POWER PLAYER: An industrial giant makes North Carolina pivotal in the gas-to-electric switch.

• Author: Barkin, Dan
• Position: POINT TAKEN

Eaton Corporation is a company with a long history and a new story. Named for one of its founders, Joseph Eaton, it was formed nearly 150 years ago as Torbensen Gear & Axle Co. The name came from Eatons partner, Viggo Torbensen, who had the idea for a new kind of truck axle and had a mother willing to financially back the startup. It was a success, one of many in the then-booming manufacturing center of Cleveland, Ohio. After a few years, one in three U.S. trucks had a Torbensen axle, which sounds impressive, but there were fewer than 100,000 trucks in America then hauling freight on bad roads.

The company was born during the transformative rise of the internal combustion engine powering cars and trucks. Its engineering and manufacturing prowess are now deeply embedded in the latest transformation--how electricity is stored and used.

The center for much of Eatons work in this transformation is in the Raleigh area, a major manufacturing and engineering site for its critical power and digital infrastructure division. About 650 of Eatons 3,000 North Carolina employees work--in newly remodeled offices on Six Forks Road and factories nearby--on Spring Forest Road in Raleigh and in Franklin County to the north.

SAGS AND SWELLS

To understand the significance of Eaton, you have to learn a little about something called an uninterruptible power supply, or UPS.

UPS has gone from being that backup power supply for a few minutes, to being the brains of the new electric grid. Eatons Raleigh operations are at the center of innovation, dating back to its 2004 acquisition of Powerware, says James McBryde, engineering director for Critical Power Solutions, and an electrical engineering graduate of N.C. State University.

At minimum, the typical UPS is doing what an UPS has been doing for a long time. "You can think of it as a power conditioner and a power backup system," he says. First, the UPS is taking electricity in from the utility and cleaning it up, basically, eliminating the sags and swells in the voltage that can cause problems with equipment. It's similar to the massive data centers with hundreds and thousands of servers--the modern cloud computing hubs. Eaton does a lot of UPS business out of Raleigh with the nations data centers.

The other part of the UPS is the battery. When the UPS senses a disruption in the power coming into the building, it takes over.

THE SWITCH TO LITHIUM-ION

In recent years, technology in the UPS has improved due to research...