Entergy Corporation (ETR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. Thank you for joining us. I have a few things to cover before we kick it off. We have Brandon from the Four Seasons, who is going to give us a safety overview.

Good morning, welcome. First things first is that in medical emergencies that we do have. You can contact us with 4 3s, 3333, the security response. We have 3 ADs. One will be located inside of Magnolia room, one at the front desk and security will have the other third -- the third AD. We have alarms, we don't have them scheduled for today. But in case you do hear alarm, it's going to be a brief alarm security engineering. We investigate the alarm. If we hear it again, then that's basically going to give me instructions. So you evacuate. If we have to evacuate, you have 2 -- that's closely nearby. Through that stairwell, stairwell 3, we will bring you to the second floor. We have an exterior stairwell, and we'll go to [ Canal ] in Convention Center. That's the rally point there. If you're going out to the rear of the building, we have stairway #1, and that will bring you down to the elevator -- I mean, to the hotel lobby. As you evacuate that way and then bring in the hotel lobby to the [ Harris ] under the [ breeze weight ]. That would be it.

Thank you, Brandon. So a couple of other things and then we'll start. So we will be discussing forward-looking information. And as you know, market factors and other conditions can drive actual results to vary. And then I want to go through the agenda for the morning. So we're going to start with Drew. He's going to give us a framework to think about Entergy's unique robust growth story. And then he's going to turn it over to Rod who will give a deep dive in the utility through the lens of the customer. We then have an economic development panel discussion. We have 2 third-party outside experts and it'll be hosted by 2 of our operating company presidents. I think you'll really enjoy this discussion. It will be followed by a short break, and then we'll come back from the break. Kimberly will give the financial overview, and then he will come back to Drew, who's going to talk about our long-term growth opportunity. At the end, we'll bring back Drew, Rod and Kimberly on stage or open mic Q&A. So if you have questions, please hold them 'til the end and we'll make sure we get them answered at that point. And so now without any further ado, I'd like to introduce Entergy's Chair and CEO, Drew Marsh.

All right. Good morning. And in case you were wondering, our speakers are powered by electricity. So thank you all for being here for Entergy's 2024 Analyst Day presentation. We're very excited to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for all of you that are online. Welcome to all of you online. Welcome to all of you that are here in person. We're really excited to have you here in the hometown of our headquarters, New Orleans. I hope that -- and I've heard that some of you are going to take advantage of that, spend the weekend here, take advantage of our hometown. We're really excited to have you here. And also thank you to some of you that made it out yesterday for our field trip. You're able to see some of the investments, your dollars being put to work for the benefit of our in our customers and our communities. So thank you for all that. We have a really exciting, unique and robust story to talk about today. So let's just dive right in. I'm going to start by talking about our business philosophy. And you all are familiar with our business philosophy. We talk about our vision statement of, we power life. And our 4 stakeholders, our customers our employees, our communities and our owners. We aim to create value for all 4 of our stakeholders. And we talk about them all the time. And then of course, as we're creating, we start with our customers. Our customers are at the center of everything that we do of every decision that we make. And we are on a journey to improve ourselves still in that space. In fact, we call our customers, customers, of course, but that's a fairly recent thing. A few years ago, we called our customers, rate payers. And when they didn't agree with us, we call them interveners. And so the journey is intervenor to rate payer to customer and ultimately to guests. And we have a lot of customers have over 3 million customers, and they have a wide variety of needs, a lot of interest. It's a very diverse group. We need an employee base that reflects that customer base. That's the best way for us to serve our customers. Our customers come from all corners of our community, our employees need to come from all corners of our community. And that means we got to attract a lot of talent from a lot of places. So we have to create value for our employees as well. That means we have to give them a lot -- if we start, of course, with competitive compensation, but we also have them good experiences. We need them to have a strong culture to grow and develop. And of course, these days, employees want to have impactful work, meaningful work. And that means we have to be best in our communities. These are the things that our employees care about, and that's where they're going to find sources of value. So we're aiming to create value for our employees. And as our employees want to do that impactful work, they're going to head out into our communities. And they're going to volunteer their time. We're also -- we're also creating value in our communities by philanthropy, investing in our communities. But our communities want more than that. They want jobs. They want economic developments. In a lot of cases, they want tax dollars to do other things in the community. So we're trying to help our communities by creating value there. But we're creating value all along the way. And of course, we're working to create value -- value for all of you, our owners, you are looking for return on the investments that you're making. And it may seem a little odd to start with owners at the end of this conversation after all this is an owner's discussion. This is an Analyst Day, our debt and equity owners are here. And when you think about it, it actually makes perfect sense. Because if we do not have successful, loyal customers, if we don't have excited, engaged and included employees, if we don't have vibrant and growing communities, then our owners don't have a chance to earn their returns. So all of this fits together. In fact, it becomes a core to our overall strategy. So as we put -- and you can hear some of the boats going on outside. As we put all of this together and we make these investments on behalf of our customers and we're creating value for all of our stakeholders. We're aligning everyone around where we are headed. And together, we are ultimately going to move through a regulatory process. And if we're all together, if all of our stakeholders are together, we can make that regulatory process more effective and efficient. So you can see creating value for all of our stakeholders is absolutely critical to our overall strategy. So now I want to talk about something that is really exciting to all of us here in Entergy and what gets us out of bed in the morning. And this is the growth opportunity that's ahead of us. Now I'm going to talk about 4 macro themes. I know you're familiar with, but I want to talk about how they intersect with Entergy and how that creates more opportunity here at Entergy than anywhere else in the space. And these are onshoring, clean energy, electrification and of course, technology. So I'm going to start with onshoring. And you're familiar with this. So over the past 14 years, we have seen compound annual growth in our industrial space of over 5%. And that is driven by what you see up here on the screen. So these are key ratios that our industrial customers are paying attention to. And they show the competitive advantage of the Gulf Coast. You can see the length of time associated with these trends. These are long-term durable trends that our customers are looking at and they're choosing to invest on the Gulf Coast. This trend, this macro trend of onshoring is what is behind our 14 years of compound annual growth, which is unmatched in the space. Now we don't see this slowing down anytime soon because if you step back and you think about the global picture, the world is a challenging place. There are broken global supply chains. There's geopolitical uncertainty. And all anybody anywhere in the world who is looking to invest in manufacturing capacity, they're looking for the biggest, most stable market, which, of course, is still the United States. And when they look at the United States, they're looking for access to Mississippi River and the ports on the Gulf Coast that gives us access to international markets. We have abundant infrastructure for transportation, abundant infrastructure for energy. We have supportive communities, supportive governments. We have a lot of available labor. And of course, we have low energy prices. So when they're looking to the United States, they're looking to the Gulf Coast for those investments, which is pretty exciting. That means that this is going to continue on for a long time and means a lot more potential for electric infrastructure investments driven by our customers. I'm going to talk about the second one, which, of course, you're also familiar with clean energy. And a lot of people are moving in this direction for good reason because their customers want them to. When you look at our customer base and you look at our industrial customers, in particular, this is something we've talked about in the past that it hasn't changed. Our industrial customers, if you add up their emissions and you rank them by state, they would be the second largest state in terms of industrial emissions. That means that they need to clean up. Not clean up because some government is telling them that they need to clean up, but because their customers are telling them they need to clean up. And that means they are having conversations with us. They have aspirators today to get clean, and we're having conversations with them about how to do that. They don't have a whole lot of options. They can do some energy efficiency, of course. They could do some electrification, which means more opportunity for electrical infrastructure investment for us. They also are increasingly looking at hydrogen and carbon capture. And of course, you don't get credit for hydrogen and carbon capture unless you actually have clean energy to go with it, which means more investment opportunity for us. And on top of that, you have the IRA and the incentives and other things that are driving opportunities for people to just greenfield clean energy, blue and green hydrogen, blue and green ammonia. We have more opportunities for that kind of clean energy investment in our service territory than anywhere else. So our customers are driving these expectations. And this in a -- for a long time. I think back to my own youth and San Angelo, Texas in the 70s. And if the power went out, my mom said, "go outside and play and don't come back until dark." That was fine because that's probably what I was going to do anyway. But if I was at school, and the power went out. It didn't matter because we had a pencil and a chalkboard. And nobody was using a computer. So our lives were not dependent upon electricity. And that meant that the infrastructure that we had reflected that customer expectation. I meant it was built to a standard which didn't mean it had to be there all the time. Okay, hold that thought and fast forward to today. Everything that we do, if we -- however we want to learn how we want to work, how we want to entertain ourselves depends on electricity. And it's continuing on. I talked about the potential for electrification of our industrial processes. I talked about there's the potential for electric vehicles. So there is a lot of opportunity for growth from this trend still to come. But the expectation that comes with this is that our lives are actually now much more dependent on electricity. And what that means is the expectations for reliability and resilience are much higher. Most of our infrastructure was built in the '70s or some -- a lot of it even before. You saw some of that on the tour, when you were comparing where we are to where we are going, with reliability and resilience investment. So this is a great opportunity for us, and we have been able to align with our stakeholders on a clear path to drive reliability and resilience. We already have $2 billion of approved investment between Entergy Louisiana and New Orleans. We have a pending filing in New Orleans. We have another filing on the way very soon in Texas. So we have a very clear path to make incremental investments in reliability and resilience with a lot more of that to come, driven by customer expectations. So this is another place for significant electric infrastructure investments. And then the final category I want to talk about, technology. And of course, this boils down to AI and data center, something that all of you have been reading about and writing about extensively over the last year or so. This is a significant opportunity for us. But we haven't always thought about it that way. So 6 or 8 years ago, we got -- we were at an investor meeting. Some of you may have actually been there. And we got a question, are you all thinking about data centers? Well, at that time, we were in the midst of a 14 year -- the past 14-year run on industrial sales growth. And we were talking to LNG facilities, metals manufacturing chlor-alkali uprates, petrochem facilities, auto manufacturers. These were big, big customers, 100-, 200-megawatt customers. And that's what we were thinking about then. So we looked at -- we looked at data centers. And at that point in time, the key factor for data centers was speed, actual speed measured in nanoseconds. So in order to be effective, you had to be located right next to where the data was needed. So that meant you need to be right outside New York City, you're right outside D.C. or maybe right outside Silicon Valley. If you were in Mississippi, the speed of light was a factor. They were too far away. So we looked at that. In fact, that day also, those data centers, a large one with maybe 30 megawatts. So I'll go back to the question with that investor dinner, and we got the question, what do you think about data centers? Are you all looking at data centers, our response, my response was, our customers eat data centers for breakfast. And that's because we had these huge customers. Now obviously, things have changed, right? If you're talking about a 1 gigawatt data center, that's everybody's largest customer. But we do have 1 customer who has showed up, AWS. We have a customer out there. And they are a very large customer. That's exciting for us. That's very exciting for us. The name of the game, though, and this is still speed, but it's not speed measured in nanoseconds. It's speed to market and speed to market turns on 2 critical factors: availability of land, and availability of electricity. Two things that we have an abundance of and have access to. So we are excited about this opportunity and more opportunity for infrastructure investment. When you take all of these things together. A lot of our peers have opportunities in each one of these categories. But no one has the 14-year 5% compound annual growth rate that we have due to onshoring. And they don't see that we have that opportunity continuing on. Nobody has the industrial base that we have that needs to clean up plus all of the clean energy opportunity that's available because of the existing infrastructure in the Gulf Coast already. No one has the clear line of sight to drive reliability and resilience in incremental investment for our customers. And of course, lots of people have data center opportunities we have a significant data center opportunity as well. Looking at all of these and the opportunities that we see, the diversity, the robustness, the track record, this opportunity is more significant for us than anybody else and it's not even close. Now a few years ago, we stood on the stage and we talked about, we want to be the premier utility. And you all responded saying, that's nice. But you got to do some things first. Number one, you got to manage storm risk a little better. Number two, you've got to improve your balance sheet. Number three, you got to be more consistent. And lastly, you need regulatory outcomes to be better. So we got to work. And I'm proud to tell you today, we've made significant progress on every one of these efforts. So let's start with storms. So we began in a place where we are recovering all of our storm costs. That's a great place to start, but that isn't the whole story. Rod is going to talk to you a little bit more about the investments that we are making. And I just mentioned to you, the reliability and resilience approvals that we already have. Those are very good places to start for ongoing mitigation of storm risk. And we've made really good progress, and we have very clear line of sight. That's still not the only thing. There's more to it because we have improved the way that we actually respond to storms with technology and activities in the field, more training for our employees. So that's a great place to go. And then finally, and Kimberly's going to talk about it, we've improved our financial picture. We are much better situated to manage risk. So that's excellent progress on managing storm risk. I'm going to go back to what I was just talking about, our improved financial picture. We've worked really hard to get our balance sheet in a place where it is very competitive with our peers and it is above critical thresholds. So we're very excited about that. And going forward, we are building in buffer against risk, but it's not just about risk. It's also about growth. We have created a really strong platform for our customer demand growth. And so this is a great place for us to be. We are very well situated going forward. Third, you ask us to be more consistent. And specifically, you were talking about our industrial sales growth. Is it durable? Can it last? And what this says is, 14 years 5% compound annual growth rate. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the industry. So we're excited about that. This isn't a trend anymore. This is who we are. This is what we expect. In fact, we expect this to accelerate over time. So there's a lot of opportunity there. But that consistency, and you can look, it is really consistent, not every day, but it is very consistent over those 14 years. That has led to consistency in capital investments. We've consistently invested to meet these customer needs. And as we have made those consistent investments, we have had consistent outcomes in earnings per share. That is consistency across the board. This is what a premier utility looks like. We've made excellent progress here. Last, I want to talk about regulatory outcomes. And this is going to bring us full circle. The way that we are getting to better regulatory outcomes is bringing all of our stakeholders into the conversation. And this slide is telling you about all of the value that's being created for each of our stakeholders. There is value across the board. It is consistent and is ongoing as we are creating value, as we are responding to our customers' needs, we are creating value for our customers and every stakeholder. And together, we are moving through the regulatory process to make it more effective and efficient. That's our strategy. This is how we operate every day. And we have a lot of good examples that Rod is going to get up here and tell you about in one second, how this happens, boots on the ground every day. We are following the same formula. So I'm going to bring Rod up. And as you might guess, he's going to start with the customer. Thank you.

