Xcel Energy Inc. (NASDAQ:XEL) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Xcel Energy Inc. (NASDAQ:XEL) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript April 30, 2026

Xcel Energy Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.91, expectations were $0.907.

Operator: Hello, and welcome to the Xcel Energy 2026 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. My name is Jordan, and I’ll be your coordinator for today’s event. Please note this conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Reporters can contact media relations with inquiries and individual investors and others can reach out to Investor Relations. I will now turn the call over to your host today, Mr. Roopesh Aggarwal, Vice President, Investor Relations, to begin the conference. Please go ahead, sir.

Roopesh Aggarwal: Thank you, Jordan. Good morning, and welcome to Xcel Energy’s 2026 First Quarter Earnings Call. Joining me today are Bob Frenzel, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Brian Van Abel, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. In addition, we have other members of the management team in the room to answer your questions if needed. This morning, we will review our 2026 first quarter results and highlights, provide updated 2026 assumptions and share recent business and regulatory updates. Slides that accompany today’s call are available on our website. Some comments during today’s call may contain forward-looking information. Significant factors that could cause results to differ from those anticipated are described in our earnings release and SEC filings.

Today, we will discuss certain metrics that are non-GAAP measures. Information on the comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations are included in our earnings release. In the first quarter of 2026, the ALJ for the Prairie Island outage case recommended an additional $42 — $41 million disallowance of replacement power costs. For power procured in 2024, associated with an extended outage at the plant starting late 2023. As a result, Xcel Energy recorded a charge of $37 million or $0.04 per share in the first quarter. Additionally, in the first quarter of 2026, Xcel Energy recognized $22 million or $0.03 per share due to an increase in estimated insurance proceeds for the Marshall Wildfire litigation. Given the nonrecurring nature of these items, they have been excluded from first quarter ongoing earnings.

As a result, our GAAP earnings for the first quarter of 2026 were $0.89 per share. While our ongoing earnings, which exclude these nonrecurring charges, were $0.91 per share. All further references to earnings, drivers and variances in our discussion today will refer to ongoing earnings. For more information on this, please see the disclosures in our earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Bob.

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

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

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

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

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

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

At that time, we also expected that our base plan would likely need to be augmented based on anticipated but unapproved transmission and generation needs. Through the first quarter, we now believe we have line of sight to at least $7-plus billion of the $10-plus billion opportunity that we highlighted last year. This incremental investment includes the 765 kV process draw to Fantom transmission line in our SPS company that was allocated by SPP in February. 2/3 or over 1,200 megawatts of the generation of storage needed for the Google data center project, and 800 megawatts of generation approved by the Colorado Commission in February and April as part of the near-term procurement portfolio. From here, we continue to see additional infrastructure investment needed to serve our growing customer needs, including active generation RFPs in PSCo, NSP and SPS, additional regional transmission investments in SPP and MISO and the generation to support the 3 gigawatts of data center demand that we added to our target plan on the Q4 earnings call.

As these opportunities materialize, they will drive additional growth in investment, both within and beyond our 5-year capital plan. As we continue to add to capital backlog, it’s also important to execute on the projects that are in the queue. And in the first quarter, Xcel Energy invested over $3 billion in new infrastructure for our customers. We brought online nearly 500 megawatts of new solar generation and utility scale battery storage in SPS and in Colorado. In total, these projects will deliver system resiliency and reliability as well as over $425 million of tax credit benefits to our customers over the life of the projects. And across our entire portfolio of projects from 2026 to 2030, we expect customers will see more than $7 billion in aggregate benefits from PTCs and ITCs associated with various generation and storage projects, helping keep our customer bills amongst the lowest in the country.

And with continued growth across our industry, we also recognize that supply chains and qualified labor for generation, transmission and distribution projects will become more constrained. That’s why I recently announced alliances with GE Vernova and NextEra and strategic agreements with Tier 1 EPC firms across our portfolio of renewable and gas generation, transmission and distribution projects are critical to delivering on our growing investment pipeline well into the 2030s. Finally, our field teams continue to operate at the highest levels and were recently recognized by EEI with an Emergency Recovery Award for outstanding efforts to restore service quickly and safely following severe thunder storms that came through our Upper Midwest service territory in 2025.

