Smart Grid Industry Booms in North Carolina's Triangle

A Duke University report trumpeted that fact, concluding that only California has significantly more smart grid vendor firms.

The reason? Perhaps it's because North Carolina has "a number of institutions already contributing to smart grid development, including specialized R&D centers, Tier I research universities, energy efficiency and renewable energy firms, and supportive government and non-profit agencies," according to the report.

John Murawski of the Charlotte News-Observer thinks it's not that simple: "No one is sure when Smart Grid technology achieved the critical mass here to qualify as an industry cluster, but the field has drawn liberally on the region's abundance of engineers, scientists and programmers, some of whom lost their jobs in formerly high-flying tech companies that hit hard times."