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Xcel Energy is a U.S. electricity and natural gas utility, with operations in Western and Midwestern states. They include portions of Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin. Xcel serves approximately 3.7 million electric customers and 2.1 million natural gas customers. It was formerly known as Northern States Power company.

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Xcel Energy (XEL): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Xcel Energy

xcel energy

Hello, and welcome to the Xcel Energy 2026 fist quarter earnings conference call. My name is Jordan, and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this conference is being recorded, and for the duration of the call, your lines will be in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the prepared remarks, and questions will only be taken from institutional investors and analysts. Reporters can contact media relations with inquiries, and individual investors and others can reach out to investor relations. I will now turn the call over to your host today, Mr. Roopesh Aggarwal, Vice President, Investor Relations, to begin the conference. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Jordan. Good morning, and welcome to Xcel Energy's 2026 1st quarter earnings call. Joining me today are Bob Frenzel, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, and Brian Van Abel, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. In addition, we have other members of the management team in the room to answer your questions if needed. This morning, we will review our 2026 1st quarter results and highlights, provide updated 2026 assumptions, and share recent business and regulatory updates. Slides that accompany today's call are available on our website. Some comments during today's call may contain forward-looking information. Significant factors that could cause results to differ from those anticipated are described in our earnings release and SEC filings. Today, we will discuss certain metrics that are non-GAAP measures. Information on the comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations are included in our earnings release.

In the first quarter of 2026, the ALJ for the Prairie Island outage case recommended an additional $41 million disallowance of replacement power costs for power procured in 2024 associated with an extended outage at the plant starting late 2023. Xcel Energy recorded a charge of $37 million or $0.04 per share in the first quarter. In the first quarter of 2026, Xcel Energy recognized $22 million or $0.03 per share due to an increase in estimated insurance proceeds for the Marshall Fire litigation. Given the non-recurring nature of these items, they have been excluded from first quarter ongoing earnings. Our GAAP earnings for the first quarter of 2026 were $0.89 per share, while our ongoing earnings, which exclude these non-recurring charges, were $0.91 per share.

All further references to earnings, drivers, and variances in our discussion today will refer to ongoing earnings. For more information on this, please see the disclosures in our earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Bob.

Thank you, Roopesh, and good morning, everybody. At Xcel Energy, our mission is to make energy work better for our customers, helping them thrive. Our past quarter showcased our commitment to this mission through focus, execution, and delivering on our plans to strengthen and modernize the grid, to expand our energy sources, and to deploy innovative technologies to ensure that the energy that we provide our customers remains reliable, affordable, and safe, both now and well into the future. On these fronts, we are off to a great start this year. In the first quarter, Xcel Energy invested over $3 billion in new infrastructure to support our customers' and state's growing energy needs for increased resilience and cleaner energy. We're on track to deliver our most extensive capital investment plan in the company's history this year.

We identified additional transmission and generation needs in our states, delivering on our expectation of incremental investment above our base plan. We announced details of our contract with Google for a new data center in the upper Midwest that we believe is a model for large load development that benefits customers and communities. We filed that contract with the Minnesota PUC. Continued to use our scale and our balance sheet to ensure that we have the right partnerships with critical suppliers, Tier 1 EPC firms, and developers to execute on budget, on time, and on scope on our growing portfolio of projects. We delivered strong ongoing earnings of $0.91 per share. We remain confident in our ability to deliver on our annual investment plans and our earnings guidance for the 22nd year in a row, one of the best track records in the industry.

On our fourth quarter call, we announced progress on our data center pipeline with assigned ESA for a large data center in the upper Midwest. During the first quarter, we provided further details about this groundbreaking agreement with Google. As demand for electricity accelerates across the country, we believe that utilities have a responsibility to lead with solutions that balance innovation, reliability, sustainability, and affordability. Xcel Energy's customers already have some of the lowest energy bills in the country. In fact, when you adjust for inflation, the typical Xcel Energy residential energy bill is almost 25% lower today than it was 10 years ago. In nominal terms, Xcel Energy residential electric bills are approximately 30% below the national average.

