A right.
Shares of Duke Energy are down by about two and a half percent.
The company reporting earnings.
Where they raised their five year capex planned to about eighty three billion dollars on increased data center and industrial demand. The company also removed certain language concerning methane emissions and net zero carbon emissions from their statement.
We spoke earlier to.
Lend Good, the chair and chief executive officer at Duke Energy, about that data center demand. In the wake of deep Seek's emergence and the company's commitment to clean energy.
The strategy hasn't changed.
Duke Energy is committed to a future of reliability and affordability, increasingly clean energy as we retire older plants and bring new things on. But to your point around load growth and data centers, we.
Do see an uptick and.
Gas generation that wouldn't have been the case five years ago, just as we put together plans on how we're going to serve this load in this moment. So really committed to a future and we see a bright opportunity for the company as we pursue this growth.
I'm curious, Lynn, when we talk about those gas plants, and more importantly, some of those coal plants and the longer term trajectory. I mean, originally Duke had made plans to shut some of those plants. I know you've reversed on that, partly because of demand, and I don't know how much the new administration is factoring into that. But you take your big facility out in Indiana that's now
supposed to be online, what until twenty thirty eight? Should we expect that to be even extended further than twenty thirty eight?
Now, Remaine, we have been working toward a twenty thirty five date for retirement of coal, and we really see that as being important because these assets are aging. The supply chain supporting coal has been challenged, and we expect that to continue. But we have always looked at those dates as something that has to be reviewed in the context or what's going on in the business, and also
within the context of where our regulators are. And so as I think about twenty five to twenty thirty eight, I don't look.
At that as a huge shift.
Duke is not stepping away from a commitment of modernizing our fleet. We're just reflecting the reality of the growth that we see in the near term, and how do we maintain reliability and keep bills as low as we can for customers at the same time pursuing our goals for cleaner energy over time.
I'm glad you used the word reliability, particularly in the context of the data centers and AI.
There's been a lot of talk.
Amongst the companies, hyperscalers and some of the other end users here about having reliable transmission here. Was there any shift at all in some of those customers' needs, demands, hopes based on what we learned out of Deep Seat a couple of weeks ago.
It's a really good question because there's been so much dialogue over the last week about what it means, and I would say to you, remain the tone of the customers we're dealing with. The hyperscalers that we are dealing with has not changed. They have always expected and shared with us that energy efficiency would be a part of their business model because they know they're big consumers of electricity. How can I reduce that demand on the system over time?
Because I also expect my volume to increase, and so as we look at our plans over the next five years, we do not see a big impact from this recent event, but of course, are continuing to listen for changes in the industry, and as I said, we'll expect energy efficiency to continue to be an objective for the tech companies and we welcome that because the demand for stake broadly is just putting an impact on the system.
That'll demand more and more resources.
Linn, the other day, I was talking to the Energy secretary newly confirmed, and he was talking about coal and extending the life of coal plants. He doesn't think there'll be a renaissance of coal, but nonetheless I'm curious Lynn as to the direct like, what would it take for a utility like you guys, the power company, like you guys, to say, restart a coal plant.
I don't see us restarting coal.
Plants, Alex and I would get back to the business case around coal in addition to clean energy. Over time, these plants, many of them fifty sixty years old, where the decisions around how to maintain and how to replace equipment can be challenging when you're looking at a useful life that is shortened, and so we believe the right answer is to continue to modernize, continue to modernize our fleet, continue.
To take advantage of new technologies.
So that we are making the right decisions for our customers over the long term, and that has been our
strategy at Duke. It continues to be our strategy and with the growth that we're seeing, this is why natural gas is showing up more strongly than it would have five years ago, because it represents a base load resource that we believe matches this load requirement in this moment, and you can see that in some of our plans that we think adding those resources is important in this decade, but we will continue working toward cleaner energy over time, and those plans have not changed.
You have a five year capital plan that actually increased capex to eighty three billion dollars, and I'm assuming a lot that is going to be that hyperscaler and that data demand.
Do you think we're ever going to be in a.
Place where you're going to build like a mini power plant right next to a hyperscaler, or is everyone is going to be sharing the same power on a grid.
I'd look at this opportunity alex as being a combination of both, and as you can imagine, for customers of this scale that have this amount of demand for power, we are having conversations with them about how we can meet their needs, and it could, for example, include connecting to the grid, but also having a backup power supply.
That we could take advantage of in a peak period.
There will be demand response opportunities, energy efficiency opportunities, and I believe some of them may have an interest in having their own on site generation. I think what's important is we want to be a part of that part of data centers, artificial intelligence, US leadership, and technology.
We want to be an enabler of that. And so those.
Conversations with customers are ongoing, and I would say largely those conversations taking advantage of the grid for at least some, if not all, of their load, and then some of these other technologies more on the margin.
At this point, how cooperative len ARE regulator is going to be not necessarily at the federal level, but at the local and state level.
We were hand in glove with our states and local communities on economic development, and in this moment we're talking about data centers, but think about expansion of life sciences, think about advanced manufacturing. We have had a long standing partnership around economic development and the states see data centers as an important part of economic development, particularly at the local level property taxes for example, that could be important to a community.
So we're an.
Ongoing dialogue, also ongoing dialogue with regulators. Their interest is in making sure if we add this load that we're not in some way subsidizing that load with other customers.
So those conversations.
Are ongoing, and we have a lot of experience in how to execute those types of contracts and we see them as being relevant to this moment as well.
N Good there, the chief executive officer over at Duke Energy,