And for the seventh year in a row, Xcel Energy was named the World’s Most Ethical Company [ Honore ] by Ethisphere, which measures the company’s corporate governance, culture of ethics and environmental and societal impact. As we look forward to the rest of 2026, Xcel Energy will continue our focus to deliver customers safe, clean, reliable and affordable energy, execute with excellence on our 2026 $14 billion capital investment plan are most extensive in the company’s history, to realize the unprecedented opportunities for growth that we laid out in our base and incremental investment plans, to secure incremental large customer loads that can benefit all customers and meet this moment in our country’s growing demand for energy, to reach constructive outcomes on multiple rate cases and resource solicitations, make operational and system hardening investments to protect our communities from the risks of extreme weather and to deliver on our earnings guidance for the 22nd year in a row.

With that, I’ll turn it over to Brian.

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

Higher depreciation and amortization decreased earnings by $0.05 per share, reflecting our capital investment programs and lower natural gas revenues due to weather partially offset by rate case outcomes decreased earnings by $0.03 per share. Turning to weather and sales. Colorado overall experienced its warmest winter on record during the first quarter. As a result, impacts from weather to electric and natural gas sales reduced earnings by $0.09 per share. On a weather-adjusted basis, first quarter electric sales increased by 2.8% driven by continued oil and gas growth in SPS and broader C&I growth across jurisdictions. For 2026, we continue to expect full year weather-adjusted electric sales to increase 3%. Moving to recent regulatory activity.

In our North Dakota electric rate case, the commission approved our previously announced settlement authorizing a $27 million revenue increase. And in our South Dakota electric rate case, we reached a constructive black box settlement with staff for a net revenue increase of $26 million. A commission decision is expected in the second quarter. This Tuesday, we received intervenor testimony in our Colorado electric rate case, which we believe provides a starting point for ongoing settlement discussions over the next month. Late yesterday, we received the ALJ report on our Minnesota electric rate case, recommending a 9.8% ROE and a 52.5% equity ratio, with a final commission decision early in the third quarter. And in New Mexico electric rate case, intervener testimony is due on May 1, and we expect the commission decision in the fourth quarter.

As we look to our financing plan, Xcel Energy continues our commitment to maintain a strong balance sheet to fund accretive growth with the balance of equity and debt. In the first quarter, we issued forward contracts for over $1 billion of equity from our ATM program. Additionally, we issued an $800 million junior subordinated note at the holding company, which received 50% equity credit with the rating agencies. This, combined with our unsettled forwards and [ collar ] forward contracts from 2025 addresses over half of our $7 billion of equity need in our 5-year base plan. We also continue to make strong progress on the Smokehouse Creek wildfire claims process. We’ve resolved 231 of the 300 submitted claims. We’ve reached settlements with 79 of 107 potential claims presented for mediation by parties represented by attorneys.

And finally, 26 of 73 complaints have been settled or dismissed and have reached a statute of limitations for property loss claims. We’ve updated the low end of our estimated liability to $460 million. We have committed $397 million in settlement agreements, including agreements with the subrogated insurance plaintiffs in the 3 largest claims by acreage. In total, we have $525 million of insurance coverage. Moving to guidance. We are reaffirming our 2026 ongoing EPS guidance range of $4.04 to $4.16 per share. We remain confident in our ability to deliver 6% to 8-plus percent long-term earnings growth and expect to deliver 9% EPS growth on average through 2030. Updates to key assumptions are included in our slides and earnings release. With that, I’ll wrap up with a quick summary.

Xcel Energy posted strong ongoing first quarter 2026 earnings of $0.91 per share. We continue to lead a clean energy transition while ensuring safe, clean and reliable service and keeping customer bills as low as possible. We have line of sight to $7-plus billion of opportunities in our incremental $10-plus billion investment plan. We’ve announced details of our data center agreement with Google, which we believe is a model for driving large load growth while protecting and [ driving ] benefits to our other customers and communities. We partnered with multiple Tier 1 EPC firms, critical suppliers and developers to ensure we have the resources needed to execute on a growing portfolio of investment opportunities on budget, on time and on scope.

We continue to work to reach constructive outcomes, including settlements in our active rate cases. We maintained a strong balance sheet and credit metrics and have addressed over half of our $7 billion 5-year base equity needs. We are reaffirming our 2026 ongoing EPS guidance of $4.04 to $4.16 per share. And finally, we remain confident in our ability to deliver 6% to 8-plus percent long-term earnings growth and expect to deliver 9% EPS growth on average through 2030. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we will now take questions.

Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Richard Sunderland from Truist Securities.

Richard Sunderland: Starting with some of the — starting with some of the regulatory progress this week. I guess Colorado with the intervenor testimony, could you expand a little bit more on the sort of settlement potential over the next month that you referenced in the script? And I guess just curious about any other takeaways you’d highlight there? And then similarly on Minnesota with the ALJ rec. Just any other thoughts you could offer would be helpful.

