Former Florida state representative Joe Gibbons sat in the library of the Faith Community church in Greensboro, North Carolina, trying to convince its pastor to quit promoting rooftop solar. With a lobbyist’s charms Gibbons told the Rev Nelson Johnson that rooftop solar, which allows customers to generate their own renewable electricity, was bad for people of color. Gibbons argued that it created an imbalance in which those without solar panels end up subsidizing those who have them, Johnson recalled in an interview with Floodlight.

Johnson, a civil rights stalwart who was stabbed by a member of the Ku Klux Klan in 1979, had trouble believing him.

It felt like he was an employee of Duke, Johnson said of Gibbons, referencing his state’s power company.

At the time Gibbons met Johnson in 2015, Duke Energy was opposing a state bill that would have allowed anyone to install solar panels and sell electricity directly to consumers. Johnson was at the center of a legal battle over just such a third-party solar project planned for his church.

Gibbons wasn’t a Duke employee – not directly anyway. He founded a tax-exempt group called the Energy Equity Alliance; little information about its finances are available. But it was closely aligned – through two board members and Gibbons’s wife, Ava Parker – with NetCommunications, a Black-owned consulting firm. That year, NetCommunications was paid $750,000 by the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a powerful utility trade group to which Duke belongs, for “consulting”. Duke did not respond to requests for comment.

Gibbons denied receiving funding from any utility in an interview with Floodlight and Capital B. But tax records and leaked internal