Under a 15-year agreement, Google will cover the entire cost of its service and infrastructure requirements to power its new data center, including 1,900 megawatts of new wind and solar generation and long-duration storage using Form Energy's innovative 100-hour iron-air battery. With credit protections in place, we estimate this new data center will save customers $1 billion-$1.5 billion over the term of the ESA, helping keep customer bills low long into the future. In addition, and as part of our shared sustainability goals, water needs for the data center will be limited through Google's use of air-cooled technology in lieu of water-cooled. In April, we also reached a definitive, non-exclusive agreement with, on our previously announced MOU with NextEra Energy to co-develop generation, storage, and interconnections to accelerate data center development across our operating companies.

We expect this joint development agreement will deliver a balance of company-owned resources and Power Purchase Agreements with NextEra across all forms of generation, including wind, solar, battery, storage, and natural gas. We are already underway developing solutions for 2GW of new data center capacity with plans to expand in the near future. In April, we also followed our large load tariff in Colorado with proposed terms that are similar in scope to our Google ESA and the Minnesota large load tariff filing. Data centers will commit to long-term contracts with minimum bills, termination fees, credit requirements, and incremental cost tests to ensure that our existing customers are protected from new large load customer needs. In the coming months, we plan to make similar filings in Texas, New Mexico, and Wisconsin.

We believe our partnerships with hyperscalers, regulators, communities, and developers set a high bar for responsible large load development. We're partnering to ensure large load growth strengthens our overall system, benefits our local communities, and maintains our state's clean energy goals, and doesn't increase costs for our existing customers. These collective actions give us confidence in our ability to deliver on our forecast to secure 6 GW of data center load by year-end 2027 with in-service dates into the early 2030s. In October of last year, we outlined our plan to meet the growing infrastructure needs of our customers. We detailed a $60 billion base investment plan to continue our energy transition and to make needed investments to strengthen our transmission and distribution systems.

At that time, we also expected that our base plan would likely need to be augmented based on anticipated but unimproved transmission and generation needs. Through the first quarter, we now believe we have line of sight to at least $7+ billion of the $10+ billion opportunity that we highlighted last year. This incremental investment includes the 765 kV Crawfish Draw to Phantom transmission line in our SPS Company that was allocated by SPP in February. Two-thirds or over 1,200 MW of the generation and storage needed for the Google data center project and 800 MW of generation approved by the Colorado Commission in February and April as part of the near-term procurement portfolio.

From here, we continue to see additional infrastructure investment needed to serve our growing customer needs, including active generation RFPs in PSCO, NSP, and SPS, additional regional transmission investments in SPP and MISO, and the generation to support the 3 GW of data center demand that we added to our target plan on the Q4 earnings call. As these opportunities materialize, they will drive additional growth and investment both within and beyond our five-year capital plan. As we continue to add to capital backlog, it's also important to execute on the projects that are in the queue. In the first quarter, Xcel Energy invested over $3 billion in new infrastructure for our customers. We brought online nearly 500 MW of new solar generation and utility-scale battery storage in SPS and in Colorado.

In total, these projects will deliver system resiliency and reliability, as well as over $425 million of tax credit benefits to our customers over the life of the projects. Across our entire portfolio of projects from 2026 to 2030, we expect customers will see more than $7 billion in aggregate benefits from PTCs and ITCs associated with various generation and storage projects, helping keep our customer bills amongst the lowest in the country. With continued growth across our industry, we also recognize that supply chains and qualified labor for generation, transmission, and distribution projects will become more constrained.

That's why our recently announced alliances with GE Vernova and NextEra and strategic agreements with Tier 1 EPC firms across our portfolio of renewable and gas generation, transmission, and distribution projects are critical to delivering on our growing investment pipeline well into the 2030s. Finally, our field teams continue to operate at the highest levels and were recently recognized by EEI with an Emergency Recovery Award for outstanding effort to restore service quickly and safely following severe thunderstorms that came through our upper Midwest service territory in 2025. For the seventh year in a row, Xcel Energy was named the World's Most Ethical Companies honoree by Ethisphere, which measures the company's corporate governance, culture of ethics, and environmental and societal impact.

