Duke Energy’s Harry Sideris on Resilience and Affordability

Harry Sideris is president and CEO of Duke Energy, having served in various leadership roles at the organization for nearly three decades.

Sideris recently joined the Electric Perspectives podcast to discuss his vision for Duke Energy and reflect on the devastating 2024 hurricane season.

Following is an abbreviated transcript, lightly edited for length and clarity. To listen to the full episode and catch up with other recent interviews, visit electricperspectives.com/podcast.

Electric Perspectives (EP): You’ve had a long career in the energy industry and at Duke Energy. Tell us about your career journey and how your background is shaping your leadership of the company?

Harry Sideris (HS): I've had the honor and privilege of working for Duke Energy and its predecessors for almost 30 years. It all started with responding to a classified ad in the newspaper. I know that's a foreign concept to people today. That's how I ended up getting my job at Carolina Power & Light (CP&L) back in 1996.

As an engineer, I thought I was applying for a job at a power plant, solving mechanical, chemical, and process issues. I quickly learned there was so much more to working at CP&L and in the power industry. Our product is so vital to life. I fell in love with the sense of purpose I got coming to work every day, knowing that I was making a difference and that our product had a real impact.

At Duke Energy, our purpose is to power the lives of our customers and the vitality of our communities. Throughout my 30 years here, I have seen our employees volunteer with their communities, teach children about electricity at schools, and support vulnerable customers working to provide for their families. Seeing those efforts firsthand is something that I love about our company.

I've had 20 different roles at this company. I've done a little bit of everything, so I feel perfectly suited to running each and every aspect of our business, providing reliable and affordable service to our customers.

EP: What is your vision for Duke Energy, particularly as the energy landscape continues to rapidly evolve?

HS: My vision for Duke Energy is simple: We want to continue to operate as the premier electric company, with a reputation for reliable and affordable service for our customers. We want to be the company that people want to work for, where they can build meaningful and prosperous careers and feel empowered to make decisions that serve their communities.

We put customers first in everything that we do. We're ensuring reliability while serving our customers at the lowest possible cost. We are a company that's there for customers, both when a storm hits and when times are good.

We are mindful of the vast array of stakeholders out there, including regulators, politicians, large customers. We want to be known as an honest broker that contributes to energy policy discussions while looking for ways to make the communities and the states we serve better through economic development.

Finally, we strive to be a company that investors believe in and trust to deliver results and value—that they want to be invested in for the long term. With the demand growth that we're seeing, we're blessed to serve some of the fastest-growing states in the country. We are prepared for this moment, serving our customers and meeting this dynamic growth.

We are working directly with stakeholders and our states, and we're doing some great things. Earlier this year, we announced a contract with GE Vernova that will allow us to reserve gas turbines, which will allow us to move quickly and meet this explosive growth. In June, we announced the largest economic development project in the history of North Carolina, partnering with Amazon Web Services on a data center campus in Richmond County. It's a $10 billion investment that will create 500-plus jobs. Particularly in a rural community, that's going to have a huge impact.

EP: You’ve been outspoken about Duke Energy’s storm response work. Last year, Hurricane Helene’s destructive winds and catastrophic flooding devastated the Carolinas and several other states that you serve. What can you share about Duke Energy’s response and recovery efforts following Helene and how that informs your work today?

HS: We had quite the fall last year. We had three storms back-to-back-to-back: Debby, Helene, and Milton. All hit Florida, and all moved up the coast into the Carolinas. Helene, which was the most destructive of the three, hit all seven states that we serve. We saw 3.4 million outages during Helene and 5 million across the three storms combined.

I'm so proud of our team and how they responded to all these storms, particularly Helene. No one could have imagined the destruction that we saw in western North Carolina and upstate South Carolina. I grew up in Asheville, N.C., so it was personal for me to see the destruction, to think about 18 feet of water coming down the valley, washing out our substations, our poles, our homes, and our cars. It was just so devastating. In upstate South Carolina, there aren’t very many trees left from that storm. It seemed like every one of them was toppled last fall.

I joined our teams on the ground soon after the storms passed. It was heartbreaking to see some of the sites where, as a kid and as a teenager, I used to drive around. Seeing the destruction where my dad worked, where I set up my first bank account when I was 5 years old—it was very impactful to us.

We have a mantra here at Duke Energy that everybody has a storm role. So, when something like this happens, all 26,000 people at the company get behind it and work tirelessly, sometimes 16-plus hours a day, to make sure that we're getting the lights back on for our customers. That’s what really helps them find a sense of normalcy to start rebuilding.

