• Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy

Since Duke Energy is one of Charlotte's darlings, I thought our CLog readers might be interested in hearing what CEO Jim Rogers has to say about the next 50 years in the energy biz. Here's a snippet:

What do you believe the energy mix will look like in the coming decades?

Over the last 20 years we have started using coal in a cleaner way. But there needs to be more technological development to use it in a low carbon world. Is this carbon capture and storage (CCS)? Is it a system to use algae to capture carbon and accelerate the growth of algae and then use it as a biofuel? I think CCS will play a role particularly if utilities are in a region where the geography works, but that's predominantly in the Midwest. The ultimate solution to [make coal more sustainable] is to recycle the carbon. We have relationships with a number of Chinese companies, and they're actually more focused on how you recycle the carbon rather than storing it. On some level, it seems like a more sustainable practice to take it and reuse it rather than store it in the ground.

Read the entire interview, with Ariel Schwartz, here.

This is great news ... hopefully Duke Energy will keep up this type of thing once it gobbles Progress Energy up so Charlotte can become the green energy hub it longs to be. (Do not hold your breath ... or, do, since coal is the fall back and using it to create electricity mucks up our air quality.)

Solar developers in the Charlotte region are welcoming the news that Progress Energy Inc. is seeking bids to buy power from relatively large 1- to 3-megawatt solar projects to be built in the state.

Erik Lensch, founder of Argand Energy Solutions, says his company intends to submit a bid for a project it has been considering for some time with a municipality in eastern North Carolina. He calls the request for proposals Progress issued in late June a significant move for a solar industry that hasn’t had a lot of good news in North Carolina lately.

Michael Byrnes, chief executive of NxGen Power, says his company is “thrilled” and hopes to participate, though he declines to say more about any plans for a bid. He says it’s clear Progress has listened to solar developers who have had trouble finding larger projects — in the 1- to 5-megawatt range — in the Carolinas.

“More is always better,” he says. “This is a strong statement by Progress on solar power, and Progress is an outstanding partner.”

There has been concern about rough times for North Carolina’s fledgling solar industry. An initial burst of activity followed the General Assembly’s 2007 law requiring utilities to produce some of the energy they sell from renewable sources. But as the major utilities and the electric cooperatives began meeting the phased-in requirements ahead of schedule, companies feared the job pipeline would dry up.

Read more from The Charlotte Business Journal here.

Did you hear? Time Warner is hiring in Charlotte.

We like jobs, don't we?

Now maybe the company's customer service can stop sucking so bad.

Time Warner Cable said Monday it would add hundreds of jobs in Charlotte over the next three years and build its second U.S. data center to better handle video, data and voice traffic.

The country's second-largest cable operator said it will hire 225 new accounting, finance, engineering, IT and human resources workers by 2014 to qualify for up to almost $3 million in state grants linked to hiring and investment targets. The company must hire at least 64 workers by the end of 2012 under terms of its state incentives deal. Charlotte, the city's chamber of commerce and the state community college system are also adding sweeteners.

The new jobs will pay an average of $61,044, more than the Mecklenburg County average of $51,584. The company now employs nearly 2,800 people in the Charlotte area and more than 6,400 statewide.

Read more from Forbes and the Associated Press here.

Charlotte-based Duke Energy is asking our government — which has mandated that the company keep rates as low as possible — to raise its rates for electricity by about 15 percent.

I think this is a good idea. Here's why:

For most people, the rate increase will amount to less than $20 per month. Many of us waste that much money on much less important things every day. My hope is that a $20 rate increase will help encourage people to pay attention to their energy consumption and, hopefully, learn to make their homes more energy efficient and to think twice before plugging in one of their gadgets, and leaving it plugged in and on when not in use.

Another reason why this rate hike is good: It's time to update the fleet. Duke Energy's energy production fleet, that is. Some of the coal plants are way past their prime, some need to be retrofitted with better equipment, etc. And, some new plants will need to be built to adjust for the population influx that Charlotte continues to draw. All of that takes money, and this is money we want Duke Energy to spend on their infrastructure.

Why? Because updated plants are less likely to be environmentally dangerous and they're less likely to spew toxins that negatively impact our health.

