Progress Energy will soon be buying electricity from an unusual source of energy: Ted Turner, the founder of the CNN cable news empire.

In an announcement issued Thursday, Raleigh-based Progress will buy the power output from a recent Turner investment: a solar farm near Oxford in Granville County.

The 2.5-megawatt solar farm is jointly owned by Turner Renewable Energy and by a subsidiary of Southern Co., the multi-state electric utility based in Atlanta.

Turner Renewable Energy is owned by media mogul Ted Turner, whose business interests include alternative energy and more than 55,000 head of bison on land holdings spanning 2 million acres in a dozen U.S. states and in Argentina.

The Granville Solar Facility is the first North Carolina energy project and fourth joint solar acquisition for Southern and Turner. The facility is nearing completion and expects to begin generating power this month.

Southern Co., which issued the announcement, said the company teamed up with Turner Renewable Energy in January 2010 "to strategically develop renewable energy projects in the United States." The Turner-Southern venture owns solar farms in New Mexico, and Nevada.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Thursday it will boost safety reviews for the second time this year at Progress Energy's Shearon Harris nuclear plant in southwestern Wake County after discovering malfunctions that the company had failed to report.

The NRC said that Raleigh-based Progress narrowly escaped having to pay a financial penalty for failing to report the violations, which involved an improperly functioning ventilation system in an emergency personnel bunker 2 miles from the nuclear plant.

"However, significant violations in the future could result in a civil penalty," the NRC said in a letter to Progress.

The NRC will conduct a follow-up safety inspection in the coming months at the Shearon Harris plant, which is less than 25 miles from downtown Raleigh. The NRC has two on-site resident inspectors at the site.
 

Home builders will be able to guarantee heating and cooling bills as a way of marketing new high-efficiency homes to home buyers under a program approved Tuesday by the N.C. Utilities Commission.

The program pushes new efficiency boundaries by enticing customers with guaranteed savings as opposed to a mere promise. As part of the guarantee, customers who get utility bills that exceed the guarantee will qualify for reimbursements.

Under the program, Progress Energy will pay the home builders up to $4,000 per home for meeting the strictest efficiency standards. Qualifying homes will have to be significantly more efficient than homes with the federal Energy Star rating.

It's not clear when Raleigh-based Progress will begin offering the program to home builders, and when the builders will begin offering billing guarantees to their customers.

Progress Energy is scheduled to shutter two more coal-fired power plants on Monday as the company phases out its use of the cheap but dirty fuel across the region.

The latest closings are the final two units at the Cape Fear plant near Moncure in Chatham County and the H.B. Robinson Unit 1 plant near Hartsville, S.C.

In all, Progress is now in the process of demolishing a dozen coal-burning units at five sites. Two weeks ago it closed the aging H.F. Lee power plant near Goldsboro.

Progress Energy Carolinas, a subsidiary of Charlotte-based Duke Energy, announced its coal-abandonment strategy in 2009 in response to expected federal caps on greenhouse gases and stricter limits on pollution.

The 316-megawatt Cape Fear plant has six coal-fired units on site, the last two of which were built in 1956 and 1958. Two of the six units were retired in 1977 and another two last year.

The H.B. Robinson plant is Progress' only coal-fired plant in South Carolina.

Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers touched on all his talking points Thursday morning as the beleaguered chief executive continues making his speaking circuit around the state to reassure the public -- and public officials -- that the newly-merged electric utility can be trusted to act in the interest of the state and its residents.

Charlotte-based Duke has been under scrutiny since merging with Raleigh-based Progress Energy in July, and almost immediately firing Bill Johnson as CEO and reinstating Rogers at the top of what is now the nation's largest electric utility. The firing is under investigation by the N.C. Attorney General and also by the N.C. Utilities Commission, which had approved the merger with the understanding that Johnson would run the combined company.

"The CEO change at the end was a big surprise to this community in particular. That's not what we had in mind at the start of this long journey," Rogers told a group of business people in downtown Raleigh. "And I'm sorry it created more anxiety about this merger. Some of you already viewed the merger with mixed feelings."

Progress Energy will blast the emergency sirens at the Shearon Harris nuclear plant Tuesday in a quarterly test of the plant’s public warning system.

The 83 sirens will be sounded at full volume for about three minutes between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. The tests are conducted every three months.

Progress operates 83 sirens mounted on 50-foot towers within the 10-mile Emergency Planning Zone around the nuclear plant in southwestern Wake County.

The area includes the towns of Apex, Holly Springs, Fuquay-Varina and Moncure and the New Hill community.

Duke Energy is on track to staff its entire 29,000-employee organization by next month in the wake of the Charlotte power company's merger with Raleigh-based Progress Energy.

The newly structured company is also preparing to introduce a new corporate logo and a name change for its recently acquired electric utility subsidiary. That means that customers of Progress Energy, formerly called Carolina Power & Light, will have to get accustomed to a new name: Duke Energy Progress.

Since completing its merger July 2, the combined Duke has now filled the top 675 executive and management positions and is staffing mid-level and lower level slots. What remains unknown is the number of people who will be laid off as a result of the consolidation that will eliminate 1,860 positions company-wide.

"We are making extensive efforts to minimize the number of employees who must leave the company involuntarily," Duke CEO Jim Rogers said in an Aug. 31 letter to the N.C. Utilities Commission. "Our goal is to provide affected employees with options whenever possible.

"In situations where we have exhausted these options and an involuntary severance is unavoidable, we have put in place a severance plan that provides financial assistance for the transition," Rogers wrote.
 

The volume of internal corporate records Duke Energy has filed with the N.C. Utilities Commission as part of the agency's investigation into Duke's conduct already exceeds 5,000 pages.

Duke said in filings yesterday that it plans to make additional disclosures in the coming weeks. The filings are part of the fallout from Duke's ill-fated merger with Raleigh-based Progress Energy, which has exposed deep rifts between the two companies and triggered a pair of state investigations.

Only about 600 of Duke's pages are publicly accessible on the commission's web site -- consisting largely of emails sent between board members and CEO Jim Rogers. They have been filed along with nearly 1,900 pages submitted under seal by the Charlotte-based Duke's Raleigh law firm, Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice.

The confidential filings cite exemptions to the state's public records laws, which shield records protected by attorney-client privilege as well as corporate trade secrets.

The bulk of the filings, however, were made by the white-shoe New York firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore. This firm is representing six former board members of Progress Energy who joined Duke's board July 2 as part of Duke's merger with Raleigh-based Progress.

Not a single page of the Cravath filings is public.
 

Another top executive from Progress Energy is leaving in the wake of the Raleigh-based power company's troubled merger with Charlotte's Duke Energy.

Duke said today that Vincent Dolan, 57, will step down by the end of this year. That would make Dolan, who will have worked for the Raleigh utility more than a quarter-century, the fifth high-level executive to leave what is now the nation's biggest electric utility in the wake of the $32 billion merger.

No reason was given for Dolan's planned departure. But it's no secret that Duke was disappointed in the way Progress handled its Florida operations, which Dolan had overseen since 2009. Duke officials told the N.C. Utilities Commission in public hearings last month that they had serious concerns about the Progress-Duke merger on account of soaring nuclear costs in Florida, Progress Energy's biggest service area.

In its announcement, Duke lauded Dolan as "an exemplary leader and a tireless advocate for Florida customers."