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Candidates › NC-02 race › 2025–2026
Gene Douglass
R Republican nominee for U.S. House, NC-02
Has not served in Congress
- On the ballot
- On the general election ballotNov 3, 2026 · North Carolina US House 2
- Where to vote
- Find your polling place (opens in a new tab) · More ways to vote
- Top priorities
- Bring Your Own Plant. Feed the Grid.
- Safeguarding Women’s Sports
- Money
- $0 raised, $0 spent, $0 cash on hand. Where it comes from
2 priorities from efdouglass.substack.com, in the order they are listed there. Every heading and the text under it is copied exactly, as one passage for each page it is from, and links to that place on the page; hover a source to see which passage it opens.
A data center that pays for its own nuclear fission power generation can lower the household bill. A statute that bans the fuels cannot.
PART 2 of series.
I restacked Alexander Muse months ago because he built these rooms when they were still called carrier hotels. They have sat next to hotels and condos for decades. The panic is new. The buildings are not. Read him here:
He wrote the neighbor essay. He wrote the bill essay. The title is the argument: the data center did not raise your power bill; more demand, done right, makes electricity cheaper.
That is the federal lesson. Not Loudoun Virginia’s pile-everything-on-one-utility model. Not a moratorium as a personality. The hall is a customer. The question is whether Congress will let anyone build the plant that serves it.
The chemistry is simple. A hall is a heat machine that wants 24/7 electricity. It is not witchcraft. It is the old IBM computer room with a bigger electric bill. Homes use about 1,510 TWh a year. Stores and offices, 1,490. Factories, 738. All U.S. data centers in the LBNL 2023 count: 176 TWh. Direct on-site water at those campuses: about 48 million gallons a day. Thermoelectric plants withdraw 133 billion. Irrigation, 118 billion. The scare posters skip the scale. A tight local pipe can still pinch. That is a site question. It is not a reason to ban the only fuel dense enough to run the hall at 2 a.m.
Muse’s Virginia canary piece is the rate-design half. Northern Virginia stacked the world’s densest cluster onto one utility while the statute preferred weather generation. JLARC still put statewide data-center water around 2.1 billion gallons for the year. Household rates there sit below the national average. The canary has been singing a tax-base note, not a funeral dirge. What failed was cost allocation: the household paid for wires the campus should have written a check for.
Here is the rule I will take to the House:
The campus brings its own firm power — a restarted reactor with private capital, a third- through fifth-generation nuclear fission plant, an SMR, or gas that actually runs until the next license is stamped.
It pays for its own interconnection.
It does not dump the feeder onto a retiree already on the grid.
If the plant is sized right, leftover electricity feeds the system. That extra firm supply is how a large new load can pull the average rate down instead of pushing it up.
That is not a thought experiment. Constellation is bringing Three Mile Island Unit 1 back as the Crane Clean Energy Center to serve a 20-year Microsoft purchase — on the order of 835 megawatts — with a late-2027 target after FERC cleared an interconnection waiver. A private offtake. Existing nuclear fission power generation. Which needs federal permission to connect.
Meta is working the same problem from the other chair — people whose job is to finance the halls and the power under them. Alexander Muse wrote that piece; I noted it Sunday. That hire is a closer, not a diversity press release. Competence is competence. The test is whether the campus pays for nuclear fission power generation instead of parking the bill on a household.
Do not confuse the two units. The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, PA was Unit 2. The core was damaged. The containment held. Offsite radiation was a small fraction of ordinary annual background — noble gases, not a plume that poisoned the county. The damaged fuel was removed and the building cleaned. Unit 1 sat next door, ran for decades after that, and is the machine being restarted. Horror-movie TMI is a 47-year-old political prop. The chemistry is a contained accident, a cleaned building, and a sister unit that still has work in it.
That is the model. Wake County already hosts the Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant at New Hill — one pressurized-water reactor on Harris Lake since 1987, still licensed into the 2040s. Extra units on that site were studied and then cancelled. The fuel was never the problem.
Federal policy should treat old coal land as a pad, not a shrine. Keep the water and the transmission hook. Let the shops that actually build reactors — Westinghouse, NuScale, GE Hitachi, TerraPower, X-energy, Holtec, and the salt-cooled designs — clean the ash site and set a modular plant on the dirt. Light water, sodium, salt, TRISO: pick the machine that fits the load. Put the data hall on the same pad. Old coal yards and ash land already ate the acres. They do not need a mountain of fuel stored on site anymore. That dirt can hold the modular plant and the hall together, with one security perimeter that serves both a nuclear site and a computing site. Let the offtaker help pay for the reactor the way Microsoft is paying to restart TMI-1. That is how the campus builds the plant instead of raiding the household bill. Robeson’s old Weatherspoon land, and the same pattern in Scotland and Richmond, is that kind of dirt. Duke is already studying SMRs at Belews Creek on the same theory.
Update and uprate what is already here. License the next unit. Stop holding hearings about fusion reactors that do not exist.
Congress’s job is the license and the wire, not a green adjective. The Department of Energy under President Trump is already pointing civilian nuclear fission power generation back onto the map. My job is to support that office — and every serious vendor on the list — so households keep cheap power and the halls get enough firm electrons. Those halls are not a new species. They are the grandchildren of the old IBM mainframe farms. NRC timelines that stretch a decade are a veto by calendar. FERC rules that trap a private offtake behind a multi-year queue are a veto by paperwork. Breeders that eat spent fuel and a repository that was already studied — Yucca Mountain — are engineering. Blocking them was politics. I will vote to speed civilian nuclear fission licenses, to treat restarts and advanced plants as the default path, and to stop letting an NGO lawsuit be a substitute for a safety finding.
