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Duke Energy joins national Careers Electric™ coalition to build next-generation energy workforce

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The coalition aims to train 25,000 workers over the next 10 years, creating pathways to stable, well-paying careers

CHARLOTTE, N.C., June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Duke Energy has joined the newly launched Careers Electric coalition, a new sector-driven approach to workforce development in America’s skilled trades, with a targeted focus on North Carolina.

Why it matters: As electrification accelerates across energy, infrastructure and advanced manufacturing, electrical careers are projected to grow by roughly 10% over the next decade, with workforce gaps widening as experienced workers retire.

Our role: Duke Energy will help connect training to real-world job opportunities and ensure programs are aligned with industry needs, with a focus on commercial electricians, where demand is most acute. The company will:

Connect students to careers: Partner with companies like Zachry Group to create clearer pathways from training to job opportunities, particularly tied to major energy infrastructure and generation projects.Invest in training capacity: Support community colleges and workforce programs through Duke Energy Foundation funding, which has provided more than $6 million over the past five years to strengthen the energy workforce pipeline.Support local expansion: Champion new or expanded programs near Duke Energy construction sites to better align workforce supply with regional demand.Engage students early: Participate in graduation events and career fairs at training academies to raise awareness of electrical careers and connect students directly to employers.

North Carolina focus: The coalition’s early work in North Carolina could become a blueprint for other states and centers on two key pathways:

High schools: In 2026, the program aims to train 200-250 students and plans to scale annually.Community colleges: Ten North Carolina community colleges will expand existing advanced electrician programs by 20% over the next three years, with plans to grow to additional schools.

What they’re saying:

Kendal Bowman, Duke Energy’s North Carolina president: “The energy transition and our state’s growth depend on a strong skilled workforce. We’re grateful to Siemens for their leadership in launching Careers Electric and bringing partners together for this first-of-its-kind effort. This initiative is about creating clear, accessible pathways into high-paying electrical careers – especially those that don’t require a four-year degree – and helping build a pipeline of electricians ready to support North Carolina’s future.”David Etzwiler, CEO of the Siemens Foundation: “High-quality workforce training is essential not only to meet employers’ growing demand for skilled talent, but also to expand access to well-paying trade careers for more Americans. Seeing industry leaders, including competitor companies, come together as part of this powerful coalition underscores just how important workforce training is to the strength of our economies and communities.”

Who’s involved: Duke Energy joins founding industry partners ABB, Amazon Web Services, JetZero, Hitachi Energy and Siemens, alongside workforce development organizations and education leaders working to scale proven training models nationwide.

Local partners include:

NC Chamber, NC Department of Commerce, NC Electric CooperativesNC Business Committee for Education, Wake Technical Community College, NC Community College System Office and Foundation, EVITP, and Families and Workers Fund

Duke Energy 
Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is one of America’s largest energy holding companies. The company’s electric utilities serve 8.7 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, and collectively own 55,700 megawatts of energy capacity. Its natural gas utilities serve 1.6 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio and Kentucky.

Duke Energy is executing an energy modernization strategy, keeping customer value at the forefront as it invests in electric grid upgrades and efficient generation resources to strengthen the system and serve growing energy needs.

More information is available at duke-energy.com. Follow Duke Energy on X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook for stories about the people and innovations powering its communities.

Contact: Madison McDonald
24-Hour: 800.559.3853

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/duke-energy-joins-national-careers-electric-coalition-to-build-next-generation-energy-workforce-302798144.html

SOURCE Duke Energy

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San Jose City Employees Get Strike-Ready After Several Months of Stalled Contract Negotiations with City Administration

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SAN JOSE, Calif., July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — On Wednesday, July 29, hundreds of San Jose city employees and members of IFPTE Local 21 and MEF-AFSCME Local 101 will attend Strike School to learn what it means to strike and the laws that protect their right to strike. Organization around Strike School comes after months of stalled negotiations between city workers and the City Administration. Workers have signed a strike pledge and held several informational pickets to shed light on San Jose being the most thinly staffed agency in the state, as well as the City’s implementation of AI without any guardrails, which further jeopardizes quality public services. Workers are forced to do more with less across all city departments. This Strike School session comes as the second of two- the first took place on Saturday, July 25, with hundreds of members in attendance.

Who: Hundreds of City of San Jose employees represented by IFPTE Local 21 and MEF-AFSCME Local 101. Spokespeople will be available for interviews before the members-only program.

What: San Jose Strike School Session #2

When/Where: Wednesday, July 29, 2026, at San Jose First United Methodist Church (24 N 5th St, San Jose, CA 95112). The program begins at 5:30 pm; registration begins at 5:00 pm

Visuals: Workers in blue, green, and teal union shirts, with banners and picket signs

BACKGROUND: In June, after receiving the City’s Last, Best, and Final Offer (LBFO) and working to reach a deal before contract expiration and City Council’s summer recess, San Jose workers called for mediation in order to reach a fair agreement.