As we look forward to the rest of 2026, Xcel Energy will continue our focus to deliver customers safe, clean, reliable, and affordable energy. Execute with excellence on our 2026 $14 billion capital investment plan, our most extensive in the company's history, to realize the unprecedented opportunities for growth that we laid out in our base and incremental investment plans, to secure incremental large customer loads that can benefit all customers and meet this moment in our country's growing demand for energy, to reach constructive outcomes on multiple rate cases and resource solicitations. Make operational and system hardening investments to protect our communities from the risks of extreme weather, and to deliver on our earnings guidance for the 22nd year in a row. With that, I'll turn it over to Brian.

Thanks, Bob. Good morning, everyone. Starting with our financial results, Xcel Energy had ongoing earnings of $0.91 per share for the first quarter of 2026, compared to earnings of $0.84 per share in 2025. The most significant earnings drivers for the quarter include the following. Higher electric revenues due to rate case outcomes, non-fuel riders and sales growth, partially offset by weather, increased earnings by $0.23 per share. Higher AFUDC increased earnings by $0.10 per share. Offsetting these positive drivers, higher interest charges and common equity financing decreased earnings by $0.18 per share, reflecting funding of our infrastructure investments and discipline to maintain a strong balance sheet. Higher depreciation and amortization decreased earnings by $0.05 per share, reflecting our capital investment programs.

Lower natural gas revenues due to weather, partially offset by rate case outcomes, decreased earnings by $0.03 per share. Turning to weather and sales. Colorado overall experienced its warmest winter on record during the first quarter. As a result, impacts from weather to electric and natural gas sales reduced earnings by $0.09 per share. On a weather-adjusted basis, first quarter electric sales increased by 2.8%, driven by continued oil and gas growth in SPS and broader C&I growth across jurisdictions. For 2026, we continue to expect full-year weather-adjusted electric sales to increase 3%. Moving to recent regulatory activity. In our North Dakota electric rate case, the commission approved our previously announced settlement authorizing a $27 million revenue increase.

In our South Dakota electric rate case, we reached a constructive black box settlement with staff for a net revenue increase of $26 million. A commission decision is expected in the second quarter. This Tuesday, we received intervener testimony in our Colorado electric rate case, which we believe provides a starting point for ongoing settlement discussions over the next month. Late yesterday, we received the ALJ report in our Minnesota electric rate case, recommending a 9.8% ROE and a 52.5% equity ratio, with a final commission decision early in the third quarter. In New Mexico electric rate case, intervener testimony is due on May 1st, and we expect the commission decision in the fourth quarter.

As we look to our financing plan, Xcel Energy continues our commitment to maintain a strong balance sheet to fund accretive growth with a balance of equity and debt. In the first quarter, we issued forward contracts for over $1 billion of equity from our ATM program. Additionally, we issued an $800 million junior subordinated note at the holding company, which receives 50% equity credit with the rating agencies. This, combined with our unsettled forwards and collared forward contracts from 2025, addresses over half of our $7 billion of equity need in our five-year base plan. We also continue to make strong progress on the Smokehouse Creek wildfire claims process. We've resolved 231 of the 304 submitted claims.

We've reached settlements with 79 of 107 potential claims presented for mediation by parties represented by attorneys. Finally, 26 of 73 complaints have been settled or dismissed and have reached the statute of limitations for property loss claims. We've updated the low end of our estimated liability to $460 million. We have committed $397 million in settlement agreements, including agreements with the subrogated insurance plaintiffs in the three largest claims by acreage. In total, we have $525 million of insurance coverage. Moving to guidance, we are reaffirming our 2026 ongoing EPS guidance range of $4.04-$4.16 per share.

We remain confident in our ability to deliver 6%-8%+ long-term earnings growth and expect to deliver 9% EPS growth on average through 2030. Updates to key assumptions are included in our slides and earnings release. With that, I'll wrap up with a quick summary. Xcel Energy posted strong ongoing first quarter 2026 earnings of $0.91 per share. We continue to lead a clean energy transition while ensuring safe, clean and reliable service and keeping customer bills as low as possible. We have line of sight to $7+ billion of opportunities in our incremental $10+ billion investment plan. We've announced details of our data center agreement with Google, which we believe is a model for driving large load growth while protecting and providing benefits to our other customers and communities.

