Capital Markets Day Transcript - ENJ 2026-06-09

Liz Hunter, Head of Investor Relations

Good afternoon, and welcome to Entergy's Investor Day. I'm Liz Hunter, Vice President of Investor Relations. We have a couple of items to cover before we begin our program. First, we'll start with a safety message from Lieutenant Sabah on behalf of the New York Stock Exchange. Lieutenant.

Lieutenant Sabah, Analyst — Lieutenant, New York Stock Exchange

Hello, everybody, and welcome. As she said, my name is Lieutenant Sabah. I'm here 45 years, and my partner's here 31, so that's over 80 years combined. just to tell you a little bit about ourselves we're both fire safety directors the important thing is we have all these large groups everybody should know where the exits are we have three exits on this floor a B and C they're all emergency exits you'll be instructed by our fire safety team and God forbid of an emergency what exit to take we tell you not to take the elevators unless otherwise instructed we all our security offices are CPR and AED an emergency oxygen so just in case there is a medical will respond sergeant Ramos is going to show you all the exits now which is very important because I could tell you where they are but you like you may not find them so he's gonna show you now sergeant ramos he's going to take you to the actual exits we would yeah okay you have the a staircase it'll take you down to 11 wall and new street the b and c staircases will take you to broad street and then the staging area will be right outside uh we we just emphasize you know when you get up and take a break, walk around A, B, and C. We have an interior staircase, which is, it goes from 7 to 6. We advise you not to take that, because that's not going to take you outside. So just remember, A, B, and C. And pretty much that's it. You know, welcome, have a good time, and a safe time. A nice meeting you all.

Liz Hunter, Head of Investor Relations

Thank you. As you all know, today we will make certain forward-looking statements, and as you would expect, actual results may vary due to market conditions and other factors. We are so excited to have you all here with us this afternoon. It is great to see so many friendly faces in the audience, as well as know we have many familiar faces listening online as well. Today, we are going to share with you the story of Entergy's growth opportunity. Kicking us off, Drew Marsh will highlight progress that we've made since our 2024 Investor Day in New Orleans, as well as share an update on our business strategy. Next, AWS and Meta are here, and you will hear from Brandon Oyer of AWS and Nat Solstrom of Meta, as well as Haley Forsackerly for Entergy Mississippi and Phillip May for Entergy Louisiana in a conversation about powerful partnerships and how we're able to work together to benefit all stakeholders. We'll have a brief break and then Kimberly Cook Nelson and Bill Abler will take us on a deeper dive into Entergy's strategy for execution on growth and operations. And Kimberly Fontan will share our strong financial plan and how it's differentiated. Drew Marsh will round us out on near-term and long-term growth drivers and opportunities. You may have questions as we go throughout the day. We ask you to please hold your questions until the end. The six energy management presenters today will have a live 30-minute question and answer session where they will be able to answer your questions at that time. We're thrilled to have you here and we can't wait to get started. So without further ado, introduce Chair and CEO, Drew Marsh.

Drew Marsh, CEO

Good afternoon, everybody. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you all for being here. Thank you, Liz, for introducing us. It's an exciting day. We have a lot of things going on. We have a story to tell you that starts with tremendous unmatched outlooks in the industry, and it also includes a lot of things that aren't yet in our outlooks. And these are all for the benefit of our stakeholders. So it's a unique opportunity for us to tell our story, and we're excited that you're here. So I'm gonna start, as Liz said, talking about the plans that we set out for you two years ago at our investor day. And we have been sticking close to those plans. They have yielded significant benefits for our four key stakeholders. And then I'm gonna tease a little bit about the opportunities that are still ahead of us, but it'll get filled in by some of the other presenters, as Liz said. So let's get started. Two years ago, when you all came to New Orleans for Investor Day, we said that we wanted to be the premier utility. And I'll admit there were a few snickers in the room when we said that two years ago. We said what we wanted to do was to create value for our four key stakeholders. We wanted to make sure that our customers had success and they were loyal. We wanted to make sure that our employees were talented and engaged. We wanted to make sure that our communities were growing and vibrant. And if we had those things, we were confident that our owners would get to earn their returns. So that was what we wanted to do. We also laid out how we wanted to do it. And it starts with our customers. always starts with our customers. What do our customers want to achieve? What are they trying to do going forward? How can we help them? And then we got busy trying to transform ourselves to meet those customer expectations. Things like changing our culture, changing our mindsets, changing our skills and capabilities, changing our organization design in some cases, our processes, whatever it took to make sure that the customer needs could be met. And with that in hand, we got to work, trying to execute with excellence. And that started with building a plan. Building a plan that met all the goals of our four key stakeholders. And once we had that, we broadened it out to a much bigger stakeholder group. That's part of our stakeholder engagement efforts. And that allowed us to create all kinds of opportunities going forward. Once we had that in hand, we could get them to buy, to help us to buy into, support what we were doing, to give us input and feedback, and go on to actually give us some arms and legs to get the approvals required going forward. Once we had those approvals, then we would drive to operational excellence in the capital project space and in the operational excellence, an ongoing operation space. Having gone through all of that work in the how, we could get to the outcomes that we were looking for for key stakeholders. And of course, two years ago, we talked about the sales growth opportunity that we had. And it's the same sales growth opportunity that we have today. You know about the technology space and all of the data centers. That part is very clear, and there's a lot more opportunity, and we'll get to that. today we have two of our largest customers here to talk about it. But I want to remind you about the on-shoring piece. That's our more traditional industrial customers. And the ingredients for that that have been driving 5% growth over the last 15 years are still in place. That includes access to the Gulf Coast and Mississippi River to get our customers to get to international markets. that includes abundant energy and transportation infrastructure in our service territory it includes welcoming communities and of course it also includes some of the lowest energy costs in the country including us having some of those low electricity costs some of the lowest in the country and the basis from those costs to other key markets in the world Europe and Asia that hasn't changed and we do not expect that that will change anytime soon so that is a ongoing continued advantage for our region. And then the other opportunities are still there. Clean energy. Our industrial customers ultimately need to clean up their emissions. And electrification, which is a multi-decade trend. Those are not as prominent in our current outlooks, but they are going to be significant in years to come. So we're excited about all of these things. And following this plan and these opportunities is what has created a lot of value for our four key stakeholders. So let's talk a little bit about the value that was created for our four key stakeholders, starting with our customers. And the proof, the most obvious piece of proof for that is that our customers are showing up. When we talked to you two years ago to today, our electric service agreement backlog has grown by nearly double. And it's an incredible backlog that includes lots of major companies. Yes, data centers are in there, but it also includes L&G and steel and petrochemical companies. So it is a very diverse backlog. It also includes robust international companies with a lot of experience at industrial development. So there's a lot of capability in the backlog. And of course, it's continuing to grow. So it's an exciting backlog that we have, and there's a lot more associated with it. Of course, our industrial customers only make up a little over 50% of our sales, and we have 3.1 million customers. The vast majority of our customers are residential customers, so we pay close attention to them as well. We're proud to say that we still have some of the lowest residential rates in the country. Our advantage over the national average for rates is continuing to grow. And that is translated to continually lower share of wallet for our residential customers. We are at 25-year lows and we do not see that changing anytime soon. And while we've heard a lot about dissatisfied residential customers from the national media, it is a very different story in our service territory. In the last two years, our net promoter scores have risen dramatically, such that we are now in the first quartile for the industry on net promoter scores. So that's a lot of what our customers have been experiencing, but they have a lot more to still look forward to. And it comes in the form of the Fair Share Plus Pledge. Of course, that is the pledge that we've made that matches up with our data center customers rate payer protection pledge. And fair share means that the data center customers are going to cover the incremental costs associated with serving them. It also means that they're going to pick up their share of fixed costs, things like storm costs and overhead costs. And that adds up. over the 15- to 20-year lives of these contracts, that means $7 billion of savings for our existing customers. And Kimberly Fontan will talk a little bit about the contract provisions that are helping make sure that those savings stay in place. Of course, we care about our employees as well. Our employees are critical to our success. We've gotten a lot of, our employees have experienced a lot of upside in all of this growth, right? they are we are learning a lot we are learning new processes new tools new capabilities and we're growing and it's energetic and exciting so there's a lot of our employee experience that we've been gaining as an organization but we also know that we need to attract to retain our talent on an ongoing basis in today's competitive market so we've been actively improving our benefits to try to do that we've also been upping our game on training and development leadership and team building, and also individual capability building, like AI, and making sure that our own employees can figure out the best way for them to make their job more productive, make themselves more productive, and make their lived experience as an Intergy employee more valuable to them. With those things in mind, we have driven down voluntary turnover at Intergy by 15% in the last couple of years. And that means that we have more productivity internally, and we have a much better chance to execute on all of the activities that are ahead of us. Beyond employees is communities, and we've been active in communities for a long time. In the last year, our employees racked up over 600,000 hours volunteering, and our various philanthropic initiatives created over 145 million dollars of economic value in the communities that we serve. But the place where we can have the highest impact is in the multiplier effect of economic development. That's where our biggest opportunity is, and this is where the plus part of Fair Share Plus actually comes in. In that plus part are more jobs and more revenues through tax dollars and other mechanisms in communities. That means help and support for schools and libraries and fire departments in the communities we serve. A great example is Richland Parish. Teacher pay in Richland Parish was in the bottom ten in the state of Louisiana and now it's moving into the top ten in the state of Louisiana. Now Richland Parish is one example but this is playing out in counties and parishes throughout our service territory because it's not all happening in one place. It's happening throughout. And the benefits for our communities aren't just coming through tax dollars. They're also coming through the customer bill. Things like investments in energy efficiency that our customers are making and we are making. Investments in low-income initiatives and also through the infrastructure that we're building. The infrastructure that we're building is making our grid more resilient, which in turn makes our communities more resilient. And it also means that the infrastructure we're making is going to be more fuel efficient. And that benefits our customers, which benefits our communities. And we know that if we create value for our customers, our employees in our communities that is the bedrock for our stakeholder engagement. So two years ago we talked about stakeholder engagement as a new focus area for us and our strategy was to highlight these benefits on an ongoing basis and as we did that we could bring the benefits not only to these key stakeholders but we could spread the word to other critical stakeholders in in the processes that we are running. And as we did that, we gained followership, support, and sometimes, as I said, arms and legs to actually go out and make these things happen. And the benefit of then ongoing success in legislation to drive additional economic development, success in getting more resilience, success in getting faster storm cost recovery, All of these things are benefiting customers and communities. And as we said before, our formula is to create value for our customers, our employees, and our communities so that our owners will earn their return. And here is the evidence that that's happening. Our sales growth from two years ago has doubled to 9%. Our five-year capital plan from two years ago has doubled to $67 billion. Our total shareholder return is more than doubled the S&P 500 over that time frame. And of course, our earnings per share growth rate is nearly double the median of the S&P 500, excuse me, the utility peers. That is premier utility performance. And so we are very excited about that. And maybe we should stop there. But wait, there's more. You'll hear from our customers in a minute. And they are going to talk about their continued interest in growing through, and they're going to need more electricity for that. That's a significant opportunity for us going forward. But it's not just about electricity from data centers. There is still the industrial growth opportunity. There is still electrification. There is still clean energy opportunities. And beyond that, beyond electricity sales, there are other products and services that our customers need from us, starting with resilience. We've been talking about resilience for several years now, and that is still ongoing. And there are clean energy investments. And Kimberly Cook Nelson will be up here in a minute to talk about some of our strategies associated with the clean energy investments and the resilience, how we can cross that economic threshold so that our customers can benefit from our work. So these are the opportunities that are in front of us, and of course, as we always do, we're gonna start with our customers. And so we're gonna set the stage and bring our customers up with Haley and Phillip, and we'll get started with the next section. Thank you.