Now, at the end of July, members of both unions have been without a contract for over a month. Instead of investing in our community, city officials have elected to spend taxpayer money on corporate giveaways through massive contracts with ineffective AI companies and an outrageous $325 million subsidy towards hockey arena renovations. The City could develop a strategy that ensures corporations pay their fair share from benefitting directly from city services. Instead, San Jose insists on cutting taxes for some of the largest corporations that occupy the city, while residents and working families pay more. Workers are preparing to go on strike if necessary.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/san-jose-city-employees-get-strike-ready-after-several-months-of-stalled-contract-negotiations-with-city-administration-302837042.html

SOURCE IFPTE Local 21

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Modine Publishes 2026 Sustainability Report

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RACINE, Wis., July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Modine (NYSE: MOD), a diversified global leader in thermal management technology and solutions, today announced the publication of its 2026 Sustainability Report. Titled Purpose-Driven Engineering, the report highlights the company’s significant progress in environmental stewardship, including the early achievement of its 2030 targets for both energy and water intensity, alongside major strides in product innovation and strategic transformation.

During fiscal year 2026, Modine accelerated its sustainability momentum. The company achieved reductions in energy and water intensity based on a 2018 baseline, surpassing its 2030 targets for both metrics. Additionally, Modine maintained strong, consistent progress on reducing absolute Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions based on a 2018 baseline.

“FY26 represents a pivotal moment for Modine as global trends continue to accelerate demand for advanced thermal management solutions,” said Neil D. Brinker, Modine President and Chief Executive Officer. “As we move into this next phase of our company, our direction is both ambitious and intentional. We will continue expanding our portfolio of advanced data center and commercial HVAC&R technologies and partnering closely with customers to build infrastructure that is more resilient and more efficient.”

To support the sustainability of these growing markets, Modine introduced new solutions, expanded the use of AI across products and operations, and advanced efforts to further embed sustainability throughout its value chain. As part of these continuous improvement efforts, the company received independent limited assurance on its GHG emissions data for the first time.

Looking ahead, the company plans to develop new forward-looking targets to account for the transformational change in its business and the opportunity to continue serving customers in high-growth markets.

“Our progress this year, particularly in surpassing our 2030 energy and water intensity goals years ahead of schedule, is a testament to the dedication of our global workforce,” said Erin J. Roth, Modine Vice President, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary and Chief Compliance Officer, who leads the company’s sustainability program. “Sustainability is embedded in how we operate and innovate, and we are proud of our collaborative efforts to engineer a cleaner, healthier world.”

Learn more about Modine’s efforts by reading our 2026 Sustainability Report, available at Modine.com.

About Modine
For more than 100 years, Modine has solved the toughest thermal management challenges for mission-critical applications. Our purpose of Engineering a Cleaner, Healthier World™ means we are always evolving our portfolio of technologies to provide the latest heating, cooling, and ventilation solutions. Through the hard work of more than 13,000 employees worldwide, our businesses advance our purpose with systems that improve air quality, reduce energy and water consumption, lower harmful emissions, enable cleaner running vehicles, and use environmentally friendly refrigerants. Modine is a global company headquartered in Racine, Wisconsin (U.S.), with operations in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. For more information about Modine, visit modine.com.

Contact: sustainability@modine.com 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/modine-publishes-2026-sustainability-report-302837053.html

SOURCE Modine

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Firmable launches MCP, giving sales teams a direct line from any AI tool to verified company and contact data

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New Firmable MCP brings GTM data, CRM context, and buyer intent into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and more.

SAN FRANCISCO and MELBOURNE, Australia, July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Firmable, the AI-native B2B sales platform, launched its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, giving revenue teams the ability to run go-to-market activity directly from the AI tools they already use. The Firmable MCP is available now through Firmable Connect, a new hub at https://connect.firmable.ai that brings together MCP, webhooks, native CRM integrations, and API access in one place.

Sales teams have spent the past two years bolting AI onto old workflows and legacy data platforms. Reps switch between five tabs to build a single account list. Agents hallucinate company details because they’re working from stale, unverified data. CRMs fill up with duplicate records nobody trusts. The AI tools got smarter. The connection to the data underneath them didn’t keep up.

That gap is exactly what Firmable was built to close. “Every competitor in this space talks AI now,” said Karthik Venkatasubramanian, co-founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer at Firmable. “Most of them mean an AI layer sitting on top of a legacy database. Firmable is AI-native from the ground up, continuously sourcing, assembling, and refreshing accurate data and buying signals, not retrofitting an old system to sound like a new one.”

