Tower of power: more than a third of the electricity produced in the U.S. comes from equipment made in this factory in Southwest Charlotte.

• Author: Maley, Frank

About 10 miles from down-town Charlotte's glitzy skyscrapers, Westinghouse Boulevard carries travelers through a drab gantlet of squat warehouses and industrial plants. Train tracks lace the landscape, sometimes running alongside the road, sometimes across it. Near the boulevard's western terminus, a large factory rises, white with blue trim, behind a thin veil of trees. Inside, 780 employees of German industrial giant Siemens AG build and repair generators and turbines--the guts of modern power plants. More than a third of electricity produced in the U.S. comes from equipment made here--either by Siemens or the previous owner, Westinghouse Electric Corp.--since the plant opened in 1969.

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Westinghouse built the 550,000-square-foot factory to make steam turbines for nuclear plants, mostly in the U.S., plant manager Mark Pringle says. In the late 1980s, it closed a factory in Pittsburgh and moved production of generator rotors to Charlotte. Siemens bought Westinghouse's power-generation business in 1998, and more changes followed as executives evaluated their North American assets. "They decided to leave Charlotte as a key generator manufacturing facility, but they kind of moved steam-turbine manufacturing to Germany."

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The Charlotte plant still repairs turbines and does small-scale manufacturing of them, but generator work accounts for about two-thirds of what's done here. Parts arrive by truck or rail from all over the world, then are shaped and assembled in the long, cavernous factory. Cranes that can lift as much as 100 tons each move parts sometimes wider and longer than utility poles from station to station. Two, even three, cranes occasionally are needed to lift heavier objects. Bright yellow safety rails help workers navigate a factory floor framed by black beams and ducts painted in light shades of green and purple.

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Typically, a year passes between an order for a new generator and when it ships. "That's mostly driven by the time it takes to get the materials, since the materials are so large" Pringle says. "The actual time in the factory to build it is about six months." Finished products typically leave by train or truck and sometimes continue by ship, but occasionally other modes are employed.

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