Haley Fisackerly, CEO

Well, good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for what I think is gonna be one of the most important conversations we have this afternoon. And that is a discussion with two of our largest, most sophisticated and fastest growing customers in our system. I'm Haley Fisackley, President and CEO of Energy Mississippi. And to my right is Brandon Orr with Amazon Web Services. And Brandon is Head of Energy and Water for the Americas at Amazon Web Services. He has more than two decades of experience in critical infrastructure and energy markets. And in his current role, he is responsible for procuring energy and water for all of Amazon Web Services in North and South America data centers. So, big job he has in front of him. He's been with Amazon since 2018. He's worked in various roles. But what I think is really neat, he began his career in the United States Navy's Nuclear Submarine Force, where he supervised reactor plant operations. And get this, he spent over two years, cumulative years, living underwater. That's not for me. And lead reactor defueling and refueling where he learned the ins and outs of nuclear energy. And after his naval career, he transitioned to the civil sector where he oversaw 600 megawatts of thermal generation and distribution management at Brookfield Asset Management. Thank you for your service and thank you for being with us today, Brandon.

Brandon Oyer, Other

Thank you, Haley. Thanks for having me.

Phillip May, CEO

Now, I'm Philip Paye, President and CEO of Energy Louisiana. And with me is Nat Sahlstrom, Vice President of Energy and Sustainability at Meta, where he leads the company's efforts to secure energy infrastructure and drive the strategic transformation of power systems to support Meta's global data center portfolio. Nat has been a leader and innovator of data center energy infrastructure since joining Amazon in 2011 as their first energy hire. He has worked with policymakers in 27 countries and around the world, creating commercial and regulatory structures that enable scalable development of highly reliable data center infrastructure. Most recently, Nat served as the chief executive officer of Track Capital Management, where he led the team focused on securing energy infrastructure and renewable energy for hyperscale data center campuses. Please join me in welcoming Nat Solstrom. Thank you.

Haley Fisackerly, CEO

Well, Nat, Brandon, thank you for being here. I mean, your two companies represent some of the largest capital investments our world has never seen, so it's amazing what significance here. And you two are definitely familiar with each other, Nat, when you spent time at AWS, so glad to have you. So the first question I have is for both of you, and it's kind of a two-part question. So first, if you will, share with our friends today, one, your presence in each of our states in the Entry-G service territories. You could give them a feel where you are, what your presence is today. But also, why Entry-G? Now, you're making major investments anywhere in the country, but you chose our service territory. What has been unique about partnering with Entry-G, if you can? Brandon, start us off.

Brandon Oyer, Other

Well, thanks, Haley. um i i think you know first i'll just clear the air in the room of i wouldn't carve out time in my schedule for most days to come sit with most of my utility partners around the country um but but when you called and asked it was a it was pretty easy decision for me to come and explain the story because what we've done to to grow in the state of mississippi is is impressive i'm proud of it the company's proud of it and our customers are benefiting from it and i think really what's differentiated the work with Entergy and AWS has been, we have started from the ground level at, you know, set the stage from a government perspective. So there's Senate bills that are established in Mississippi that enabled our rate making. And then from the first deal that we've done in Canton and in Ridgeland, where we have, you know, two campuses there, you know, we work together to build a commercial relationship. We want to keep costs out for our customers. We want to grow scalably. We want to be a part of the community. We don't want to impact your residential rate payer customers. And we just had a mutual alignment, and that's happened since day one. And then we went into an execution phase. Executing for our customers is core of what AWS does every day, day in and day out. And, you know, we get into the project and Entergy energizes a substation before we're done completely building out the data center. And that doesn't happen around the country. So that saw that we wanted to keep doing this, build on a good thing, right? So now we've recently announced an expansion down in Vicksburg. So we started in Canton, go to Ridgeland, expand down into Vicksburg. And we just continue to have a relationship where you have commercial ability, engineering technical ability that works with our teams on the ground, going to tell our story in the community. We want to be a part of the community. We have customers and employees in the community just like you do. So there's this natural fit with how everything works. And, you know, with building at our scale, things don't always go perfect. We work through any challenges that we've had, and, you know, there's just been this mutual trust built. So we're excited for what we have done, and we see plenty of runway left

Haley Fisackerly, CEO

in the state of Mississippi. Well, it's a lifelong Mississippi, and I'm excited about the transformation that y'all are bringing to our state and opportunities. So thank you for that.

Nat Sahlstrom, Other

Sure. Perhaps an observation on where we are today. It's not lost on me on the fact that we have two energy infrastructure folks from cloud companies sitting at the New York Stock Exchange sharing anecdotes about our experience within IOU. 15 years ago, that would have been unheard of. And it's worth recalling just the fact that, Philip, you mentioned earlier that at Amazon, they didn't have an energy person on staff. Neither did Microsoft. Neither did Google. Neither did Meta. And the reason being is energy was not scarce. It was not critical. It was almost an afterthought. And I want to talk a little bit about scale because the first data center I ever visited was in northern Virginia in 2011. It was in the process of being converted from a Keebler chocolate chip cookie factory into an AWS data center, and it was a 10-megawatt facility. When we talk about scale today, and we're going to talk about the partnership with Entergy, we're talking about gigawatts of investment, 100-megawatt buildings in sequence being churned out like factory. that is just fundamentally different than where we were 15 years ago and it's why people like Brandon and myself are up here talking because energy has become the critical feedstock into cloud and AI infrastructure and partners like Entergy who have the vision the perspective the customer orientated mindset to say what would have to be true in order for us to go build five gigawatts with you versus oh we could never do that our commission won't approve our transmission groups too busy to go talk with you there's an attitude of problem solving where the energy team people latched on to the vision almost immediately and as a result we've had our biggest project ever which is in richland parish philip bear with me for a second i think scale from 10 megawatts to a five gigawatt infrastructure project that we're building in louisiana right now and five gigawatts some of these numbers almost become abstractions at the point that we're we're dealing in today. But maybe if I can capture your imagination for a second. Five gigawatts is 5,000 acres. 5,000 acres may be an abstract unit of measure, but when you go to our site in Richland, Paris, it stretches as far as you can see. The horizon is dominated by the construction of these facilities in partnership with Entergy and the thousands of men and women who are helping us build that facility every single day. And that has an enormous knock-on effect that's so positive for that community. And it manifests itself in almost strange figures. For example, we found out that we have the largest private truck gas station in the country right now. 1,200 trucks visit our site every single day. And across that 5,000 acre, 5 gigawatt plant of IT load, we're talking about a $50 billion investment across Meta in partnership with Entergy. So the scale that we're working on It just really requires that type of vision that the energy leadership team has met us with.

Phillip May, CEO

So from chocolate chips to, I don't think we have a lot of chocolate chips in Richland, but we're going to have a lot of AI chips. Yeah. You know, we talked, Drew mentioned the change in teacher pay in Richland Parish. So it went from bottom 10 to top 10 as a result of the sales tax revenues and so forth. It's the way that we're changing the state. It's not limited, as Drew mentioned, to Richland Parish. I have a friend who has a business in New Orleans, Gallo Mechanical. They hired 100 people that are going to be working out of that site, and their expectation is they'll probably be there 10 years. That's the impact that we're having on our state. Now, one of the things that impressed me when we first started talking to Meta back in 2024 is your commitment to protecting our customers, that rate payer protection that was the focus of how we contracted and so forth. So if you would talk to me about beyond just the fact that we're creating direct customer benefits by the way we contract it with Meta and with AWS, talk to me about the other things that we are seeing in the way of benefits, certainly customer rate benefits, but also Meta announced a infrastructure or a training program today. Maybe you'll share a little bit about that and just in general, the kind of benefits we're seeing across our service area.

