NextEra Energy CEO: Powering AI, Nuclear's Comeback and a Historic Utility Merger

I don't care who I'm in a room with. If you think something I've said is stupid or dumb or I haven't thought about something or I have a blind spot, I don't care if you're a 25 year old newbie out of an MBA program, or you're somebody who's been with the company for twenty years. Push back and tell me what you think I'm missing. Hi, everybody. I'm Nikola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. And today, I'm joined by Jon Ketchum, CEO of NextEra Energy, the world's most valuable power company. We own 1.5% of the company worth more than $2,000,000,000 Now, AI needs electricity, more of it faster than anyone expected. And NextEra is building the power to match and just agreed to the biggest merger in the industry's history to do it. So, how do you build the biggest power company on Earth? Let's figure it out. John, warm welcome. Well, great to be here. Thank you, Nikolay. You started out as a regional Florida utility, and now you've grown to something which is huge. So in five sentences, what does NextEra do? Well, we're a builder, Yep. Number one, right? When you look across The United States, we're the only company that is fully diversified across the entire energy value chain, building in just about every state in the country. And what really separates us is our development capabilities and our approach to customers and affordability. We build cheaper, we buy cheaper, we operate cheaper, and we finance cheaper. And scale matters more than ever in our industry. Absolutely. And what would you say is the biggest difference between you and an ordinary power company? Well, the biggest difference, I think, is our scale and our capabilities and our experience. You know, we've been doing this now for two to three decades. So if you look at the last twenty years, for example, and you compare us versus our next 20 largest peers, we built more than the next 20 combined. Wow. Just to give you an example. But until recently, being a power company was kind of pretty boring, right? I mean, it was steady, boring, and now, wow, exciting, Yeah. Happens, well, what it's been boring at NextEra. Let me tell you, Nikolay, we've always had exciting opportunities. But you're right. Power demand has been static. Yeah. And it's expected to increase sixfold over the next twenty years. So an enormous opportunity that we're looking at as we look to the future. Absolutely. And we'll come back to the drivers behind that. Now, you also agreed to buy Dominion Energy, which is another very large U. S. Utility. So why Dominion? Well, it's a really well run company. They are in three terrific states in Virginia and South Carolina and North Carolina. Growth opportunities in all three states. Also challenges where we have to make sure that we meet the customer requirements, which are affordability. Affordability is at the …