We've partnered with multiple Tier 1 EPC firms, critical suppliers and developers to ensure we have the resources needed to execute on a growing portfolio of investment opportunities on budget, on time and on scope. We continue to work to reach constructive outcomes, including settlements in our active rate cases.

We maintain a strong balance sheet and credit metrics and have addressed over half of our $7 billion five-year base equity need. We are reaffirming our 2026 ongoing EPS guidance of $4.04-$4.16 per share. Finally, we remain confident in our ability to deliver 6%-8%+ long-term earnings growth and expect to deliver 9% EPS growth on average through 2030. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we will now take questions.

Your first question comes from the line of Richard Sunderland from Truist Securities. Your line is live.

Thank you. Starting with some of the regulatory progress, this week, you know, I guess Colorado with the intervener testimony, could you expand a little bit more on the sort of settlement potential over the next month that you referenced, in the script? I guess just curious about any other takeaways you'd highlight there. Similarly on Minnesota with the ALJ rec, just, you know, any other thoughts you could offer would be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, and good morning. You know, I think, I'll start with Colorado All Electric. I think maybe we take a step back a little bit from a macro view. We have the lowest bills in the country. In Colorado, a 1% share of wallet. We have one of the fastest transitioning clean energy systems, generation fleets in the country. We're achieving state policy, and hopefully that is recognized by our policymakers in the state. Now, specifically about the rate case. We look at the intervener direct testimony, and it's relatively consistent with what we saw in the last case. If you look at our last case in Colorado, we had a near unanimous settlement, and we've settled three of the past four electric cases.

We think we have a decent starting point. If you look at the procedural schedule, the settlement deadline is on May 28th. We'll start settlement discussions, look forward to working with the parties early in May, and hopefully we can reach a constructive settlement like we have in the last few rate cases. That's kind of on the Colorado side. On the Minnesota side, for those of you who didn't catch it, we had the Minnesota ALJ report late yesterday. It was after we had already shipped off our ER, so it's not referenced in our earnings release. You will see details in it in our 10-Q that we file later today. Look for a full disclosure in our 10-Q as we work through it.

You know, we think it's a generally a balanced overall recommendation. It's constructive to see a 9.8% ROE, a 52.5% equity ratio. We're digesting a few of the other kind of trackers and other pieces in it, but overall, we think it's a constructive recommendation. Procedurally, we'll see an MPUC deliberations in June and then an MPUC order in July. As we talked about, you know, we're working through a lot of rate cases, and looking to reach some constructive outcomes this year and deliver for both our customers and our shareholders.

Great. Thanks for running through all of that. Turning to some of the data center activity, you know, obviously, you had a lot of commentary around the Google agreement and the landmark effort there. I'm curious, I guess it's slide 14, I think the 4 GW contracted by year-end 2027, just, you know, any thoughts on sort of the gating factors to signing the, you know, $6 billion-$8 billion incremental CapEx framework you called out elsewhere in the deck? Is that applicable there? I guess just anything you can highlight on the financing side of those advances as well, you know, any unique ways to finance that?

You know, hey, it's Bob. Let me kick it off, and then I'll ask Brian to weigh in with anything extra. You know, not surprisingly, yesterday's hyperscaler announcements continue to show high interest in data center developments, and we're seeing a lot of interest across all eight of our states in terms of activity and backlog. At the top of the slide you mentioned, Richard, is a 20 GW backlog, and that continues to a greater than 20 GW backlog, and that just continues, the interest level continues to grow in our service territories.

you know, we've got a gig under either built or under construction, another one that we're in front of the commissions with approvals on, particularly this Google transaction, and expect, as we said in our fourth quarter call, to execute on enough ESAs this year that we get to a 3 GW target, another 3 GW next year. We're actively engaged with our customers. These are long and deliberate discussions to make sure that we can reach innovative and constructive outcomes like we did with the Google. I think we've proven that we can do, you know, competitive, highly renewable, low carbon data center development in our regions.

I'd say we have the most length in our company in the upper Midwest, and that's been a focus area for us and a focus area with our JDA with NextEra. As we think about the large load tariff filing in Colorado and the abilities that it allows us to bring the generation, the transmission, and the load all together in a package to the Colorado Commission, and then we have those capabilities as well through both SPP and SPS processes in Texas and New Mexico. We do expect to file a large load tariff in Texas as well this year to help expedite that, but it doesn't preclude us from coming forward with contracts in the near term.

