GENERATION GAP.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Industry Overview - Statistical Data Included

That's what Mover and Shaker of the Year Rick Priory wants Duke Energy to fill -- all around the world.

Transit workers have shut down buses and subways, so Rick Priory takes the shoe-leather express across town, skirting mounds of rubbish -- garbage collectors also are on strike -- spilling onto sidewalks. He stops, takes a hard look around and goes back home. He calls the tunneling contractor who has offered him a job. The essence of his message: Stick it where the sun doesn't shine -- and he's not referring to the hole the contractor wants him to dig under Manhattan.

Twenty-three years later, he finds New York no more hospitable. It's November 1996. He and boss Bill Grigg, chairman of Duke Power Co., are here to announce the Charlotte-based electric company is buying Houston-based PanEnergy Corp., a natural-gas company, for $7.7 billion. Priory, Duke's president and chief operating officer, walks to the front of an auditorium in the World Trade Center.

Hundreds of reporters and analysts are waiting. Grigg, a lawyer, lets Priory, an engineer, outline the deal. Bright, affable, quotable -- "a gas molecule is just an electron waiting to happen" -- he's a natural. Under the TV lights, his Mr. Clean head even resembles a nuclear reactor's dome.

Deregulation, he explains, will revolutionize the energy industry, just as it has banking and telecommunications. After his garbage-pile epiphany, he spent years designing nuclear plants. Now they're political ptomaine. So is coal. That leaves gas. In 15 years, it'll fuel nine out of 10 new plants. Duke will lead that revolution, and it all starts with PanEnergy. The new Duke, which would become today's Duke Energy Corp., will buy, move and store gas. It will trade energy as a commodity like pork bellies. It will build some plants just to sell them, capitalizing on its engineering expertise. It will build others to generate unregulated energy to sell. It'll expand into Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, where demand will double in 25 years.

As for PanEnergy, federal regulators are throttling utility mergers, Priory admits, but we'll close this in 12 to 18 months. Any questions? Somebody snickers. That turns into laughter and spreads. "I got hooted," he recalls. "We got catcalls. We were told we'd still be sitting here three years from now like a bump on a log, going nowhere."

Three years are long since up, and the numbers will soon be in for the fourth. By any measure, Duke is going places. "We closed PanEnergy in seven months," says Priory, who spent weeks stroking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Federal Trade Commission and other agencies, convincing them that tying a Texas gas company to a Tar Heel light company wouldn't short-circuit competition.

In 1996, the year Wall Street razzed him, Duke Power pulled in $4.8 billion of operating revenue. When Priory finishes counting change for 2000, it'll exceed $40 billion, up more than 80% from 1999. He runs the world's 10th-largest energy company. Pretax earnings have consistently exceeded $2 billion a year since he became chairman and CEO, as well as president, in 1997.

Consider some other reasons why Rick Priory is BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA'S Mover and Shaker of the Year. "People are judged by results, and looking at Duke Energy stock this year, you see some strong ones," says Tom Hamlin, utilities...