Brian Van Abel: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I think I’ll start with Colorado Electric. I think maybe we’d take a step back a little bit from a macro view. We have the lowest bills in the country. In Colorado, a 1% share of wallet. We have one of the fastest transitioning clean energy systems, generation fleets in the country. And so we’re achieving state policy. And hopefully, that is recognized by our policymakers in the state. Now specifically about the rate case, the — we look at the intervenor direct testimony and it’s relatively consistent with what we saw in the last case. And if you look at our last case in Colorado, we had near unanimous settlement and we’ve settled 3 of the path for our electric cases. So we think we have a decent starting point.

If you look at the procedural schedule, the settlement deadline is on May 28. So we’ll start settlement discussions, look forward to working with the parties early in May. And hopefully, we can reach a constructive settlement like we have in the last few rate cases. So that’s kind of on the Colorado side. On the Minnesota side, for those of you who didn’t catch it, we have the Minnesota ALJ report late yesterday. It was after we had already shipped off or ER, so it’s not referenced in our earnings release. You will see details in it — in our 10-Q that we file later today. So look for a full disclosure in our 10-Q as we work through it. No, we think it’s generally a balanced overall recommendation. It’s constructive to see a 9.8% ROE, a 52.5% equity ratio.

We’re digesting a few of the other kind of trackers and other pieces in it. But overall, we think it’s a constructive recommendation. And procedurally, we’ll see MPUC deliberations in June and then an MPC order in July. So as we talked about, we’re working through a lot of rate cases and looking to reach some constructive outcomes this year and deliver for both our customers and our shareholders.

Richard Sunderland: Great. Thanks for running through all of that. And then turning to some of the data center activity. Obviously, you had a lot of commentary around the Google agreement and the landmark effort there. But I’m curious, I guess, in Slide 14, I think the 4 gigawatts contracted by year-end ’27, just any thoughts on sort of the gating factors to signing the $6 billion to $8 billion incremental CapEx framework you called out elsewhere in the deck, is that applicable there? And I guess just anything you can highlight on the financing side of those advance as well. Any unique ways to finance that?

Robert Frenzel: It’s Bob. Let me kick it off, and then I’ll ask Brian to weigh in with anything extra. Not surprisingly, yesterday’s hyperscaler announcements continue to show high interest in data center development, and we’re seeing a lot of interest across all 8 of our states in terms of activity and backlog. So at the top of the slide you mentioned, Richard, is a 20 gigawatt backlog, and that continues to — a greater than 20 gigawatt backlog, and that just continues — the interest level continues to grow in our service territories. We’ve got a gig under — either built or under construction, another one that we’re in front of the commissions with approvals on, particularly this Google transaction and expect, as we said in our fourth quarter call, to execute on enough ESAs this year that we get to a 3 gig target, another 3 gig next year.

So we’re actively engaged with our customers. These are long and deliberate discussions to make sure that we can reach innovative and constructive outcomes like we did with the Google. I think we’ve proven that we can do competitive, highly renewable, low-carbon data center development in our regions. I’d say we have the most length in our company in the Upper Midwest, and that’s been a focus area for us and a focus area with our JDA with NextEra. But as we think about the large load tariff filing in Colorado and the abilities that it allows us to bring the generation of the transmission and the load all together in a package to the Colorado Commission. And then we have those capabilities as well through both SPP and SPS processes in Texas and New Mexico.

And we do expect to file a large load tariff in Texas as well this year to help expedite that, but it doesn’t preclude us from coming forward with contracts in the near term. So we’re active on the engagement front with all the hyperscalers and all of the large data center developers and just a lot of interest in the footprint that our company provides in terms of high penetrations of low-cost renewables that our existing customers have benefited from, and we think these large load customers can benefit from as well.

Brian Van Abel: Yes. Just a couple of things to make sure we get all parts of your question there. As we think about — you referenced a $68 billion number, that’s something we’ve had in our slides before in terms of — that’s what we view the incremental investment opportunity to sort of every gigawatt of data center. If you look at Google being a model that’s served with a lot of renewables, long-duration storage, very different than if you’re serving it with just the CCGT. So when we think about moving forward, our clean energy policies and priorities and meeting our state objectives that gives us a really good investment opportunity when we think about how we’re going to serve these. And you think about — if you look at the slide, when we talk about our $10-plus billion investment pipeline, that slide, we talked about the RFPs 10 to 12 gigawatts of RFPs in flight.