We're active on the, on the engagement front with all the hyperscalers and all the large data center developers, and just a lot of interest in the footprint that our company provides in terms of high penetrations of low cost renewables that our existing customers have benefited from, and we think these large load customers can benefit from as well.

Just a couple of things, make sure we get all parts of your question there. You know, as we think about, you referenced the $68 billion number, that's something we've had in our slides before in terms of for, you know, that's what we view the incremental investment opportunity to serve every gigawatt of data center. If you look at Google being a model, it's served with a lot of renewables and long duration storage, very different than if you're serving it with just a CCGT. When we think about moving forward our clean energy policies and priorities and meeting our state objectives, that gives us a really good investment opportunity when we think about how we're going to serve these.

You think about if you look at the slide, when we talk about our $10+ billion investment pipeline, that slide, we talk about the RFPs, 10 GW-12 GW of RFPs in flight, it's the three additional gigawatts of data centers that we expect to contract. Those 3 GW of data centers are going to be another, you know, 6 GW, 9 GW, 10 GW of generation that we need. A huge long-term opportunity to kind of fill in the back end of this five-year, but also just deliver transparency and growth visibility into the early 2030s. Not only about, you know, filling in our investment pipeline here in the back half of this decade, but really driving investment, driving the investment pipeline in the early 2030s.

That is, you know, have to mention just the customer affordability opportunity that this drives. We think about we bring forward the clean energy opportunity with the resources and the resources advantage we have in the middle of the country, paired with the affordability benefits for our current customers. We're super excited about this opportunity. You asked about a kind of alternative financing, we're certainly looking at all those alternative financings, just like we know our peers are. Right now, our base plan to beat is how we've talked about it, you know, funding incremental CapEx with incremental equity of roughly 40%. We're already ahead of our, you know, we're one quarter into our five-year plan, and we have 50% of our equity taken down for our base five-year plan.

I think, we're really staying ahead of it, and we'll continue to deliver growth and happy to fund accretive growth with equity and maintain that strong balance sheet because we think it's really important as you go through this cycle of long-term extended growth. Sorry, long-winded answer, but you asked, like, three or four questions there.

Appreciate the comprehensive response. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Nicholas Campanella from Barclays. Your line is live.

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions.

Appreciate all the regulatory follow-up. Hey, how are you? You have line of sight now to the $7 billion of incremental versus I think $10 billion of upside, and just maybe give us some clarity on the shaping of that spend, and as you roll forward the plan, I believe, to 2031, just how much of that is going to get encapsulated? Thanks.

Yeah. Hey, Nick. Good morning. I can take that one. We kinda You know, we, in that slide eight in our earnings deck, we kinda highlight the different pieces of that $7+ billion. Think about that 765 transmission line in SPS. You know, that should be in service by, the goal is by 2031, so a lot of that will be captured in our current five-year plan. I think kind of the back part of that five-year plan. The Colorado generation, 800 MW, some gas and 600 MW of wind. Again, that should be, you know, in service by around 2030, particularly the wind, when your goal is to capture the Production Tax Credits. Then we haven't specified the in-service dates on the assets to serve Google.

That's still not public. If you think about it, if it's wind and solar, the goal is to get those in to capture the tax credits to ensure that you have, you know, low-cost renewables. And then, you know, the long-duration storage has a longer potential runway in terms of tax credits. That's the best way to think about it. You know, as we roll forward, we always provide our comprehensive update in Q3, but that's a good way to think about kind of how this stuff rolls into this front five with a little bit flowing into kind of early 2030s.

Okay, that's great. I really appreciate that. Maybe just to follow up is, you know, as you get to the back end of that plan, the large loads are gonna be ramping, hopefully. You know, at what point would you kind of revisit the 40% equity financing assumption? Secondly, just any thoughts on defending the Baa1 outlook here with Moody's? Thanks.

It, you know, we think about it longer term, it's important to maintain a strong balance sheet, good credit metrics. Now, we certainly understand where we are with Moody's, and we think about over the long term is that 17% CFO to debt type of metric. Obviously, in a large build cycle, that gets pressured a little bit, but we do believe, and I've always said it, anyone who's listened to me for the past six years as CFO, is that it's important to maintain a strong balance sheet over the long term.

