By Shawn Heath, VP and Chief Sustainability Officer, Duke Energy 
A few years ago, a Duke Energy critic said the company was not paying enough attention to renewable energy and was unwilling to embrace change.
Since then, the company has invested $4 billion in wind and solar in 12 states – and has a list of new projects waiting to get built.
Electric utilities are not known for their willingness to embrace change. We are often viewed as conservative and entrenched in our business model. Of course, there are regulatory and business model constraints that limit our ability to offer services as quickly as some would like.
But I believe electric utilities are actually embracing change faster than people realize – and our focus on sustainability is helping us do that.
Operating the electric system requires making constant, rapid changes. We have to ensure the supply of our product at any given moment exactly matches the demand. We’ve managed that kind of rapid change for over a century.
It’s even more important these days, when the slightest perturbation in power quality can wreak havoc for some manufacturing processes, and a power outage only a few seconds long can disrupt the electronics in our customers’ homes.
However, the truth is we are delivering a non-differentiated product to increasingly differentiated customers. The 20 million people served by Duke Energy get the same reliability and the same power quality. The electrons flowing through the wires come from many generation sources. You can’t tell if an electron comes from a coal plant or a solar plant.
Customers want more control over their electricity sources and usage. For example, one of our largest customers told us they want rooftop solar on their buildings. From our perspective, utility-scale solar is more efficient. But the company wants rooftop solar so their commitment to sustainability is visible to customers. They want us to provide rooftop solar and they want us to provide it cost-effectively. We are working to make that happen.
So what else are we doing?
- We are fine-tuning our mobile communications with customers so they have better information on the restoration of an outage, or the basics of their usage and power bill.
- We’ve made a big jump into battery storage technology. We have 10 projects around the nation where we have invested money to find out how to better integrate this technology into the electric grid.
- We are coming up with new energy efficiency programs that are helping our customers be more sustainable. To cut down the costs of lighting, we’ve distributed 61 million compact fluorescent light bulbs to our customers over the past few years. That would offset the carbon output of 352,000 passenger cars.
- We have modernized our generation mix, which now has a near equal mix of nuclear coal and natural gas – with renewables and hydro filling out the portfolio.
Lynn Good, Duke Energy CEO, summed up her view of sustainability as enduring business success and responsible stewardship. “For Duke Energy to be sustainable, we must develop new products and services that give our customers what they want. However, we also have to ensure that the safety and reliability and cost-effectiveness of the system are maintained – anything less is simply unacceptable.”
Part of that is embracing change and making sure those changes translate to better value for our customers.
Duke Energy has accepted the new realities facing our business and is leading the effort to find innovative solutions for our customers that also reduce our environmental footprint. To me, that is the essence of sustainability.
Shawn Heath serves as vice president and chief sustainability officer for Duke Energy. He is responsible for the company’s sustainability-related goal setting, reporting, internal programs, and outreach with external stakeholders. He was named to his current position in January 2012 and joined Duke Energy in 2001. He has held a variety of positions, including director of state energy policy and vice president of outreach and advocacy for the company’s regulated operations in North and South Carolina. Prior to joining Duke Energy, Shawn was employed by Arthur Andersen from 1994 to 2001, providing both audit and management consulting services. From 1993 to 1994, he served as an accountant for Beverly Enterprises.