Well, good morning, everybody. Come on, guys. Good morning, everybody. We are awfully excited about the conversation. And yes, we are going to start with the customer. I have a lot of ground to cover a number of different topics. So let's get on. Let's dive right in. Our strategy starts with the most important stakeholder, the customer. No surprises there. The insights that we glean from our engagement with them across the customer categories, they help to inform and prioritize those major drivers of value for customers. It starts and it informs our customer-centric capital plan to deliver that customer value. But those insights also inform and help us prioritize our efforts to engage and align our stakeholders around that value. Why does that engagement conversation becomes so important and why you're going to hear so much about it in my comments? Engagement is what ultimately feeds into the regulatory process where we get alignment around those things that help us do what. Constructive regulatory outcomes put us in a better position to deliver on our commitments to you. We will rightfully, and for good reason, focus most of the conversation on our unique industrial growth story. But make no mistake about it. Our investment plan is tailored to meet the needs of all of our customers, reflected through those experiences and attributes that matter most to them. What are they? You always hear us talk about power quality and reliability. What does that ultimately mean? Yes, it means investment in reliability. It means investments in more resilience. But it also means the incremental infrastructure to help meet our customers' growing demands and their desire for clean and/or green attributes. We also talk about customer interactions. Those are solving the customer frictions and adding value at each interaction we have with them, whether that's in person, online or by phone. We'll also talk about and incorporate this conversation around price to value. In our service territory, we usually wind up over indexing on this price-to-value conversation thinking it's just a customer affordability issue. No, it's about our ability to ensure that we're investing in delivering value. Certainly, we are driving operational efficiencies, which lowers our costs. We'll talk about that. But for our commercial and industrial customers, it's about our cost input to their processes and ultimately, their ongoing ability to remain competitive, whether it's domestically or globally. We are a huge component of our industrial customers' global and domestic competitiveness. That's why this price-to-value conversation is so important for us. And sort of that fourth dimension that we trade upon is our value as a good corporate citizen and environmental steward. We're trading on our reputation when we're engaged in stakeholder engagement. And we'll connect the dots as to how that plays into our ability to ultimately create value for you. At the end of the day, the things I just described in the last 60 to 70 seconds is taking care of the basics. Our ability to take care of their basics is what puts us in a position to capture the unique growth story that Drew just referenced. Drew laid out the macroeconomic trends that are driving customers to look to the U.S. and specifically to look to the Gulf South for all the right reasons. But building off of these advantages, Entergy brings more value to the table. Low energy costs, our ability to deliver clean energy solutions, which I will go into more detail about. But where we really differentiate ourselves and you're starting to see it now more than ever. Our ability to -- on that conversation around speed to market to deliver timely service to meet the growing demand, but our proven record of working in partnership with our customers to help them meet their own goals and working with our multiple stakeholders, sometimes who have competing interest to achieve common objectives and thereby bring value to ensure that our communities are growing and thriving. It's a competitive advantage for us when we do it right, and it facilitates again the growth story and the support we have from our stakeholders behind it. Playing to our strengths is how we win in the growth game. And it affects our outlook. Indeed, we've been knocking on customers' doors, our engagement with them. But for all the reasons we've been talking about, they're knocking on ours. We have a pipeline of industrial growth opportunities. We've maintained the disciplined probability-adjusted approach that we wind up talking about every quarter on the earnings calls, and we don't go into too much detail, but it's a probability-adjusted approach for tracking and converting those opportunities from prospect origination on the front or I guess, in your case, it would be the left side of that funnel, all the way through to service delivery. We don't include these growth prospects in our forecast until they reach certain milestones. You've heard us talk about it as a conservative approach. Those milestones are things that we track reimbursement agreements when we're having to make long before we signed the ESA, we're having to make investments to make sure that we have the facilities available to them when they ultimately decide to land. We're tracking reimbursement agreements also credit accretive and helped to reduce risk. We're tracking when those customers reach their final investment decisions. We're on their earnings calls. We're in their C-suite. We're talking to their Board members as well. And of course, on the back end, we're always tracking ESAs. And is not until we have clear line of sight again on that probability risk-adjusted basis, do we actually put it in the plan. But that's just what we disclosed to you. Our confidence in the strength and durability of our pipeline is also measured by interconnection studies. Well, and by -- in 2024, by all accounts, we think this will actually be a record year of the number of requests for interconnection studies. Why is this an important metric for us? It's usually the first real indication aside from our person-to-person, board-to-board, execs-to-execs engagement with customers. It's our first indication that the customer is actually serious about locating in our service territory and or having us serve them. And it's because the company then has to make a significant investment to sort of kick off this analytical process that leads to our ability to serve them. So when we look at those types of trends, these leading indicators give us really strong confidence that our sales growth outlook across our operating companies in that 5-year planning period is both solid and durable. Last fall at EEI we confidently shared a 6% to 7% industrial growth. And as we reported with the release this morning, that 6% to 7% is now 8% to 9%. And the outlook is not only strong, it's getting more diverse. Yes, you see our long-standing strength in the traditional customer base, the energy-intensive LNG that Drew was just referencing to the types of customers that use data centers for breakfast. Chemicals, petrochemicals, the industrial gases and the like. They are there. They're still growing. They're still expanding. Clean energy projects that have shown up in the last few years are showing up in our outlook. And yes, we are seeing the very same surge in interest in large data centers that we're seeing elsewhere around the country. We're folks looking to develop in our region. But when looking at our 5-year outlook, only AWS is in the plan, but we have more data center opportunities on the horizon. Make no mistake about it. And the outlook is not only diverse by sector, but also by geography. Across all of our operating companies, which for us, help us reduce our overall industrial growth, the overall risk in our industrial growth pipeline. And I'll reiterate what Drew said, nobody else has this unique growth opportunity. This level of growth with this much diversity is unmatched in our space for us and for you driving a significant value with even more potential upside. Speaking of potential upside, we are engaged with these data centers across the operating companies. It can be intimidating when you think about the scale 5 to 10 gigawatts of additional load. It's intimidating. But for those of us who've been in the game for a while, it is exciting as you know what. It is for us a once-in-a-generation kind of opportunity that will require significant incremental investment. And yes, at an accelerated pace. And I'll declare and Drew holds our feet to the fire could show up in the near term. And speed to market is critical in how we capture this opportunity. The data centers, each one of them want to be first to market, not just quick to market. They want to be first to market. We're certainly accelerating already to serve them and the demand for energy is consuming so much of the conversation with him, and Drew alluded to it, but these hyperscalers aren't talking about megawatts. They're talking about multiple gigawatts when they're talking about siting and/or expanding. So we are aided though in this process. It's not just us making changes to be able to meet speed to market. We happen to be in states that tend to be business-friendly and welcoming to anomic opportunity, and you'll hear a little bit about that. Actually, you hear a lot about that in the panel that will come right after me. And on the energy supply front, it does matter to these large customers, including the data centers that we have a proven history of delivering large, combined cycle facilities on time and on budget. And on top of the need for energy, the data centers have very aggressive sustainability commitments. And so timely access to clean power is really critical for them in deciding where they want to build. Those advantages are why we are in the conversation with so many of them. To that end, we're driving outcomes that accelerate the expansion of our renewables footprint. We talked about it, you heard on the last call about the Mississippi legislature where they pass legislation to streamline the CCN approval process. That's a big deal for us to add renewable and clean energy to support the AWS project. We talked about it on the call that for us, this was a blueprint of collaboration between Entergy, the Governor of the State of Mississippi, who had a pro-business agenda, the state legislature for the state of Mississippi, the commission, the economic development partners, AWS and all of its ancillary partners and vendors as well. We were the catalyst through our stakeholder engagement process, efforts, strategy and ultimately, the team, Haley Fisackerly, the team in Mississippi, bringing these parties together to talk about value creation. What were the headwinds that stood in front of our ability to deliver value for the people in Mississippi for AWS to its objectives. And when I say the people of Mississippi, I assume that the governor's point of view was identical to the legislature's point of view that was identical to the customer's point of view. Part of the work that Haley and his team with the support of us ultimately had to do was to bring these people together, identify what their primary objectives were and then ensure one, they had input into the process, but that the outcomes met everybody's objectives. That's what stakeholder engagement is all about, and you'll see that theme playing out and it's supporting our ability to deliver renewables for AWS in Mississippi. But in Louisiana, for example, they recently approved, we announced it -- I guess it was within the last week or so, the LPSC gave us the approval to streamline 3 gigs of renewable capacity in Louisiana. The process was the same. We had customer demand for green energy, they wanted renewables. And our current green tariffs were already oversubscribed. So it wasn't just Entergy coming you say, listen, we don't want to have to go through the process of an RFP every time we want to build out additional renewables. We have customer demands to date where we have to move quickly. Well, much like in the case with Mississippi, our stakeholder engagement strategy brought customers to the regulators and other stakeholders, and we got -- we delivered a significant win for Louisiana and renewables. And we just announced our joint development agreement with NextEra to build out 4.5 gigs of solar and storage projects over the next 5 years. Leveraging our stakeholder engagement strength, the strength of partners, like NextEra, who has a capacity to develop renewables that's greater than ours. Why not? Why? Because it's customer driven. Our objective is to deliver outcomes for our customers in the most efficient possible. They just helped us potentially increase our capacity, deliver renewables at speed and at scale. And with the cooperation of our states, we can meet the speed to market equation for renewables. It all ties in together. And so aside from our ability to deliver what these customers in terms of the reliability and the attributes around the power, I go back to this conversation around price to value and why it's so important. We're a central piece to their value proposition around their own competitiveness, and we don't take that lightly. We've been positioning ourselves to be a low-cost provider. This should not be new to any of you. We have been able to maintain our costs well below the national average. We've been focused around remaining disciplined around our O&M spend to maintain that low-cost advantage. And we're not satisfied with that. We're constantly looking for ways to drive more efficiencies. And I know Kimberly will discuss in detail a little bit later. Our goal with our O&M process and management is to offset the natural effects of O&M tied to us being able to serve this growth and combating or offsetting the headwinds of inflation to create headroom for all the investment that I'm going to talk about in a second. And for us, keep in mind, on an inflation-adjusted basis for -- for every $1 of O&M that we can save in terms of maintaining that cost discipline, we create $5 to $7 of capital opportunity. You guys know this in and out, and we talk about it often. But it's our means -- this discipline is our means of being able to put capital to work for customers while also again, maintaining our low rate advantage. I'll share the capital plan more on the capital plan in a moment. But the point here is that we're looking to provide the biggest value, the biggest bang for the buck for customers. And that's what gives us credibility when we're going in front of the regulators seeking relief because not only are we looking to create value for customers, we're being mindful and this is what provides air cover for regulators to make sometimes tough decisions. We're providing the conversation around price to value that we're actually paying attention to affordability and ultimately competitiveness for the C&I customers. And as we build the infrastructure to meet our customers' demand, Entergy -- aside from our customers, Entergy remains committed to our path to a cleaner generation portfolio. We are already amongst the cleanest generators in the space. That's been the case for some time. But with our customers demanding more energy, we have to make sure we don't lose sight of our own North Star. We start this clean conversation. And I see our Chief Nuclear Officer sitting up front. We start with our 5 gigs baseload nuclear from our fleet. That's a big competitive advantage. Along with the planned retirements of our remaining coal fleet, our investment plan reflects both carbon-free and carbon-managed generation through continued focus on what we consider to be the known and proven technologies such as renewables and battery storage, you all are quite familiar with. And our capacity plan focuses on new efficient combined cycle generation, and I want to be specific about this, with the capability to convert hydrogen and enable carbon capture and storage technology which we expect to be viable at utility scale in the near future. And I know that sounds fuzzy to say in the near future because we're seeing that for a reason. Yes, we recognize the challenges and uncertainty, but we expect it to be relevant in our supply portfolio in the near future. I'll be a little bit more specific about that. While CCS for our customers actually in the Gulf South, is a proven and demonstrated technology, the ecosystem that be required for utility scale application still requires further development. But our region, we believe, is really well supported to support the expansion. We have significant existing infrastructure in place, and our large customers are already investing in pipeline expansion and sequestration. We are bullish on CCS in our expansion plans, both for ourselves and our own ambitions, but as well as our customers. And we do and we're going on a record. We expect CCS technology to become viable by 2030. We plan to install CCS at the new combined cycle plants to be built in the coming years. And in our view, that ultimately includes the new Legend plant that we just announced earlier this week in Texas, and I see Ellie sitting there and he's not squirming in his seat. So I'm going to assume he's still very much aligned with that statement I just made. Our customers are interested in exploring diverse solutions to meet their sustainability goals. And we're going to leverage these partnerships to pursue CCS hand-in-hand with our customers. We do not yet have delineated capital in our plan for CCS, to be fair. But we've received the grant from the DOE to conduct a FEED study on CCS. It's about $10 