Duke Energy’s leadership changed the guard during its first-quarter earnings call Feb. 13 as retiring CEO Lynn Good and her replacement, Harry Sideris, split the presentation.
Good announced her retirement effective April 1 early in 2025. (See Duke Names Harry Sideris as Company’s Next CEO.)
Last year was defined largely by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which hit Duke’s territory. Good thanked the communities it serves for their support and understanding as the utility restored service after the storms. Duke plans to spend $83 billion in the next five years to meet the growing needs of its utilities.
“This capital represents infrastructure spending driven by growing jurisdictions and underpinned by robust regulatory processes such as integrated resource plans and approved grid investment spending,” Good said. “With the continuation of our 5 to 7% [earnings per share] growth rate through 2029, with the potential to earn higher in the range as the years progress, Duke Energy enters the back part of this decade in a position of strength, and we’re excited about the future.”
Good said Sideris and the incoming chair of the board of directors, Ted Craver (formerly Edison International’s CEO), are up to the task of leading the utility.
“I assume this new role at a pivotal point for our company and industry,” Sideris said. “We share the new administration’s commitment to ensuring the availability of reliable and affordable energy to meet our country’s aspirations for technology leadership and economic growth. These priorities align with our business strategy, and we look forward to working with President Trump, both parties in Congress and our states to build, operate and protect the critical infrastructure needed to deliver on these goals.”
The needs to meet growing demand and replace aging infrastructure mean the firm plans to invest billions of dollars in new generation and the grid, with Sideris saying the firm had a “decade of record infrastructure build.”
A key source of the new demand for Duke’s utilities is going to be data centers. Sideris said that while Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek’s efficient model might have made headlines and cut into chipmaker Nvidia’s stock, the hyperscale data center developers the utility has worked with already expected efficiency advances.
“They’re full-speed ahead,” Sideris said. “They’re looking at the fact that these efficiencies may actually increase the demand for AI. So, we have not seen any pullback in anything they’re planning on. In fact, we’ve seen a lot more discussions with accelerating some of their work.”
Many of the near-term data centers being built in Duke’s territory are not for AI but rather the growth in demand for cloud services, Good said.
“Then as we move later into the plan, that’s where some of the generative AI data centers are coming in, and that’s when we see the larger load growth,” Sideris said.
This year and next, Duke expects 1.5 to 2% load growth across all of its utilities, jumping to 3 to 4% in 2027 and staying there through 2029. Its core market of the Carolinas should experience slightly higher growth, with 2% this year and next heading to 4 to 5% for the rest of the 2020s.
Duke plans to build about 5 GW of new natural gas-fired generation by the end of 2029, mostly in North Carolina, with just one of five plants located in Indiana. The firm plans to start procuring 1.5 GW of solar per year in North Carolina and an additional 900 MW of solar in Florida by 2027.
The utility also will add storage in the coming years, and it could add small modular reactors by the mid-2030s. Of the $83 billion, Duke plans to spend $37 billion on its transmission and distribution systems.