Nat Sahlstrom, Other

Yeah, sure. I think the first one is just the new paradigm is that hyperscalers paying for all of their infrastructure, energy supply, and associated costs is just table stakes. That is the new normal. Folks like Amazon and Brenner and his team and the team at Meta, we like to transcend just the table stakes of paying for our own way, but also participating in investment programs that directly impact the communities where we have operations. So one of the things that we've looked at is kind of the abstract numbers, which are the savings that accrue to rate payers and energy system. Together, we've calculated that's roughly around $2.6 billion of the life of the projects that energy rate payers will benefit from. And then some of the direct investments come with the $200 million matching fund that we've done for low-income assistance programs in your service territory. But aside from the dollars, I think some of the things that are really powerful are the personal stories, because these economic output numbers almost become abstractions. They're like gigawatts and billions of dollars. What does that even really mean? The really powerful transformational stories that I think impact our social license to operate come from people whose lives have fundamentally changed because of the investments in your service territory. I think about the people who create food trucks that were unsure about seasonal volatility, about their income, and they went from having one food truck to having five food trucks. Then I think about the workforce mobilization programs that my friend Brandon and Amazon are doing and that met is doing yesterday we announced the american workforce academy where we're planning we already seeded that with 150 million dollar investment that's going to create new jobs in the trades we're starting with four states including ohio indiana texas and louisiana we had another program that we call the level up program because with enough dollars and time these energy issues they can be solved workforce development i think is the next big challenge on on the horizon and metas is standing up to go meet that challenge with these programs I was talking with Philip backstage a little bit about this but our level up program which is for a new fiber technicians we had 400 positions for this was the pilot program it had 30,000 applicants almost immediately if you think about the math on that that's like getting into Harvard to get into this type of program and one of the things that we're really excited about these type of programs is it reduces friction for workforce mobility and transformation if you think about those times when you've thought about making a career transition or thinking about taking on additional training one of the points that makes that tough is the friction the transaction cost by paying people while in these programs by making the tuition free and by underwriting a job at the end of that process you eliminate a lot of that friction which we think benefits everybody including the communities where we operate

Phillip May, CEO

because new jobs are created and it's great and you know the great thing about that program too is it continues to have a desire for a lifeline or lifelong learning because it increases your income and your capacity and your value and brandon i know you guys are partnering with intergy mississippi on a number of things including infrastructure mississippi you want

Brandon Oyer, Other

to share some stories there yeah sure but i think just to build on on nat's point here real quick before we move off the the workforce development um you know the the numbers they they can become kind of become abstract after a while but an anecdote from a recent graduation cohort in one of our workforce development in Mississippi was a son and a mother went through one of these programs together. And you want to talk about generational impact and like building a foundation in a community. And when you start having multi-generations of families go through that learn how to cable splice and repair servers from somebody who probably didn't even know what a data center was 12 to 18 months ago, like that's what makes us proud to go and invest in these communities and really watch the impact. Aside from the numbers, I like those little anecdotal stories. From an infrastructure perspective, obviously being an engineer at heart and loving to see physical infrastructure get built, one thing that Amazon has always wanted to pay our fair share, and we understand that we will trigger infrastructure that needs to be built to support our load. We also know that the infrastructure around the United States is aging, 50, 60 years old so eventually that's going to need to be replaced and when we started talking with with energy about how our projects would be served you know we saw that there was upgrades that were going to be needed to to meet the reliability that our customers would want and there was a natural fit and you know recently energy announced superpower mississippi where you know revenue from the data center is going to enable 300 million dollars worth of investment to go upgrade infrastructure that had been deferred had it not been for the data centers coming to you know invest a substantial amount and put a substantial amount of load onto the system eventually that would have been born by the rate payers i saw drew's slide earlier where you know he's he's keeping his uh and increases in electricity costs below the national average and i think that this just continues to to show that it's part of being a a good good neighbor you know invest in the infrastructure that everybody benefits from. It's why connecting to the grid makes the most sense. You know, we continue to see a lot of noise out in the industry about, you know, people wanting to do other things. And I think, like, we continue to see over and over again it's most cost-effective and the most reliable to stay connected to the grid. So it's great to spread those benefits throughout the community. So, yeah, I mean, from jobs to building out infrastructure to benefit the broader community, like, we're proud of what's going on.

Haley Fisackerly, CEO

We are too, you know. one story didn't get told enough we were talking about in Mississippi alone we've seen six manufacturers that already exist in the state ABB Siemens Energy some others that have announced over a half a billion dollars worth of expansions and almost another thousand jobs and they're providing components to data centers and also the electric companies and stuff so huge opportunities so it is transformative let's pivot here now a little bit you know both companies you made very clear when you were engaging with us the importance around clean energy so if you can talk to share with the audience what is it about the partnership with energy what characteristics

Brandon Oyer, Other

and helping you meet those objectives yeah i mean it's no no secret that we have a goal to be net zero carbon by 2040 and thankfully due to the net over here sitting to my right you know amazon has a portfolio of 40 gigawatts of renewables around the world we have 700 renewable projects all over the world we've made an investment into x energy developed next generation smr's we're working with energy northwest for the first deployment of that we see a natural fit between how amazon thinks about clean energy and energy's goal to you know clean up over time as well and there's again since day one we've we've just seen that natural fit so we built on the renewable portfolio that we had already established in mississippi energy had some projects teed up one of our first projects enabled you know a substantial build out of a solar facility and you know there will be thermal resources and gas resources built to meet the need now but we're looking down the road on next generation technology on how can we cost effectively you know clean that up so there's again we we need to meet the need now but we're not throwing everything to the wayside we know that we've we've got to make decisions to grow the business, to keep costs out of the business, while also having a long view in how are we going to decarbonize. And thankfully, Entergy looks at it as a holistic approach. We don't think there's a one-size-fits-all from a clean energy perspective. We see it as a natural portfolio of a bunch of tools that will fit together. So we'll continue looking at solar. We'll continue looking at investing in nuclear, whether it's smrs or up rates or um you know anything under the sun really so i i think that that portfolio view that energy holds fits well with with how amazon and i think how you know some of the other larger hyperscalers build great matt how about meta what's your approach on this yeah i

Nat Sahlstrom, Other

would say that one of the things that energy has done to differentiate itself is to meet our decarbonization goals with a corresponding level of seriousness about the investments in the generation and transmission resources required to go meet those challenges. Net zero carbon by 2040, by 2030 is no insignificant challenge. And when you're talking about bringing gigawatts of new load onto a system, there has to be a corresponding seriousness about how do you keep those loads met reliably and cost effectively. And the Entrygy team has just been an exceptional partner about thinking about integration resource mix transmission how can we do this in a cost effective way how can we do this in a way that's rate payer neutral how can we do this that will meet the box requirements of third-party groups that are going to be perhaps intervening in corporation just really a full thoughtful curated approach towards what do we want to do versus the realities of matching your system and i think that even expands to longer data technologies brandon alluded to the fact that some of the tech companies like meta and amazon google Microsoft and others, are making investments in longer-dated technology. And similar to how an organization like Entergy has an integrated resource plan with an eye towards the future and emerging technologies, Entergy has met with us and said, oh, if you want to look at SMRs, you want to look at Gen 4 technologies, you want to look at solar and battery integration, we'll work with you hand-in-hand to go choreograph how those type of investments, your ESG goals, can meet with our requirements and our own system reliability and cost-effectiveness.

Phillip May, CEO

Yeah. No, I appreciate that. And we're looking forward to the partnerships we can have around clean energy and continue to expand that. Now, you talked about it, just the scale of this project. And I get to get up to that part of the state from time to time when you fly in. And for you folks, you can now see it on Google or off to go see it for yourself. When you fly in about 50 miles out, you can see that site. That's the scale of what we're seeing here. here and what we're seeing also is a trend towards this growing scale of these data centers and so forth i know uh i think your term is super clusters is something along that line give me your thoughts on first of all that trend towards these larger data centers i mean moving away from the chocolate chip cookie factory to 5 000 acres of of this stuff and what do you see in terms of the growth of this over the longer term and how much appetite for compute does this industry have

Nat Sahlstrom, Other

yeah it's a good observation and one of the things i would first say is that it surprised me in some sense our willingness to concentrate so much load in one region but a key to that is a lot of the benefits that you achieve around economy as a scale having dedicated mobilized workforce that you can plan on for the next 10 years comes with the spirit of partnership that we built with energy and local government officials and you need to have that level of patronage and support for the long run in order to go and invest in a project that will last 10 to 15 years across its build cycle to say nothing that we're going to be operating these data centers frankly i've never we've talked about demobilizing data centers i've we've seen the data center close they don't close so i need a chocolate chip cookie factory if it's the one i'm thinking of yes yeah but um they tend to be around for a long time but if you If you have a well-defined path towards energy resources, job creation, and a social license to operate like we do in Richland, Paris, then I see that, boy, that five gigawatt cluster strategy makes a lot of sense. And having a partner like Entergy who's willing to say, ah, we found what worked really well for this first pattern. You've got a big service territory. You've got sister companies. If you can rinse and repeat and make those transactions less painful, you know, we had a lot of negotiations with your team. understanding each other, how we work, how our legal teams work, how our accounting teams work. That's an awesome thing to harvest those learnings and rinse and repeat and cut the cycle time down on the next one, six months, nine months, 18 months. And there's a lot of benefits that accrue to both of our organizations from doing that type of strategic planning. If you think about supply chain, which is something that keeps me up at night and I'm sure your organization as well, all those secondary and tertiary benefits can be rinsed and repeated as we go into other big campuses.

Phillip May, CEO

Yeah, and I think the benefits of these things are starting to sink in, so other communities are keenly interested in getting some of this action for themselves, right? Brandon, you guys have a little different approach to this, but it's also one that's scaling up. Tell us more about that.