million granted. We expect that grant to lead to a demonstration pilot at our Lake Charles Power Station. Again, just being specific about what is currently in the plan, our plan versus what we expect to adjust the plan to accommodate. So let's lay it out here, $33 billion over 5 years, designed to deliver outcomes that support the very customer objectives that I was alluding to, building infrastructure to support growth, upgrading our systems to make them more reliable and resilient, to adverse weather. Clean energy solutions to meet their -- our customer sustainability objectives and then other investments that ultimately drive positive customer experience. To the objectives, we're increasingly investing to expand the generation portfolio and to really prepare for this growth opportunity. Each new growth opportunity, regardless of the sector is going to require generation of some sort of interconnection, new substations and ultimately feeds into the MISO, MTEP process. We continue to prioritize these capital needs across the planning horizon that drive customer value. And we are creating and maintaining flexibility to adjust to make sure that our customer needs are being met in a timely fashion. Our progress, though, is not just notional. We're measuring impacts of the investments that we're making that benefit the stakeholders. And we have line of sight to drive improvements over the next 5 years. These are important and Drew alluded to it, but reducing outage frequency by over 30% through those reliability improvements in asset renewal, reducing emissions by 20% through our commitment to carbon-free and carbon-neutral generation that I just referenced. It's a big deal to be able to talk about finally a pathway to reduce storm costs by 20% through a resilience plan that we know is still, despite all the success for us is still in the early innings. And then driving improvements to our Net Promoter Score through our customer experiences. The Net Promoter Score becomes important going back to the point that I made, taking care of the basics in the regulatory environment with our mass customers is how we earn the right to take advantage of these growth opportunities. And the benefits that we're tracking extend well beyond what we track as benefits for customers. The communities we operate in will enjoy significant benefits in multiplier effects from the billions of dollars that both we and our customers are investing in our region. Job creation and a growing tax base just to begin the conversation. As we talk about customer outcomes, we do remain very mindful of our residential customers, and I start the conversation with that and their ability to afford their electric bills. And I -- that you quarter-over-quarter, month-over-month are constantly looking at this conversation around affordability as a proxy for our regulatory support environment. We totally get it. It's part of the reason why, and we agree, we have a history of keeping bill growth generally in line with inflation. But our customers, including those sensitive price-sensitive residential customers that made it clear, they're requiring more reliable resilient service, and it's in part for a lot of the reasons Drew referenced about the dependency regardless of where you are in the socioeconomic strata, and regardless of where you sit in the C&I space, the dependency on electricity is requiring a greater dependency on reliable and resilient service. So we're responding to that, which is why value becomes part of the conversation with price, even for those price sensitive customers. Delivering the value that they're demanding reflects average bill growth slightly above our usual target that you see of 3% but it's important to emphasize that our starting point has always been consistently below the national average in our industry peers. And so we remain competitive to the industry peers despite the fact that the outcomes are slightly above that 3%, but we expect to stay there in terms of being below the national average. That's our competitive advantage. It's a commitment we're making, and we believe it will also support our stakeholder engagement strategy and getting ongoing support for our investments. I'll also emphasize that our communities are actually seeing and in this political environment becomes really relevant, they're seeing lower unemployment rates. That's a big deal in legislative and regulatory circles when we're bringing customers to bear for regulatory support. It matters that we can translate jobs to unemployment rates going down in the regions where we operate. So as Drew highlighted, electricity has never been more important. And it has never been a smaller share of our customers' wallet, net-net. That is really important to our ability to get our business done in the regulatory arena. I would be remiss if I did not have a specific conversation around a key critical stakeholder in our value proposition. The employees are -- we can give you all the platitudes about our commitment to employees, but let's be really clear, the employees of the engine that powers our success. And we are as focused on creating and maintaining value for them as we are when we talk about the customers, ensuring they have the right skills and capabilities in the key focus areas is how we win with our customers. And we've built partnerships with colleges and tradecraft to ensure the steady availability of talented and skilled employees. We focus on cultural transformation keeping them up to date with evolving and emerging technologies and advancements in data analytics and AI, they want to remain relevant in their jobs to our stakeholders. And that means more opportunities for them to grow, thrive and ultimately support our strategic objectives and priorities. We would be remiss also to talk about the cultural transformation for our employees in the field of stakeholder engagement because what we're asking them in exchange for this, what we believe, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to be relevant in the transformation of the Gulf South. We're asking them to play a more active role in representing the company's interest in our stakeholder engagement strategy. Historically, your title had customer, government, public policy or regulatory or something in order for you to feel like you had a role in stakeholder engagement. Now your commitment to stakeholder engagement begins when you have a badge that has Entergy on it. If your picture is on a badge that has Entergy on it, you have a role in expectation, not only in storm drills, but in our ability to be effective in our stakeholder engagement strategy to create value for our stakeholders. So we talk about our focus on those 4 key stakeholders: customers, the employees, community and you. But we have a broader set of stakeholders that help us drive the outcomes that matter to you. I mentioned earlier how we made progress working with our stakeholders to get results in Louisiana with the 3 gigs of renewables expansion, the improvements in Mississippi in support of Amazon Web Services. But in addition to the streamlined CCN process that helps us move to deliver the energy and attributes more quickly, the Mississippi legislature approved our ability to recover financing costs in rates through CWIP. And just this past week, the Louisiana legislature approved the sales and use exemption tax for data centers. This didn't just happen. This happened because employees like Haley's team in Mississippi, like Phillip's team in Louisiana, we brought those stakeholders together to talk about, again, the headwinds to value creation. Bringing people together who otherwise would have just sat in their intervener silos and staked out a position. What we were doing long before we made the filings was bringing them to the table to give them an opportunity for input into the plans we had forward. So when we actually make these filings, they already incorporate the feedback from folks, and we're not waiting around for the procedural schedule to tell us what those stakeholders' interests are or issues are and it wound up producing a set of outcomes that was not only beneficial to AWS, but was credit accretive to us in reducing the risk of financing cost for a project long before the customer service. But for us, effective stakeholder engagement with all of our employees, it's a core part of our ability to execute on the strategy. And I'll go back for a moment to the $1.9 billion of resilience in Louisiana. That outreach, that customer engagement strategy started. When we walked off the stage, I guess it was New York in 2022 when we told you we would know we were moving in the right direction by the time we made the filing when the conversation would be more about the scope and the scale and the pace of resiliency versus the idea of whether we needed to spend capital on resiliency. We knew then what we know now was that it was going to require us educating and bringing into the tent at the local level, all of the stakeholders who would otherwise not know that they had an interest in the outcomes of the investments we're making. At the local level, with the chambers of commerce, we're in Louisiana. So we call them -- we have parishes as opposed to counties. But the chambers of commerce, Parish presidents and at the state level with elected officials and the commission. We spent nearly 2 years having conversations with them about their concerns. How can we address your concerns, not only in the filing, but in the way in which we're executing on this capital. What types of reporting requirements would give you confidence, going back to a point I made that customers would be getting a viable bang for the buck that we are spending. And what do we need to show you that we're continuing to be responsible stewards in keeping our O&M low. But we didn't just keep the conversation and involved with public officials. We engaged a local contracting partners who -- which was particularly effective because for them, resilience wasn't just about jobs and opportunities as you would expect. By the time they got deep into the nuances of our investment plan, this was for them about protecting their communities and the state, not just electric infrastructure, and that's what the resiliency conversation was in investments for us was really about. And this cacophony of messaging from all stakeholders resonated with the policymakers, as you would expect it to. Throughout the process, our community partners and these Parish leaders and local communities, we're given opportunities to review the plan. We early before there was a public filing and it made a difference that they got an opportunity to provide their critical input again, that's stakeholder engagement in action. With these partners with these partners, we continue to pursue federal funding to help offset the program cost. Again, Entergy is not just looking to grow rate base through capital deployment. We're looking to offset the cost of this work through federal support and again, working with our government officials to build more resilient communities is also part of the stakeholder engagement strategy. Louisiana established a public private partnership with multiple parishes for grants from FEMA in this instance, for hardening infrastructure for flood water pumping stations, that's a big deal. For emergency operations centers, fire, police stations and water towers. Think about the public narrative as an adjunct to our traditional conversation around [ G, T and D ] facilities, when we're asking the federal government to help support our efforts to create a more resilient delivery system for customers when we're actually bringing our elected officials and policymakers with us in the conversation. Not only with FEMA, Louisiana submitted 2 applications to the DOE for infrastructure hardening. And then on -- again, doing another click on the stakeholder engagement conversation, we created a community benefits working group as part of the DOE grant application process that gave us the opportunity to solicit input from various segments of the community, getting their buy-in to this resiliency conversation. And we also -- we put skin in the game for the community. Again, we didn't want just a public policy maker support. We actually wanted the community support. When we put $2 million up to support some of the administrative costs of the stakeholder engagement process, town hall meetings and the like, but also to begin to match some of the grants that the federal government would give us. If we were successful with the grant application, all of us sudden, in the community partners who would have otherwise been antagonistic to the process and wait a minute, Entergy is not only participating in this stakeholder engagement to talk about the value of their investment. They're putting skin in the game. And we found that the conversation around resiliency, adaptation, our resiliency plan, again, was no longer about fighting as to whether or not it will happen. What's the most efficient way for Entergy to get its ability to make those investments and how can we continue to partner with Entergy to help offset some of the costs with whatever the Feds are willing to do. The point being is that the LPSC's approval of that $1.9 billion resiliency plan was part and parcel of a 360-degree view of stakeholder engagement that we had to initiate and that began when we had our conversation with you, literally 2 years to talk about what mattered most and the commission at the end of the day, aligned around those common objectives, protecting what matters most, customers, homes, businesses and the communities we serve. I don't want to leave out Texas and Ellie. Just this past week, Texas filed for approval to build 2 advanced natural gas powered plants, including the Legend CCGT that I mentioned. These investments are really important to fuel the growth in Southeast Texas and to serve large-scale economic projects in the region like Sempra's LNG facility that we've been working in close partnership with. The filing is part of a broad initiative that we named the Southeast Texas Energy Plan are a step ahead, which is a really cool name. But this is no less a significant stakeholder engagement opportunity. And it was part and parcel of an ongoing conversation that Ellie created with this team called the Southeast Texas Leadership Summit. Did I get that right? We brought stakeholders together from the state of Texas, including commission leadership, the PUCT Commissioner, the Texas state controller, the former DOE Secretary who is now the CEO of EEI, along with public policymakers and officials and our customers from the State of Texas talking about their interest in our investment strategy to support the growth in Texas. And again, there are going to be more initiatives coming out of this step ahead process, but my point to you is that the stakeholder engagement behind it isn't just happen stance. It is a deliberate part of our strategy to execute to create greater certainty and predictability around the support we get in the regulatory environment. That's why it's so important that we talk about stakeholder engagement. It's why I'm telling you what we're sharing with our employees that they don't get to stand by and just allow it to happen through others that we're taking matters in our own hand trying to drive this value conversation far beyond just the regulatory filing. Take a look at this slide. And I know for most in this room, it feels like the generic slide that you used to help inform modeling assumptions about the timing of our regulatory processes and mechanisms. But I'm asking you to take a look at this slide through a different lens. This slide is why stakeholder engagement is so important. This is the illustration of how aligning together with our stakeholders on where we're going and why manifest itself in more efficient and constructive regulatory outcomes. This is the point of the execution of the strategy that Drew opened up with where we said it starts with the customer and our capital plan being informed by what the customer tells us is important. That we, in turn, through the stakeholder engagement process or telling that value story that we, in turn, get to bring to the regulators to get support for our opportunity to create value for you. That's what this is all about and where the stakeholder engagement strategy kind of comes to a head. We're successful when by the time we make the filing, we've taken care of the lion's share of the work of aligning the common interest to get regulatory outcomes. I started with customers, and I'll talk about the benefits of our plan to our communities and our employees. But we always begin with the end in mind. Our customer-centric focus, strong industrial sales growth, robust investment plan and broad and ongoing stakeholder engagement strategy means a healthy and growing utility, strong rate base growth and a positive earnings outlook, demonstrating solid value for our owners. For us, is what this entire customer-led conversation is all about. I'll end as I began, we're excited about the opportunity we have before us. We think it's once in a generation. We're committed to executing for you. We're confident in our outlooks and committed to our ability to deliver value for all 4 of our key stakeholders. That ends it for me, thank you for indulging me with your time. Give us a quick minute to set up the stage for the panel where Phillip May, CEO -- President and CEO of Entergy Louisiana and Haley Fisackerly, the President and CEO of Entergy Mississippi, going to introduce our special guests.