You think $20 a month is expensive? Wait until you see your bills for the asthma doctor or the cancer doctor. And be glad there will be less strain on our environmental resources — which tax payers will ultimately have to pay to clean up, too.

And, I know: Not everyone can pay an extra $20 per month. I hate that, but I have a proposal: Those of us who can afford to pay more than $20 per month could sign up to do so to help offset the rate increase for those who can't. I will gladly pay an extra $5 per month to help my community, and I'm willing to bet many of you would be happy to do the same.

• Duke's 81-year-old Riverbend plant, just a few miles from Uptown.

• Photo credit: Colin Dunn

Folks in south Charlotte recently made it clear that they don't want the Foxhole Landfill expanded, nor do they want ReVenture's proposed incinerator/gasification plant's leftovers. But, they're not the only ones pushing back against the government's and developer's trashy plans in this state.

Check out what's going on in Eden, N.C., and how Charlotte-based Duke Energy's coal ash is mixed up in the mess:

Opposition to a proposed landfill outside of Eden is growing, just days before the developer is scheduled to meet with area residents.

A Facebook page titled "Residents Against a Landfill on the Dan River near Eden" had nearly 150 members on Wednesday evening , and Will of the People, a local conservative activist group, launched a petition campaign last week to oppose the project.

"We're just suspicious of an undertaking this massive by people with no experience in the field," said Thomas Harrington, an Eden attorney and Will of the People founder. "We're pro-business and pro-jobs, but we feel this will not be a plus in the eyes of anybody."

The petition drive will close at the end of the month, and the petition will be sent to a group of officials, including the Rockingham County commissioners, the EPA and local legislators.

Oak Ridge developer Kevan Combs requested a special-use permit to open a landfill on 1,700 acres just south of the Eden city limits off Harrington Highway . Combs has not bought the land yet.

Combs would use about 350 acres of the property for a landfill and recycling operation. He does not intend to collect residential waste from Rockingham County but is interested in disposing of coal ash from Duke Energy's Dan River Steam Station as well as material from mining efforts outside of the state. The landfill also would dispose of and recycle other residential and commercial waste.

Read the rest of this Waste Management News/News & Observer article, by J. Brian Ewing, here.

Of course, one side of the argument says the dump will be good for jobs and the economy — while the other fears for their health and their property values.

Doesn't this sound familiar, y'all?

• Photo Credit: Aparna E.

In case you missed this article in Sunday's New York Times, I thought you'd like to hear about this innovative Charlotte company.

Edison Nation takes all of those good ideas people come up with and makes them a reality. Cool, eh?

Check out this snip from the article:

“We focus on the people who have great ideas but want to keep their day job,” says Louis Foreman, the chief executive of Edison Nation, the company in Charlotte, N.C., that teamed up with Ms. Kaufman. “We’ll never compete with the people who are hard-wired to go out and start their own business — and we don’t want to.” But risk-averse people have eureka moments, too, he says. And that’s Edison Nation’s sweet spot.

“We have lots of fuel to turn a spark into a fire. But sometimes that spark is elusive,” says Mr. Foreman, who says his company splits all revenue with its inventors. “There’s no hold-back. If a dollar comes in, 50 cents goes to the inventor, 50 cents to us. It’s a transparent process.”

Read the entire article, by Amy Wallace, here. (Subscription may be required.)

• Photo credit: Clive Darr

What is iCloud, from Apple? Check it out:

iCloud stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more. And wirelessly pushes them to all your devices — automatically. It’s the easiest way to manage your content. Because now you don’t have to.

OK, that's still vague, but after poking around on the company's iCloud page, I've learned that it is, essentially, a virtual hard drive. So, instead of saving electronic files to your computer or an external memory device (like a CD or thumb drive), you'll save it to the cloud, which you can access from any device with internet access, like your smart phone.

Personally, with the prevalence of hackers and my general distrust for anyone else managing my stuff, this isn't something I'm interested in, but apparently a lot of other people are, and thanks to that interest, Apple has built a giant facility in Maiden, N.C.

You may ask yourselves, "Why Maiden?", as Jeremy Markovich did in this MSNBC.com/ NewsChannel36 article (below). The answer? Cheap electricity from one of Charlotte's darlings, Duke Energy.

