One of the largest electric power companies in the United States, Duke Energy Corp. is a highly respected force in electric power generation.

Duke has approximately 28,000 megawatts of regulated generation (mostly coal). It serves 4 million electric customers in North and South Carolina, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky and 520,000 gas customers in Ohio and Kentucky.

Duke gets 71% of its electricity from coal-burning plants and pumps 100 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, making it the third-largest corporate emitter in the United States.

Smart Grid

CEO James Rogers has for years actively advocated for climate change legislation and was dubbed “the green coal baron” in a June, 2008 profile in The New York Times, which described him as one of the electric industry’s most vocal environmentalists. He sees Smart Grid as a way to delay construction of more coal-fired plants. Rogers, however, has not always been able to get employees and rate makers to play along.

Duke is scheduled to roll out nearly two million meters in the next five years and anticipates spending $1 billion through 2013 to digitize its distribution system to better balance supply and demand, pinpoint trouble sooner, and restore outages faster or avoid them altogether.

The utility is aggressively targeting stimulus dollars for smart energy efforts.

Renewables

In May, 2009 Duke announced it will build between 100 and 400 electricity-generating mini solar power plants throughout North Carolina over the next two years in one of the first large-scale initiatives of its kind in the U.S. The $50-million proposal approved by the North Carolina Utilities Commission allows Duke to install solar panels on the roofs and grounds of homes, schools, office buildings, shopping malls, warehouses and industrial plants, starting later in 2009.

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Duke expects to have more than 700MW of wind energy in commercial operation by the end of 2009 and to develop 5,000 additional megawatts of wind energy in 14 states over the next several years.

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For vendors only …

With an ambitious smart meter roll-out schedule, Duke has realized for a while that it will need help. As it moves from pilots to deployments, its data integration problems will escalate quickly.

Duke has had extensive conversations with virtually every major vendor, but hadn't settled on long-term partners until recently. In June Duke entered a three-year partnership with Cisco Systems to work on a two-way digital communications architecture for the Smart Grid. It also recently announced plans to use the Convergys customer management system and Ambient's communications technology.