Brandon Oyer, Other

Yeah, well, I'm going to break script here a little bit and get into the interactive part of the discussion for the room. Raise your hand if you plan on using less data in the future. all right so like the day in and day out we were becoming more no i didn't see any um so day and day we're becoming more dependent upon data we we use it to make ourselves more efficient we use it to you know get our kids to and from school so that they can learn for you know higher education learning for solving complex cancer solutions and everything in between f1 racing um so i i think that like there's going to be a continued need for more data over time and there's a big focus on you know ai build out and for amazon web services it's more than just ai build up ai is a big part of that don't don't get me wrong but um we we have a service that we've been building and selling to customers for a couple of decades and we know that there is going to be growth from general compute from storage and then into ai and we also know that ai is going to change over time so we are definitely building these large campuses that we know are right now you know designing to to handle the the workload of ai but having a mind of well what about in 10 years when something changes how are they going to be utilized then so aws is building this this durable business on on the like back of what's been built over the past couple of decades so you know right now maybe we're not building a five gigawatt campus and i don't even think we've announced how many gigawatts we're building and i'm going to keep it like that today but we will continue to grow across the service territory where it runs our workloads that our customers can tolerate we start to run into you know physics constraints unfortunately we haven't figured out how to fix the speed of light um that transmits through fiber so we have some you know constraints there and but we will continue to adapt and grow so we can balance what our business needs along with where does it make the most sense within the system and you know our planning teams work together like we've built out a transmission modeling team where we can run simulations energy can run simulations and we can say hey where does load actually benefit um and i think that that's that's how we'll continue to build this partnership because you know we want to keep cost out we want to build most efficiently um but you know continue to to grow i don't i don't think our vicksburg announcement would be the last announcement if i um you know had to guess so i think there's plenty of runway left and you know look forward to the to the partnership

Phillip May, CEO

great thank you thank you both well very good and i think this panel has helped illustrate the value of these partnerships and the meaningful changes changing forever the economic trajectory of the regions that we serve and we're very excited about that now haley and i being our most experienced topco residents one of the job hazards of working with folks like this is we have permanent smile on our face yes we do thank you all for participating i appreciate you making the trip into this and and please join me in thanking our guest we're going to go into a short

Speaker 11

break and we'll be back in this room at 210 thank you good afternoon i'm kimberly cook nelson i'm

Kimberly Cook Nelson, COO

energy's chief operating officer and you could tell from that video we have a lot going on and

Bill Abler, Other

i'm bill abler head of energy's resource planning group it's great to see so many familiar faces in the audience and thank you for the accolades so kimberly and i are going to talk about energy's operational blueprint for success i'm going to start with talking about our customer-centric

Kimberly Cook Nelson, COO

planning process and how that has enabled growth second i'm going to talk about our gas generation portfolio how we're executing with scale with speed and efficiency using our large network of partners and with standardization i'm also going to talk about how we're taking that same framework and applying it for success in areas like solar and carbon capture and third we'll

Bill Abler, Other

both discuss how effective planning and execution positions energy to do even more so supply planning has been a key enabler to say yes to large load customers and capture that growth that is especially critical in today's tight markets where having a resource plan being able to serve is the first gating criteria to capturing that growth the results of our effective planning are evident when you look at the magnitude of growth in our five-year plan our industrial customers are leading the way the sales growth is expected to more than double over the next five years coming from data centers also traditional industrials like lng steel and petrochem this is is leading to a total retail sales increase of over 50%, which is commensurately driving our resources to also increase by more than 50% over this period. So as I've discussed supply planning internally, I'm very fortunate to have a leadership team that understands the planning process. You have Drew, you have Kimberly, you have Kimberly Fontan, who all held my job at prior points in their career. They understand the planning process. Though with unprecedented growth, tight speed to market requirements, shrinking reserve margins across the country, and a very dynamic federal regulatory landscape, I have let them know that this is not your father's resource planning job. The traditional planning process does continue to underpin planning for our traditional residential, commercial, and traditional industrial customers. And it makes sure that we deliver on the three core planning objectives of affordability, reliability, and sustainability. In addition, we've had to evolve our planning process to work with data centers, to be more iterative, to develop bespoke solutions, deliver on what they're looking for, which is speed to market, firmness of service, cost competitiveness, and clean energy. And we need to make sure we protect our other customers along the way. And that means maintaining reliability of the bulk electric system, as well as ensuring that existing customers benefit from these large load additions consistent with our fair share pledge the bottom line is we have found ways to say yes to our customers through our planning process we have many structural and regional advantages that have helped us capture the growth we have a lot of land we have welcoming communities and as you just heard from the panel data centers want to locate in our region and in addition being vertically integrated has allowed us to provide complete power solutions for the data centers and protect other customers along the way while we do that. And it's many of these same advantages that allow us to site and build new generation. In addition, we have been deploying transmission strategies to lower the cost and increase the speed to market for our transmission. For example, we were successful obtaining 14 interconnection rights for power plants through the MISO-ERAS process. We are repurposing over 4 gigawatts of interconnection rights to support other new generation and we have been very strategic as to where we are citing our new generation to relieve congestion and lower the cost of transmission for that new generation we have advantages with natural gas and as many of these same advantages that are driving tremendous amounts of new generation in our plan so when you look at and double click on fuel and say why is energy different it's pretty apparent when you look at the network of natural gas pipelines in our region. It is a robust network of natural gas supply. And what that means is that we can more quickly and cost-effectively interconnect new generation. We can do so either with spare capacity on existing pipes. We can work with the pipelines to rapidly expand that capacity through compression. And when we do need to build new pipe, we can do so quickly and cost-effectively due to existing rights-of-way, supportive communities, and short distances to supply from a supply and demand perspective across the US there is plenty of natural gas obviously there's a lot of growth in LNG exports there's a lot of growth and power demand for data centers the markets which fully see and understand these demand dynamics agrees with the perspective I just shared when you look at the NYMEX Henry hub fuel prices they're trading at roughly three dollars and fifty cents for the annual strip over the next decade. That is flat nominally and declining in real terms. And even better for Entergy customers, most of the markets we get our fuel from actually trade at discounts to Henry Hub that further supports affordability. And there is high liquidity in these markets as well. And one of the reference points on that map, there's about 20% of the daily flows for U.S. gases flowing through that every day. We have the Hainesville shale gas in our backyard. and we have growing access to low-cost Permian gas through projects like the Trident pipeline. Trident is a great example where we partnered with an LNG customer. We partnered with the pipeline to build new pipe, delivering lower-cost fuel and also more flexibility of supply. And there's many other examples where we're partnering with customers and pipelines to deliver similar outcomes. So the results of our nimble and customer-centric supply planning process are evident when you look at the longer-term plan. On the left, you can see a significant amount of load that's met by 30 gigawatts of new and repowered resources over the next 10 years. And you can see that we are maintaining reliability of the bulk electric system along the way. On the right, you can see the types of resources that are in our plan. CCCTs have unique attributes to reliably serve high load factor, 24-7 customers like data centers. And given their cost advantages, it is no surprise why the majority of the resources in our plan are combined cycles Now we do have many other types of resources as you can see there For example, we have four gigawatts of batteries and demand response We have three gigawatts of new solar And even without any incremental sales, those solar additions could expand by another five gigawatts based on the clean energy demands Of already contracted customers Now, the only way to translate that plan into outcomes for all of our stakeholders is through execution. Kimberly's going to talk about our self-build execution in a second, but I also wanted to let you know we've been very active driving execution on the commercial side, too. We have six gigawatts of acquisition and contract resources in this plan, and we have already contracted for two-thirds of that. So now I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Kimberly, and she's going to talk about how we are driving execution across our generation, transmission, and clean energy projects.

Kimberly Cook Nelson, COO

Thanks, Bill. You all heard from our customers earlier today. They are asking for more and more energy, while also demanding higher reliability and more certainty. Because of that, we know we have to execute, and we're ready. Overall, our execution strategy is simple. Leverage our scale, work with our broad network of trusted, credible partners, and then standardize and repeat. I think you heard a little bit today, rinse and repeat. We like to say standardize and repeat. We have the capability and the resources to meet our customers' needs. Not only do we have turbines, we have lots of turbines, you'll see that in a second, but we also have breakers and transformers and generators and people and capabilities. We have it all. We have it all locked up through 2032. Our scale gives us credibility. Our deep partnerships give us access. So let's start with scale. As you can see in this waterfall, we have secured 24 gigawatts of dispatchable generation. And to answer our customers' requests for more, we have it. We've added six more turbines in just the last six months. Our large portfolio helps us to attract partners, it attracts a workforce, it attracts better pricing. And we have the experience and the proven results that we have delivered time over time. Just in the last couple decades, we have built multiple gas generation units, on time, on budget, overcoming some significant challenges. We're poised to do that again and more. Next comes our strategic partnerships, because we know people are core to our success. With scale like ours, our EPCs can attract and retain a trained workforce because we offer continuity. We're not just selling jobs. We are selling careers. We're creating a standard workforce that we can move from plant to plant to plant across a nearly identical portfolio. Someone can start with us as an apprentice and be a construction superintendent or more before they're done with our portfolio. in fact we've already had over 700 people move from our first project on to our next projects 700 people with our strategic partners scale with the strategic partnerships also provides mutual benefits for our epcs that means higher productivity over time because the continuous improvement because of a deepening expertise within their workforce because we're having more efficient and we're driving more efficient schedules, and it creates better cost competitiveness for our EPCs. Now, we're leaning on our current consortium quite a bit, Sargent & Lundy, Mitsubishi, the industrial company, but we're also continuing to explore and sign up additional EPC partners like we did with Zachary earlier this year. beyond our constructors we also have strong partnerships in our supply chain in our engineering support partners with strong capabilities that we've worked with for a very long time and we have great relationships with because of our scale we also get high priority responsive service from these partners our third element is standardization Standardization drives efficiency and predictability. Over the last few years, we've adopted a design-once, build-many philosophy. It's transforming the way that we engineer, we construct, and ultimately how we operate our fleet. It unlocks faster engineering, more timely procurements, faster construction. You can see the progress we've made in just our first few plants and projects. And we're taking that progress and we're applying it into our schedules for our upcoming plants because it helps us meet that cost certainty that are so important for these customers that you saw on the stage today. Standardization also unlocks supply chain. It allows us to do things like buy in bulk. We're buying equipment and materials in bulk. We're buying out whole steel runs for some of our projects. It allows us to access long-lead equipment. It allows us to negotiate better pricing. In the long term, standardization supports shared resources, shared inventories, improved maintenance strategies, and a lower lifetime cost for our units. So, our current plan has unprecedented growth in it, and we have a solid plan to execute. So, you might be asking,

Bill Abler, Other

how much more can Entergy do? Could we serve another 15 to 20 gigawatts of large load growth over the next several years? The short answer is yes. From a planning perspective, there are a number of ways we can accomplish this. We would take an all-the-above approach and balance real world constraints like equipment and labor availability. Here's a straw man portfolio of how we could do that. With ramps starting in 2028, reaching full service by the middle of the next next decade. Ultimately, any specific solution will be determined by the customers who we will work with, iterate with, to develop their preferred solution set. And we can execute on this growth.