Thanks. Well, good morning. I'm Haley Fisackerly, President and CEO of Entergy Mississippi and I'm excited to kick off this next panel talking about economic development. I'd like to introduce our first guest as Gray Swoope. Gray is President -- Founder, President and CEO of Vision First Strategies and economic development and site selection firm with clients in over 48 states and representing a good number of Fortune 500 companies. Prior to that, Gray spent a career over 30 years of economic development in the profession in the local and the state area prior to Vision First. He was Secretary of Commerce and President of Enterprise Florida. For then Governor Scott from 2011 to 2015, led a number of projects that led to some of the greatest outcomes there that enterprise's history. Prior to that, he was Executive Director for the Mississippi Development Authority under our good friend, Governor Haley Barbour, brought numerous projects to the state, some including Toyota, General Aviation, PACCAR and Steel Dynamics. But Gray also will tell you, not one that he saw himself ever doing, but he also had to assist the governor and Hurricane Katrina recovery. It was a fiscal agent for the then $5.4 billion HUD grant program to help recover area. He spent areas time in the local areas but also in the state of Arkansas. So knows our area well. He was Director of Economic and Industrial Development under them, Governor Bill Clinton. So we're glad to have Gray with us.

I'm Phillip May, President and CEO of Entergy Louisiana. It's my pleasure to introduce the Secretary of Louisiana Department of Economic Development, Susan Bourgeois. Susan has 3 decades of experience in terms of building, transforming and sustaining teams through actions around strategic plan and project development, fundraising and advocacy. Prior to our appointment as LED Secretary. She also served as President of SVP Consulting and was most recently President Emeritus of the Northshore Community Foundation. Susan served in multiple roles under the Louisiana Governor Foster Administration. She is active in international Women's Forum, Northshore Business Council and the Lake Shore Regional Medical Center. I got to know Susan from her many roles and leadership on the Board in which we served most recently, she was the Chair of GNO, Inc., which is an organization that focuses on creating thriving communities and better quality of life to economic development. Susan has built a reputation through her visionary acumen for collaboration, innovation and most importantly, building meaningful alliances, all of which is critical to creating those driving communities in a thriving state. Please join me in welcoming Susan Bourgeois.

All right. Panel, let's get into it. So before we get into talking about all the opportunity and the growth. Gray, you've been doing this for over 40 years, and you've been successful because you've evolved. Kind of give the audience here feel for what does economic development look like today? How has it changed? What do state -- What does Susan -- what do states have to do to be successful? And how do the utilities play a role into that?

Well, first of all, it's great to be here. And Haley, I think and having the opportunity to watch economic development evolve over several decades. Thanks for reminding me for. But it has become very complex. You think about the size of -- the Projects Secretary will tell you that you see today, the complexity that goes around them, it's very different from what it was because it's complex, you have to do a lot of things run in now that you never did in the past. You think about product development, what do we have from a site inventory standpoint. What are we doing from an infrastructure standpoint. All those things are very important in the site selection process. But more than anything -- and Drew and Rob, you all both hammer this home, but we always say in economic development, it's a team sport. Stakeholder involvement in putting together the right team to win these projects is critical today more so than ever. I'll look at the projects that we work with, what we see, it is -- it has to have a team of educators. It is a team of government officials. It's everybody that's involved to win the projects and the investment to be a partnership in these communities. And often now, where we see utilities, investor-owned utilities like Entergy, you're providing intellectual capital in those conversations because power is a part of that conversation. But it's so because of the network that you've built over the time with the stakeholders and the communities that's essential and the communities that haven't done their homework and done that they're the ones that are going to be really at a disadvantage.

Susan, we have a new governor who is keenly interested in growing the stake. Tell me what is that approach we're seeing with the Landry administration.

Yes. Thanks, Phillip. And I think saying we have a new governor is important. Because we have a new governor. Therefore, we have a new secretary. I'm about 4 months on the job here. So I say that both as sort of prior forgiveness, if you will, but also about the excitement around opportunity and the way that the governor is approaching economic development differently. As Phillip mentioned, sort of in my intro and my bio, you didn't hear a lot about specific wins, not like Gray, but you will, because my background really isn't in specific economic development, I'm not practitioner. My background is an organizational development, it's in relationship building. And I say that, and it's an organizational transformation. And that is really the best answer to question. This governor in Louisiana wants it to be fundamentally different. I think I was selected for this role primarily because we knew we were walking into a major transition as a state government. And most importantly, we had to transform our systems and delivering economic development in Louisiana in order to provide the opportunities that this governor is insisting we provide our people, is why we're changing things. So I will say there are 2 or 3 things. And actually, Rod used some of the words, and I like that Rod's were going to be echoed to mine. Number one is engagement, we are engaging the private sector in ways that government has not done in the past in Louisiana. Number two is that transformation. We're looking at everything from best practices in other states that have historically, at least in the short term, done better than Louisiana in outcomes and economic development. We've researched breast practices and said, how do we have to change it here to do it that way, responding at the speed of business is critical to that. Partnership engagement, responsiveness and frankly, just an open philosophical commitment to being, a, we want to win and that we are open for business.

And Susan, we have the legislature passed a restructuring bill for Louisiana economic development. We were active in the bill, what is that about?

Yes. So one, again, we're moving pretty fast right now. And so the first thing that we did was we looked at both the internal structures at LED, not to get inside baseball, but we also looked at our governance structures. And so we have just passed a bill, which we will sign big press conference next Tuesday, talking about how we do it differently and Entergy as a company and, Phillip, individually have been critically important to that work. But it does 3 really important things. Number one is that we are going to be -- we, as a department are going to be led and advised and our work will be informed by the private sector, right? That people inside government don't actually know necessarily what the private sector needs. So we have created the Louisiana Economic Development partnership, which will be a Board that will position our department to capitalize on opportunities before us, but also to paint the path forward. The most important part of that is a mandatory strategic plan, right? Just good organizational management. And that board's responsibility that private sector board will hold us responsible to and accountable to that plan. So that's great start. Entergy clearly has had a role in getting us there, and we'll continue to have a role in that space. The second thing it does, gosh, this is so inside baseball, but you'll have no idea how meaningful this is to us. It exempts our state agency out of all things, state procurement, state technology restrictions. The limitations and the handcuffs we have as a department have been really remarkable to me coming from the private sector into the public sector. I'm just going to give you a quick anecdote because you need to understand the importance of this. We have 200 employees in our department, and I could only get permission to have 14 sales force licenses because, just state government, right? So the fact that we have the ability to do what we need to do to operate like a business so we can be responsive to business, the bill is changing that. So there are multiple statutory reforms that are happening in the bill. But I think the greatest takeaway is that the private sector, the existing leadership in Louisiana's private sector will be driving the future of economic development in Louisiana.

I think the big thing is we expect, and we'll get a much more agile and responsive organization..

Absolutely.

Great. Let's move over and talk about this region. You work projects in 48 states. Clients in states, you know our region, you lived in Arkansas, Mississippi, you work projects in Louisiana, Texas, Talk about the region. Gray, Drew talked earlier about the Mississippi River, the quarter here long Gulf Coast, give the perspective that juicy working projects in these 48 states that is unique about this Gulf Coast region introduced [indiscernible] territories.

Yes. I listened this morning, and I found it very interesting a lot of conversations about the infrastructure that you have here. I kind of look at it a little bit differently in that, it's really asset rich. If you think of economic development strategy, we think often about asset value optimization, how do we use these assets in a way to go about economic development. But if you look at the legacy industries that you have in the energy territory, you have strong automotive, you've got automotive suppliers. You've got timber industry. You've got in Arkansas, the unbelievable steel industry in metal fabrication is now there, across the Louisiana's platform of the legacy from a petro and chemical industry and then even into Texas in the industry there that even looking at doing more distribution there with the ports and doing some things. But you've got assets more so than just infrastructure. And so when I look at that, it brings opportunity. When our clients are looking for diversification of what they do and how to use these assets, how do they go about maximize or optimizing those. I think that's real critical insight selection. So you have opportunities then with -- as an example, one of the strategies that you're working on and looking on carbon capture. If you look at the infrastructure that's here and with the recent acquisition of Denbury and the infrastructure there for pipeline there, it's all over your territory. And so it opens the door for more opportunity to build off that to meet clean energy goals. You also see new opportunities like in Arkansas as well as lithium mining that's coming onboard. It is an asset-rich region that we in looking at clients in a lament of clients and where there's assets to optimize to take advantage of for their making of products. It sits very well in how you use those having leadership to understand how to use those assets to make objectives.

When you look at that, though, when you're looking at those projects and you're working, what there other things like from a political or community competitor standpoint too, that stand...

Well, you kind of asked me what's changed a whole lot. I think today, because of the complexity of the projects that you do have to have leadership that understands that, look, having served in a role, a secretary commerce in the state that e-com development was that seen as a very positive thing. I've sat through those conversations where about leadership, not embracing it, but states that are embracing certainly in the states that your territories in, they embrace economic development and looking at the partnership. So it starts with the -- having conversations and what you guys have done such a great job with is laying the groundwork to understand, we've got to build product. We have to have a product. And that product can include sites. It's workforce, it's education, all those components that go together. But you do that on the front end to be successful in the back end to have the projects that have huge capital investment and have to have a highly skilled workforce to operate. And so it's very critical build those relationships on the front end because you can't just pop in and say, "Hey, now we want to do something." You look at the example that we used in Mississippi. The conversations on the data center project, they started 4 or 5 years ago about what is the world possible. Can the South -- can Mississippi even play in that space? And so those were conversations that led to legislation that actually started in 2022 that laid the groundwork for data center space in the state of Mississippi.

You heard the conversation of what the assets are. What why are companies coming to Louisiana? And more importantly, who is coming? What businesses and industries are coming to see?

So I think the why to Gray's point is it's a wonderful coupling, if you will, between assets and infrastructure, right? They are the natural assets, Louisiana has some really unique ones. The Mississippi River, obviously, we have also 5 deepwater ports and therefore, access to the entire globe through the Gulf of Mexico. But the other piece of that is Louisiana is historically an oil and gas state, that is not going to change. That's certainly part of our future as well in our petrochemical history and -- but the industry infrastructure here is really unmatched, and there are people coming here. The other interesting thing I find that so many of the new processes that people are interested in. And I'll go off on a tangent on this one, but this is really the answer. Every single project that has come across my desk in the 4 months that I have been there, every single one has an environmental or a decarbonization component to it, every single one. And so that's the real answer. The global pressure, the global insistence on changing the energy narrative, right, no matter what the politics are of that, that is real. And Louisiana is incredibly well positioned for that because so many of our industries marry with it or come from it, right? I give the example all the time to people to try to make it simple for them. We've been taking oil and gas out of the earth for a long time now in Louisiana. Decarbonization, there's no better place to do it because we are prepared. It's very similar pipelines. It's very similar processes. It's just sort of hitting the reverse button, right? But the supply chain, the workforce. We are trained, our historic infrastructure and our historic industries are positioning us to respond to that global pressure, I would argue unlike any other state. And then when you -- so to the second part of your question is what are people looking at what kinds of industries. It's the natural gas piece, look -- find natural gas, nobody could have prepared for what happened in the Ukraine, obviously. But the fact that the state was positioned in the private sector was already positioning on the LNG front. And then just that geopolitical pressure that exacerbated that need. So the LNG play is huge and it continues to grow the commitments in that space in Louisiana. We just keep working to fulfill them. There's so much opportunity ammonia. Ammonia. Ammonia has been part of Louisiana for a long time and the need for it and the need for clean ammonia. That's a huge piece of what we're doing here. There's a lithium play in Arkansas, but there's a lithium supply chain play in Louisiana. And so -- but every industry the cleanness of every industry. It's -- take what Louisiana has done for a long time and now put a clean component to it, and that's who's coming here, and the demand is really tremendous.

And Gray, every day in the news we're hearing about data centers, but more AI, machine learning, hyperscale. Rod showed that the growth has come in to our area. One of your clients is AWS. You're working these projects. Give the audience your perspective, what is the size, the time line, the scale of this? Who are the players? And more importantly, what are they looking for when they're trying to pick a location to go to?

