These executives are energizing the power business with their persistence, ideas and pure gut instincts.

What is an innovator? Must he, or she, be an inventor? Or merely an idea-prone CEO with a knack for building a string of successful companies? Or could an innovator be both a scientist and CEO?

In this first-ever feature, Fortnightly has chosen innovators from all segments of the energy business. Innovators who, in every sense, have something to prove next year, whether that be seeing out the commercialization of technology or a leading corporate strategy designed to make competitors wonder who blew them by.

Size doesn't matter. Whether they're heading a $16 million or a $12 billion venture, it's drive and vision that makes the executive. These corporate officials clearly have what it takes to look beyond the usual and see what it will take to put their companies over the top.

Robert L. Aveyard,vice president and chief information officer, Conectiv Resource Partners

If you asked me to do a production line job where I had to do the same thing over and over again I'd get bored and start looking for ways to do it differently," says Robert L. Aveyard, Conectiv Resource Partners CIO. "It's always, 'Is there a way to do this better?'"

Aveyard each day looks for a better way to complete tasks, but his job at the Wilmington, Del. utility has much more variety than any production line. More challenges have been thrown his way via deregulation and the March merger of Delmarva Power & Light Co. and Atlantic City Electric Co., which formed a $2.5 billion enterprise known as Conectiv Inc.

Notable tasks Aveyard's team is working on include providing system support for local voice/data/long distance packaging at Connectiv Communications and carrying out millions of dollars worth of solutions to make systems Y2K-compliant. It's moving very fast on information systems support for 15 HVAC companies acquired over the last year. The companies, falling under the Conectiv Services banner, account for $100 million in annualized revenues.

All that doesn't include the time Aveyard and his 120 staffers have put into aligning information technology at each of the merged companies. Conectiv has two local area networks that have been a challenge to unite. One 1999 goal is to link the companies on a single system.

Key to the future of operating in a deregulated environment is continued deployment of Conectiv's SAP enterprise system. The system allows the utility to better understand costs and track them back to cost centers. Moving from the FERC cost accounting system to a competitive accounting system is crucial to the business, Aveyard says.

He says the utility wants each line of business to "own" its budget and make commitments on revenues, then have projects support those commitments. They'll need to know how many employees use PCs on a local area network, for instance, and what the charge for operating is a year. What is the cost of adding an employee and the corresponding IT?

But the new cost accounting technology can't be considered a cure all, Aveyard says. Employees' natural instinct (em the wrong one (em is to load FERC accounts into the SAP system.

Supplying technology to Conectiv's nine business units means understanding very different IT needs.

"If you have trading on line, they have some high reliability and availability needs," he says. "If they're off when the market peaks ¼ they may miss a trade or have a position they don't dispose of quickly enough. That costs them money. On the other hand, we have a services business where they're out repairing things and they don't want ultra-high reliability. Even a fax machine might work."

Acquiring the HVAC companies has posed questions like that, and the company, Aveyard says, must be careful not to impose one solution, possibly a costly solution, on all problems. "You can do a lot with a fax machine. You don't have to have the latest technology."

On the other hand, Conectiv is examining how to boost technology in its trading areas. Having a trading arm poses the question: "Is it cheaper for me to generate power myself, in my own power plant, or to buy it on the open market? Or, hey, if the open market's going up, is it cheaper for me to generate power at the greater rate and sell it on the open market because I got a good margin?"

To make those decisions, employees will need to understand fuel prices, contracts for gas, oil and coal, and the capabilities of plants to turn those fuels into electricity.

Aveyard hopes to find solutions to these challenges soon. The CIO will have little choice, as the deregulation "assembly line" has been turned on in Pennsylvania and starts up in New Jersey next July.

Allen M. Barnett, president and CEO, AstroPower Inc.

This year will be long remembered by Allen M. Barnett, president and CEO of AstroPower Inc.

On Feb. 12, the company (em the second largest U.S.-owned photovoltaics maker (em went public, raising $16.7 million. In July, AstroPower opened a 60,000-square-foot manufacturing plant near its Newark, Del. headquarters. It will produce 9 megawatts of solar cells and modules, tripling the company's output. And before the year's end, Barnett expected to file his 16th patent, for the next generation of silicon film.

"It will put the interconnects on the solar cell itself so you don't have to wire the cells together," the CEO says of his invention. "It actually transforms the device from a high current, low-voltage device to a high-voltage, medium current device."

