Duke Energy

In 1900 Walker Gill Wylie and his brother Robert H. Wylie established the Catawba Power Co. The opening date of the Catawba plant, April 30, 1904, is considered the birthdate of Duke Power.⁠[1]

Duke Energy names Dr. W. Gill Wylie, James Buchanan Duke and William States Lee as the company’s founders. The Catawba Hydro Station in South Carolina began providing electricity to Victoria Cotton Mills.⁠[2]

Historian Robert F. Durden, commissioned by Duke Power to write its history, described the enterprise as “the brainchild not of Duke, but of Dr. Gill Wylie.” Wylie recruited the engineer Lee to design generating plants linked by high-voltage transmission lines, and the two persuaded James B. Duke to join them in 1905.⁠[3]

In 1905 James B. Duke and his older brother Benjamin N. Duke launched the Southern Power Company.⁠[4]

In 1924 the Southern Power Company became the Duke Power Company.⁠[4]

By the time of James B. Duke’s death in 1925, more than a dozen power plants had been completed.⁠[3]

Announced on July 5, 1966, as part of the Keowee-Toxaway Complex, the Oconee Nuclear Station began commercial operation on July 16, 1973, becoming the 18th nuclear plant in the United States.⁠[1]

On June 18, 1997, Duke Power Company changed its name to Duke Energy Corporation under a merger agreement with PanEnergy Corp, issuing 158.3 million shares of common stock for all of PanEnergy’s outstanding common stock at 1.0444 shares per PanEnergy share. At the end of 1997 the company had about 23,000 employees.⁠[5]

On April 3, 2006, Duke Energy and Cinergy Corp. completed their merger, with Cinergy stockholders receiving 1.56 shares of new Duke Energy common stock for each Cinergy share. The combined company had a market capitalization of about $36 billion and assets of more than $70 billion. Paul M. Anderson became chairman, and James E. Rogers, formerly Cinergy’s chairman and chief executive, became president and chief executive officer.⁠[6]

In 2007 Duke Energy spun off its natural gas business to form Spectra Energy.⁠[2]

The merger of Duke Energy and Progress Energy took effect on July 2, 2012, with each Progress Energy share converted into 0.87083 shares of Duke Energy common stock. The combined company had 7.1 million electric customers and a market capitalization of about $49 billion. The new board immediately appointed Jim Rogers president and chief executive officer, and Bill Johnson resigned from that post by mutual agreement.⁠[7]

Johnson had been forced out hours after the merger closed, and he said Duke Energy had “buyer’s remorse” over rising merger costs. To settle the North Carolina Utilities Commission’s investigation, Duke Energy agreed that Rogers would retire as CEO by the end of 2013 and that it would keep at least 1,000 employees in Raleigh for at least five years.⁠[8]

On June 18, 2013, Duke Energy named its chief financial officer, Lynn Good, to succeed Jim Rogers as CEO. Rogers was to retire on July 1 and remain board chairman until the end of the year. Good, 54, had worked under Rogers since 2003 and had been CFO since 2009.⁠[9]

Good was to take over as CEO and join the board on July 1, 2013. “The business case for consolidation in this industry remains,” she said.⁠[10]

On February 2, 2014, a storm water pipe beneath an ash basin at the Dan River plant broke, releasing ash basin water and ash. On February 20, 2015, Duke Energy Carolinas, Duke Energy Progress and Duke Energy Business Services entered into plea agreement memoranda with the U.S. Department of Justice, and Duke Energy recognized a charge of about $102 million, with the payments borne by shareholders.⁠[11]

On May 14, 2015, the three subsidiaries pleaded guilty in federal court in Greenville, North Carolina, to nine criminal violations of the Clean Water Act. They were sentenced to pay a $68 million criminal fine, $24 million in community service payments to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and $10 million to a wetlands mitigation bank, and were placed on five years of supervised probation.⁠[12]

The spill had coated 70 miles of the Dan River in gray sludge. Judge Malcolm Howard said this was the largest federal criminal fine in North Carolina history.⁠[13]

On October 3, 2016, Duke Energy completed its acquisition of Piedmont Natural Gas, adding 1 million natural gas customers. Piedmont was to keep its name and operate as a business unit of Duke Energy. “Uniting Duke Energy with Piedmont Natural Gas is a powerful combination,” said Lynn Good, then chairman, president and CEO.⁠[14]

The total cash purchase price was $5.0 billion. Piedmont distributes natural gas in portions of North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.⁠[15]

In December 2016 Duke Energy completed the sale of its Latin American businesses, including the sale of its Brazilian business to China Three Gorges.⁠[15]

At the end of 2025 Duke Energy had 26,441 employees. Harry K. Sideris has been president since April 2024 and CEO since April 2025.⁠[16]

In July 2025 Piedmont agreed to sell its Tennessee business to Spire, expecting completion on March 31, 2026. In August Duke Energy agreed to receive $6 billion from a Brookfield affiliate for an anticipated 19.7% indirect interest in Duke Energy Florida.⁠[16]

In June 2026 Harry Sideris said the utility was “focused on keeping power affordable for customers while meeting surging demand from AI and data centers.”⁠[17]

On October 7, 2026, Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress reached a settlement with the North Carolina Public Staff, joined by AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry, GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, Meta PlatformsMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry, MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry and others. New customers using at least 50 megawatts would take service under a new High Load Factor rate schedule, and grid facilities serving a single customer would require a nonrefundable upfront payment. The agreement requires approval by the North Carolina Utilities Commission.⁠[18]