Well, I think you had to back out is, first of all, look at whether it's hyperscale, colo, enterprise and you share that in your graph. And so I'll speak to the hyperscale and there's 4, maybe 5 players in that space, and that's about it. AI is driving this demand for building machine learning, AI -- data centers. when we look at how to put that, how do you go about putting that process together to find the right locations. The first conversation is usually with utilities. And it's looking for a partnership in how that -- because we -- it's interesting because we get to set in a lot of conversations, you mentioned that we've done work in 48 states, if you're wondering it's Alaska, North Dakota that I don't like because I don't understand it. But not that I'm keeping track. But if you back up and you look at those conversations, when you start to sit down like someone like you were Phillip and say, "Hey, yes, we're here. We kind of wanting to be able to figure out how to get the 300 megawatts in the year, and then we're going to be able to scale the 5 to 6 years to a gig." You're like, "Woah, we can't have that conversation." What has been different in the process here in having that conversation is that certainly with Haley and their team and with industry team, it was embracing. And so that's what you're looking for when you say, all right, let's figure this out. You need what and when, here's what we have, how do we go about it? How can we have a partnership. The partnership piece on the front end is very important. The second piece of that then is what is the tax climate. And if you look at -- and again, I'm not speaking on behalf of any clients, generically, you look at shale, a building. They're going to be anywhere from $1 billion to $1.6 billion a shale, 75% of is going to be personal equipment. And that's going to turn over 3 to 4 years. And so tax is a big implication of cost. And so if you don't do things like sales and use tax, and we've talked about it, then you really are limiting yourself and be able to compete that space. And so sales and use taxes is a huge player in that. So once you figure out that you've got utilities are going to be a partner with you in the process and how to figure out to get to the power needs, the tax climate is right, then it becomes question of when. In prepared sites, yes, they are very helpful because when you start looking around in this map rush now for space, you see a lot of land being acquired, but due diligence hasn't really been done on it and a lot of these places will never work. And so the communities and states and regions that have done a little bit more homework on where are the best locations, they're going to be the winners.

But if a state is conceding to sell and use tax, there's a lot of debate about the jobs. Why are the communities wanting this?

Yes. Well, as a former state Director, I will tell you what makes for a good state strategy is to have economically healthy community. And if a community has an investment of $10 billion, which was recently announced, you look at the revenue that comes off of that from supporting community services. School systems, the ad valorem taxes, even through an abated model are going to be tremendous. And so it becomes a very -- again, looking at a state and a community, it becomes a huge economic impact, almost catalytically impact on those communities in where they locate. But so if you look at, for instance, like the project you just mentioned, you had an issue with the wastewater system. Well, companies like the ones that we've worked with, they're looking at how do you do sustainable solutions for cooling, well, we're going to use greywater and do improvements to a wastewater system that was needing improvements anyway. So revenue from taxes helped generate that. So it's a creative solution that's a win-win for everybody. The other thing in the economic impact when you're looking at is not just a community the data center sitting in. But as you -- in your announcement this morning on the partnership next year in the solar. Those are going to typically go in areas that do not see this type of activity. And I know in the footprint that you're looking at, that's going to be a huge windfall for tax revenue. And these communities well. So again, from a state perspective, if you're doing those things and you're winning those investments, yes, it's the immediate Perisher county that has the investment, but the spin-off around it is tremendous.

Right. Susan, we worked with your team on getting sales and use tax and a better approach to get that done in this session. But tell me why do you think data centers going to be interested in Louisiana?

I think the interesting thing about Louisiana, it's almost a tale of 2 cities, if you will, in the state. The answer to your last question is about more of that historic legacy infrastructure primarily in many respects, that South Louisiana other than the timber industry. The data center space, North Louisiana has immense opportunity because we have a lot of land. It's historical farmland. And timber is a crop, right? So I know we feel really powerful about trees and there's a -- it's also a great decarbonizer, by the way. But timber is a crop. And so the amount of available land that we have. And so we knew that there would be an absolute play for Louisiana in the data center space. And Entergy has been really a leader and a driver in that, even in my first week on the job. There's a -- great story on that one. Phillip had a meeting with the governor regarding a long-term potential data center conversation. And the governor called me, I've been on the job about 2 days, and he said, let me just apologize now. I forgot I had you since you're -- so you're not in this meeting. So honestly, right, they have the meeting with that. I mean the governor forgot, he had a secretary of Economic Development, but that's okay. At any rate, so Entergy has been at the table with us from literally me from day 1 on that. But the interesting piece is that while we knew, right, the sales and use tax piece was going to be critical to this. The way Louisiana does things is that we have a fiscal session every other year. So we can address tax changes, changes to our tax code itself, except for every other year. And so we really had our hands tied to some degree, waiting until next year to change that until we realized there was a bill going through this particular legislative session that was a sales tax rebate, and rebates can happen at any point. And so in typical Louisiana politics fashion, what we call that is, we hijack the bill. And we took that great bill that was originally a fiber optic rebate conversation. Sorry, AT&T. We did hijack bill. It was the right thing to do for the state and with partners and with Entergy's help and some others, we hijack that bill and pass the sales tax rebate. And so now -- and that was effective upon signature of the governor. So we effectively today, have that opportunity. Because we didn't have the luxury of waiting until next legislative session to fix that. And Entergy helped us down that path. But that decision in that action, if you will, great to your point, that was transformational. We couldn't compete without it, and we don't have the luxury of waiting another 18 months to get there.

So the other thing I think that working with you in your first 4 months, been very impressed with you, but the stakeholder engagement is at a different level. I know that you have chaired many boards have been involved in a lot of commissions and so forth, as have I. We've used that to help move along things. Do you have some thoughts on how important stakeholder engagement has become in this process?

Yes. It's critical. I think that's, first of all, the benefit of me coming out of the private sector, not state government, right? Because one of the first things I did when I testified in committee is about this bill, as I said, we are supposed to be a job creation agency as LED, but that doesn't need jobs inside of our department, right? We don't want more government jobs. We want partnerships with the private sector where the experts are, where the experts lie. Those of you -- many of you in this room probably don't know about this thing, but it's a really cool thing it's called Washington [indiscernible] and every year, all of the Louisiana power base goes to Washington, D.C. for 3 or 4 days, and we have what's called Washington [indiscernible]. And that's where the governor decided to announce appointment. And so there are 2,000 people in this entity, right, this or this event, all of whom are CEOs and the major players of politics and the economy of Louisiana. And this is a true story. And within the first 36 hours, I had 300 business cards of people that put cards to my hands, not to get something from me, but to say, what can I do for you, use me. My company is successful here. Let me tell your story, take me on calls. I have a friend who wants to move a company here. So it didn't take me long to realize we had to create a formal structure to capitalize on that. So the first hire I actually made a secretary was to bring somebody on from the private sector whose role is private sector engagement, and we are creating formal structures around building the relation, not building. We have the relationships, using the relationships with the private sector in a way that informs and excels economic growth in Louisiana. And so to say that we have a commitment to it, it's really sort of fundamental to everything we're building out. We are not hiring additional state employees inside of LED to be the experts when we have access to experts like Phillip and his team. It would make no sense for us to recreate that wheel. And so we, instead, are formalizing the processes to use your relationships, your information and your expertise, and we're doing that across industries.

[indiscernible] I want to go back to AI with one thing, a couple of areas for us, but also Drew talked about the speed to market. Is it speed or [ green ] now it's both. So which is first?

speed is important. I mean I think from a competitive standpoint, everybody is trying to get into the space. And so each of those speed to market. But with that, at the same time, is figuring out pathways, okay, how can we get up and running and what is the pathway to get clean and green energy at the end of the day because they still have all those companies still have their sustainability goals and metrics that they're working on. But right now, it is how can we get speed, how can we get power and how can we get started? I also should mention, too, that if you look at the history of the industry, latency, was a big factor. And so locations that had closer to proximity markets that were using data centers, not for machine learning or AI. Those were probably had a bigger advantage. But today, that latency issue is not -- is still important, but not as important, it opens up the door for the first conversation, what is the world of possible? Can we even do this here. And so certainly, the 4 states in the Entergy's territory now have an opportunity that with these type of data centers you now have.

And in economic development, I know you focus a lot on this is the jobs to workforce. What is it that AWS and companies like them. So now you're [ leaving ] the high population areas, putting centers where the land is available, maybe not as the population base. What do they have to do in the workforce?

So it's -- the beauty of a data center is very similar to operating utility you need skills of all sizes. I mean here from technical associate all the way up to graduate level. And so if you look at the people that are working in a data center, surprisingly, the 2 campuses of Mississippi ultimately will employ 1,000 people. The announced jobs as I think, around 65,000 a year. It's what the market will demand but engineers are going to be a lot higher. So it has a huge payroll impact. And when you look at the payroll impact on a community from that workforce, it's going to kind of raise the bar for everybody. But having community colleges, working with high schools, dual enrollment. Everything from fiber splicing to computer engineering and even electrical engineering is all important in that process in having those relationships built on the front end are very important. So as you know, often the conversation when we're in that search [ is yes ], we're talking about power, we're talking about land, we're talking about how do we put it all together, that next conversation is tell us about workforce and what can we do as a company to invest in and partner with you. So it's all about partnerships.

Susan, I've been with the company 38 years, and I've never seen a pipeline like what we have in front of us right now. It's a very exciting time. It's exciting also from perspective what it means for our state. Talk to us a little bit and share your thoughts why do we do economic development? What is this really about?

Yes. So I don't actually like calling an economic development, right? So for panels like this, it's inside baseball, it's easy, right? But when I'm talking to real people, right? Sorry, guys. When I'm talking to real people, and I'm trying to explain and tell them I'm 22 years old, what I do for a living I have to use different words, right? And truth be told, it is about -- and I do try to simplify because it's the right thing it's about ever-increasing wages, right? It's about improving incomes and it's about improving outcomes. At the end of the day, to me, and I believe at its most simple form, this is about creating a quality of place and rising incomes. And if we can do those 2 things, that is what economic development is. That is what our opportunity is, and that's the why. For me, you didn't ask, but I tell this every time I get a chance. There's one reason I'm doing this job, right? I have retired. I was retired for about 6 months. That didn't work out so well for me. But the reason is, in Louisiana, this is an inside Louisiana thing, but we have -- we're our own worst enemy oftentimes. And we don't know about the opportunity. So therefore, we don't talk about the opportunity. And we have long accepted this misperception that our kids have to choose between home and culture and all the things we love about this place, right, between home and economic opportunity elsewhere. And first of all, I will tell you that, that's wrong. That is a perception. It's not a reality. But secondly, it's unacceptable, right? So that is my why. At its most fundamental level, it's that every Louisianian deserves the right to enjoy the food, the culture, all the good stuff, the reason that you all are here in New Orleans, right? And economic upward mobility and the opportunity to make a living wage in a better and better growing wage every day and provide for themselves and their families in a quality place. It's pretty simple. At the end of the day, that's what we do. That's why we do it. That's why governor wants to change the way we do it, and it's why I do it. And it's not more complicated than that. It really isn't.

Yes. And first of all, I'm a [indiscernible] I got to meet you on the day that you -- yes, the first day of the job and, boy, has had a huge impression business leadership, but also people that are in our business that are looking at locations. So you're doing a great job and those only been 6 months [indiscernible].

Thank you. I'm still new, right? As long as I can -- it feels like.

Yes, it's been on top. But -- so the definition of economic development real quick. I think everybody in this room, we told you the rights up or down, you probably all have something very different. I kind of look at it the same way that Susan does, but I think it in terms of like local elected officials, often if they're in a rural community, their definition of economic development is, I want a Chick-fil-A. That's not that's a market-driven approach. It's not what we do every day. Yes, it's nice. Okay. You can't love it. Okay. It's less what I call the competitive project side, where the Secretary of Commerce here in the other states and the utilities play and how do you figure out a way to partner and attract the capital investment and the type of jobs that raises the bar for everybody. It is not just [indiscernible] it just doesn't happen. And so you figure out ways when how to support your education, your workforce, how do you build the product that we talked about. But it's also laying the groundwork as we've been hammered from the very beginning, what people are all on the team together in understanding the business leadership, government leadership. This is where we're going. Here's our strategy, here's how we're going to work. If you do those things right, then you will get the payroll and the jobs that are game-changing for communities, and that's how you build healthy states, healthy communities from an economic standpoint. So to end the selfish question here, [indiscernible] you work with utilities, you work projects. Once again, all over the country, you work with AWS. How about our region now? What is it about Entergy that you saw that it stands out?

Yes. And again, I'm not speaking on behalf of any client, disclaimer there. I will say that what we get the opportunity to see as a lot of investor-owned utilities. We get to see and work with TBA, Salt River authority, a lot of federal type organizations as well. What is different is the approach. And we saw from the very beginning. A lot of times you'll sit down. And again, you start talking about numbers, of like whether it's a battery facility or whether it's a data center or whatever. Capacity is the biggest issue, and a lot of leadership in utilities today will not look at that as a, there's no way we're going to be able to do that. You've even had -- and I won't say, who, but we've had a group get up and walk out. So can't do it. After we sat there and set the meeting up with the state and the utility and they just got them walked out. That is not what you see here. You see a leadership from the very beginning that listened. They had leadership that listened that went back and put plans together 5 years ago. What could this even be possible? And well, what does it take? What are the little things, things that you don't think about right away and how -- a lot of these companies run their own fiber. They don't use a buy fiber from anybody else. It's proprietary systems. Right of way becomes a big issue. They listened. Part of the bill that was with [ edge job ], I believe, at the same time, that provided an ability to do right away for data center on fiber. So it's listening, it's addressing it. It's knowing that this is a long-term partnership and how can we work together with the clients, your customers and, okay, are there ways that we can look at how do we build and invest in and guarantee then how do we work together to find the solutions. And that's what we've seen from day 1 from Entergy.