Could 1999 be as exciting?

With Barnett, you never know.

After all, the small company's sales have doubled in the last three years. This year's sales are expected to be about $24 million, up from 1997's $16 million figure. The new manufacturing plant may prompt more expansion in 1999.

Couple that growth with the fact that the market for solar power is almost $2 billion.

Barnett, who holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, started his "AstroPowered" journey in 1981 when he won a government contract to do a comparative analysis of solar cell manufacturing. The analysis looked at crystalline silicon and all the thin films. Barnett concluded that manufacturers needed the performance and stability of crystalline silicon and the low cost potential of thin films. Thin silicon was the answer.

He proposed the problem to Arco Solar, but was told that while thin silicon was indeed the way to go, he wasn't the person to solve the difficulty of manufacturing it.

"I'm a trained engineer," he says. "It was like, whoa! That was a challenge."

Arco's rejection led him to pioneer the development and manufacturing of thin, crystalline silicon solar cells on low-cost substrates.

Over the ensuing years, Barnett would raise $9 million from private investors, venture capitalists and a company called Astrosystems. Between government contracts and other equity, AstroPower became a going concern. It has grown to 280 employees and for its first six months as a public company, its profits nudged $520,000.

The silicon-film process makes solar cell wafers by growing a thin layer of silicon from a liquid bath. Usually, the wafers are made by sawing slices from a silicon ingot. AstroPower's cells cost less per watt, but have a slightly lower energy conversion efficiency than competing technologies.

AstroPower, Barnett admits, couldn't have succeeded without the largesse of the federal government. Its latest cost-shared contracts were inked Sept. 10. The contracts, partially funded with $5.2 million from the Department of Energy, will power further development of advanced Silicon-FilmTM solar cell products.

Barnett says his company hasn't had an impact on the PV market ¼ yet.

"The market is going to be 150 megawatts this year and we're going to be about 5 percent of the market share." About 85 percent of the company's sales are international.

AstroPower is competing against such giants as Siemens Solar Industries and Solarex.

There is residential demand for solar technology, but the problem is making a product at the right cost and one that's user friendly, the CEO says. To that end, last year the company partnered with GPU International Inc. to form GPU Solar. It hopes to sell to the residential market PV systems ranging from 1 to 4 kW.

Barnett insists, in the year of AstroPower's 15th anniversary, that everything at the company could be done better. He's driving the company as hard as he did back in the 1980s, when he was told he wasn't the man for the job. "I don't know whether we've achieved success yet, but we have a nice business," he says.

Edward G. Cazalet, CEO, Automated Power Exchange Inc.

Edward G. Cazalet can get angry when he talks about the California Power Exchange, the $100 million state-funded nemesis of his small Silicon Valley startup.

And why not? His David to California' s Goliath of power exchanges resulted when state officials rejected his plans for an independent, competitive electric power trading system. If your best shot at the $23 billion California electric power business fizzled because regulators chose another route, you'd get mad, too.

But Cazalet hasn't stopped trying to win his share of the competitive electric business. At last check, he was trying to see that the PX didn't end competition in California with its proposed settlement before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to write off $100 million in development costs.

"It's an outrageous grab for monopoly power without regulation," Cazalet says. In the settlement, the California PX seeks flexibility to set the partial requirements price at any level, to develop new products subsidized by full requirements customers, and ultimately spend ratepayer money to compete with other power exchanges across the country.

APX is one of two holdouts in the case.

But Cazalet is used to sticking it out.

"We're a small organization," he says of his 38-employee company. "We have to find a way of doing it simply and cheaply. We don't have $100 million."

Cazalet started the company with his own money and in his own home in September 1996. Since then, several investors (em including Technology Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and Bechtel Enterprises (em have pumped about $5 million into APX.

The underpinning of APX's design was sketched in Cazalet's Ph.D. dissertation on electric power system operation and planning. Then, over the last 10 years, while under contract to the Bonneville Power Administration, Cazalet developed an advanced power market simulation model and software product. It forecasts market prices by mimicking the hourly operation of every West Coast power plant and major transmission interface. The scheduling and dispatch methods were very similar to the current APX design.