Kimberly Cook Nelson, COO

Our execution strategy of scale, partnerships, and standardization works great across all of

Bill Abler, Other

the generation that's in this plan here. So the result of entry usability to both plan for and execute on another sizable tranche of growth shows that the very high near-term growth rate we have of both load and generation is sustainable throughout the next decade.

Kimberly Cook Nelson, COO

But wait, there's more. Because we can take this same framework and apply it not only to what we have in our plan, but use it to unlock additional growth and investment in places like expanded solar, CCS, new nuclear, transmission, resilience. Let's take a look. let's start with transmission these large loads and the associated generation they need a strong backbone so we're expanding our generation portfolio we're building over a thousand miles of new trans did i say generation i meant transmission we're building over a thousand miles of new transmission with 800 of those miles being big 500 kv lines now transmission is often seen as poles and wires. But I'll tell you, the engineering behind it is much more complex. And we're continuing to improve our designs and our construction methods. Just recently, across two projects, we've applied continuous improvement principles and saved over $200 million. And we're taking those great ideas and expanding it through the entire portfolio. Plus, you heard earlier, our teams have a track record of meeting and beating those in-service dates that our customers are relying on. We're optimizing our towers, our conductors, our foundations, our construction methods. Just take a look at this video. So what you have right here is a helicopter bringing in a cross arm. What you'll see in a second is that cross arm setting into a cross arm guide. This cross arm guide was designed and built by our teams. I've challenged them to patent this thing. When it lands into the cross arm guide right there it also auto pins instead of the old manual methods that we used to use what does that do it saves hover time for that helicopter that improves safety and that also improves efficiency and we're taking great ideas and applying it through all thousand of those miles our transmission scale also supports our resiliency goals as we're building out our transmission system we're building it to the higher resiliency standards that we expect from today's day and age. With that, we get incremental resiliency benefits. What does that allow us to do? It allows us to do less transmission-specific resiliency projects, which opens up and unlocks the potential for more and faster distribution-specific resiliency projects. So in the end, our customers get more resiliency benefits. So we're continuing to monitor our capital plan and investments and we put in phased regulatory filings on resilience to make sure that we're continuing to maximize the benefits for our customers while also optimizing our spends. Now back to gas. You might all this gas that we're building you might be asking how are we going to clean it up affordably? Our answer, one of the key answers, is carbon capture and sequestration, which is still in first-of-a-kind space, which means higher costs and more uncertainty. So we need to fix that. But we are uniquely positioned for success in this area, starting with literally where we're uniquely positioned. In our service territory, you can see we have the geological formations that are conducive to carbon dioxide storage. We also have lots of wells that are established or in various stages of establishment, and we're right in the middle of CO2 piping infrastructure, so we are uniquely situated. Beyond that, we apply our same strategy as we did with gas, scale, partnerships, standardization. In scale, we are building dozens of gas units, nearly identical. That gives us the volume to move from first of a kind to nth of a kind, where carbon capture and sequestration will become viable, affordable, and investable. In partnerships, I'm happy to announce today that we have very recently assigned an MOU with our strong partner, Mitsubishi. The objective of this MOU is to bring the eighth carbon capture unit to 50% of the cost of the first carbon capture unit, right within that band where you heard today it has to be affordable, right within that band that we feel like our customers are willing to pay. Drew and I were just in Japan a couple weeks ago solidifying that vision with Mitsubishi leadership. our goal and objective is by the end of the year to have a clear plan and roadmap of how we're going to make this happen that we can shop with and align with one of our major customers that are equally committed to clean sustainable energy and want to embark on this portfolio with us solar you heard bill 500 gigawatts of interest in solar how do we do that scale Scale will help us meet that interest while also meeting our philosophy of an all-of-the-above generation portfolio. Historically, on the left, we've treated solar as individual projects bidding into one-off RFPs. Moving forward, on the right, we're targeting multi-gigawatt standardized portfolios. Because we know when we bid into those RFPs, we win. That means we're competitive. But the portfolio approach sets us up for expanded success. The first being that key pillar of scale, followed by standardized designs and constructions and working with our construction partners for more efficiency in construction methods. This is very important because we know that solar is essential to our customers' clean energy desires. looking a little farther ahead is new nuclear we continue to view new nuclear as a very important baseload clean energy generation for our customers as of today nuclear is still high cost with some schedule uncertainty but we are really really excited about all of the efforts undergoing in the industry right now to fix that. Things like NRC reforms, looking at simplifying designs through risk-informed regulations and standards, or testing new technologies like accident-tolerant fuel or TRISO fuel, again going after simplifying those designs. Who knows, a future nuclear power plant could resemble a CCCT just powered by a nuclear reactor. In addition to those efforts, we need partners. We need partners that will help us to manage and spread the risk. Partners like the large-scale customers, government agencies, OEMs, developers, other utilities, people that we can work with to figure out how to solve this unit, this issue. We are actively engaging with all of those partners because we have to figure out how to put all the puzzle pieces together to get to success. Because new nuclear is hard. But again, our view hasn't changed. We see nuclear in our future. It is important for the long run. But we won't put our customers or our operating companies at risk. We are willing to take some risk, but it has to be proportional and it cannot violate that first rule. We will not put our operating companies or our customers at risk. So in the end, you've heard Bill and I talk about we have a clear blueprint for successful execution. First, we have our solid base in our customer-centric supply plan that enables growth. Second, we have our strategy, which is consistent and proven. Scale, partnerships, standardization. And third, we're applying this framework to unlock additional growth opportunities in areas like expanded solar, new nuclear, carbon capture. We do have a lot ahead of us and we are executing and we're continuing to look forward just like we did with our gas generation procurement strategy.