Though, while it's cheap it is not free, and the energy giant stands to make some serious coin from the iCloud.

Duke Energy, for one, welcomes our new Apple overlords. Executives gushed about it in a release shortly after the company announced it was coming to Catawba County. “The great thing about a data center is that they run full?out, 24?7, with no shifts and no seasonality," said Clark Gillespy, vice president of Economic Development, Business Development and Territorial Strategies for Duke Energy Carolinas. "It's the type of customer where the meter spins and spins at an exponential pace. It may be the most ideal customer we could have."

"We fully expect Apple to be one of our top ten customers in the Carolinas," said Stu Heishman, Duke's director of Business Development. Duke also lobbied to get the Google and Facebook server farms, and supplies power to them both.

How much power would the data center use? Duke won’t say. According to an April report from Greenpeace, the place has the potential to suck down 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power roughly 80,000 homes (Millar is skeptical. “That’s crazy,” he says). Greenpeace isn’t happy. As they point out, much of that power is generated by coal and nuclear fission. Jobs says the the Maiden facility is “as eco-friendly as you can make a modern data center,” although he didn’t elaborate. Calls to Apple were not returned.

Read the entire article here.

Of course, more energy demands mean the company will have to produce more energy to satisfy their big corporate customers. That means more coal will be harvested from our mountains and burned in the plants that pollute our air and water. It also means that our current, aging nuclear plants will be busy creating more toxic waste.

What would be great is a news report that Apple, Google and Facebook all fill their properties with wind turbines and solar panels instead of taxing our state's electricity grid and polluting our environment with their energy-hungry products. Though, it's important to note that it's our demand for those products that sparks the whole deal.

Here's some news to watch closely, especially since Piedmont Natural Gas' corporate headquarters are located right here in Charlotte:

The North Carolina House of Representatives has passed a bill that moves the state a step closer to allowing hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” in the state, where it is now banned. The measure calls for a study – to be completed by  May 1, 2012 – of whether the controversial method of extracting natural gas from shale would be environmentally safe in North Carolina. The state Senate passed a larger energy bill last month that calls for a similar study.

Fracking blasts water, sand and hazardous chemicals into the ground at high pressure to crack open shale and extract natural gas. It can contaminate ground water, deplete water supplies, lead to flammable faucet water and leave polluted waste water in its wake. Last month in Pennsylvania a fracking well exploded, spewing thousands of gallons of chemical-laden liquid into a creek.

Supporters of fracking say the natural gas industry has done a poor job of explaining natural gas exploration and that environmentalists have engaged in fear mongering. They say the risks have been exaggerated and are outweighed by the benefits. Fracking provides a domestic source of energy that is cheaper than oil and cleaner than natural gas. Fracking can be safely regulated, they say.

Environmentalists disagree that the benefits outweigh the risks.

“We’re concerned about toxic air releases, drinking water contamination and contaminated ground water supplies for tens of thousands of folks depending on private wells” in the area where fracking is being considered, Hope Taylor, director of Clean Water for North Carolina, said. “These folks could suddenly find themselves faced with the kind of well contamination that has been reported many times in several states –

natural gas at high enough concentrations to be lit at the tap or even explosive.”

Read the entire article DCBureau.org, by Rose Ellen O'Connor, here, and find out what a Duke University study concluded about fracking.

Further reading:

The shale gas boom: Energy exploration in Carolina -- The Fayetteville Observer

Natural gas rights going fast in Lee County -- Raleigh News & Observer

The Sanford Herald actually ran a three-part series on the issue, which you can read here.

And, here's a video from that series (you may have to pause it to read the text):

In what-in-the-hell-took-Washington-so-long news: The Obama administration is starting to go after the businesses that hire undocumented workers.

Why we didn't start the immigration reform brouhaha with those who hire undocumented workers is beyond me. Though, the American government does have a long history of staying out of businesses' business as they do all they can to reduce costs and turn a buck.

But in this situation, we're not talking about using a cheaper ingredient — we're talking about humans who leave their lives in their homeland for an opportunity to improve their lot ... exactly what immigrants in America have been doing since the land was "discovered." And, as many have in the past, they get here and frequently find themselves working in sub-par conditions, being villainized, discriminated against, living in impoverished conditions all for little pay. Then, historically, the government goes after the immigrants and makes them pay for seeking a better life for their family in the land of the American Dream ... unless, of course, the immigrants' vote is desired, then the game changes a bit.