In the APX system, participants make buy/sell decisions based on the APX Market Price(TM) posted on their computer screens. Orders can be placed close to delivery or a week in advance. APX's hours allow buyers and sellers to conduct business around the clock. A trader connects to the APX Market Engine using either the Internet or a modem and APX-supplied software. A screen shows the current market price and a calendar on which the trader can specify the days he wants to order power. The trader then indicates how much electricity he wants each hour.

About 50 participants have registered with APX, although not all are active.

Ironically, BPA isn't active because of credit concerns, which have loomed larger since the June 24 midwest power spikes, caused in part by a municipal utility with bad credit.

"We passed up a tremendous number of participants because of credit issues," Cazalet says. "Bonneville Power says they're going to come in eventually, but the stumbling block is the credit. It's not the quality of their credit, but the liquidity of it."

APX plans a rapid expansion over the next two years, which should make it a profitable company. Possible markets include the Midwest, the Northeast and the United Kingdom.

"[In New York,] they're going to build much more of a trading market that fits exactly in with the technology we've got," the CEO says. "They've essentially have abandoned what California has copied."

Cazalet and his company, indeed, have moved out of the kitchen ¼ and into the fire of free markets.

Anthony F. Earley Jr., president, chairman and CEO, DTE Energy Co. and Detroit Edison Co.

Since joining Detroit Edison as president and CEO in March 1994, Anthony F. Earley Jr. has had his hands full.

He has led the formation of a domestic energy strategy, one that is slowly building the $3.8 billion, 8,500-employee business around steely know-how.

Earley has brought in more than half his management staff of 15 from outside the industry. He has set a goal of 6 percent annual earnings growth. He wants to boost the company's historic 13-to-1 price-to-earnings ratio to 17, "because that is a measure of what the financial markets think of you ¼ Obviously, the more they're willing to pay, the more they think you have opportunities in the future."

Earley is making sure the utility's base business is competitive. That means being in the top ranks of utility producers. He has put together a plan that will move the business up from the mid-ranks on fossil fuel plant production. DTE Energy will have to slash $50 million from operation and maintenance budgets.

The company's final challenge is creating a portfolio of unregulated growth businesses. It generated $15 million in net income from unregulated operations in 1997. "We'll probably triple that this year," Earley says.

The company's strongest growth business is in producing different forms of coal, such as pulverized coal and coke, that it supplies to steel manufacturers. DTE's Energy Services Inc. subsidiary acquired a coke processing plant mid-year from Bethlehem Corp. for $200 million. Earlier, the same subsidiary purchased a limited partnership interest in a Knoxville, Tenn. coke plant for the same price.

In Pennsylvania, another DTE subsidiary, DTE Edison America, claimed more than 10 percent of the market open to customer choice. "We're using web-based technology as well as what we call an 'energy club' approach," Earley says. "[We] go to customers and for a flat fee per month we will get for them electricity at wholesale rates."

This past June, DTE Energy, in a joint venture with Mechanical Technology Inc., demonstrated a residential fuel cell that someday will be sold under the name Plug Power. "We intend within the next three years to have units on the market," Earley says. The price marker is $5,000 for a 7-kilowatt unit. "We believe it's going to take at least $100 million to get us to where these units will be produced commercially," the CEO says. GE Fuel Cell Systems and the Department of Energy will be partners in the development.

Earley says DTE can't forget the strengths its distribution system offers. Over the past five years, that portion of its business has risen from the bottom quartile to the top quartile in reliability. Similar gains have been made in customer satisfaction and cost to operate the system. The processes it took to revamp these systems are easily repeatable, he says, so the utility is looking over the Canadian border to Ontario. DTE Energy recently signed a joint venture with an Ontario utility to improve utility service ranging from setting up a call center to boosting system reliability. "Deregulation [in that market] may give us opportunities to pick up distribution properties there," Earley says.

All this activity doesn't include what's happening at home, where the Michigan Public Service Commission has issued a series of orders allowing customers to choose electric suppliers by 2002, with some customers beginning to choose this year. The PSC also has decided DTE can recover $2.4 billion in stranded investment, a number the utility is comfortable with, but wants to see locked in place with legislation.

Knowing Earley's determination to see his company's market position improved, shareholders may soon be applauding his legislative achievements.

Ken Karas, chairman and CEO, Enron Wind Corp.

"Why am I doing this?

That thought galloped through the mind of Ken Kras, then president of Zond Corp., in November 1986. "This" was running a wind turbine development business that, frankly, was sucking wind.

