like that. The wind gusted, but it didn’t roar. The storm came from the Gulf of Mexico, so much of the wind energy had dissipated, but the rain became a steady deluge that went on for hours.

Hickory was by no means ground zero of Helene’s destruction. I have seen what others went through. 20 miles west and further from here in Burke, McDowell, Rutherford counties and along the Eastern Continental divide ridge line. That is where the storm stalled out and the rain came down the slope. These things have happened before around here. Back over a hundred years ago there was a little town called Mortimer up near Wilson’s Creek in Caldwell county that got washed out twice in around a 20 year span.

As the morning of September 27 moved along, I eventually lost my access to the internet and there were issues with cell service. The electricity blipped off a few times and once for a couple of hours. There were some limbs down and the neighbor had to cut one up that was blocking his driveway, but other than some water seeping into the basement there was no major damage.

My boss called and said they were going to open, but there was no rush to get to work. We were going to have some customers, because the club where I was working is in a closed community and some of the people there don’t know much about cooking or don’t have a desire to cook – modern convenience culture and all.

As I have stated on here before, I drove to work and took a path where I knew there would be no flooding and if the road was blocked it would be dealt with in short order. I didn’t see any trees down or power down. It just looked like one of those rainy Autumn days you always see. I only saw a tree down a couple of blocks from work and it had been mostly dealt with.

At work, there were only three of us working in the kitchen as opposed to the normal seven or eight. Many people take adverse weather conditions as an opportunity for a day off – I don’t. We worked our shift and did a bit of business, but we were never swamped, and at 9pm we were out of there.

I headed home, heading back the way I have thousands of times before, and I struck a humongous tree at 40mph, and was very lucky that wasn’t the end. Not to get back into this rabbit hole, because there is a book’s worth of material here, but I was less than an inch away from not being here. Like a friend said, “That was iffy.” When the rescue squad checked my blood pressure about 15 (or so) minutes later and it was 240/140. I called my sister and she was there in a hurry, I went to the hospital and got my head glued. That would be another part of the book.

The sun rose the next day and I caught a ride to work. I would never drive that little red car again. I didn’t really know what was going on in the world or about the aftermath of Helene. Over the next few days I discovered just how lucky I was. After Helene, the area to the west of here wasn’t the same. Any low lying areas from Morganton, Marion, Chimney Rock, and west of Asheville were flooded. Roads were buckled, rivers had changed course, homes lay open like broken boxes. The power of Helene hadn’t come from the wind. It was the aftermath of the water it wrung out over the tops of the Appalachian mountains that had nowhere to go but down the slopes to run through the valleys. We saw people’s videos of houses falling off the sides of the mountains and the valleys became rivers of debris.

Some people thought the shock would fade once the electricity was restored, once school buses rolled again, once the National Guard packed up and left. But as the months went by, the aftershocks revealed themselves to be heavier than the storm itself: families pushed into cramped motel rooms when trailers ran short; businesses shuttered after insurance stalled; children dealt with schools that were having to be renovated because of damage. Much of the visible damage has been cleared now, but the invisible wreckage still lingers on.

What people remember most may not be the floodwaters but the waiting. Waiting in lines for bottled water. Waiting for FEMA inspectors who came late or not at all. Waiting for claims adjusters to return phone calls. Waiting for the first check that might bridge a mortgage payment or cover a truck repair. And then waiting again when the money didn’t stretch as far as promised. In the stories told around kitchen tables, the storm often appears as a backdrop. The main character has been the wait.

Yet against the fatigue there were flashes of strength. Community churches opened their doors when shelters filled. Volunteer crews cleared roads before counties sent in equipment. Neighbors ran extension cords across yards to power a fridge, or cooked meals for families living without. These moments were never broadcast in Washington or Raleigh press releases, but they formed the foundation of recovery. In the quiet corners of these communities, people did for each other what systems failed at.

Scars remain. A year later, you can drive through parts of the affected areas and see houses with tarps over damaged roofs. You can walk into shops where “Help Wanted” signs hang, not because business is booming, but because the staff left town after losing homes that were condemned or apartments they could no longer afford. You can hear in ordinary conversations a fatigue that doesn’t fade: the sense that rebuilding has been something endured, not supported.

Anniversaries invite two instincts: remembrance and assessment. We remember the losses and the trials, but we also measure what has been learned, what has changed, and what has been ignored. Hurricane Helene was a natural disaster; the year that followed was a civic one. The storm revealed the strength of neighborliness and the limits of bureaucracy. It showed the cracks in housing, healthcare, and infrastructure. And it left behind a question that still echoes: if this happens again—and it will—will we be any more ready?

That is what this week’s News and Views must consider. Not only the night Helene struck, but the 365 days that followed, and the lives reshaped by both the storm and the system. This reflection is not about re-living fear, but about recognizing the burdens still carried by families and the lessons still waiting to be claimed. A year has passed, but the test of memory is whether it becomes preparation.

Hurricane Helene Data References & Citations