Firmable’s Lead GTM Engineer Asher Chua will introduce the MCP connector and illustrate its use in a live and recorded webinar on August 12. Register here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/4817852096930/WN_asz65zH-RXeB85Crg1mlqg

Kieran Krohn is Head of Growth at ScaleStation, a Firmable and HubSpot partner specializing in GTM strategy and processes. “We’re big fans of Firmable and have been impressed with the quality of their data, which is why we recommend them to our customers,” he said. “As we move deeper into a world of AI, we find it more and more useful to be able to leverage Claude as the operating layer that connects into our different systems. Having access to Firmable’s data via MCP makes a huge difference in being able to pull that data and manipulate it with intelligence.”

One connection, five unique processes beneath

The Firmable MCP gives almost any AI tool – Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Codex, or Cursor – direct access to the Firmable B2B data stack. What makes it different comes down to five layers working together, continuously, before a rep ever types a prompt:

AI-native sourcing. Firmable’s proprietary AI pulls from hundreds of datasets to build its own map of the market, rather than reselling the same licensed feeds most other vendors use. That means more company profiles, deeper decision-maker detail, and stronger mobile and email coverage. Teams switching from Apollo or ZoomInfo consistently uncover meaningful net-new contacts on day one, and in head-to-head testing, Firmable delivers significantly higher verified mobile coverage than these legacy vendors in the same market.Structure at scale. AI agents map, resolve, and clean every record automatically, stripping out bots, inactive accounts, and stale profiles before anything reaches a user. Inefficient manual list curation is not required.Refreshed and verified. Database segments refresh continuously, and every record is cross-checked against live signals, so sellers aren’t calling a number that was disconnected two months ago or emailing someone who changed jobs in the spring.Insights at speed. AI agents scan constantly for what matters: role changes, hiring surges, funding rounds, and surface it as an assigned CRM action, not as a chart buried in a dashboard.Delivered for action. All of this reaches reps wherever they already work, in the Firmable app, through the new MCP connector in Claude and ChatGPT, via two-way CRM sync, or through webhooks and API access for custom workflows.

A rep can now ask their AI assistant to build a list of mid-market SaaS companies in San Francisco and map the buying committee at each one, and get verified, ready-to-action results in one step instead of ten.

Built-in guardrails, not just built-in AI

Firmable’s MCP marketplace, part of Firmable Connect, already contains an industry-leading set of 540 pre-built skills and prompts.

Some, like CRM Push Prep, add a layer that most AI tools skip. Before any list is written to Salesforce, HubSpot, or Microsoft Dynamics 365, CRM Push Prep previews exactly what will be created and what will be updated; flags duplicates; shows the cost and waits for the rep to confirm the list by name. No AI tool gets to write to a CRM unsupervised.

Other popular skills include Account Brief, which pulls firmographics, tech footprint, and ICP fit into one structured answer, and Buying Committee Mapper, which grounds its recommendations in real, verified Firmable contacts weighted by what the rep is selling.

Firmable Connect: one platform, four ways in

Firmable Connect is the new home for this capability. Alongside the MCP, the platform offers webhooks that push job and role changes, funding rounds, and intent spikes straight into Slack or any workflow tool; native two-way sync for HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Microsoft Dynamics 365; and direct API access for teams building on Firmable data. Setup takes seconds: install the MCP, authenticate with OAuth, and run a first GTM skill in under two minutes.

“We didn’t want to be another data vendor with an API bolted on,” said Leigh Jasper, co-founder and co-CEO of Firmable. “Other tools hand you a database and wish you luck, but Firmable is your AI sales teammate. We wanted to meet revenue teams inside the tools they’ve already adopted for AI, and to make sure what shows up there is data they trust enough to act on immediately, with the context they need. Smarter data, sharper timing, that’s the whole bet behind Firmable Connect.”

The launch lands as Firmable accelerates its expansion into the US and Canada, building on its established base across Australia, New Zealand, and wider APAC. The MCP is available today, with a free trial for new users.

Firmable MCP is available now at https://connect.firmable.ai/mcp, where the full skill and prompt marketplace can be browsed, and downloaded into your AI tool. Teams can start a free trial at https://app.firmable.com/sign-up.

About Firmable

Firmable is an AI-native B2B sales platform, your AI sales teammate, that helps revenue teams find, understand, and connect with the right buyers at the right time. Combining verified company and contact data with CRM context, buyer intent, and agentic AI, Firmable powers go-to-market teams across the US and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. www.firmable.ai

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/firmable-launches-mcp-giving-sales-teams-a-direct-line-from-any-ai-tool-to-verified-company-and-contact-data-302836625.html

SOURCE Firmable

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