And then it’s the 3 additional gigawatts of data centers that we expect to contract. Those 3 gigawatts of data centers are going to be another 6, 9,10 gigawatts of generation that we need. So a huge long-term opportunity to kind of fill in the back end of this 5 year, but also just deliver transparency and growth visibility into the early 2030s. So not only about filling in our investment pipeline here in the back half of this decade but really driving investment driving the investment pipeline in the early 2030s. And that is have to mention just the customer affordability opportunity that this drives and we think about — we bring forward the clean energy opportunity with the resources and the resources advantage we have in the middle of the country, paired with the affordability benefits for our current customers.

So we’re super excited about this opportunity. You asked about a kind of alternative financing, but we’re certainly looking at all of those alternative financing, just like we know what our peers are. Right now, our base plan to beat is how we’ve talked about it, funding incremental CapEx with incremental equity of roughly 40%. And we’re already ahead of our — we’re one quarter into our 5-year plan, and we have 50% of our equity taken down for a base 5-year plan. So I think we’re really staying ahead of it, and we’ll continue to deliver growth and happy to fund accretive growth with equity and maintain that strong balance sheet because we think it’s really important as you go through this cycle of long-term extended growth. So sorry, long-winded answer, but yes, like 3 or 4 questions there.

Richard Sunderland: We appreciate the comprehensive response.

Operator: The next question comes from the line of Nicholas Campanella from Barclays.

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

Brian Van Abel: Yes. Nick, I can take that one. We kind of — in that Slide 8 in our earnings deck, we kind of highlighted the different pieces of that $7-plus billion. Think of all that — that trend that 765 transmission line in SPS that should be in service by the goals by 2031. So a lot of that will be captured in our current 5-year plan is in kind of the back part of that 5-year plan. The Colorado generation 800 megawatts some gas and 600 megawatts of wind. Again, that should be in service by around 2030, particularly the wind when your goal is to capture the production tax credits. And then we haven’t specified the in-service dates on the assets to serve Google that’s still not public. But if you think about it, if it’s wind and solar, the goal is to get those into capture the tax credits to ensure that you have low-cost renewables.

And so — and then the long duration storage has a longer potential runway in terms of tax credits. So that’s the best way to think about it. As we roll forward, we always provide our comprehensive update in Q3, but that’s a good way to think about kind of how this stuff rolls into this front [indiscernible] with a little bit flowing into kind of early 2030s.

Nicholas Campanella: Okay. That’s great. I really appreciate that. And then maybe just a follow-up is, as you get to the back end of that plan, the large loads are going to be ramping hopefully and at what point would you kind of revisit the 40% equity financing assumption? And then secondly, just any thoughts on defending the Baa1 outlook here with Moody’s?

Brian Van Abel: We think about it longer term, it’s important to maintain a strong balance sheet, good credit metrics. Now we certainly understand where we are with Moody’s. And we think about it over the long term, is that 17% [ CFO to debt ] type of metric. Obviously, in a large build cycle, it gets pressured a little bit, but we do believe and I’ve always said it, anyone who’s listened to me for the past 6 years as CFO, is that it’s important to maintain a strong balance sheet over the long term. In terms of that equity financing, that’s generally been our rule of thumb. But every time we roll forward a new 5-year plan depending on the cash generation, cash profile, timing of projects in service, tax benefits, we incorporate all that.

So 40% is a rule of thumb, but we’ll continue to be consistent with what really maintains our metrics. But like I said, we think in this type of build cycle, this type of capital investments, a volatility in the market, it’s important to have a good balance sheet to weather through things.

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

Robert Frenzel: Yes. Nick, it’s Bob. Thanks for the question. One of the interesting things about the MISO market and the capacity auction itself, it’s been much more volatile and less predictable than maybe some of the other regions, given the large bilateral nature of the MISO market. The print itself isn’t something we look at in the near term because we have a bit of length here in the upper Midwest, and we’ve been able to sell into that market. But over time, it’s not the signal that we use to drive new capacity additions and new load forecasting. So relatively uninteresting in the short term for the capacity auction in MISO and we’ll keep an eye on it. But our long-term forecast is in partnership with MISO, where we see asset additions, asset reductions and load growth still leads to a really exciting region in an area that data centers definitely want to show up and be energized by. So not much to the auction itself.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Julien Dumoulin-Smith from Jefferies.