A special California energy tax credit for renewables, driven by the tax shelter market, had expired in 1985. Zond laid off about 300 employees. Creditors piled up at the door, seeking repayment of $10 million. Zond owed its banks $17 million. There was no money left to finish a project. And an IPO attempt collapsed.

Karas still remembers the advice of his company's attorney: File for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But he didn't file. And he didn't give up hope.

Today, Zond is now Enron Wind Corp. of Tehachapi, Calif., having been bought in January 1997 by one of the world's largest energy businesses. At the end of 1998, EWC should be the third largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world. It will have completed the largest wind project ever, a 107-megawatt Minnesota wind farm.

Revenues will have grown from $50 million in 1997 to $300 million this year. The 600-employee company will have made 500 wind turbines in 1998, five times more than last year. It will have installed about 400 MW of plant.

"We're still here today and we're successful," says Karas from a hotel room phone in Tokyo, on the start of a business jaunt that will take him to China, Denmark, Germany, Greece and Spain. "We've created more than just a business. We've created an industry."

The company was incorporated in 1980 not as a manufacturer, but as a wind plant developer. In 1982, Karas was hired as chief financial officer, later becoming president and CEO. From the beginning, Karas understood the importance of economies to the future of wind power. His financial perspective proved pivotal.

"I had the tendency to keep my eye on the wind power ball rather than going off in different directions," he says. He says Zond, and now EWC, did a good job of envisioning the technology and reducing costs. That was key, and still is, to getting wind technology to stand on its own without subsidies, and without consumer support, the CEO says.

"We can't just be dependent on society's environmental largesse. That's great and I think it's even appropriate, but I think what we really need to do is drive down the cost of [wind] energy ¼ At the end of the day as a businessman, that's the most secure way for me to run my business."

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, while competitors were going out of business, Karas' financing expertise helped Zond build the 77-MW Sky River wind power project, at the time the largest wind facility in the world. Karas later pioneered insurance coverage for wind resource deficiency, and raised more than $500 million in project financing.

Through Karas' leadership, EWC has built two turbine lines, offering products ranging in cost from $850,000 to $1.5 million per megawatt, depending on location. The project in Minnesota, called Lake Benton I, provides electric at a 30-year "levelized" rate of 3 cents per kWh (em a figure competitive with fossil fuels.

The CEO envisions dramatic growth for the company. Two "Storm Lake" wind plants in Iowa will total 188 MW when completed next year. Karas hopes to hit $1 billion in revenues by 2001.

He may do that with the help of the next generation turbine, called the NGT, being developed under a $20 million contract with the Department of Energy.

The goal is to take the cost of wind power energy down to 3 cents per kWh or less, without government subsidies.

"We're not going to supplant conventional technology or nuclear technology," says Karas. "That's not this technology's role. But there's no reason we can't be anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the world's energy picture."

No one is expecting that over the next 10 years even, but Karas can be hopeful. His optimism helped him before. Why not now?w

Richard B. Priory, chairman and CEO, Duke Energy Corp.

If you don't move, you will fail. So goes the credo of Richard B. Priory, who has carried that testament with him through his 20-plus years at Duke Energy Corp., making himself over from a design engineer to CEO and taking the business from small local player into one that is making tracks as a world powerhouse in energy generation, wholesale trading, and plant design, construction and operation.

Going into 1999, Priory will head Duke's $2 billion in annual investment aimed at building the Charlotte, N.C. company's "asset platform" in midstream gas and electric generation markets.

Priory's laser vision has kept the company focused on what it does best, and that means staying away from retail markets. Unfortunately, that has meant more competitors lately, as companies discover they can't stand the overhead and capital burn rates of investing in retail businesses.

"The bad thing ¼ everyone is revamping their strategies and they appear to be heading down the same path that we are now," Priory says. "Now I've got more competition. So now's the time for innovation again."

Priory stepped into office at about the same time as Duke's $7.7 billion takeover of Houston's PanEnergy Corp. The takeover doubled assets to more than $20 billion and tripled operating revenue to $12 billion-plus. Over 1997-1998, Duke spent $1.2 billion for power plants in California and Connecticut.

Duke also can claim to be one of the largest U.S. power generators through nuclear energy, and Priory is proud that its plants carry some of the lowest capital costs anywhere, as they were built at 60 percent of the national average.

