There's methane in his madness.

• Position: Natural Power Inc.'s Bill Rowland - Company profile

"Everybody told me I was crazy buying a big hole in the ground," recalls Bill Rowland. That was in 1969, when he paid $700 an acre for a 130-acre plot off North Boulevard in Raleigh.

Rowland turned the hole - a rock quarry - into what's called a stump dump, where tree stumps and construction debris are still being discarded. He also opened a 3.5-acre sanitary landfill nearby. About 100,000 cubic yards of garbage later, the landfill began getting so hot Rowland couldn't put his hand on the ground covering it.

The heat came from decomposing trash, and Rowland knew that where there's decomposition, there's gas. So he created Natural Power Inc. in 1984 to capture the methane from the landfill, and people called him crazy again.

"When we put this system in here six years ago, most people said it wouldn't work, but I was bullheaded enough to see it work," he says.

The system, which cost $150,000, now nets Rowland about $1,100 a month in electricity that, by federal law, CP&L...