Julien Dumoulin-Smith: Let me nit pick on a few things you guys have already said here. So just taking it from the top, on Colorado intervenor testimony, obviously, hearing some decent confidence on settlement. Again, I never say it’s never done until it’s done. But how do you think about the prior guidance of this 50 to 60 basis points of lag here? How do you think about that being attainable? What are the permutations? And then also given in parallel here, the comprehensive capital riders here now available, how do you think about the future cadence of cases? How you might come together around any settlement and trying to establish a longer duration here?

Brian Van Abel: Julien, I can take that one. I think really, certainly, if we can reach a constructive settlement that prior guidance remains intact. I think when you look at kind of where staff and UCA are at a 9.0 kind of midpoint for staff and 9.2 ROE for UCA. It’s like I said, it’s a decent starting point for settlement negotiations. And certainly, our equity ratios in Portland, Colorado, like I was talking about, overall, it’s really important to maintain credit quality in Colorado, too. So the equity ratio is a significant point of that. But like I said, we’ve had a good history, a good track record of settling on the electric side. So you think about the riders and the opportunity. I think there is an opportunity to have a longer-term path to not filing rate cases maybe every year that we have been.

But certainly, it does depend on the constructive settlement here on the electric in the electric case to kind of set that base framework. So it’s absolutely something we’re thinking about and look forward to engaging the parties here over the next months is if we can read something constructive.

Julien Dumoulin-Smith: Awesome. Excellent. And then to go back and take a little bit on Nick’s question around the data center large loads. A couple of pieces here. Just what’s the geographic footprint that you’re contemplating here in incremental announcements? I mean, obviously, the different states have different tax regimes. You alluded here to Texas filing something here. How disproportionate might that geography be relative to your others here? How might that impact, again, the comments that you just made about Colorado? And then to nitpick further, this NextEra partnership, you throw 2 gigawatts out in that pipeline, is that separate and distinct from what you’re talking about in this 3 gigawatts by ’27? Sorry, I know you’ve thrown a few different numbers, but I want to try to tie them out here.

Robert Frenzel: Julien, it’s Bob. Thanks for the question. And let me see if I can clarify a little bit. First of all, like I said, we started with generation length and transmission capabilities, and that’s led people to be most interested in the upper Midwest, the Minnesota, the Wisconsin and the Dakotas are really interesting to our data center developers in the near term where we have more length. In the longer term, working on a large load tariff in Colorado, there’s active legislation in Colorado around trying to work on making Colorado a place where we can have a framework — legislative framework to bring data centers there and attract them. And then in the South West, a hugely popular region given the price of electricity down there and the attractiveness down there.

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

That’s helpful.

Julien Dumoulin-Smith: Awesome. All right. Excellent. And then just in as much as just nitpicking on cost, obviously starting the year out well, any updates on Sherco here and timeline there?

Brian Van Abel: Julien, do you mean comanche?

Julien Dumoulin-Smith: So — well, I was thinking Sherco is going as much as — I think it’s still planned retirement in ’26, right?

Robert Frenzel: Yes. Our plans are to continue to retire Sherco at the end of this year, and we have both the transmission and generation needed to serve that interconnection on a go-forward basis in the Upper Midwest and it’s part of our long-term resource plans in the Upper Midwest. Those plans are still intact. We’ve not heard anything that would lead us to do anything differently at this point.

Julien Dumoulin-Smith: Awesome. Sorry, I know lots of things going on. Best of luck. You guys got a lot cooking.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Carly Davenport from Goldman Sachs.

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

Robert Frenzel: Sure. Happy to comment. You’re accurate. Each of the agencies in the state undergo sunset review, the PUC was up this year. It’s usually somewhere in a 7- to 10-year cycle. And the goal is to look at the effectiveness and the efficiency of the agency and the necessity of the functions for the futures of the state. So one of the provisions in the legislation itself was the expansion of the use of of securitization as a tool. We’ve — I think we’ve been really thoughtful as a company in proposing securitization in the cases where it makes a lot of sense. If you look back we have permission to securitize the remaining balance of Comanche 3 when that plant retires at the end of 2030. We’ve looked at securitization for portions of our wildfire investment in the state.

We’ve proposed and not executed on securitization around fuel costs, particularly around winter storm Yuri. So there’s sort of — that’s a good tool to have in the tool chest. I just think we want to make sure that it’s used for the right things as we go forward, and we’re talking about securitization. We are very engaged in the legislation as drafted. There’s a little bit of time between now and the end of session and we continue to talk with all parties about how to make sure that we can bring efficiency and effectiveness to the state, whether it’s speed of filings, decision-making on resource plans, there’s a lot of things that we think that in this era of energy growth that we’d like to see be able to do and to partner with the PUC as we move forward to working with all the stakeholders to do that.