In terms of that equity financing, you know, that's generally been our rule of thumb, but every time we roll forward a new five-year plan, depending on the cash generation, cash profile, timing of a project's in service, tax benefits, you know, we incorporate all that. 40% is a rule of thumb, but, you know, we'll continue to be consistent with what really maintains our metrics. Like I said, We think in this type of build cycle, this type of capital investment, a volatility in the market, it's important to have a good balance sheet to weather through things.

Great. Just one more that I had that we were curious on is just the MISO capacity print. I mean, I know it came down a little bit earlier this past week. Do you see that as a tailwind at all to the territories that you're operating in? As you kind of think about capacity planning and, you know, where you're doing data center development, how is that maybe changing thoughts there? Thanks.

Yeah. Hey, Nick, it's Bob. Thanks for the question. You know, one of the interesting things about the MISO market and the capacity auction itself, it's been much more volatile and less predictable than maybe some of the other regions, given the large bilateral nature of the MISO market. The print itself isn't, you know, something we look at in the near term because we have a bit of length here in the upper Midwest, and we've been able to sell into that market. Over time, it's not the signal that we use to drive new capacity additions and new load forecasting. Relatively, you know, uninteresting in the short term for the capacity auction in MISO, and we'll keep an eye on it.

Our long-term forecast is in partnership with MISO, where we see, you know, asset additions, asset reductions and load growth still leads to a really exciting region and an area that data centers definitely want to show up and be energized by. You know, not much to the auction itself.

Your next question comes from the line of Julien Dumoulin-Smith from Jefferies. Your line is live.

Hey, good morning, team. Thank you guys very much. Let me nitpick on a few things you guys have already said here. Just taking it from the top on Colorado intervener testimony, obviously hearing some decent confidence on settlement. Again, I never say it's never done till it's done. How do you think about the prior guidance of this 50 basis points, 60 basis points of lag here? How do you think about that being attainable? What are the permutations? Then also given in parallel here, the comprehensive capital riders here, now available, how do you think about the future cadence of cases? How you might, you know, come together around any settlement and trying to establish a longer duration here?

Hey, Julien. Good morning. I can take that one. You know, I think really it, you know, certainly if we can reach a constructive settlement, the prior guidance remains intact. I think, you know, when you look at kind of where staff and UCA are at a 9.0 kind of midpoint for staff and 9.2 ROE for UCA, it's like I said, it's a decent starting point for settlement negotiations. Certainly our equity ratio is important in Colorado. Like I was talking about overall, it's really important to maintain credit quality in Colorado too, so the equity ratio is a significant point of that. Like I said, we've had a good history, a good track record of settling on the electric side.

As you think about, you know, the riders and the opportunity, I think, you know, there is an opportunity to have a longer-term path to not filing rate cases maybe every year that we have been. Certainly it does depend on the constructive settlement here on the electric, in the electric case to kind of set that base framework. Obviously, absolutely something we're thinking about and look forward to engaging the parties here over the next month to see if we can reach something constructive.

Awesome. Excellent. To go back and nitpick a little bit on the next question around the data center large loads. A couple pieces here. Just what's the geographic footprint that you're contemplating here in incremental announcements? I mean, obviously the different states have different tax regimes. You alluded here to Texas filing something here. You know, how disproportionate might that geography be relative to your others here? How might that impact, again, the comments you just made about Colorado? To nitpick further, this NextEra partnership, you throw 2 GW out in that pipeline. Is that separate and distinct from what you're talking about in this 3 GW by 2027? Sorry, I know you're throwing a few different numbers, but I wanna try to tie them out here.

Hey, Julien, it's Bob. Thanks for the question. Let me see if I can't clarify a little bit. First of all, like I said, we started with generation length and transmission capabilities, that's led people to be most interested in the upper Midwest. The Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas are really interesting to our data center developers in the near term where we have more length. In the longer term, you know, working on a large load tariff in Colorado. There's active legislation in Colorado around, you know, trying to, you know, work on making Colorado a place where we can have a framework, legislative framework to bring data centers there and attract them. In the Southwest, you know, a hugely popular region given the price of electricity down there and the attractiveness down there.

