Watts up, doc?

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Cover Story

A guard in green fatigues and a flak jacket pokes his head through the door of the gatehouse. "Pull over there and shut it off," he orders, motioning with his M-16 to a bare patch of pavement. A second guard, his rifle held low, trots into position behind the visitor's car. With the dying whisper of the engine, the pine woods of New Hill, a crossroads in southern Wake County, grow still except for cawing crows and the guard's terse, "What do you need?"

Several hundred yards through the woods lies the reason for the security. Clouds of water vapor waft from a massive, hourglass-shaped cooling tower. Beyond that is a domed building whose walls encapsulate 3-inch-thick steel reinforcement bars. "It'll withstand a direct hit by a tornado," spokeswoman Sharon Hall says. Then she adds solemnly: "Or an airplane."

Here, atoms in millions of uranium pellets throw off ferocious heat to create steam to turn turbines that generate 900 megawatts of electricity, enough raw energy to power two cities the size of Charlotte. This is Progress Energy Inc.'s Harris Nuclear Plant. This is William Cavanaugh III's kind of place, the heart of a company as committed to the mundane business of producing electricity as the grim-faced guards are to protecting it. That resolve, along with Progress' reluctance to chase after the utility industry's hares in their pell-mell pursuit of The Next Big Thing, has propelled this tortoise ahead in a race for higher profits, more investors and, perhaps, survival.

A few hours earlier, sitting in a boardroom that overlooks downtown Raleigh, Cavanaugh had called generating and transmitting electricity "our core business." More than a dozen years after pundits had labeled regulated power utilities as dinosaurs lumbering toward extinction, the CEO and chairman of Progress Energy remains skeptical of laissez-faire electricity markets and the notion that trading power like pork...