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

Robert Frenzel: Yes. Thank you. I appreciate you recognizing all the great work that the team has done over the last number of years. It still goes in a number of buckets. We talk about situational awareness and our ability to understand weather patterns and take action on more discretely more accurately with less customer impact has grown over the [indiscernible] than a opportunity to [indiscernible] grown and our ability to [indiscernible] make it safer [indiscernible] in the prone area is sufficient [indiscernible] new outage management systems, new customer notification systems, more engagement on the community side. So yes, we are in a low snowpack in Colorado this year in a drier conditions. We think with all the things we’ve done under the operational side, the situational awareness side and the community engagement side is going to lead us to have a high safe summer in Colorado.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jeremy Tonet from JPMorgan.

Jeremy Tonet: Just wanted to come back to the Google agreement here. I’m just wondering what you think that means more broadly if Google is willing to pay for newer technologies and such like form here. What do you see this as a trend? What do you see these trends and the other conversations at this point as far as appetite?

Brian Van Abel: Yes. I think that’s — it’s a great question in the sense of if we think about what our kind of our alignment with state policies and how we move this forward. I think one good example is in Colorado, in the legislative session, there’s an advanced geothermal bill moving through the legislature. And that could be another place where you could see maybe a hyperscaler could help fund advanced geothermal project in Colorado, given Colorado’s focused on the clean energy transition. So I think this is a really great theme as we think kind of how do we align the data center opportunity, hyperscale opportunity with our state policies objectives from a clean energy perspective, right? New technology is generally more expensive. It takes investment to commercialize it. And so we think this is a great kind of blueprint as we think about longer-term opportunities in not only again in Minnesota but other parts of our service territory.

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

Jeremy Tonet: Got it. And I was just wondering maybe if we take a step back, if we just think about, I guess, your ability to win more data center load here kind of stands out maybe versus others in the industry. I’m just wondering if you could speak to what do you think is some of the key tier offerings, if it’s speed to market or if it’s a type of solutions or otherwise? Just wondering what you see as kind of key to the rate of wins as you guys have posted.

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

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

Brian Van Abel: Yes. And I would just add a little bit on the execution side. We are sitting in the middle of the country, if we’re going to deliver a portfolio of clean energy resources, that takes a development team. That takes scale. If you look at just our base plan, we’re developing 10 gigawatts of generation in storage, 7 gigawatts of that is renewable. So it takes a platform, and that really gets to our partnership on the EPC side, our OEM side because when you think about what’s next another gigawatt this year, 3 more gigawatts next year, that takes a significant pipeline of clean energy resources for us to execute on. So I think the hyperscaler is having the confidence in what we’re doing already and having that track record of delivering these projects on the renewable side is also really important.

Jeremy Tonet: Got it. That’s very helpful. Just a real quick last one, if I could. I recognize this is probably premature, but figure I’ll try anyways. After seeing the ALJ just now, any thoughts on the prospects for settling given this very early time of review?

Brian Van Abel: Just on the electric side, I think, generally, the most likely time to settle is leading into hearings. And we’ve had the hearings. Certainly, we’d be willing to discuss settlement, but really, the impetus is leading into hearings, which happened already. So we’re looking forward to the MPUC deliberations in June and seeing the order in July.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Ross Fowler from Bank of America.

Ross Fowler: So just a couple of specific questions and then one general question this morning. So for the JDA with NextEra, is there — do you see potential to expand that beyond 2 gigawatts? How are you thinking about expanding that?

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

Ross Fowler: Okay. That’s very helpful. And then — we’ve touched on it, Jeremy’s question touched on it a little bit. You touched on above at the beginning. One of the things that maybe the market has been thinking about because we’re focused on growth, growth, growth and more growth is sort of the layer of execution risk behind that. So you have the GE Vernova strategic alliance. Just on those 5 natural gas turbines, is that just in the queue or price? So that’s the specific question. And then the general question, right? Can you point to some things because I think you guys have a different sort of execution risk profile than most?

Robert Frenzel: Well, so let me start with the immediate question. We have 24 gas turbines through Siemens and General Electric that are slotted and in various stages of production and delivery over the next 5 years. So I feel very comfortable where we sit on access to gas turbines and ability to meet our base and our upside case. With respect to risk profile, I think we sit in a great spot. And I don’t know if you were trying to complement us there or not, but I’m really excited about where we sit with our key vendors and suppliers, GE Vernova being just one of them, NextEra just being one of them. But we’ve got negotiated and framework agreements with handfuls of both EPC vendors and equipment vendors across both our transmission, our distribution and our gas businesses.

