Former Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, an important figure in U.S. energy policy and politics for more than 40 years, died Monday in Louisville, Ky. He was 71.
Throughout his career and after he retired, Rogers was seen as a utility visionary, advocating industry ownership of its role in global warming, including leading the utility lobby Edison Electric Institute toward more environmentally-friendly positions. He was an early advocate of competitive, market forces in the typically monopoly-dominated industry, including support in 1990 for emissions trading of sulfur dioxide from coal-fired power plants.
In 2009, Newsweek named him among the 50 most powerful people in the world.
Rogers was also a rare bird among utility company executives. He was a Democrat, and not shy about it. He helped persuade the Democratic National Committee to hold its 2012 nominating convention in Charlotte. As the Charlotte Observer reported Monday, “The local host committee needed to raise nearly $37 million, but the national party had placed unprecedented restrictions on corporate donations. The local committee fell $10.9 million short and Duke Energy paid that debt, at a cost of $6 million to shareholders….” Rogers was chairman of the host committee.
Rogers retired as CEO of Duke Energy in Charlotte, N.C., in 2013, a year after he orchestrated a messy takeover of rival Progress Energy of Raleigh, N.C., creating a giant electric and gas utility that dominates the Tar Heel State and has operations in five other states. In the merger, he orchestrated the sacking Progress CEO Bill Johnson, seen as a rival for leadership of the company. Johnson now heads the federal government’s Tennessee Valley Authority.
Rogers made his business reputation by making bold mergers. His first CEO job was heading PSI Energy (nee Public Service of Indiana) after that company’s disastrous venture with the Marble Hill nuclear plant. He then worked a merger with another struggling Midwest utility, Cincinnati Gas and Electric, which had a massive nuclear failure with the Zimmer plant (later converted to burn coal).
As head of the new company, Cinergy, Rogers led it into a 2006 merger with Duke Energy, where he became CEO. When he left that job in 2013, he stayed on for a year as chairman of the board. Lynn Good, who succeeded him in the Duke executive suite, said, “Our industry has lost one of its most influential and extraordinary leaders. I was fortunate to work alongside Jim and see his dynamic leadership skill up close.”
Ralph Cavanagh, long-time energy analyst and policy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a written statement, “He understood earlier than most the promise of energy efficiency and renewable energy, and embraced them at a time when many of his utility peers were skeptical at best.”
Born in Alabama and raised in Kentucky, Rogers was once a reporter for a Lexington newspaper. When he graduated from the University of Kentucky law school, he went to work as a consumer advocate for the state’s attorney general. He then moved to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, to the Akin Gump law firm in Washington, and as an executive at the Enron Gas Pipeline Group, working closely with the company’s late founder Ken Lay, well before Enron’s rapid rise and ever faster crash into oblivion.
In his 2015 book – “Lighting the World” – Rogers wrote, “I’d like to foment a grand collaborative effort to ensure that everyone on earth who lacks power gets access to clean, sustainable electricity.”
— Kennedy Maize