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

Thank you all and we'll turn it over to Kimberly. Well good afternoon and thank you Bill and Kimberly for clearly laying out how we are executing on our plan and how we can do so much more. Our financial plan reflects the significant large load growth that we have. First, it is strong and differentiated. Second, it has flexibility to ensure we manage risk, execute and deliver on our outcomes, and it enables us to do more. And third, it is an unmatched investment. So let's take a look. Our retail sales are 9%. You hear Drew say this earlier, and that is underscored by 16% industrial growth across the period. 9% retail sales growth that is unmatched in the industry, and twice what we had just two years ago in New Orleans. And that 68 terawatt hours that you see there, we sold 128 terawatt hours in 2026. So that is a better than 50% increase in just a few years. And as a reminder, we only include hyperscale sales at their minimum bill level and our large industrial customers at their probability-weighted level, giving us confidence in our forecast an opportunity to do more. Now, looking a little closer at our industrial sales, the colors across these two charts reflect the diversity of the sales in this segment. And on the left, what you see, the hyperscale represented by the gray bar, reflects a better than 50% increase from that specific customer sector. But the chart on the right shows that by 2030, the hyperscale and the large industrial customers, each represent roughly 50% of our overall customers in this segment, reflecting the diversity of our customers in the industrial space. Now, this level of investment requires a significant, this level of sales requires a significant amount of investment, and we see $67 billion. Again, consistent with our sales, that's twice what we had just a couple years ago. And it reflects the CCCTs that Kimberly talked about, the thousand plus miles of transmission, solar and batteries for the customers that want that, distribution to improve local service reliability. And when you translate that into, you can see on the left, you can see investment and depreciation. And what you see on the right is rate base, $97 billion of rate base by 2030, roughly $100 billion, more than twice what we had just a few years ago, a 16% rate-based growth since 2025. That is the highest rate-based growth in the industry. Now, this level of investment requires significant focus on affordability, and we start from a really good place, with our rates well below the national average, and we would expect that to continue as our bill trajectory through this period increases roughly equal, slightly above inflation, assuming flat fuel. And we offer a number of tools to help our customers, whether that's levelized billing, pick a date, payment arrangements, or new tools like the low-income rider that was filed in Arkansas earlier this year to help qualifying customers. And that doesn't include the support that you heard from Meta and AWS earlier, partnering together with us and also Google, where they are supporting our energy efficiency programs and our power-to-care programs to support our customers. We're also managing our O&M, and here again, we start from a very good place, with our dollar per megawatt hour in the first quartile in the industry. And with the significant amount of investment that we're making, we would expect only a modest increase in O&M, such that we would expect that dollar per megawatt hour to decrease over this period by at least 20%. And we're deploying technology and AI across our business in the operations space and vegetation management. We're targeting using AI to ensure we're effectively deploying those dollars. In our call centers, we're using AI to aggregate our calls, understand our customers, improve the customer experience. And in our back office, we're using AI to help with our workflows, all focused ensuring that we are managing costs for our customers. Now, we're also managing risk across the business to ensure that we deliver on our commitments and enable us to do more. That starts with our contracting strategy. It builds into our significantly improved balance sheet size and strength. It's supported by our very healthy liquidity and our accelerated resilience investments and our constructive regulatory mechanisms. In the regulatory space, we have partnered with our commissions to ensure that we have what we need to create economic development in our states. In every one of our operating companies, we either have one or both forward-looking mechanisms or riders that ensure we can make the investments we need to help our customers to grow. And we're seeing that partnership show up in our returns, because over this period, we expect our utilities collectively to earn roughly equal to their allowed ROEs. underscoring that partnership and underscoring how we're managing risk to execute and deliver on our commitments. So looking at our contracting strategy with the hyperscale, you've heard a bit of this today, but it starts with a three-pronged approach. The first is pay your fair share. And Drew talked about that, but that means the customers pay the incremental cost that they drive onto the system and the appropriate allocation of embedded cost. The second is support our credit. Ensure that we are healthy during the construction period and beyond. And the third is get your clean attributes from us. And when we couple this three-pronged approach together, we help our customers to grow in our service territory, we support a healthy utility, and we support all other customers. And it translates into terms like 15- to 20-year contract lengths, significant minimum bills, credit, commiserate with the customer with adjustments as appropriate if that credit profile changes, and early termination provisions should those be needed. And you heard Bill talk about how we're managing supply and load to ensure that as we're building the assets, these customers can ramp, and we're offering demand response options for them to also ensure that other customers are supported as they ramp up. We're also continuing to focus on our storm exposure, both physically and financially. From a physical perspective, the infrastructure that we're deploying for the large customers makes our system more resilient and is built to the latest standards. And the accelerated resilience dollars that we have approved are also furthering the strength of our system. From a financial perspective, we saw structural changes just last year in Louisiana and in Texas that enable us to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to recover those dollars when a storm does occur, supporting our balance sheet and lowering costs for customers. And our very healthy liquidity position means that we are able to manage through should a storm occur and our growing balance sheet size means the storm of a billion dollars is substantially less, 70% less than it was just a few years prior. We're also focused on credit and as you know we have spent a lot of time working to improve the strength of our balance sheet and it is showing because on a Moody's basis on the chart on the left, what you see is capacity against our threshold at least at 15% or greater in every year in the forecast period. That's 100 basis points of frame against our thresholds. In 2025, we closed at 2025 with the highest FFO to debt on a Moody's basis in the industry. Significant focus on improving our balance sheet strength here. And you see the same thing on the chart on the right with S&P, where we have space against our threshold to manage the business. And you see some differences in the calculation. That's primarily methodology differences in how cash from customers is treated. But the message is the same. Focus on our balance sheet gives us the ability to execute on our plan the opportunity to do more. The uplift that you see in the back end of the period is related to investment tax credits for solar and batteries, which we would fully expect to provide back to customers to support customer affordability, but that provide flexibility in the near term. And as a reminder, we only include nuclear production tax credits when they're earned. So the 2025 earned credits are reflected in 2026, as they're expected to be monetized this year. But 27 through 30 include no nuclear production tax credits, giving us confidence in our plan, flexibility if they incur, and opportunity to help manage affordability for our customers. Now that brings us to our earnings per share. And when we roll forward our adjusted earnings per share, we see greater than 8% growth throughout the forecast period through 2030. And the underlying growth rate is double digit. Consistent with what I said on the first quarter recall, the year-over-year growth for 2030 is similar to the year-over-year for 2029, or 12%. This is the highest adjusted EPS growth rate in the industry. And it comes with clarity and transparency by year of our expectations across the period. A clear, executable growth trajectory. Now, of course, we have to finance all this investment to ensure that we can deliver on our plan, and we are well on our way, because you see that the funds from operations support roughly 50% of the funds that we need. We've also assumed $3 billion of junior subordinated notes, $7 billion of equity, and our alternate financing assumptions haven't changed in this forecast, meaning we've assumed a couple in this period. Now, our $7 billion equity, that is in the bottom end of our 10% to 15% equity target on our total capital plan. This is a key differentiator for us. And the block issuance that we did just last month means that we have sourced roughly 60% of our equity needs, giving us ample time to source the remaining as we don't need it until 2028, and giving us flexibility to execute across the planning period and we've assumed a six percent dividend growth rate over the period balancing supporting the dividend and supporting the growth needed to help our customers continue to grow in our territory now Drew Kimberly and Bill talked about the opportunity to do more and we are ready and able to finance that opportunity. We see 10 to 15 percent equity on a percentage of total capital plan on a run rate basis supported by cash from operations, significant cash support from our customers, our constructive regulatory mechanisms, and alternative financing tools like the first of its kind build to suit lease in the utility industry that we closed on just last year. Managing our equity growth while enabling us to continue to grow and deliver not just on what we have, but the opportunity for more. Our EPS growth trajectory is the strongest in the industry, and it is not even close. And our premium reflects that in the near term, but it trails off in the long term. So perhaps the question you have is, does it last? How long does it continue? And the answer to that question is we see greater than 8% growth rates in the base case through at least the middle of the next decade. Greater than 8% growth in the base case through at least 2035. We have a strong differentiated plan with flexibility to deliver on the plan, manage risks, and enables us to do more. And that makes us an unmatched investment. And with that, I'll turn it over to Drew to talk about that additional opportunity. Thank you. All right. Thank you,

Drew Marsh, CEO

Kimberly. And so you've heard about our story. We have a great story. And we have even greater opportunity ahead of us. Our story is one that creates value for all four of our key stakeholders. And as Kimberly said and others, there are some real amazing attributes associated with it. The 9% retail sales growth outlook. The $67 billion capital plan is $13 billion on average a year. The solid credit outlook that's well north of any critical thresholds. And of course, the unmatched earnings per share growth rate. These are great things, but as I said earlier, but wait, there's more. There's more opportunity out there. You heard from our customers today talking about the sales growth that they are going to drive themselves. They have more needs, more interests, more objectives, and we are a preferred partner for them. So we expect that there will be more opportunity in that space. It's not just the data centers, though. It is also our traditional industrial customers. That growth opportunity is still there. And as we look forward, there's more opportunity beyond that in terms of the clean energy and the electrification trends that are still ongoing. And then Kimberly talked about the potential to unlock these other strategies. And you heard from the customers that they are interested in clean energy. And you know our residential and commercial customers are still interested in resilience. So these are opportunities that we're working hard on. Let's talk a little bit more about the sales growth. So we've shown you this before. We have a funnel, a pipeline just like everybody else. This pipeline has been growing substantially. Just a year ago, it's grown over 20% at just about every single point from the beginning to the end at the ESAs. And that is what allowed us to backfill this disclosure on the right, our 24-month ESA outlook, and that is the 7 to 12 gigawatts for data centers and the 3 to 5 gigawatts for other industries. That is substantial and it's continuing to grow, even as we are knocking it off. In this past spring, we signed a number of electric service agreements with data centers and with other customers. So this opportunity continues to be very strong. So keep this disclosure here in mind because I'm going to talk a little bit about and follow up with what Bill Abler was discussing. You know, how are we going to serve that next 15 to 20 gigawatts? And as you can see here above our base case, and as Bill described, there is opportunity for some of the growth to show up in our current outlook period. The bulk of it would be in the first half of the next decade, but it can also begin to show up in the next five years. And of course, the capital plan would follow that. The capital plan over here would say that there is opportunity for incremental capital deployment in the current outlook period. And of course, the bulk of that growth would be in the first half of the next decade. Kimberly pointed out the base case and she said in the next part of this the the first half of the next decade that we expect that in our base case we would continue to be able to grow at greater than eight percent and if you add in these sales growth opportunities which roughly are equivalent to the midpoint of our disclosures on the previous page that would get us well into the double digits again. So that's the significant sales growth opportunity that's ahead of us. But as Kimberly Cook Nelson described, there are things that we are working out on to unlock these other products and services that our customers are asking for. You know, using things like scale partnerships and standardization advantages that we have because of what we're doing already. And in some cases there are other advantages like geography that are important to what we can do here for our existing customers. So this is a significant opportunity for us as well that is not baked into our outlooks. So if you put it together, you have unmatched earnings per share growth for the next five years. And then you have the potential to continue that growth at at least our base case level and we have clear line of sight above that with our sales growth opportunity and then even more opportunities beyond there. So that lays out a significant growth path for the next five years. If you'll permit me to even look further ahead but wait there's still even more and this is going back to some discussions that we've had with you over the last several years. Coming out of 2020, we did an analysis that said, using the same growth drivers that we've been talking about, technology and data centers, large industrial growth, clean energy and electrification, that we should expect that we could triple our 2020 sales by the time we got to 2050. And we've updated that. We've grown a lot. As Kimberly said, we had 128 gigawatt hours of sales last year. That was up well over 20 percent from 2020. And we updated our analysis with the same drivers, and we still expect to triple our sales growth from 2025, a much higher base, by the time we get to 2050. That is significant growth and significant opportunity. And when you think about the unmatched earnings per share growth in the current outlook period, the opportunity to meet that in the next five years looking at this analysis we really don't expect it to slow down anytime soon so it's a great plan and an even greater opportunity this is going to create value for our four key stakeholders and we are excited and honored to have the opportunity to really work on this and bring value to all of our stakeholders including all of you as owners. It's a unique position that we're in to be able to execute on this and we're looking forward to it. Thank you very much for your time today. We really appreciate the opportunity to tell you our unique customer-led growth story. Thank you. So we are going to reset now and do the question and answer session so you have a chance to ask your questions. So just give us a moment to get the uh get the chairs back up on the stage and we'll we'll go again all right okay so we have uh some microphones which are going to go around the room and so we'll uh we'll start uh taking the questions uh hi drew can you hear me okay yes i drew and team