We’ve got wind turbines available. We’ve got solar. We’ve got breakers, high-voltage transformers. We’ve got a lot of equipment and access to people through our partnerships, and we feel very confident in our ability to meet our base and our upside capital plans.

Brian Van Abel: Yes. And I think, Ross, that’s one of the reasons why you see that slide in there about the generation — or base generation of executing over the next 5 years, right? The EPCs or OEMs see that we have a long pipeline, and it’s how — scale matters and that’s how we get these partnerships with the Tier 1s. And really, it’s not just through 2030 is long-term partnerships. If you move from site to site to drive crew efficiencies, you don’t have [indiscernible] costs. So there’s a lot of efficiencies. We can drive scale in terms of ordering multiple gigawatts of [ Bob said CTs ] or wind turbines. So huge, huge benefits of scale here, and I think that helps derisk us from an execution perspective. And also we think about it, it gets to how are we competitive in RFPs, how do we deliver the most competitive projects for the benefit of our customers, ultimately is what it gets down to.

Ross Fowler: Yes. No, it’s definitely about to be complementary, Bob. You guys have locked a lot of this down and [ thought in a very Old Navy guy way ]. So definitely that to be complementary.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Steve Fleishman from Wolfe Research.

Steven Fleishman: So Slide 8, just the famous Slide 8, can you spend a quick minute just on the noncheck marked items and when we’ll have visibility on them? And then also just like how much of the CapEx would show up by 2030 on some of those?

Brian Van Abel: Yes, Steve, happy to take that. Yes, we just start kind of the most near-term is the SPS RFP. We received the bids in January going through the evaluation. You’ll see a — we’ll make a filing with the New Mexico Commission here later in Q2 and that’s 1,500 to 3,000 megawatts of nameplate capacity. A lot of kind of renewables in that as part of that is to meet the New Mexico Renewable Energy Standard. So we expect renewables related to that would come in prior to the end of 2030. So the good opportunity there in terms of what filters into that back part of our 5-year plan. So that’s the nearest-term catalyst. The NSP RFP where we received — just recently received the bids working through the evaluation process and expect a filing with the Minnesota Commission later this year.

Again, that was one of those acceleration of our resource acquisition for the secure renewable resources for the benefit of our customers to make sure we capture the tax credits. So that’s, again, looking 4,000-plus megawatts renewable generation storage by 2030. Obviously, that filter into our base 5-year plan. So really great opportunities on top of the $7-plus billion that we’ve basically given line of sight to through this first quarter. Then the next one is Colorado. We’re working through the Colorado GTS and we’ll file an RFP later this year. So that is something will play out into next year. And — if the renewable resources, the goal will to get them in by 2030, but there’s likely some baseload in thermal generation coming with that.

So that could slip a little bit into the 2030s on that, just depending on when we need the resources. Then on the 765 transmission lines in SPP, that’s a competitive bid that we’ll bid into later this year. We likely won’t get a decision on that until next year. And then on the data centers, obviously, we talked about, we’re going to execute on 1 gigawatt this year, and then the 3 gigawatts really will be a significant opportunity next year and kind of depends on what those resources are. But I view that as really how do we deliver those longer-term growth visibility post 2030. I mean we have a great line of sight into 2030 — in the early 2030s, how do we continue to extend that and give our shareholders visibility into a long term — executing on our long-term growth objectives.

Steven Fleishman: Okay. Just one quick follow-up on the NSP and SPS renewables RFPs. Just do you — do you expect most of that to be company-owned or some — will some of this be PPAs? Or how should we think about that?

Brian Van Abel: Yes. Look, I think it’s a balance. I mean we haven’t disclosed any of the details and we always say publicly 50-50. We’ve done better in some RFPs in the last SPS we did north of 75%. Minnesota, we have some opportunities in terms of if you think about reusing transmission interconnections. So — but I think our — always our guide is 50-50 important that we have competitive projects as it goes to our regulated development team in terms of bringing forward competitive projects for the benefit of our customers. But we always guide 50-50 and our goal is to do better because we think we have really competitive projects.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Sophie Karp from KeyBanc.

Sophie Karp: Congrats on a good update here. Is there a way for you to quantify customer benefits from incremental data center load as it materializes like some of your peers are doing? I’m just kind of thinking sort of beyond potential kind of community relations issues and things like that, that arise sometimes and if that could be helpful for you to kind of show that benefit more directly? Is it possible?