Gray and Susan, thank you for being a panel, but more importantly, thank you for the work that you're doing. When we make our economic outcomes of our communities better. What we help the states that we do business and thrive. Our business thrives as well, and that's why we're here. So thank you all for joining us today. We have a 20-minute break, and then we'll be back for the next part. [Break]

All right. If you all take your seat again, please. It's my pleasure to introduce Kimberly Fontan, our Chief Financial Officer.

Thank you for that, and welcome back, and I want to thank you for the opportunities and our [ states ] the underscored [ and customer-led ] I'm going to show how that translates into strong financial outcomes. Rob showed you that we have a robust capital plan, and we have a pipeline of potential investments behind it. We have the financial discipline to execute that plan. Our risk management efforts are showing through improved lower risk profile and through improved credit. And we expect to deliver steady, predictable earnings per share growth of 6% to 8% throughout the forecast period. Rod talked about a $33 billion capital plan built on customer outcomes. Outcomes that look like a resilient and reliable system, helping our customers grow, delivering clean energy and enhancing the customer experience. When you translate that into a traditional utility review, you see significant spending in generation, transmission and distribution, all for the benefit of our customers. This plan includes the accelerated resilience that was approved by the Louisiana Public Service Commission in April. It does not include the potential investments needed to support the pipeline of opportunities and the data center opportunities that Rod described. That capital plan translates into rate base growth of 9% through the forecast period or $57 billion in 2028. That is 50% more than in 2022. And executing on that plan requires significant cost management because we expect our O&M over this period to be approximately $2.7 billion on an annual basis. And those improvement efforts help us offset the effects of inflation that we know will come. Continuous improvement efforts that look like the deployment of technology like AI and our call centers where we're aggregating and analyzing verbal comments and then using those to train -- better train our agents, decrease call volumes and increased first-time call resolution. Just this year, we've reduced call volumes by 20%, and we're on track for first quartile in first call resolution. In our operations space, we're using predictive analytics to identify in advance of a transformer failure so that we can go out and change that transformer prior to failure, providing seamless power to our customers and avoiding potential O&M. And in our data centers -- in our distribution centers, we are enhancing our processes to get our line workers into the field faster every single day, enabling us to better use every dollar helping us to manage our costs and improve the customer experience. And these are just a few of the myriad of examples of continuous improvement that's occurring across the enterprise, not just to help us manage our cost but to develop our employees and enhance the overall customer experience. And our continuous improvement efforts extend beyond O&M and into the capital space. In our capital, consistent with our customer-led approach, we've modified our capital prioritization processes, and we've implemented customer capital reviews. In the capital prioritization space, we take the list of functional needs of investments and the list of outcomes that we want to deliver through our opcos, and we marry the two, creating a prioritized list of investments. And then on the capital reviews, we take that list and we select projects for review. And we put together a cross-functional team and review them against theirs. So their contracting strategy and execution elements against benchmarks, standards and our experience, all to ensure every dollar to achieve an outcome for our customer in the most cost-efficient way. There is a clear correlation between investment dollars and customer value. And these reviews help us ensure we achieve that. Just this year, we -- in what we've reviewed, we found efficiencies of 15% to 20% in our capital. All dollars that are then redeployed to the next prioritized capital investment enabling us to deliver more outcomes for our customers for the same dollar. In 2024, we expect to review approximately 20% of our 5-year capital plan, redeploying every dollar. This instills a strong sense of continuous improvement across the enterprise. And we would expect that efficiency percentage to decline over time as the process materials and the practice is baked into the front end. Now executing on these investments requires a significant source of funding, and our largest source is our operating cash flow at more than 60%. More importantly, that is more than $4 billion or 20% more than just our previous 5-year view, fueled by the work that Rod described at the operating companies, coupled with our regulatory bodies to ensure timely and constructive cost recovery mechanisms. Mechanisms like cash on CWIP in Mississippi and the forward-looking [ rider ] in Louisiana. We closed on $1.2 billion of junior subordinated notice in May, allowing us to help fund our investments and also support our credit for their 50% equity content. And in the debt space, we're pursuing loans with the DOE to help manage our overall cost of debt. And we expect to continue to use a moderate amount of equity. For '25 and '26, we sold forward approximately half of our equity needs. And for '27 and '28, we're establishing a run rate of approximately 10% to 12% of our investments. More importantly, those forward sales, they help us support the long-term financing needs, but in the near term, they provide us flexibility and capacity to manage their risks and support our credit. This translates into strong credit that's only getting stronger. In this period, we are accelerating our credit capacity against our thresholds to above 15% while continuing to support the investments and support our dividend payout ratio of 60% to 65%. This forecast includes resolution of [ SIRI ] of which 85% is resolved. And it includes funding investments that are 30% more than they were just in the previous 5-year view, all while building capacity against our thresholds. This forecast does not include the effects of production tax credits for our nuclear plants, credits that we expect to continue to be eligible for, but which we're waiting for the treasury to provide guidance on. We're working with our regulators to provide those back to customers in a way that is both credit supportive and also provides customer benefits. And we would expect, given those 2 guidelines that we would see increased credit with those production tax credits. The important thing about this increased capacity is we are better able to manage our costs for our customers. We're better able to manage through risks, and we have the capacity to help our customers build and grow into our service territories. Now we talked about a $33 billion capital but our customers' time lines and their needs require more than that $33 billion supports. And so we've worked with a variety of partners to find alternate methods to finance. Financing alternatives that look like third-party payment arrangements. Different payment arrangements like we use for components of Orange County advanced power stations and third-party project financing, like we expect to use in the Legend project that was filed earlier this week in Texas as part of the step ahead program. These finances enable us to meet our customers' needs and they match the cash outlay with the timing of the recovery and in-service dates, meeting our customers' outcomes and supporting our credit. In this period, we expect to use this type of financing for approximately $6 billion, half of which closes in the period and half of which closes out of the period. This means that we're not just deploying $33 billion of capital for our customers. We're deploying 10% more or $36 billion, all for the benefit of our customers. We have walked down the path and are checking the boxes on support of credit and overall risk reduction. Rod talked about the timely recovery mechanisms. I talked about the financing strategies we're pursuing. And there are other efforts that continue in our overall risk reduction. In the storm recovery space, Louisiana and New Orleans have a history of accelerating their cost recovery. In Louisiana and Hurricane Ida upsized an open securitization, enabling to get dollars in faster and reducing cost to customers. And similarly, in New Orleans, they securitize in advance of the prudence finding, accelerating dollars in and supporting customer costs. And in a future storm, we would expect to continue to accelerate that cost, closing that recovery period because there's real benefit here for customers. On $1 billion storm, customers could save as much as $50 million in avoided storm costs. And we've modified our storm collection and storm estimation processes in order to support that. We announced the sale of our gas business in November, and we expect to close on that in 2025, and that continues as planned and is part of our overall derisking. And then on May 31, we closed on the lift out of our EWC pension plans. And we removed $1.2 billion of assets and liabilities. Assets and liabilities that were fully funded and therefore, require no additional funding as part of our overall pension derisking strategy. In 2020, our pension balance was over $9 billion. Today, after this lift out, our liability is less than $5 billion. That is almost a 50% reduction. And that and all of these efforts help support our overall risk reduction. And on the topic of risk, if you went on the tour yesterday, or Rod talked about the absolute physical risk reduction through the assets that we're deploying. But relative risk matters, too. And through our sales growth and through the investments that we're deploying, the relative risk in 2028 as compared to just a few years prior, is 50% less. That means the Entergy is positioned to capture the growth opportunity that you heard the panel talk about that you heard Rod talk about. And to build and grow and deploy investments all for the benefit of customers. We have a history of delivering steady, predictable earnings per share growth. And in 2022, we increased our trajectory to 6% to 8%. And we expect to continue that trajectory through 2028. We have the sales growth and the investments to support that. This forecast has overcome increased interest costs, leading to higher cost of capital, significant SIRI litigation and has built credit above our 15%. And the pipeline of opportunity that Rod described that you heard the panel talk about means that, that trajectory could only improve and potentially accelerate. We have a robust capital plan to deploy for the customers. We have the financial discipline to execute against that plan. We have an improved overall risk profile and credit that gives us capacity to invest for our customers. And we expect to deliver steady, predictable 6% to 8% growth through the forecast period with opportunity for more. And that is why this is just the beginning. And I'll turn it over to Drew to close this out and talk about the long-term potential opportunity that we see here at Entergy. Thank you.

All right. We are very excited again. We have been talking about our unique and robust diverse growth strategy all morning long. I started off with our business philosophy and talked about how we are listening to our customers, putting capital to work on their behalf. Creating value, not just for our customers but for all of our stakeholders, how we are aligning our stakeholders together and then moving more effectively and efficiently through the regulatory process. That is the repeatable process that we are running over and over again. You heard Rod talk about how we do that every day. He gave multiple examples of how that happens. He talked about the growth opportunity in front of us, a significant growth opportunity that's in front of us and all the capital that we're going to deploy and the diversity of the sales. Kimberly talked just now about the strong balance sheet that we have created and the platform that, that has 4 additional growth going forward. And of course, you heard from our panel just a few minutes ago about how all that is actually manifesting in the broader environment in our service territory. All of that sales growth. You heard about how our strategy actually really marries up the importance of stakeholder engagement and how that gives our region a competitive advantage by pulling all of our stakeholders together and how important it is that we are part of that process. I want to come back to that sales growth opportunity one more time. And we've gone through each of these 4 categories. What I want to point out though is that these aren't flash in the pan opportunities, right? These are sustained opportunities. They don't end in 2028, which is the end of our forecast period. Rod called it a once-in-a-generation opportunity. I would add that we expect it to go for a generation. And this is going to go potentially for decades. And so that makes it really exciting. And we're talking to our customers about this today. And you can see the trends that are already in here. You can see the data centers and the technology, you see that technology trend. Over here, you can see the chemical processing and the material processing. That is part of the on-shoring trend. Down below, you can see LNG and ammonia and hydrogen, all part of the clean energy trend and implicit to all of this is the expectation for reliability and resilience, right? That is an implicit expectation. Our customers' expectations have risen. And that supports all of the investments that are -- that you see in the $2 billion plus a lot more that we already have approved on the way that's supporting all of this. When you look at these slides, it's important to see these numbers that are up there, 5 to 10 gigawatts, 2 to 3 gigawatts of material processing, 4 to 6 gigawatts for hydrogen and ammonia. Those are big numbers but I want you to realize that these are not market sizing numbers. These are actual customers that we're talking to today. They're at the front end of the funnel that Rod showed. When he had the slide that he put up that showed the way that we operate and how probability change over time, it's at the front end. These are actual customers. And this means that we a lot more sales growth on the way. And when you look at it, there's a little bit of potential for sales growth in our forecast period. But certainly, after that, we expect it to continue to expand. We see a lot of opportunity. Again, it's a very diverse opportunity. Such that by the time we get out to the middle of next decade, we expect that our electric sales will double from where they are today. It's a significant sales growth opportunity and is very different than the historical patterns that we've seen within the electric utility space. That is a lot of growth. And what you see on this page isn't even all of it. The dash lines and the solid lines represent a 50% probability weighting and a 33% probability weighting for the projects that we can see today, right? That means that there's a lot more opportunity. That doesn't include all of the projects that are likely to show up between now and the middle of next decade. So a significant sales growth opportunity that's out there. And of course, that means significant electric infrastructure investment opportunity as well. That's what's over here at the end of this page. And that means that we believe, as Kimberly said, our 6% to 8% sales -- our earnings per share growth is going to continue well past our 2028 outlook. In fact, with this kind of sales growth and this kind of investment opportunity, we think that it could be at the high end or maybe even higher. And we're working to see how much we can accelerate that into our current outlook period. So this is the story that we have. It's a very exciting story. There is a lot of opportunity ahead of us. It's a unique and robust growth opportunity. And it starts, as we started at the beginning with our customers, our customers are central to everything that we do as they are following these trends. They are following the trends for onshoring and clean energy and electrification and technology. And as we are meeting those customer expectations, we are creating value. We are investing to create value for our customers and all of our stakeholders. And together, as we're creating value for all of our stakeholders, we are aligning around where we want to go starting with our customers and moving through our communities and together, we are going through the regulatory process, and we are doing it effectively and efficiently to get to the outcomes that benefit all of our stakeholders, including all of you as owners. This is the opportunity that's in front of us. We are super excited about it. It gets us out of bed every day. And I will pause there for just a minute because we are going to reset the stage for Q&A. And then will wrap up after that. So pause for 1 minute, while we get Rod and Kimberly to come on up, we'll get the chairs up here. Very good. Now I think we have a couple of microphones that are out and about. And I see some hands up over here. So we are -- we got one microphone right here starting.