What we should have been doing all along was removing the incentives for immigrants to cross our borders illegally, and that includes doing what our government is doing now: Holding companies accountable for attracting undocumented workers.

And, let's get this straight once and for all: Humans can't be "illegal," though actions can be illegal. While crossing the border without proper documentation is a crime, so too should be enticing people to do so; so too should be mistreating those undocumented humans once they arrive.

Our society seems to be always looking for some "other" person — often with brown skin — to pick on in this country, someone to blame for our collective failings and problems. When will we look in the mirror and realize that we -- with our demands that everything to be cheap and profitable -- create the problems ourselves then perpetuate them with our spending habit, i.e. our economic votes, i.e. economic demand?

I'm glad to see that our brown-skinned, "other"-looking president has shifted his focus in immigration reform, even if it is just before a major national election. If anyone knows what it's like to be demonized for being different, it should be him. My concern, however, is this move is a political ploy aimed at increasing voter turnout by those documented immigrants who are now well papered and tired of being demonized themselves.

Further, while I'm on this topic let me point this out: My lily-white immigrant friends (the ones from Europe, Northern Asia and South Africa) don't encounter anything close to the troubles my non-white immigrant friends (from Central and South America, Southern Asia and Africa) do. No. People are more likely to compliment the lily-white immigrants on their accents than to ask for their papers, even though at least two of them lived and worked in this country illegally for more than a decade. What's that all about? Never mind. I think we know. Dark-skinned others are scarier than light-skinned others.

Here's an example, from the movie Food, Inc., of businesses attracting undocumented workers only to over-work them in sub-par conditions while making deals with immigration officials:

• Photo credit: TruthOut.org

If you talk to people in the know about energy production, they're constantly pointing to Germany, France and Japan as examples of how to use nuclear energy effectively. Well, maybe they're not pointing to Japan anymore ...

In news that isn't well circulated in the U.S., Germany is exiting the nuclear energy business — a charge led by the country's conservative leader, not by the Green Party (they've been on this kick for years).

From Reuters:

Germany plans to shut all nuclear reactors by 2022, Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition announced on Monday, in a policy reversal drawn up in a rush after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

The coalition, sensitive to accusations it may increase dependence on highly polluting brown coal, said it planned to cut power use by 10 percent by 2020 and further expand the use of renewables such as wind and solar power.

Merkel's bid to outflank the opposition smacks of opportunism to many Germans but could ease an alliance with the anti-nuclear Greens that may be her best bet to stay in power. Polls clearly show that most Germans dislike nuclear energy.

In nine months, she has gone from touting nuclear plants as a safe "bridge" to renewable energy and extending their lifespan to pushing a nuclear exit strategy that rivals the ambitions of the Social Democrats and Greens.

Her change of heart coincides with a string of disastrous election results for her Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Free Democrat (FDP) allies that have been partly blamed on her unpopular pro-nuclear policy so far.

Read the entire article, by Annika Breidthardt, here.

Meanwhile, U.S. energy companies, like Charlotte-based Duke Energy, is still trying to build nuclear power plants, even as news organizations report that nuclear waste is building up after plans to harvest uranium from the waste fell through decades ago and Yucca Mountain — which we taxpayers built to house our nuclear waste — sits empty in the desert.

So, are we going to stop pointing to Germany as a nuclear and renewable energy example now, too? No, probably not, and here's why: If you drive around Germany, you'll see giant windmills along the roadside, solar panels atop new and old buildings alike, hydro stations in small creeks powering small farms and more, like simple conservation methods including motion-sensor lights in hotel hallways (so they're not left on 24/7) and sun-warmed water pipes.

We've got a long way to go to before we can wrap ourselves in the "green energy capital of the world" banner, y'all — especially since we're running way behind in this race.

At some point, we've got to stop doing the same things we've always done (while pretending that a new plant equals progress) and step out of our comfort zone; we've got to stop bickering and stop kicking our energy problems down the road for future generations to deal with and get serious about energy conservation and renewable — non-life or -health threatening — options.

Why not start now, with plans for plants currently on the table?