Muse’s grid point is the same physics in different clothes. Fixed costs of plants and wires get spread over more kilowatt-hours when a high-utilization customer shows up and pays. A 2026 look at the 2015–2024 window found that rising data-center capacity tracked with modestly lower average residential prices, on the order of 0.4 percent for every 10 percent increase in capacity. That only holds if someone actually builds the generation. A green-only statute that forbids the plant guarantees the opposite.
Deborah Ross supports only “green” sources. She has opposed nuclear fission power generation as a working source, natural gas, clean fossil fuels, clean coal, fracking, and new oil and coal leases. She talks about a current nuclear power reactor as if it were a warhead. A chemist knows the difference. A hydrogen bomb is a fusion weapon. It is started by a fission primary. That is not a power plant, and it is not the Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant turning a turbine. She leans on commercial fusion because it is still decades away — thirty to fifty years if the optimistic shops are honest — so she can hold a hearing and leave the household on the expensive column. Nuclear fission power plants exist and are being updated. Ranking member of the Energy Subcommittee on House Science can read a hearing script written somewhere else. A chemist who earned the doctorate at N.C. State can work the chalkboard. That is why this seat is useful. I will vote to license third- through fifth-generation nuclear fission power generation and the TMI-style private restart. Large loads that want American sites can bring that plant with them.
Solar already occupies far more U.S. farmland — roughly 300,000 to 600,000 acres — than data centers have taken so far. Attacking the hall for footprint while cheering utility-scale panels is a double standard. The hall can be required to carry its own generation. The panel farm cannot run at 2 a.m. without a backup you were told not to notice.
Cooling is a design choice. Muse cooled floors with air and sealed glycol and a zero water bill for that loop. Some campuses still use evaporative towers. Require the dry design where water is tight. Do not import a flyer that says every hall is a river.
America is in a computing race with China. A loaded questionnaire tried to lock candidates into pause-or-kneel. I declined it. Coordinated anti-hall messaging gets amplified; that does not prove any specific local group is foreign-run. It is a reason not to treat identical packets as automatically local wisdom.
That is how a data center stops being a villain and starts being a customer who paid for a reactor the household also gets to use. Read the bars. License nuclear fission power generation. Make them bring the plant.
Ross will say she supports nuclear (nuclear what?), but purposely is not clear. Fusion power plants do not exist. Fission plants do, and they are being updated. Commercial fusion, if the optimistic shops are right, is still a decade-plus away. She has spent her career blocking the fission nuclear power generation in this state and in congress nationally, the natural gas, the fracking to mine it, the pipeline to get it here, and the leases that make electrical power now. Ranking member of the Energy Subcommittee can hold a fusion hearing and still leave the household on 35-cent per kWh power. I will vote to license the reactors we already know how to build. She can keep the press conference about the reactors that do not exist.
I want the other column: firm power, including nuclear that large loads pay for themselves; lower taxes; more houses; a federal government that stops duplicating Raleigh. We have a forty-trillion-dollar national debt. We do not have a spare California to import.
The charts are the argument. Ross can keep the adjectives.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · efdouglass.substack.com/p/bring-your-own-plant-feed-the-grid
The incumbent Representative Deborah Ross, representing North Carolina’s Second District, is a proponent of abortion rights and receives full support from Planned Parenthood. In contrast, I am unequivocally pro-life and advocate for a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to protect unborn children conceived due to irresponsible actions. I support North Carolina’s authority and duty to prohibit elective abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, with such children placed for adoption with heterosexual married couples to ensure stable family environments. While all innocent life post-conception should ideally be protected, regulation in the current climate is challenging, as the child is often the victim of parental irresponsibility. Exceptions may apply in rare cases of incest or rape, with final legislation guided by divine providence. Following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, North Carolina must regulate abortion to minimize loss of life. Representative Ross endorses expansive abortion access for nearly any reason, including late-term procedures, and seeks Affordable Care Act funding for abortion services, as well as mandatory maternity coverage for men—effectively masking support for chemical and physical castration.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · efdouglass.substack.com/p/nc-state-trains-nuclear-engineers
I oppose illegal immigration that enables drug, slave, and sex trafficking, as well as the importation of underpaid labor that displaces American citizens lacking high school diplomas, GEDs, or college degrees from entry-level jobs. Representative Ross supported the Biden administration’s open-border policies, which have allowed Mexican cartels to flood the U.S. with drugs, leading to widespread addiction and thousands of annual fentanyl overdose deaths. President Trump is now deporting hundreds of thousands of criminal illegal immigrants and promoting self-deportation for millions more.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · efdouglass.substack.com/p/nc-state-trains-nuclear-engineers
Representative Ross supports procedures that mutilate minors confused about their gender, often influenced by parents exhibiting Munchausen by Proxy syndrome, resulting in lifelong harm, sterilization, and inability to form families. This echoes eugenics practices from Margaret Sanger’s era, targeting the mentally ill and certain races. She recently voted against legislation to prohibit transgender procedures and drugs for minors in the United States.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · efdouglass.substack.com/p/nc-state-trains-nuclear-engineers
Representative Ross endorses allowing transgender men to compete in women’s collegiate sports, where they dominate due to physical advantages, violating Title IX protections for biological women. This deprives female athletes of deserved recognition after years of dedication and exposes them to privacy invasions in locker rooms. Such policies fail to protect women and raise concerns about allowing men into high school, college, and university facilities used by daughters. Fortunately, President Trump and the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division are restoring Title IX to ensure due process and protect women’s sports. Both Cooper and Ross want men in women’s sports.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · efdouglass.substack.com/p/nc-state-trains-nuclear-engineers