[indiscernible] what's outside of plan, what's above plan. that could be possible out there. If I look at Slide 85, it looks like an own versus PPA might be conservative estimates there. And then if I think about the data centers that are outside of plan, if I think about even MISO spending over time or accelerate resiliency spend. It seems like there's a lot of upside levers there. So just kind of curious, I guess, how you might frame that the likelihood or how that can look over time, just given how substantial these buckets are?

I'll start, and then I'll hand it off to Kimberly. Of course, it does start with the customers and there is more customer opportunities I was just alluding to there. So there is some opportunity. As those customers start to show up, there's going to be more investment associated with that. We also mentioned MISO, I think there is a potential for a significant amount of MTEP investment, all of this customer growth and the demand that, that is creating is also going to cause incremental transmission reliability investment, which will come through the MTEP process. So there should be quite a bit of transmission as well and not always reflected in here.

Yes. In specific, the Texas filing, Legend filing, as I mentioned, we expect that ultra finance. So that's assumed during this period, it closes at the end of the period. If you think about the 3,000 megawatts in Louisiana or the 4,500 megawatts of the [ JDA ], I think about all those as enablers help you move faster. And as the customers come and need clean energy, then it helps us to go faster and could accelerate capital into the period.

Got it. That's helpful there. And I think the slide has touched on improved ROEs over time. And just wondering if you could provide a little bit more color on the drivers to earning higher returns.

Yes. Certainly, we've talked before about the work that we're doing to make sure that we have constructive regulatory outcomes. And I talked about the incremental operating cash flow that's being generated off of that. Certainly, the cash in Mississippi helps that as you get cash earlier, you're helping your credit, but you're also helping your earnings as you're closing assets and meeting the recovery over time. So it's across the jurisdictions we certainly see it in Mississippi. We've spent a lot of time in Arkansas trying to optimize their mechanism. They have a cap and making sure that we are getting as much as we can associated with that cap and reducing the amount over the cap, for example. So it's not a specific decision. It's across the board, but I think the easiest way to see it is that incremental operating cash flow.

It's Shahriar from Guggenheim. Just to maybe fine-tune Jeremy's question here. I guess, obviously, more investment and accelerated pace could come soon later, especially over the data centers, it's a key message of the plan. Maybe just talk a little bit about the profile and the shape of that sort of the EPS guidance that you have, since you rolled forward 2 years? Are you trending closer to the top end? And then what happens if these sort of incremental items transpire, the base is strong, you roll forward? What do all these means to the plan, as we think about accretion.

Yes. We're certainly well within the range. You're spending a significant amount of capital that have confidence in that range. And when you think about acceleration of that range, if you have an incremental customer that we don't have plan, if we have a new data center that comes in, for example, and they ramp up during the period, you would certainly that was my reference to accelerate that EPS. But what is assumed is the customer profile that we have, that 8% to 9% and then on an average customer basis, it's 4% to 5% growth, and then the investments, $33 billion underneath that put us well within that range.

Got it. Okay. And then just the 5 to 10 gigawatts of the pipeline. It's a big number. I guess can you just talk about sort of customer protection and how you sort of think about exit fees, I should say, a large energy-intensive customer decide to leave, especially in the state like Louisiana. So are these kind of data centers subject to sort of these exit fees that can offset stranded costs, do these customers back out of their commitments?

Great question, and it's a question that's being asked in each state. And Mississippi right now represents the best example, our opportunity to address that is in the contracting for each individual data center customer. But that is a customer-by-customer, state-by-state conversation, and it will show up in the individual negotiations. There's no boiler plate. There's no boiler-plate answer to that question, but you are looking at, for instance, length of years of minimum requirements, if you will, for contributions from a customer. It's not just a data center conversation. It's really any large customer that will require significant upfront capital to serve where all of us have an interest in ensuring that there is that equity around cost causation and sort of cost allocation, if you will. So it's front and center. It's contracting is the space where we're sitting across the table are from those counterparties, reducing that -- managing that risk on behalf of that, our customers in regulatory.

It's Andy Levi from Hite Hedge. Just a few questions. So Drew, I thought you said at end of your comments that you guys were -- and this is a base plan, right? So there's upside to that base plan. But that you would expect to be on the top end of that 6% to 8% because Kimberly seen wasn't that specific to one of the questions that was answered.

Okay. So I'll say what I said again, Andy, to be clear, and then we can -- if I need more clarification. I was looking at the period beyond '28 and saying yes, we have a good foundation for continuing on our long term. But with all of this growth, we'd expect to turn towards the upper end and maybe even towards -- maybe even above.

Within your forecast period.

No, after the forecast period. Our objective is to try to pull that forward into forecast period. There's opportunity for that, but we are -- we weren't saying that today. I'm saying that's what we are trying bring to you next.

Okay. So your base plan is the 6% to 8% with a 7% midpoint, basically?

Yes.

Okay. Disappointing, a little bit. But -- be honest. And then just on the base plan, so what is not in the base plan that, I guess, gets you to the high end in your forecast period? And then I have one follow-up question on the PTC.

Do you want to talk about that?

Yes. So as I said, what's in the base plan is the sales growth that we talked about and the investments to support that. So the $33 billion. But I talked about the 3,000 megawatts of new -- of approval solar in Louisiana and the 4,500 of JDAs. If those come through faster than they potentially are laid out, then they would come into the period. You'd increment your investment and you can have higher-end investments. If you have a customer that comes faster than is expected or ramps faster and requires additional investment, then those would certainly pull investments into the period that was [ moved ] in the forecast period. So I think there is plenty of opportunity around what could come in. There's MTAP spending that Drew described. That could close in the period depending on the timing and what customers is supporting. So I think the takeaway is we've got a solid base plan, and there is a world of opportunity behind it that could accelerate in to move you well up.

It's Steven Fleishman of Wolfe. I'm going to ask Andy's follow-up question, which is just on the nuclear PTC, which you're not including in your metrics. Could you give us a little sense of assuming it comes out as expected, a range of potential FFO to debt for that?

Yes. We calculated that a couple of years ago, and a couple of things have changed, the market capacity or the market pricing. And as the market price increases in the capacity market in MISO, your value of your PTC decreases because you're trying to make sure that the nuclear asset is getting compensated for that. So what we had said previously was about $170 million was sort of an average potential, which could translate into credit of 50, 60 basis points. That amount varies depending on the size of the capacity market and then -- and the pricing in that market and then also how those units -- we're assuming that they run, and there's also a potential for how that flows back. So if you get credit capacity, you could just move it to increase your credit, or you could deploy additional dollars against it, maintain a 15% threshold but maybe not go way above that. So it's how you choose to use that. So I think the range varies by year, but it could be not insignificant.

Okay. And then on the -- if you don't mind, just on the alternative financings, you mentioned a few of them, but maybe specific to the Legend project. Could you go into more details on exactly what you're going to be doing there with the project financing? And it sounds like that might be a framework for maybe some others in the future would be helpful.

Sure. Effectively, you're using a third-party balance sheet to finance it until the project is closed, and then it's -- I would think about it as a BOT except that in a BOT, they traditionally build it and sell it to you. But from a structure perspective, a third party is financing it like you would a BOT. You're doing the construction the way we have on all of our assets through EPC contracts and that sort of thing. And then you buy it. You have a transaction at the end. So you buy it all at once at the same time that it goes into rates.

So it hits rate base and such. And so you're not earning a return on it as it's being built, and you'll just get it all right at the end.

For that $6 billion, you don't have a return on that, that's right, until it's closed. And then when you close, you put it in rates. You get the return like you would with any other asset.

Okay. But those -- that project, for that example, it's online by '28, and it should be in theory in your outlook for 2028 then?

That's right.

Sophie Karp from KeyBanc. I have a couple of questions. On Page 84 of your presentation, you're showing the outlook for sales growth. And it's pretty impressive, 8% to 9% CAGR for the industrial, and it's flat for residential. I'm kind of wondering with all these industrial customers coming in, presumably, we could see some population growth as well. So should we think about these residential projections as conservative and something that could be an upside?

Yes. When you think about residential growth, we're continuing to see effects of energy efficiency. So you do see residential growth, and we're certainly seeing it in Texas, for example. In other areas, you're not seeing as much population move in. And you do have to consider the effects of offset of energy efficiency, which we have an assumption around. So that's why you're getting to that blended roughly flat residential.

I would agree that I think there could be some conservatism in there. It's hard to tease that out. But certainly, there's a multiplier effect that comes along with this level of investment and then the subsequent jobs that should come off of that and then the reinvestment of those tax dollars and communities that make them more attractive to draw people in. So I think there is opportunity for residential growth that we haven't been seeing for quite a while. But this significant industrial growth and the investment that that's bringing could bring the residential and commercial growth along with it eventually.

And then could you talk a little bit about your partnership with NextEra Energy Resources? Kind of what led to it? Why NextEra Energy Resources? Could we see more of that? Sort of any color would be helpful.

Yes, I'll start, and I'll hand it off to Rod. It's -- and Rod talked about this a little bit. They're a partner that has a lot of scale and scope and supply chain capability, and we're on an accelerated time line. So they make sense. So it's not an exclusive arrangement with them, but they are a good partner, and they are helping us with our own elements. So we are looking to own these assets, and they are a good partner to have to try and get us there.

And it's a -- they're a viable partner for us to upscale our capacity to deliver for customers. It's not much more complex than that. And this is one of the rare opportunities we have to align with NextEra on a constructive basis. We know that they compete in other areas for other opportunities in our service territories. But this is all part of stakeholder engagement. This was one avenue. We -- our interests were very much aligned. So we took advantage of that for the benefit of our customers.

Scott Senchak. Just a question on the dividend. What's the target payout ratio? And what is the dividend growth rate?

The target payout ratio of 60% to 65%, and the growth rate is roughly 6%. So we've moderated the growth rate to the bottom of the range to enable us to continue to grow the dividend but also support the growth in our customers.

Got you. So over time -- I think you're at 64% last year, so that should trend down a little bit. And then at that point, will we see the dividend more in line with earnings?

I think we'll have to evaluate that. I mean I certainly think that we continue to expect to pay a strong dividend, and we also want to support our customers' growth. And so that 6%, 60% to 65% is the balance of that.

Got you. And then on cash taxes, what is the assumption for taxes during the plan?

I think the tax rate is in the back of the deck.

I'm sorry, cash taxes. Are you paying -- or when are you a cash taxpayer?

Well, I think if you're referencing the corporate minimum tax, that really come into effect in the back end. It keeps moving out, frankly. It's off of book income. It's a funky calculation. But I don't have the exact cash tax timing. I'm sure Ian and Bill can get that for you.

Andrew Weisel, Scotiabank. First, just a quick follow-up on the NextEra. Have you gotten specific on the ownership structure of these projects? Will it be build, own, transfer or PPA or a mix?

It's going to be -- we will ultimately own these assets under this JDA. So that has been settled. They will have, I think, some ongoing participation in that because I know that they're also looking for ratable income, but we will own the assets.

Okay. Great. Then second on the resiliency. Thanks for the tour yesterday. Really cool to see the stuff in person. You got approval for a portion of what you asked for, obviously. What are sort of the next steps in terms of what will it take to get more approved? Will it take demonstrating construction of the first batch? Will it take more storms, unfortunately, to prove the need or more conversations? How do you think about the process to get more of that stuff approved?

Promises made, promises kept. At the end of the day, the reporting requirements are to provide transparency to make it easier. It's an ongoing stakeholder engagement conversation. It was far more palatable for the regulators and other stakeholders to stomach the first 3 years as proof of concept in support of -- and certainly from our vantage point and our stakeholder standpoint, the expectation that this is ongoing. This is not a short-term, short-shot, one-opportunity play. This will -- this resiliency conversation will go on what we believe to be a decade, decade plus. And we're confident in the starting point. We are aligned with the first 3 years. But as we sit here today, we have an expectation that this will be ongoing.

Vikrum Vora, GSAM. A question for you, Rod. As far as the accelerated deployment time line, which you highlighted, I think the 35% to 40% savings in terms of getting to market -- I don't know if it's getting to market or getting the ESA signed. Are there benefits outside of just -- I know it was a focus of data centers, but just for large industrial customers? And how do you sort of, I guess, think about that within the context of where else the customer is maybe locating to site projects, right, either in the country or outside the country? And are those -- is that savings sort of in there going forward, meaning is it a competitive advantage for you? So...

I want to make sure I understand your question. You talk about the diversity of our customer base. I want to make sure...

No, no, no, I'm talking about the accelerated deployment. The 35 -- so basically 36 to -- 30 to 40 months, I think, from initial conversation to ESA signing, I think, was the target.

Yes.

Does that make sense?

Yes. I think it was actually getting online to market like serving the customer on your speed to market.

Okay. Okay.

And talking about the 35% to 40% reduction in time that it takes.