Speaker 8

uh thanks for taking the questions uh obviously nuclear is kind of a very large opportunity in of the industry but not without its risks uh there's been numerous mous on nuclear including with energy so hyperscalers keep backing the smrs can you elaborate maybe on the inbounds are focused on small nuclear large-scale nuclear and if the interest starts translating into appropriate risk agreements what regulatory constructs do you see would be needed well we're still a long way from

Drew Marsh, CEO

regulatory constructs, I'll say that. You know, there's been conversations for both. There's advantages and disadvantages to both, right? If you talk about the AP1000s, you've got the large scale economies of scale that go with that, and you have the fact that those have been built. But the AP1000s are taking advantage of some of the newer regulations that Kimberly was talking about. And so they may be able to reduce costs and risk in a way that the AP1000s can't. We're working through all that and trying to figure it out. I don't know if you want to add anything to

Kimberly Cook Nelson, COO

that. No, I would just say from a technology standpoint, I mean, there's plenty of technologies out there that will be successful. And we are ready to follow the lead of a customer, what the customer would like us to bring to the table. We could make any of them work. It's the it's the risk in the the other constructs that we need to look at yeah i i don't think we'll

Drew Marsh, CEO

be able to rely very cleanly on the regulatory construct we need to make sure that the risks are managed by you know by in another way so you know we could get some help from the regulatory construct but we need to make sure that the risks are coming back to our customers in a significant

Speaker 8

way maybe to elaborate a little bit on just the regulatory constructs in general uh kind of the questions around gencos or any kind of separate entities in building out the generation is there do you see any kind of opportunity set there with a genco given kind of the continued expansion of

Drew Marsh, CEO

the backlog as you mentioned yeah i mean something that we've looked at we know that there are other utilities have done something like that. So it's something we'll consider. We want to make sure that the customers continue to benefit. That's probably the key criteria. All the value that we're able to create for our existing customers and the way we set it up, we think that works really well. But if there's other ways to create even more value for customers, certainly we would

Speaker 8

look at them. Maybe just a quick one for Kimberly. Can you maybe talk about the ESAs that are kind of starting to ramp up soon and going beyond the minimum take levels, is there an opportunity to kind of change regulatory strategy around recovery? Does that kind of give you some leeway in terms of stay outs or deferring some rate cases? Yeah, I mean, we only include minimum

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

bills, as I said, so it does give you opportunity for additional revenues in the period. We'd have to decide what we do with that. So in Mississippi, you heard Superpower Mississippi referenced, You could use that to deploy other investments across the board. You could use it potentially to move in your ranges. You could use it to help customer affordability. I'll point to Philips FRP, which was filed just earlier this month. He did not have a rate change in his FRP. I think you're starting to see the effects of large customers helping. You know, that $7 billion is really coming from not having to increase in your embedded cost cost, because structurally, you've got more customers that are paying those costs.

Jeremy Tonet, Analyst — JP Morgan

Good afternoon. Jeremy Tenette, JP Morgan. 10 years is a long look, longer than Energy has talked about before. I was just wondering if you could expand a little bit about what's locked in there. What gives you the confidence now to think about that such later data growth, that type of duration?

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

Yeah, we certainly had a lot of discussion about that longer-term growth trajectory. And, you know, we are very clear in our five-year period. We give you specific, clear outlooks. But what we see is greater than 8 off of 2030. And Drew talked about the elements. So we talked about 7 to 12 in the data center space, 3 to 5 of gigawatts in the other and customer space. That sales growth, which is what we've seen over the last five years, we don't see any reason that that stops. And that's going to continue to drive you above that 8% would be our expectation. And then just unlocking other investments for our customers, whether that's the clean energy he talked about or other elements. But really, you know, we don't have the year by year through 2035, but we see enough opportunity that we're comfortable with that growth rate through that period.

Jeremy Tonet, Analyst — JP Morgan

Got it. Thanks for that. And then at the risk of getting too far ahead of myself, the upside scenarios, I was just wondering if you might be able to provide a bit more color, quantification or some sense of what could that look like?

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

Well, I think we gave you what we're comfortable giving you, but better than 8% in the base case. That sales opportunity moves that to double digits, as Drew said. And the investment's really going to depend on what our customers are willing to sign up for. If we can drive the CCS down, like Kimberly said, we make those incremental investments. There's none of that in the period. So there's a lot of opportunity for investment, but we won't do it on the backs of the regular customer. We're going to need our large customers to help support that, which will help us continue that significant growth rate.

Paul Zimbardo, Analyst — Jefferies

Hi, over here. Thanks, Paul Zimbardo from Jeffries. I don't want to pin you down on the mix too much, but as you look beyond 2030, obviously the next four or five years, heavily driven by gas and generation, almost half the plan. Does that shift to be more renewable? You mentioned a little bit of the nuclear, the CCS. Could you give a kind of a flavor of where you see the mix of the capital framework evolving in that five-year plan?

Drew Marsh, CEO

Yeah, I think it's, Bill described it, but maybe, Bill, you could elaborate a little bit more on the mix.

Bill Abler, Other

Yep. Paul, you kind of got a sense for what we're thinking for the next tranche of growth. I mean, there clearly is more combined cycles in there. Those are the workhorses to deliver the 24-7 energy, but it is truly all the above, you know, that delivers that speed to market, which is a key attribute. In some cases, it's a bridging solution, too. It may be whether it's an on-site generation or whether it's extending the life system or existing generators. how do we use that to help serve them now but maybe bridges to a different

Paul Zimbardo, Analyst — Jefferies

solution down the road okay great and then one other one just in terms of the potential ESAs the large low customers at your your two big ones up there on the stage are you seeing more clustering as in should we think about like the the pipeline is existing customers expanding campuses expanding into region are you seeing some diversification as you mentioned like the non data center side

Bill Abler, Other

as well thank you the answer is yes um the clustering hubs um kind of similar terminology a little different structure but yeah they're coming at with with larger scales and i think what you heard from the customers is they see synergies whether it's through the partnership with us whether it's through workforce synergy so i think they they like scale we like scale and i think there's a lot of benefits of building in scale and if i could add to that you know we're

Phillip May, CEO

seeing all the all the above what we're finding though is with the larger balance sheet better credit quality companies they're looking for larger scale we're just seeing that ramp up over time and so it is truly kind of an all of above you still have a lot of interest in what we will call smaller data centers maybe a sub gigawatt but very large but the trend moving towards those larger super clusters haley you have anything to add to that no i would agree

Haley Fisackerly, CEO

and and they've all situated themselves with enough land to grow and that's one of the area they've gotten where they could come to the south and find large areas of rural areas that allow that expansion to happen and so they've all positioned themselves for that opportunity

Nicholas Amicucci, Analyst — Evercore ISI

hi everyone uh nick amicucci from evercore isi i have a two-parter here that kind of dovetails with each other um so just with the amount of generation that you guys are building simus simultaneously uh what um how much schedule and budget contingency is kind of embedded in the plan and then just to piggyback on that the plan also has a thousand miles of transmission lines so how dependent is the generation on that transmission build out and the interconnection keeping pace

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

all right you want to talk yeah i'll start we you know we scheduled out particularly if you think about the generation with the large customers like the hyperscales we worked with them on what delivery points they wanted but we built in enough flexibility that we believe that we could deliver on the schedule that they needed and yes you do need the transmission to connect with the generation in order to allow them to ramp up but we plan that out just like we would plan out any build out like that so we believe we have a schedule that we can deliver for our customers and make sure we're meeting them and you heard you heard uh brandon say earlier we delivered the substation before the customer could even take it so we're seeing some good outcomes come out

Kimberly Cook Nelson, COO

of part of our part of our execution yeah and i talked about continuous improvement through our standardization and we're continuing to get better and better saw that on a couple of the slides we're baking those improvements into our schedules to again make sure that any issue that comes our way we have some room to maneuver through it and make sure that we keep that

Drew Marsh, CEO

certainty that the customers are looking for and bill you want to talk a little bit about the transmission and the linkage to the generation how those things have to work together yeah

Bill Abler, Other

absolutely um so it somewhat depends on the generator situation there's a myso interconnection to you we got to have physical transmission um so it is dependent um but we we certainly map those things out in our processes and the other thing i wanted to mention on contingency it's not just about budget contingency it's about it's about resource adequacy contingency so we're building in a lot of provisions in our contracts so that if there was a delay in the generator and service date we don't firm up the service until that date so that helps make sure we ensure bulk electric

Brian Owen, Analyst — RBC

system reliability okay hi how are you uh brian owen from rbc um i just had a quick one on the 15 to 20 gigawatts of potential capacity from the uh the rfp understood that it's illustrative but but there's a ton of growth here, so just trying to wrap my arms around it. The base case here, that's kind of what's underpinning that 8% EPS growth, and I assume that the 15 to 20 gigawatts above that, is that kind of what's getting you into that sales and that potential upside unlock? Can you just kind of parse, like, the difference between those two and kind of where that falls out?

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

Yeah, the 15 to 20 gigawatts is not baked into that base case. That's right. And what Drew talked about is that sales opportunity is that second tier, which you would need to get into that 15 to 20. I think in his sales opportunity, he was in the middle to lower end of the total 10 to 17 gigawatts. So roughly lines up that 15 to 20 would be a little more than that. But underlying that's not in your base case.

Brian Owen, Analyst — RBC

So when I'm looking at the slide, kind of where you go from 2030 to your base case in 2035, none of this would be embedded in that base case out to 20.

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

That 15 to 20 is not embedded.

Brian Owen, Analyst — RBC

Thank you.