I think when we talk to developers, they First of all, I think when you're talking to the large hyperscalers and the developers, they like working with us because we have multiple regions of the country, and we can deliver solutions in different parts of the country that help them meet their portfolio of needs across a large swath of the U.S. When we talk about the high probability pipeline or the high probability projects, we expect four more gigawatts to be contracted by the end of 2027. That's inclusive of the 2 GW we threw out there with NextEra, and the NextEra partnership could be larger than that. I was just commenting on the fact that we're actively engaged in 2 GW. It could be bigger to serve all 4 GW, but we're working on that. If that's helpful.

Awesome. All right, excellent. Then just in as much as, just nitpicking on cost, obviously starting the year out well. Any updates on Sherco here and timeline there?

I was thinking Sherco as much as I think it's still planned retirement in 2026, right?

Our plans are to continue to retire Sherco at the end of this year. We have both the transmission and generation needed to serve that interconnection on a go-forward basis in the upper Midwest. Part of our long-term resource plans in the upper Midwest, those plans are still intact.

We've not heard anything that would lead us to do anything differently at this point.

Awesome. Sorry, I know lots of things going on. Best of luck. You guys got a lot cooking. We'll talk soon.

Your next question comes from the line of Carly Davenport from Goldman Sachs. Your line is live.

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question.

Good morning. Maybe just a couple quick ones on Colorado. First, I think the PUC sunset bill came out of committee last week. Just maybe your latest views there on some of the provisions around securitization, and maybe views on potential for changes like expanding the size of the PUC and just kind of your thoughts around that?

Sure. I'm happy to comment. You're accurate, you know, each of the agencies in the state undergo sunset review. The PUC was up this year. It's usually somewhere in a seven to 10 year cycle. The goal is to look at the effectiveness and the efficiency of the agency and the necessity of the functions for the future of the state. You know, one of the provisions in the legislation itself was the expansion of the use of a securitization as a tool. I think we've been really thoughtful as a company in proposing securitization in the cases where it makes a lot of sense. If you look back, we have permission to securitize the remaining balance of Comanche 3 when that plant retires at the end of 2030.

We've looked at securitization for portions of our wildfire investment in the state. We've proposed and not executed on securitization around, you know, fuel costs, particularly around Winter Storm Uri. That's a good tool to have in the tool chest. I just think we wanna make sure that it's used for the right things as we go forward, and we're talking about securitization. We're very engaged in the legislation as drafted. There's a little bit of time between now and the end of session, and we continue to talk with all parties about how to make sure that we can bring efficiency and effectiveness to the state, you know, whether it's speed of filings, decision-making on resource plans.

There's a lot of things that we think that in this era of energy growth that we'd like to see, be able to do, and to partner with the PUC as we move forward and working with all the stakeholders to do that.

Got it. That's really helpful. Thank you. Then maybe just as we move more sort of into the core of wildfire season in Colorado over the next couple of months here, maybe can you just talk a little bit about sort of expectations going in based on current sort of weather forecasts and the mild winter that you had in Colorado? Then just maybe touch on some of the risk reduction work that you've done in the last couple of years to get ahead of that risk.

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate you recognizing all the great work the team has done over the last number of years. You know, it still goes in a number of buckets. We talk about situational awareness and our ability to understand weather patterns and take action on them more discreetly, more accurately with less customer impact is really-  [audio distortion] 

On the communication to our customers who are doing new outage management systems, new customer notification systems, more engagement on the community side. Yes, we are at a low snowpack in Colorado this year in drier conditions. We think with all the things we've done under the operational side, the situational awareness side, and the community engagement side is gonna lead us to have a high safe summer in Colorado.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeremy Tonet from JPMorgan. Your line is live.

Just wanted to come back to the Google agreement here and just wondering what you think that means, you know, more broadly. If Google is willing to pay for newer technologies as such, like Form here, you know, what do you see this as a trend? What do you see these, you know, these threads in your other conversations at this point as far as appetite?

Yeah, I think it's a great question in the sense of, you know, if we think about what our kind of our alignment with state policies and how we move this forward. I think one good example is in Colorado.

