A: One of the things that's taking up most of our time as a company and my time and that's meeting the needs of the needs of our customers in such a high growth areas in the Carolinas and Florida. We're seeing tremendous growth projected and we're having to build to generation to adequately serve our customers. And we're doing it in an environment of high fuel costs and significant environmental constraints. That's both a challenge for us in picking the right technologies that will be affordable for our customers and also finance the type of construction that we'll be doing over the next 10 years. It probably affects every part of our strategy. Right now when we look at the environmental issues, including the likely regulation of carbon over the over the next five years, nuclear is certainly a viable option. But we're also looking at other things from renewables, other alternate energy-type sources, just things that will help us get through these periods. We are looking at everything on more of an alternate energy are A: hydrogen, solar in Florida, contracting to use more municipal incinerator waste to help us supply energy. We are looking in Florida at burning essentially bamboo, which I think they call it E-Grass, but it has a very high energy content, and we're looking at possibly using that for fuel. And added together it could certainly contribute to some of our energy needs in the future. We don't have [solar] panel farms. It's really more on I'd guess you'd call it an experimental basis right now. We're working with the state and the school systems and groups like that to put in solar installations at select facilities. Right it's not something that is a big contributor to our business but it's more on an experimental or pilot-type program. But some of this stuff with biomass and municipal incineration, those are making a contribution; they're equivalent to a good-sized power plant probably all added together.

We are aggressively going forward with an application for a [nuclear] plant and it's allowing us to move down the line without spending a lot of money at this point. We'll probably have to make a decision in about two years -- kind-of a go or no-go -- but it certainly looks promising at this point.

Q: What's one thing you didn't see coming?

A: In the last year in particular it's been the unprecedented runup in natural gas prices. It's affected all aspects of our business. It's had a large impact on our customers, particularly in Florida but also in the Carolinas. None of the projections that you would see on forward prices on natural gas projected some of this stuff. Even in the pass-through aspect of it, we're spreading it over time to minimize the impact on the customers. To the extent it minimizes the impact, it has more impact on us. Maybe another thing is the prospect of regulation of greenhouse gases is something that is moved forward a lot quicker in the last year than people have anticipated. While it's not really impacting our company at this moment, I know a lot of people in our industry think that dealing with carbon in the atmosphere could be one of the biggest issues facing our industry over the next five years.

Q: What's the most innovative thing you've seen or heard of another company doing?

A: I'm not sure as far as our industry goes, nothing really jumps out at me. There were no Blackberries or iPods in our industry right now that I can put my hands on. But certainly Blackberries and iPods have been very innovative and have changed the way we recreate and work. On the technical side of our business you see gradual improvements in the things that we do, but I think of that as evolutionary. There are things out there -- automated meters and broadband over powerlines -- but they just haven't caught on to a degree that's making a large impact on our industry.

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