Duke also is a supplier of 12 percent of the country's natural gas. PanEnergy brought more than 37,000 miles of pipeline to the merger. Duke owns 37.5 percent of the Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline, which will eventually ship four trillion cubic feet of gas to the Boston market, and 9.8 percent of the volume of proposed Alliance Pipeline, which will put 1.3 billion cubic feet a day of gas into the Midwest.

Duke has 22,000 employees, making it one of three major employers in Charlotte, N.C. It serves about two million residential customers in North and South Carolina.

For 1999, Duke plans to become the largest energy services company, with enough generation to back up its trading and marketing. Priory says, "you should see us announcing the control or ownership of substantial amounts of additional electric megawattage." Observers also can expect Duke to build plants and be active internationally, especially in Australia and perhaps Latin America. Duke also expects to acquire more natural gas gathering and processing plants.

"We have a strategy that says to be successful, we need a critical mass with regard to our fuel book and ability to convert fuel from molecules into electrons," Priory says. "We have a solid plan on how many megawatts, what type of megawatts, how many transportation routes, access to which supply areas that will make us successful in different regions."

Duke has a habit of building unregulated businesses. Its Duke Engineering & Services Inc., for instance, has been built into a $500 million, 3,000-employee enterprise, making it one of the largest engineering companies in the world. "We have a good deal of expertise in designing and building power plants," Priory says. He notes the engineering subsidiary brought the first phase of its $265-million, 340-megawatt Bridgeport, Conn. project on line in 10 months. The second 180-MW phase is expected to be finished by mid-1999. "I don't think you'll find anyone who's done that, through all the licensing, all the permitting and all the kit and caboodle." w

Paula Rosput, president and COO, Atlanta Gas Light Co.

"There's two kinds of excecutives in this world," says Paula Rosput, who has been president and chief operating officer of Atlanta Gas Light Co. for nearly three months. "Those who sit on the ship and watch the battle and those who storm the beaches. I like to be a risk taker, because it exposes you to much more interesting work."

Rosput has been storming beaches throughout her career, but industry took notice when she boosted the unregulated Duke Energy Power Services from a $100-million asset-based concern to a $1.6-billion company. As president of the Duke subsidiary, she was instrumental in seeing new generation plants built in Connecticut and Florida. She also helped engineer Duke's biggest U.S. power station purchase (em three California plants for $501 million.

Earlier in her career, she had worked at PG&E and PanEnergy Power Services Inc., both of which might called safe, regulated havens.

People tell Rosput that she's "moving backwards."

"'Why would you come back to the regulated business?'" she says they ask her. "And the answer is, these are all variations on the same theme. They all have to do with managing earnings performance."

Atlanta Gas Light's challenge is significant. It is asking Rosput to boost earnings in the face of a deregulating market. The company is the major gas distribution subsidiary of the $1.29-billion AGL Resources Inc. It serves about 1.5 million customers in Georgia and southern Tennessee.

In November, Georgia's gas market opened to competition, in accord with the state's Natural Gas Competition and Deregulation Act. Atlanta Gas Light has decided to stay in the merchant business, forming a marketing subsidiary to sell gas at the retail level. It will compete against 19 marketers certified by the Georgia Public Service Commission. There will be no supplier of last resort, with marketers the de facto suppliers. The local distribution company will continue to own the meter. Customers can choose to receive both sales and delivery services from their utility.

"This isn't an ordinary utility type of assignment here," Rosput says. "This has got components to it that are commodity market oriented ¼ fortunately, Duke and PanEnergy were a great teacher."

Besides building a gas purchase strategy that seeks to minimize its risk on the commodity side, Rosput faces significant challenges on the regulated side of the business.

Prior to her coming on board Sept. 21, the parent company's third-quarter financial results for fiscal 1998 were lackluster. AGL Resources posted a net loss of $1.2 million, blamed on the rate design mandated by the Deregulation Act. Losses also were attributed to start-up marketing expenses for its new retail energy marketing subsidiary and "management restructuring" costs.

The distribution company is adding as many as 50,000 new customers a year, but isn't seeing profit growth. Rosput says Atlanta Gas Light is having a hard time convincing customers of the long-term savings with gas, especially when they can win immediate, electric appliance rebates from competitive co-ops. The utility also has revisited its overly generous line extension policy to reduce how much free footage it allows to housing developers, a source of misused capital.