The Duke Energy Foundation also did a tremendous job supporting our local communities—supporting food banks, many of which were washed out by floodwaters. We partnered with these communities that we've been a part of, in some cases, for more than 100 years, making sure they rebuilt and rebuilt well. We've been at it for the past year, because this work doesn't end when you get the lights on.

EP: Following the storms, Duke Energy replaced 16,000 poles, 13,000 transformers, and more than 9 million feet of wire. That’s a tremendous amount of work that your team undertook.

HS: It was unbelievable. We had to move poles in with helicopters, because roads were washed out. The amount of wire that we replaced would have been long enough to stretch from Charlotte to Denver.

And, in a lot of these impacted areas, the level of damage was just something we had never experienced before. Roads were completely washed out. Crew quarters didn't have running water, because Asheville did not have water for almost two months. We made it a priority to serve our lineworkers and our employees on the ground, making sure they had what they needed to be successful in their restoration.

EP: What can you share about the grid enhancements and broader resilience work that Duke Energy is leading now?

HS: I always say that the grid is the eighth wonder of the world. It is truly an engineering marvel in how it handles the puts and takes of the system—how it serves customers and handles extreme weather, particularly during hurricane season but also during ice season.

We've invested $70 billion to upgrade the grid across our service territory. We are installing smart devices, replacing wooden poles with concrete and metal poles, building flood protection around our substations.

We're also continuing to invest in technology. Our self-optimizing grid technology is something we've been focused on—I call it the GPS for the grid. When something happens, it's able to reroute power around the issue, saving many, many hours of customer outages. Last year alone, we avoided 1.5 million outages by quickly rerouting power.

We plan to invest more than $100 billion in our grid during the next decade, continuing to strengthen it, make it smarter, and help us meet demand growth. We're all in on making sure that eighth wonder of the world continues to operate reliably and affordably for our customers.

EP: How do you and your team think about balancing the investments that are needed today with maintaining affordability for customers? And, how are you discussing this with customers?

HS: : Affordability is front and center on every customer's mind. A lot of folks are struggling to make ends meet. We've always focused on reliability and affordability as we meet our customers’ needs, and it's no different now. We always look at what is the most reliable solution—but also what is the lowest-cost way we can deliver that reliability.

We continue to look for other opportunities to support our customers and lower their bills. Earlier this year, we worked with our partners in Washington to ensure that the $500 million in tax credits earned by our nuclear plants—which are safe, reliable, and cost effective—flow directly back to customers annually to help offset investment.

We're also focused on working with data centers and other customers with substantial energy demands. We are making sure that these large loads pay their portion of infrastructure investments, so that work doesn’t drive up bills for residential customers.

And, we spend a lot of time focusing on our vulnerable customers—those that have the greatest financial need. We distribute more than $130 million per year in federal and local assistance to help customers pay their bills, and the Duke Energy Foundation works directly in our communities to help vulnerable customers working to make ends meet. Electricity is a vital part of everybody's life.

EP: Duke Energy is a key driver of economic development in your service territory. How are you meeting growing energy demand while supporting and creating new opportunities for your communities?

HS: We are truly blessed to serve the communities that we do in the Southeast and Midwest. They are some of the fastest growing regions in the country. We have added more than 200,000 customers two years in a row, and we are on pace to do so again this year.

A lot of people are migrating here. We also have a lot of manufacturing facilities going in, and plants and data centers are expanding. It feels like everywhere we turn, there are opportunities to add data centers. We are focused on moving quicker, working with customers, and meeting the moment.

We are truly at the front and center of economic development. We will help create more than 160,000 jobs on an annual basis, based on our investment plan going forward. That activity will generate more than $130 billion in labor income and $370 billion in overall economic impact.

EP: “Calm is contagious” is one of your mantras. What does that phrase mean to you, and how does it influence your leadership style?

HS: I wish I had made that up myself. I stole it from the Navy Seals. That is their mantra as well. Calm is contagious because, when you're on a mission, you don't need people to be nervous. You don't need people to overreact. You want to be in lockstep. You want to have clarity of thought as you're making decisions. I think that's a core leadership principle here at Duke Energy.

We're in a high-stakes industry, and we have to have clear thinking, sound decision making, and effective action, particularly during a storm or when we’re under pressure. We need to stay calm, involve all stakeholders, talk to customers and regulators, and make sure our employees have a voice. That empowers everybody to come up with the right decision and avoid the bad decisions. “Calm is contagious” is something I've always subscribed to in my career, and I think it serves us well.