That's right.

Right. But your question relative to the reduction in time line. Is it tied to geography? I want to make sure I was understanding the...

It's more tied to like is this a long-term competitive advantage for you irrespective of whether it's -- whatever type of the customer is, right?

Yes, it is. It is. The transformation part of that is that the time line -- the traditional time line wasn't just Entergy related. The shorter time line right now is being driven by the speed to market for the data centers. But when you think about the other areas that we highlighted, LNG and the chemicals, petrochemicals, their project life cycles are still sort of elongated. And so the objective for us is to have that time line be aligned with the customers' expectations. So speed to market for us is customer-centric. And so if the LNG process -- if they were intended to reduce a 4- to 5-year project life cycle to 3, then they'd certainly be aligned with that, but there's no benefit for us to be too early in reducing that time line. The readiness standpoint, clarity around recovery mechanisms, the reimbursement agreements, all the things that are credit protective for us on the front end as we're deploying capital to get ready for them, those are the things that aside from sort of this temporal reduction in time are going to be most important to us. But that 40% or so reduction is really sort of a proof of concept given what we saw Mississippi accomplished and then what the other states are beginning to replicate as they want to compete for data centers as well. Thank you for bearing with me to make sure I understood where you're coming from.

Anthony Crowdell, Mizuho. Thanks for taking me before Shelby's question. Just wanted to you give us an update on a potential settlement in SERI. We had some good momentum maybe going into the first quarter call. Maybe it slowed down. And then also on Louisiana PSC. And then second, I'm just curious. I don't know if it's specific to Entergy, but a data center question to start today. Just -- I wondered at states you're competing against. You're located in 4 different states. And is it this arms race of one, say, offering maybe more tax rebate than another? I mean what makes Louisiana win over Mississippi or Arkansas or Texas? I mean it looks like your states have similar attributes. Why a data center would locate in one versus the other.

All right. You want to have the first regulatory one?

Yes. on the SERI front, the starting point is 84% of SERI has been derisked. And from our vantage point, our negotiations around SERI are critically important. The FRP settlement and extension for us is -- takes primacy from our strategic priority standpoint. And ideally, we'd like to address them both, and that's going to be ongoing. But I don't have a time line, but I can tell you that all of the stakeholders in Louisiana recognized the importance of us creating clarity around that sooner or rather than later. And without disclosing where we are with any one specific stakeholder, our point of view hasn't changed one bit to take that off the books as quickly as we can. But our priorities are definitely FRP and then SERI with SERI being mostly addressed to date.

And then in regards to the competition around the data centers amongst the jurisdictions, I mean, that is true, and we have to be mindful of that. Each state is in a different place. Each utility is in a different place. And so they have to bring to bear to the conversation what they can. I will say there is plenty to go around. There's enough opportunity for every jurisdiction here. And I'm saying it's really -- we're talking about Arkansas, North Louisiana, Northern Mississippi. There's not a lot of data center activity along the coast to be sure. But in those areas, there is a lot of opportunity. And the communities and the governments involved want to be very competitive. So we are working hard to meet those customers' expectations.

Nick Campanella at Barclays. On the regulatory initiatives, you talked about credit supportive mechanisms across the portfolio that you're working towards. So is this just -- what states are you going to be targeting this in? Is it about doing similar things like cash CWIP in Mississippi? And how should we think about that?

You should think about it as wherever there is capital deployment that is outside the normal course, where we're trying to accommodate a specific customer, that we're going to ensure that there are regulatory mechanisms that help protect and complement our credit. We'd like it to be as more forward looking and anticipating further growth than a customer-by-customer basis, but it starts with a customer-by-customer issue. The brilliance of the move in Mississippi allows us to land and accommodate AWS. And so we got no problems with that. We think it was a phenomenal and a brilliantly constructed sort of blueprint. But in Louisiana, Louisiana, it might -- Louisiana sales and use tax conversation has a broader scope than just one customer. We like that idea, and we think that's going to be replicated to the point that Drew was making about each states wanting to be competitive. It's not a one customer by one customer play, although for our service territory, Mississippi was out of the chute, and they set one heck of a bar in terms of checking off the things that are important that enable us to respond. So it's encouraging. It's going to be iterative. But it also is going to be dependent upon how these customers show up and deliver on the commitments they made to the state that will give the states more confidence to replicate and elongate these regulatory mechanisms.

And I'll just add that we are very excited about this financial opportunity and that the financial -- and all of our stakeholders as we're thinking about this customer effort. They recognize that having a financial strong electric partner is critical to the competitive [indiscernible] region. And so that's something that is manifesting in our stakeholder engagement conversations.

I appreciate that. And then on your utility ROE outlook, you have it going from 9% to 9.5% to the plan. Is that improving your earned return? Or is that authorized returns?

Yes, that's your actual returns coming out. But effectively, that is what we were just talking about, what he was talking about, about timely recovery, closing gaps on where you have caps, for example, managing where you are relative to the caps, accelerated mechanisms like the Louisiana accelerated, all of those play in together. But those are expected returns.

No, we're not assuming that authorized returns jump.

That's right. That's right. Sorry.

We're not assuming, just to clarify. Yes.

Bill Appicelli from UBS. Just on the weighted average residential bill through '28, I think that CAGR is now 4%, which is up a little bit from the 2% you had through '26. So maybe you could just speak to why that's trending higher. Is that just because it's further out in time or the higher capital? And maybe what are the levers that could push that up or down?

Yes. So to start, you've got a fuel cost assumption in there, and you have to have an assumption. So we have a forward curve that assumes the gas prices go up to whatever the forward curve is. So if you pull that out and sort of assume a more moderate fuel cost, you would be much closer to 3%. You'd be just above 3%. Beyond that, you've got investments that are closing during the period, but certainly, you've got incremental customers that are supporting those as well. So it's really that interplay between what are you assuming around -- to think forward gas curve is a reasonable assumption, but it could go either way. And then where our customers are landing and the need, I think Rod talked about the need that our customers are asking for the deployment of dollars. They're willing to pay for some of that accelerated resilience to get on faster after an event, for example, or make sure they have power in the event of adding these economic development opportunities.

And just to drive home the first point, I think in the materials we set what our gas price assumptions are. It's up over $4.50 in '28, which is, I don't know, in the 70% range in terms of an increase from today's prices. So that's really a big piece of the driver.

Okay. And then on the CapEx slide in terms of the incremental opportunities, any way you can quantify what -- within the period, what that incremental set could be? You talked about what some of the drivers would be. But in terms of the actual capital dollars, is that in the several billion dollar range when we think about the 24 to 20 -- above the 33?

Yes. You're talking about the through '28? Yes. The answer is potential several billion dollars, both from the generation side and the transmission side. Both of those are going to be potentially some significant increases that are out there depending on how the customers actually show up. And all of that is going to ultimately be customer driven, but we think that the customers could take us down that path.

Ryan Levine with Citi. As a key stakeholder in these data center conversations, do you have a preference on which state the customer moves to? Any...

No.

Okay. Fair enough. Okay. And then on the data center topic, in terms of planning with these customers load forecast being somewhat uncertain, do you have any line of sight in terms of the pattern of the load contribution from these forms -- these specific customers that are targeting your service territories?

I'll just say they look like they are coming online, starting online fairly soon, and then they ramp for 2 to 3 years is a typical way that they would do it. So I mean they are talking about getting their first. I think Gray was talking about shelves. The first shelves should be coming online in a couple of years. And then after that, they're going to be building them out. And so they should be ramping up fairly quickly after that.

Do you expect any volatility in the load once they're fully ramped?

Not a whole lot. The expectation is these things would be high load factor assets, typically north of 90%.

Okay. And then last question. In terms of the CapEx opportunity to be accelerated, what tools would you look to manage the cash flow requirements if cash -- if CapEx were to be added?

Yes. I mean I think it's similar to tools that we talked about. You can use financing, whether that is third-party financing. The deferred payment arrangements is a nice tool where a primary vendor may be willing to work terms with you that enable you to close that when the project is completed as opposed to sort of managing your milestone payments along the way. And then if the customer is driving significant investment, there's opportunity for -- we certainly have customer contributions on some projects today. So I don't think there's a one size fits all. It's a variety of options that enable us to get to that overall objective.

Shar again with a quick follow-up. Just on the Texas assets that you guys are proposing to build, Legend is roughly $1,900 per kW. And then Lone Star is roughly around $1,600 per kW. It just seems like they're a little bit higher than kind of new build economics you're seeing, especially some of the asset transactions we've seen. I guess what's driving the pricing there? Is it the CCS capability? And then how do we think about this as you're going through a recommendation with the PUCT to get these approved and maybe competing assets?

Yes. So I think part of it is that prices are a little bit higher than we're seeing. I think -- I'm not sure exactly in the numbers that you're talking about if that is including transmission or not. So certainly, there are some incremental transmission costs that are coming along with these assets, and that's going to be a key driver as well. But there's also a lot of other economic opportunity, a lot of tax dollars, a lot of multiplier effect from these companies, particularly in Texas, that are coming in. And so they appreciate the fact that we are moving quickly to get this there. And as Rod was talking about, the [ STEP ] program, all the different people that were involved, the great example of the stakeholder engagement that we're doing to lay the foundation for getting this approved in front of the commission in Texas. So yes, it is a little bit more expensive. But I think that's reflective of where the market is actually moving right now, mostly.

Jeremy Tonet, JPMorgan. Just wondered, any thoughts you might be able to provide on the EPA rules and how that could impact new gas fire generation or just the uncertainty introducing how that would, I guess, impact planning?

Yes. So we are planning that this will eventually happen. The good news for us is we believe our customers are taking us there right now. And so we are working -- as Rod explained, we are working down a path to create the capability to do this in our service territory right now. And we are working with customers in order to create that platform and to help us with the costs associated with that. I think it's fair to say that going through Texas or Louisiana, it might be a challenge right now to get CCS approved unless it's mandated. But if customers are demanding it, they will come with us to the commission, and they will help pay for it, right? So that's -- we're thinking of it more as a development project, a traditional like merchant development project almost in order to get our customers the attributes that they want and need even though there's not yet a mandate out there. I will also add, we're doing this because we think we're ideally situated to be able to do CCS with leasing and all the things that Rod had on his slide, Louisiana primacy, the existing infrastructure around CO2 pipelines and the like. All that means we think we are well positioned. If anybody is going to lead the way on this, we think that's us.

Got it. That's helpful. That makes sense. Louisiana, quite ripe for CCS given everything you discussed.

[ Greg Rice with Fruition ]. Just on the alternate financing, you mentioned kind of $6 billion and $3 billion kind of closing in this 5-year window. When is that other $3 billion coming to play? Is that kind of fairly close to 2028 or further out?

Yes. It's in the next couple of years following 2028 because you're building in this period, and they're just assets that take longer to build, for example.

I think we got one more question.

It's Andy Levi again. So I just want to get back to my original question because I'm listening to all this, and I'm truly a little bit confused. So you have a 6% to 8% growth rate. You have all this top line growth. You have 9% rate base growth. I understand the dilution aspect of it as far as how much equity you have to issue. But some of your peers like to point to the high end. You're at 6% to 8%. You've been at the high end over the last couple of years. And actually, if you look at your track record, you're one of the top 5 companies in actually meeting or exceeding your earnings per share, estimates every year. So why do you feel you need to be kind of, I would say, conservative and not want to point to the high end? What is preventing you as a -- whether it's a risk manager, CEO, CFO, whatever it may be, to not point to the high end?

I mean I think what we've laid out is a strong plan. 6% to 8%, we -- with a 7% midpoint, we've talked about the opportunities that could drive us there. We've talked about the things that had overcame. And I talked about the investments in the customer growth that could certainly move you beyond that, but we're talking about a 5-year window. And there's things that can happen in that 5-year window that we would need to work through, but this is where we are right now. I think it's a really strong plan that we're excited about delivering for our customers.

And to be sure, Andy, we appreciate that all this opportunity means that there could be more upside in our plan, and we are working to firm that up. And we'll bring it whenever we get that firm up. That's -- it's not lost on us or anybody on the management team here that there is an opportunity to accelerate. And so we're working hard to clean it up. I think what we've got here, as Kimberly just said, is an exciting plan that is creating a platform that has less risk and more opportunity than we've ever had before. And so that really firms up what the pipeline looks like going forward, and we're really excited about that. And with that platform, we have an opportunity to really launch going forward. So we still owe you on that part. So we are coming with it. But we have a great platform to begin with. We're very excited about it. And we think there's a lot of opportunity just in the platform, just where we are. We don't know that we're getting all the credit that we deserve just for that. So we're excited. And with that, I think that's the last question. Thank you all for coming today. Really appreciate you all being in person. For those of you that have stayed with us online, thank you very much. Hope you all have an opportunity to enjoy the rest of your time here in New Orleans, and we're very excited about the opportunity to serve you as owners. So thank you very much. Have a good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join us for lunch. There's a dedicated bank of elevators in the main hallway with Entergy staff ready to guide you, and thank you for joining us.