Speaker 10

Thanks. you guys have talked about sort of significant cost reduction expectation in carbon capture technology. Can you give us sort of a sense of where, what the cost is today, and what type of demand for carbon capture are you seeing from your data center type customers? Yeah, I don't

Kimberly Cook Nelson, COO

have those numbers in front of me, but it's definitely higher than what our customers are willing to pay right now which is why we have to bring the cost down here our data center customers are interested in clean energy they talk about that a lot and we're working together with them on what those solutions could look like you know whether it's solar plus batteries whether it's carbon capture looking for all of the options and putting them on the table we do feel strongly that we'll be able to drive down the cost of carbon capture working with our partners but we're not

Bill Abler, Other

there yet we do have a slide in our appendix too that shows you a range of potential lcoe levelized cost of service for different technologies and it does have carbon capture there there is a range because there is uncertainty there but you can kind of get a sense for what we're thinking

Andrew Marc Weisel, Analyst — Scotia Bank

that range might be currently hi andrew weisel with scotia bank uh another question on the added generation cap capacity so you talk about upside of 10 to 17 gigawatts of customer demand relative to the base case, and you mentioned the 10 gigawatts of CCGT that you got secured, would the first 10 gigawatts necessarily be served by CCGT, or would that also be a mix of all of the above? And then more broadly on gas, we heard from the hyperscalers, they are committed to net zero by 2040, so how do they think about the next few gigawatts being served by gas as opposed to something non-emitting, especially if nuclear continues to be challenged? shall we say?

Bill Abler, Other

Yeah, so there's actually 10 turbines, not 10 gigawatts, and each one of those turbines is consistent with our Novum one-on-one configuration, which is roughly 750 megawatts. So it's more 7.5 gigawatts rather than 10. You know, when you look at that illustrative thing that I showed with the 10 to 15, it was similar where some of the resources that are available earlier include, like, on-site generation, include, like, batteries, because when you look at the, whether it's the EPC market or whether it's even the interconnection process through MISO, there are certain things that can drive out that timeline further. So what can we do to get that ramp earlier with some other technologies? But again, recognizing that as we get to that 2030, 31, 32 type timeframe, when we can start adding a lot more combined cycle to the system at that point.

Kimberly Cook Nelson, COO

I think as we've been having our discussions with our customers as well, each one has a different outlook and what they like a little more than another. So we continue to work with our customers, be customer-centric, iterate with them on what the supply plan is that meets their individual desires and needs.

Drew Marsh, CEO

And I would just add then on the turbines and the proximity to clean energy goals that our customers have, we're aware of that. And that's why we've got a new MOU with Mitsubishi to try to find a way to get those to be economic. because we think that gas will be an opportunity for people to generate electricity for a long period of time but we'll have to find a way to make it clean at the same time so that's that's why we've embarked on this MOU with Mitsubishi to try and find a key to unlock the door on on bringing the cost

Andrew Marc Weisel, Analyst — Scotia Bank

down overall for CCS. Okay thanks and one more for Drew and Kimberly I know you've been asked this many times but another financial update another opportunity to ask. You continue to point to greater than 8% as the CAGR, and yet the year-over-year growth rates are more like 12% to 13%. It's a pretty big delta there. Why the disparity? Is it conservatism? Is there something else holding you back on the CAGR? Can you just kind of address

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

that gap? Yeah, our view hasn't changed on this. It is greater than 8%. It may be well above that, but you don't necessarily see it linear in any given year, and we want to be consistent about that greater than eight percent and also it helps with all of our stakeholders beyond just I know we're talking to our owners today but beyond just this group and so just it's a solution that gives clarity and transparency across the board without having to you know make those adjustments every single time I'll also point to in the five-year period we give you every single year so we have the clarity that enables you to calculate that so that's how we're threading that needle. Hi it's

Bill Appicelli, Analyst — UBS

Bill Apicelli from UBS. Just going back to the earlier points on the ESAs and the minimum volumes, I mean, can you provide any color about the earning sensitivity, you know, once you get out into 2030? You know, currently, you know, 1% change in industrials, relatively small to EPS as we stand here today for 26. But how does that number evolve? I mean, can we kind of contextualize what that earning sensitivity is for, you know, being above those MVCs?

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

Yeah, we haven't given that, and we haven't given it for a couple reasons. One, we haven't given what the minimum bill is. We've said it's significantly more than 50%. The other is what I said earlier, that we'll have to decide what we do with that. So it could be affordability, could be, you know, supporting other investments, or it could be trading something else or giving, you know, giving some EPS. So if those materialize, we'll deal with that in the year that it comes in. But until then, we'll have to decide, you know, we'll want the flexibility to decide how we use that.

Drew Marsh, CEO

And I'll just add that, you know, there is high, the minimum bills that we have are high. And we do not expect even the data centers to run at 100%. So the gap is maybe not as big. So there's certainly opportunities there, but they're not going to completely reset expectations for the future, I don't think.

Bill Appicelli, Analyst — UBS

Okay, thank you. And then just one point for clarification. When you talk about the earnings growth through 35, are you anchoring that off of the new midpoint for 2030 today? So when we think about sort of when you talk about, Drew, you mentioned some of these opportunities that could push you to double digits. We should be thinking about that off of kind of the 30 starting point to 35, or is that over sort of the totality of the 10-year horizon?

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

Yeah, that base case, that incremental greater than 8 is off of 2030. So that's a base case off of that.

Bill Appicelli, Analyst — UBS

Okay, thank you.

Dave Arcaro, Analyst — Morgan Stanley

Hey, thank you. Dave Arcaro with Morgan Stanley. I had a question on the equity financing plan. You know, 10 to 15 percent of your capital plan being equity funded, much lower than most utilities in the space. And I was wondering, how do we think about that? You know, is that structural now as we look at, you know, if there's upsides to the current plan, if we look out into the 2030s, does it stay at that funding level? you know can we think of it as you know as long as you've got these large load customers still driving a meaningful part of the growth outlook that it's going to be in that same kind of

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

proportional range yeah that's right you know we don't see anything structurally change in that 10 to 15 percent assuming you have the support of the things i talked about so the large customers as you said and how we structure those contracts that our mechanisms continue to support strong cash from operations but fundamentally we don't see differences that would structurally change that 10% to 15% over the total capital plan. You can move within that range, certainly.

Rich Sutherland, Analyst — Truist Securities

Hi, Rich Sutherland with Truist Securities. Turning to the solar opportunity that 5 gigawatts referenced, I'm curious how standardization has changed the customer conversations around that and how you see that playing out of a resource mix over the next two to three years for new additions. Well, maybe we'll start with Kimberly,

Drew Marsh, CEO

and then we can go to Philip and Haley on that.

Kimberly Cook Nelson, COO

Sure, I mean, we're taking advantage right now. there's a lot of projects that are honestly being sold right now with the customer with the tax credits and we're looking at ways to bring those together and package them for the customer as a large portfolio because when the customers are talking to us they're not just talking about one small project they're asking for large expanses of gigawatts so we're working with local vendors local suppliers applying the framework that we discussed earlier around scale partnerships and standardization and really starting to see some traction and benefits come out of that but we haven't put together that full portfolio just yet it's coming

Phillip May, CEO

i'll just add that many of our customers still have sustainability goals and solar is the near term solution right ultimately we'll see other technologies we're working on ccs we're certainly have an interest in nuclear when we get the framework and the risk management right but you have these goals and solar is the path we have that we can do today and we're working on making it more efficient making it more affordable making it more work better for our customers and we think there will be a considerable interest in that for some time and the same goes with us too

Haley Fisackerly, CEO

We've, for example, in the deal with AWS, in the first deal we signed, we had an agreement to seek 650 megawatts of solar there. We're pretty much most of the way along that. But in the second deal, we also agreed to do RFPs of around 250 plus each year. In fact, another one of those RFPs is going out this week, I think, pretty soon, where they have an opportunity to take or leave those opportunities. So there's still a lot of interest for them to look at that.

Drew Marsh, CEO

And I would just add that, as you heard from the customers earlier today, it's all about economics. And I think, as Kimberly described, we are winning the RFPs because we have lowest cost of capital and we have the ability that we don't have any development fees we can execute really well. So those are basic advantages. But if we add this scale dimension in, we think we can be very, very competitive and start to fulfill those customer needs on a much larger basis.

Rich Sutherland, Analyst — Truist Securities

And then on the accelerated resilience front, you spoke a little bit about transmission enabling more capital flowing to the distribution side. Could you impact that a little bit more in terms of what's in the plan and what's the opportunity and over what period that opportunity falls? So how are we thinking about managing accelerated resilience in this next phase of growth?

Kimberly Fontan, CFO

Yeah, we have what was approved in the first round in the plan, So it's a little more than $2.1 billion. New Orleans has filed $400 million. You probably saw that. I would expect, Phil could see to that, I would expect Louisiana to file in the next few months. I think what you'll see is a continuing phased approach because there's support for the resilience, but there's also real focus on affordability. And so it's really balancing that out. So it gives us the opportunity to continue to step into that while we're continuing to harden the system with just the broader investment.

Phillip May, CEO

And I'll just add, look, we're learning as we go. We're becoming more efficient in the engineering. We're becoming more effective in how we plan these things. So, you know, we look at what we've done already and how effective that has been. You know, we had undergrounding, for instance. We've de-emphasized undergrounding a little bit because we think we can do it more efficiently, more cost-effectively with overheading that is very robust. And so it really is thinking through that plan. And the transmission build-out that we have gives us an opportunity to do more on that distribution side in a very effective way.

Drew Marsh, CEO

And I would just also throw in one more point there, that the things that Kimberly was talking about in terms of the extra scale of the transmission and things like that, that gives us more opportunity in the same space. And so that's just another log to throw on the fire to create opportunity for us to keep going in the transmission resilience space.

Liz Hunter, Head of Investor Relations

All right, and that's 30 minutes. So thank you all for your questions. We're gonna move to the reception. Thank you.

Drew Marsh, CEO

Thank you.