Atlanta Gas Light's main milestone in 1999, Rosput says, should be consistency and improvement in earnings performance. And it will do so by staying in its own backyard.

Luckily, in some areas, the utility is positioned well. The PSC, following the guidelines of the Deregulation Act, called for a reduction in base rates totalling about $13 million annually and an 11 percent allowed return on equity. Atlanta Gas Light's position in the competitive market also is improved by its 1994 decision to downsize by more than 700 employees.

Rosput says it's anyone's bet as to how the competitive markets will work out. "It's really something all of us will have to watch."

All will be watching but Rosput, that is. She'll be "storming the beaches."

Robert W. Shaw Jr., president, Aretê Corp.

If you asked Robert W. Shaw Jr. to describe his job, his explanation would be simple: "I just look around and see what's going on. And it all seems very clear to me that there's change in the wind. So my objective is to encourage people to look at the signs and opportunities and seize them."

Shaw is a venture capitalist whose Aretê Ventures Inc., and now Aretê Corp., have invested millions in energy and telecommunications technology. His successful investments include Ballard Power Systems Inc., now a $24 million company in Canada; Ciena Corp., one of the largest IPOs ever, raising $100 million; and Superconductivity Inc., a pioneer in voltage stabilization with superconducting magnets, purchased by American Superconductor in April of 1997.

Shaw's reason why he likes to build successful companies? "It's like leaving your mark. It's like being a great painter and leaving your paintings behind. My paintings are little companies."

Shaw wasn't always a venture capitalist. He started as a scientist. He's probably one of the few VCs with a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford University. Early in his career, he conducted materials and electronics research at Bell Laboratories and the Cavendish Laboratory in the United Kingdom.

In 1972, his career took a turn. Hired on as a junior scientist at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, he quickly found himself on a fast track as a consultant. By 1975, he was a vice president. He says his personality wasn't suited to sitting at a desk and doing theoretical equations all day. "I was truthfully good at it, but also antsy," he says.

By 1979 he was senior vice president and had founded the firm's energy division, building it to a $14 million practice.

Four years later, he would open Aretê Ventures Inc. of Rockville, Md.

He still manages five funds there, but formed his own business Aretê Corp., of Center Harbor, N.H., to concentrate on distributed technology and microgeneration. He manages the Micro- Generation Technology Fund, which can provide as much as $2 million in equity capital to companies developing micro-generation and related systems.

The only investors in Shaw's funds are utilities. Each investment is a blind pool. Investors put money in and Aretê invests it, then delivers a return.

So far the Micro-Generation Technology Fund has invested about $30 million, adding to the more than $100 million already pumped into other Aretê ventures. Some 28 of 65 investments are still active.

Shaw says he tries to see patterns in business before they're evident to others. Others see the patterns, especially in distributed generation, "but it's certainly not become a chorus yet."

Often, looking "at the signs" means actually stepping up and starting a business. In 1987, when Shaw saw an announcement by IBM that scientists there had discovered high-temperature superconducting materials, he realized the opportunity for such materials in the utility industry. He helped charter a company (em Superconductivity Inc.

"We created a company and financed it without actually having a ¼ specific objective," he says. "Other than to do something of importance to the utility industry with superconducting materials."

Superconductivity Inc. was the first to invent the micro-SMES, a voltage stabilization device.

Finding good deals, does not come easily, however.

His firm reviews hundreds of deals annually. "The most troubling thing is to discover after you put your money in that some major disaster has occurred in the marketplace," he says. "And something that you thought was going to propel the company to success is not going to happen.

"Occasionally, we get blinded by the optimism of the entrepreneur and don't put enough rationality into the decision-making about the price or the price of the deal or the rate of growth, and we live to regret that."

David L. Sokol, chairman and CEO, CalEnergy Co. Inc.

Everything about David L. Sokol's numbers add up to success.

CalEnergy's 1990 revenues were just under $100 million. They'll top $2.5 billion this year. Assets were $150 million in 1990. With its proposed $4-billion merger with MidAmerican Energy Holding Co., set to close in early 1999, assets will register $13 billion. Share price was $5.50 cents in 1990 (em it's more than four times that today. In 1990, CalEnergy had one customer. With the MidAmerican merger, it will have 3.5 million

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