Robert Frenzel: Sophie, it’s Bob. It’s a great question. On the Google data center itself was close to 1 gigawatt led to $1 billion to $1.5 billion of customer savings, all customer savings. That translates to about 1% to 2% of residential electric customer net benefit. Probably not a bad thumb rule, but we haven’t given any guidance on that. And so let us think back through, as we look at our other jurisdictions, a lot of that benefit comes from sharing the fixed costs of the grid. And so the transmission rate and the investment in transmission in any of our particular regions is a big driver of that when you add a large load to the transmission grid and the ability to share that cost more broadly amongst more megawatt hours.

In particular, on the Google side, the addition of 1,900 megawatts of wind, solar and storage is also beneficial as we think about dispatch priority in the Upper Midwest, so that’s a knock-on effect. It’s also beneficial for our customers. And certainly, the carbon neutrality of those assets is also beneficial. We haven’t given any firm guidance, but it’s probably in that ZIP code, and we can probably work on something like that for the future.

Operator: Our final question will come from the line of Anthony Crowdell, Mizuho Securities.

Anthony Crowdell: Hopefully, 2 quick ones. You guys are very aggressive in doing, I guess, about 50% of your equity over 5 years just in the first quarter. Any cadence on the remaining half? Are you looking to take care of it all in ’26? Or any color you give on that? And I have one follow-up.

Brian Van Abel: Anthony, generally, we don’t give specific timing on equity issuance is all I can say is we’ve been very proactive. And if you look at the forward component, the ATM going to be pushed out a couple of years. So it gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of when do you issue and when you actually draw down the equity proceeds. So it can really help kind of how do we time it with the capital investment needs. So we’ll continue to be proactive on this and get out ahead. We’re pretty proud of having half of our equity need locked down with one quarter into a, call it, 3 months into a 60-month plan.

Anthony Crowdell: Great. And then just quickly, on Smokehouse Creek. You guys gave a lot of detail on the slide. I appreciate it. You’re still under the insurance cap, I think, $525 million, you’ve been, I guess, aggressive on working through settlements. Just any color there you have on maybe resolving all of it or out of the 107 potential claims? Just any color you could give on that.

Brian Van Abel: Yes. We just — like I said, the statute of limitations is up on the property claims happened at the end of February when we hit the 2-year mark. And so those that have come in. We don’t have a lot of information. We’re early in the process. But our goal is to work expeditiously through them, like we have through our settlement process, I think we’ve had — we’ve been very successful with over 300-plus claims and lawsuits settled. And the way to think about it, Anthony, is we have low-end accrual of $460 million. We’ve finalized settlements of approximately $400 million. So it’s really that $60 million delta there that were kind of the low-end estimate and we’ll continue to provide updates on a quarterly basis, but we feel really good about what we’ve done so far.

Anthony Crowdell: Congrats on a good quarter.

Operator: Our final question will come from Steve D’Ambrisi from RBC Capital Markets.

Stephen D’Ambrisi: Just quickly on what are these — what do you think that large loads do for earned returns or structural under-earning that you have in any of your jurisdictions as they come online? The reason I ask is just clearly you have a 9% EPS CAGR out there, but rate base growth is very front-end loaded and the capital plan is back-end loaded, and we’ve talked a lot about adding incremental capital to the plan, mostly in the tail end. So I just want to understand kind of what the shape of earned returns looks like as you see rate base growth accelerating?

Brian Van Abel: Yes. I mean, I think as our shape of earned returns, we always talk a little bit about closing the gap, particularly in Colorado when we’re working through some stuff and filed rate cases that will go into effect next year in terms of full annualization of the rate cases. We’ve always talked about structurally, there’s 50-plus basis points of this structural lag. So we’ll continue to work on that. In terms of — you say data centers, I think, just about overall sales growth, whether it’s oil and gas growth that we have down in SPS, we have really diversified growth. It starts to give that opportunity whether it’s driving better returns in between rate cases or really just staying out of rate cases longer term as you start to see the sale of growth materialize.

And I think that’s a really great opportunity. Not only can you bring affordability benefits with these data center loads, but how does it help you stay out of rate cases over the long term. Now we still have a while in terms of those data centers need to start to ramp up late in this period, but I do think that’s a great long-term opportunity on both sides, affordability and driving earned returns.

Operator: That concludes the question-and-answer session. I’ll now turn the call over to Brian Van Abel for closing remarks.

Brian Van Abel: Thank you all for participating in our earnings call this morning. Please contact our Investor Relations team with any follow-up questions. Have a great day.

Operator: That concludes today’s meeting. You may now disconnect.