Southern Maryland gets it power via the South Maryland Electric Cooperative (SMECO), which distributes electricity to more than 147,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers in four counties. One of the ten largest electric cooperatives in the US, the member-owned enterprise gets its wholesale power supply through its membership in ACES Power Marketing. SMECO's service area includes all of Calvert and St. Mary's counties, and parts of of Calvert and Prince George's counties. Cities covered include Hughesville, Leonardtown, Prince Frederick, and White Plains.

The dryly named electric utility Electric Power Development Co. has a much more fun nickname -- J-POWER. With a generating capacity of 16,380 MW, the company supplies power used all over Japan. It has 67 hydroelectric plants, as well as some thermal and geothermal plants, and owns a transmission network that covers 2,400 km. J-POWER acts as a wholesale electric utility, selling to other electric power companies. Established by the Japanese government in 1952, J-POWER went through the privatization process, finally achieving full privatization and trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2004. The company is also sometimes referred to as EPDC.

Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative's mission is similar to the late Lady Bird Johnson's quest to spread wildflower seeds along Texas' highways -- the cooperative spreads currents of electricity among rural central Texas dwellers. One of the largest power distribution cooperatives in the state, Bluebonnet Electric serves almost 80,000 customers in 14 counties. The member-owned company, which was formed in 1939, operates approximately 11,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines, and 19 substations. It purchases its wholesale power supply at 21 Lower Colorado River Authority-owned substations.

A company so nice they named it twice is doubling its efforts to deliver power. NRG Energy, a leading power producer with a generating capacity of about 24,500 MW (including 345 MW from renewable energy), is moving onward and upward. The vast majority of NRG's power plants are in North America, but it also has one in Australia and one in Germany. The company's global portfolio includes about 190 generation units at 47 power plants. It also markets natural gas, oil, and other commodities, and invests in district heating and cooling and alternative energy projects. Its retail unit, Reliant Energy, distributes power to more than 1.6 million residential, business, commercial, and industrial customers in Texas.

ENVIRON is looking to clean up financially while helping to clean up the environment. An international environmental consulting firm, ENVIRON specializes in assessing risk factors related to the presence of chemicals in the environment and in products such as food, drugs, medical devices, and consumer goods. The consulting firm also helps clients comply with various environmental regulations. The company operates through two practices: environmental sciences and energy services; and health sciences. ENVIRON maintains offices in 18 countries the US, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region, and has completed projects in more than 70 countries.

BKW FMB Energy has been lighting up the lives of the Swiss for more than a century. BKW produces, transmits, and distributes energy to more than 1 million residential and business end users in Switzerland and neighboring countries. The company also trades in energy. BKW operates about 13 hydroelectric plants and one nuclear power plant; it has stakes in another 15 hydroelectric plants, three nuclear power plants, and two plants that generate electricity from wind, solar and biomass sources. The total generating capacity of its plants is 640 MW. The government of the canton of Bern owns more than half of BKW.

Orival manufactures self-cleaning water filters, automatic water filters, and strainers for industrial and agricultural use as irrigation filters, cooling tower filters, industrial water filters, and HVAC filters. The company has installed units in more than 40 countries. Orival's products are flexible in design so that the company can cater to a wide range of customized orders and local requirements -- form single units, flange-to-flange systems, and complete skid mounted packages, to diverse construction standards, alternate flanges, and voltage standards.

TestAmerica Laboratories (formerly Severn Trent Laboratories) can tell you. It operates about 40 environmental testing laboratories and more than 30 service centers in the US. TestAmerica provides chemical, physical, and biological testing of air, drinking water, tissue, and solid waste. The company has developed technologies to test air for fire retardants, explosives, radiation, and source emissions. Its affiliates include environmental and geotechnical drilling firm TestAmerica Drilling, water sampling equipment and remediation pumping system provider QED Environmental Systems, and air quality analyst EMLab P&K).

SCS Tracer Environmental traces its financial success to its large portfolio of environmental engineering, consulting, and monitoring services. Among the firm's specialties are ambient air monitoring, counter-terrorism support, environmental advisory services and environmental construction, permitting and compliance, and risk management and safety, and research and development. In addition to private sector clients, the company also works on contracts for the federal government. SCS Tracer's staff includes atmospheric scientists, engineers, and meteorologists. The firm was named Tracer Environmental Sciences & Technologies until being acquired by SCS Engineers in late 2009.

ThermoEnergy Corporation, a clean technologies company, develops municipal and industrial wastewater treatment systems, and carbon reducing clean energy technologies worldwide. The company's technologies include Zero Emission Boiler system, which converts fossil fuels and biomass into electricity without producing air emissions, as well as removes and captures carbon dioxide in liquid form for sequestration or beneficial reuse; and Controlled Atmosphere Separation Technology (CAST), R-CAST, and proprietary water technologies. Its technologies also comprise Ammonia Recovery Process technology that captures ammonia from dilute waste streams and converts it into ammonium sulfate; ThermoFuel Process, a renewable energy process, which converts digested or waste activated sewage sludge into an energy fuel that could be converted into electricity for use on-site or sold as a feedstock to third party industrial clients; and Enhanced Biogas Production process, which retrofits existing wastewater treatment plants to recover excess ammonia from the digesters. The company's wastewater treatment systems are used in the aerospace, food and beverage processing, metal finishing, pulp and paper, petrochemical, refining, microchip and circuit board manufacturing, heavy manufacturing, and municipal wastewater applications. Thermoenergy Corporation has a strategic alliance with Contego Systems LLC to provide solutions for airplane deicing. The company was founded in 1988 and is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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