Dive Brief:
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NextEra Energy Resources signed development deals for more than 3 GW of renewable energy during the second quarter, including an 860 MW deal with Google, the company announced during a Wednesday morning earnings call.
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The company also announced that it has sold a partial stake in a 1.6 GW portfolio of renewable energy projects to Blackstone for $900 million.
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Data center and heavy industry increasingly value wind, solar and energy storage resources for their ease and speed of deployment relative to other energy resources, company officials said. This has triggered a trend toward localized energy projects and away from virtual power purchase agreements, they said.
Dive Insight:
Demand for electricity is growing so rapidly that it could take years for the renewable energy sector's developers to catch up, NextEra Energy leaders said during Wednesday's earnings call.
NextEra Energy Resources — the company's energy development arm — added 3,015 MW to its project pipeline during the second quarter, including 820 MW of wind,1,455 MW of solar, 530 MW of battery storage and 210 MW from wind repowering, according to the company's presentation. The 860 MW deal with Google will provide the company with power for its growing fleet of data centers, but NextEra officials declined to offer further details.
While investors should not expect NextEra to land 3 GW in new deals every quarter, the current trajectory has utilities across the country experiencing demand at unprecedented levels, said Rebecca Kujawa, CEO of NextEra Energy Resources.
“There is no escaping the fact that these are very large numbers, numbers I don't think any utility across the industry has seen before, so it is going to take some time to rationalize that,” Kujawa said. “We are all very excited to see this growth, but from a practical standpoint it will take a couple of years for this to materialize.”
Data centers and other “hyperscalers” are increasingly looking for energy resources with shorter development timelines that can power their operations directly, Kujawa said. That has prompted NextEra Energy to focus on what NextEra Energy CEO and president John Ketchum described Wednesday as the company's “core business”: wind, solar, energy storage and transmission.
Analysts on the earnings call asked about the prospects of reopening the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant, which is owned primarily by NextEra Energy Resources, but Ketchum said the company would not pursue this course of action unless it was convinced that a re-opening would be “essentially risk-free.”
Demand for energy may be growing, Ketchum said, but that demand is primarily focused on low-cost generation assets they can deliver on relatively short deadlines.
