The Fortune Visionaries

Jim Rogers is an anomaly. His Duke Energy, the third-largest utility in the U.S., relies on coal, a rock that accounts for 45% of America's power needs.

Yet Rogers is an environmentalist and renewables evangelist. He's also a believer in "clean coal," or splitting carbon dioxide from coal and storing it deep beneath the earth, which Duke (DUK) is proofing with a coal gasification plant in Indiana. Rogers has invested in wind technology, attended the Copenhagen Climate Conference, and partnered with Chinese firms to build solar power plants.

"Between now and 2050, we're going to go from 6.5 billion to 9 billion people, and they're going to want more electricity," he says. "The battle over scarce resources to generate electricity and build power plants is going to be tremendous. I want to be a part of shaping that dual mission of modernization and de-carbonization of our fleet and making our communities the most energy-efficient in the world."

NEXT: James Cameron