The wind farm is using five GE Haliade wind turbines. Top and above: Duke Energy's Renewable Control Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, is monitoring America's first offshore wind farm built by Deepwater Wind of the coast of Block Island. That number is still small compared with the 50,000 MW that Duke’s conventional power plants generate, but it’s quickly growing. “We also purchase a great deal of solar power from other developers and plan to add nearly 3,000 megawatts of new solar in the state during the next five years.”Ĭaldwell is president of Duke Energy Renewables and Distributed Energy Technology, a division that already owns and operates more than 3,000 megawatts (MW) and manages another 3,500 MW of power produced by wind and solar plants owned by other operators. “In North Carolina, we own more than 35 large-scale solar sites,” says Robert Caldwell, the person leading Duke’s renewables charge. Its home state of North Carolina is now second only to California in the use and generation of solar energy. Over the last decade the company has expanded into renewable energy, investing almost $6 billion in 60 solar installations and 20 wind farms, including projects using GE technology. In 1965, the company added its first nuclear power plant, and in the 1990s, it became a big player in natural gas. Known as Duke Energy, the company provides electricity to more than 24 million people in the Southeast and Midwest - with GE innovation quietly helping fuel its growth along the way.ĭuke’s growth picked up steam during the boom years following World War II, when Americans started buying refrigerators, air conditioners and other big and power-hungry appliances and supplying them with electrons from large coal-fired power plants. It was a humble beginning for what is now the largest electric utility in the United States. By building new dams and connecting them to the latest water-cooled transformers and other equipment supplied by GE - whose co-founder Thomas Edison built the world’s first commercial central power plant - the partners were able to reach customers as far as 30 miles from their power stations and send electrons to the Cotton Belt’s budding textile mills, including operations in which Duke’s brother Benjamin invested. Their first power station, which came online in 1904, used the river’s bottled-up energy to generate a meager 6,600 kilowatts.īut Duke had a plan for growth. In the layer of water-bearing sands beneath the city, there is an abundant supply of naturally pure, high quality water that could accommodate the daily needs of a city several times the size of Memphis.Electric power was still a luxury few could afford when American industrialist James Buchanan Duke and his partners decided to build a clever system of lakes and dams on the Catawba River, which runs through the Carolinas. On a peak day, MLGW delivers approximately 200 million gallons of water to more than 248,000 customers. MLGW owns and operates one of the largest artisan water systems in the world. MLGW has adequate system capacity to supply far beyond the present needs of its customers. MLGW furnishes more than 60 billion cubic feet of gas per year to its 305,000 gas customers. MLGW currently purchases natural gas on the spot market and transports it to Memphis across two open access pipeline companies: Texas Gas Transmission Corp. MLGW is TVA's largest distributor, purchasing approximately 11% of TVA's power. MLGW is supplied with electricity by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a federal agency that sells electricity on a nonprofit basis to its 159 distributors.
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