In the legislative session, there's an advanced geothermal bill moving through the legislature. That could be another place where you could see maybe a hyperscaler could help fund an advanced geothermal project in Colorado, given Colorado's focus on the clean energy transition. I think this is a really great theme as we think kind of how do we align the data center opportunity, hyperscaler opportunity with our state policies objectives from a clean energy perspective, right? New technology is generally more expensive. You know, it takes investment to commercialize it. We think this is a great kind of blueprint as we think about longer term opportunities in not only, again, in Minnesota, but other parts of our service territory.

I'll come back to you, Jeremy. The idea that we believe that these large customers are absolutely committed to long-term sustainability of their own product. Because of that, they're highly interested in our regions of the country where, you know, I always say the wind blows and the sun shines. We can deliver both renewable energy as well as innovative technologies, and we've seen real receptivity at our commission levels to do that, particularly when it's protecting existing customers. We're gonna continue to be innovative, we're gonna continue to be sustainable, and I think that we're working with a customer set that is aligned with us.

Got it. Thank you for that. I was just wondering, you know, maybe if we take a step back, if we just think about, I guess, you know, your ability to win more data center load here, you know, kinda stands out, maybe versus others in the industry. Just wondering if you could speak to what do you think is some of the keys to your offerings, if it's speed to market or if it's the type of solutions or otherwise. Just wondering what you see as, you know, kinda key to the rate of wins as you guys have posted.

Yeah. Great question. We think, and I've been saying this for years, that the diversity of our company, the diversity of our regions, the ability to deliver various fuel sources and types to deliver speed to power to these customers is really important. Speed is very important to these folks today. As we roll through time, I'm convinced that sustainability is going to be very important to them. You know, just take how we handled the water situation. You know, even in the land of 10,000 lakes in Minnesota, water is still a real key topic. The ability for us to partner with a large data center owner and operator and come up with an innovative, creative air-cooled versus water-cooled solution can be a template, a blueprint for development going forward.

As you can imagine, we are talking with all the hyperscaler developers, hyperscalers, as well as all the data center developers. Depending on their customer mix and their perspectives, they're gonna find value across the portfolio of states that we serve, and we're here to meet that moment for them.

Yeah. I would just add a little bit on the execution side. We're sitting in the middle of the country. If we're gonna deliver a portfolio of clean energy resources, that takes a development team. That takes scale. If you look at in just our base plan, we're developing 10 GW of generation and storage, 7 GW that is renewables. It takes a platform, and that really gets to our partnership on the EPC side, our OEM side. 'Cause when you think about what's next, another gigawatt this year, three more gigawatts next year, that takes a significant pipeline of clean energy resources for us to execute on. I think, you know, the hyperscalers having the confidence, seeing what we're doing already and having that track record of delivering these projects on the renewable side is also really important.

Got it. That's, that's very helpful. Thank you there. Just a real quick last one, if I could. I recognize this is probably premature, but figure I'd try anyways. If after seeing the ALJ, just now, any thoughts on, you know, the prospects for settling, you know, given this very early time of review?

Yeah, just on the electric side, I think generally, the most likely time to settle is leading into hearings. We've had the hearings. You know, certainly, you know, we'd be willing to discuss settlement, but, you know, really the impetus is leading into hearings, which happened already. You know, we're looking forward to the MPUC deliberations in June and seeing the order in July.

Your next question comes from the line of Ross Fowler from Bank of America. Your line is live.

Morning, Bob. Morning, Brian. How are you?

Yeah. Just a couple of specific questions and then one general question this morning. For the JDA with NextEra, do you see potential to expand that beyond 2 GW? How are you thinking about expanding that?

Yeah, thanks. Look, the JDA itself is unbounded as far as I'm concerned. You know, we partnered with, you know, a national development platform to pair nicely with, as Brian mentioned earlier, our very strong strengths in generation and transmission development itself. That partnership, that JDA could be, you know, we did this for speed to power and expand the pie and to deliver on this moment in the country's needs. You know, it could, it could be the partnership that we go through all of our generation needs for large loads. It's not exclusive, though. It doesn't have to be. We still can have great relationships with all the other generation developers and data center developers out there, but there's no limit on it.

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