Conversations From the Corner Office

BIO

Duke Energy Chairman, President and CEO James Rogers

James Rogers' path to Duke's corner office started at the Herald-Leader newspaper in Lexington, Ky., where he spent his first years out of college as a reporter. He later went back to school and earned a law degree from the University of Kentucky. Rogers plied his legal skills first on behalf of consumers in gas-, electric- and telephone-rate cases as an assistant attorney general for the state of Kentucky. He later joined the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, where he eventually became deputy general counsel for litigation and enforcement. After a stint in private practice, Rogers joined the Enron Gas Pipeline Group in Houston, serving as executive vice president of interstate pipelines.

His rise to the top job of a power company came about unintentionally. In 1988, someone (Rogers still doesn't know who) submitted his name as a candidate for the CEO position at PSI Energy, the largest electric utility company in Indiana and one of the component companies that would later become Cinergy. With no experience at the helm of an energy company, Rogers thought he had little chance of winning the post. But after reviewing his plans on how he'd run the company, PSI officials decided to tap him for the job, which he held until the company merged with Cincinnati Gas & Electric Co. to form Cinergy in 1994. Rogers then ran Cinergy for more than 11 years.

While at Cinergy, Rogers made public his concerns about global warming, and he began calling for reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions through a "cap-and-trade" program in which the government would cap carbon emissions at a certain level and companies could buy and sell emissions credits to comply. At the time, Cinergy burned 30 million tons of coal per year, and Rogers decided a cap-and-trade scheme would be the least disruptive to businesses of any greenhouse-gas reduction measures that might arise from Congress. His experience with cap-and-trade dated back to the early 1990s, when a similar program was implemented to reduce emissions that caused acid rain.

Rogers took his embrace of cap-and-trade to Duke Energy when the company merged with Cinergy in 2005. In January 2007, Duke joined with other corporations to formally call on Congress to formulate a cap-and-trade scheme for carbon dioxide. Critics have called the plan a subsidy for coal-dependent utilities. Rogers counters that a cap-and-trade program mitigates economic disruptions as the emissions are reduced.

Rogers also sees nuclear energy playing a key role in future zero-carbon energy generation.

Rogers is a member of the executive committee of the Nuclear Energy Institute and a board member of the Institute of Nuclear Power. He is also chairman of the Edison Electric Institute, which represents nearly three-quarters of electricity generators in the U.S.

Rogers lives in North Carolina with his wife Mary Ann. He has three children from a previous marriage and seven grandchildren.

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