Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our inaugural Constellation Energy Corporation Virtual Analyst Day. I am pleased to be joined by our management team who will speak to you about Constellation's vision, strategy, world-class operations and financial outlook. After their presentations, we will take a 15-minute break before starting our Q&A session. Last night, we issued the presentation for today's webcast, which can be found in the investor relations section of Exelon's website. The matters which we discuss during today's webcast contain forward-looking statements and estimates regarding Constellation and its subsidiaries following the completion of the separation from Exelon that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ from our forward-looking statements based on factors and assumptions discussed in today's material and comments made during the call.
Please refer to yesterday's 8-K and Constellation's Form 10 registration statement for discussions of risk factors and other factors, including uncertainties surrounding the separation that may cause results to differ from management's projections, forecasts, and expectations. Today's presentation also includes references to adjusted operating earnings and other non-GAAP measures. Please refer to the information contained in our presentation for the reconciliations between the non-GAAP measures and the nearest equivalent GAAP measure. This event is being streamed live. Should we experience any technical disruptions, or if any individual users experience any network interruptions, all materials can be accessed on the Exelon investor relations site following the scheduled end time of the program. I'll now turn it over to future President and Chief Executive Officer of Constellation, Joe Dominguez.
Thanks, Emily. Good morning, everyone, and happy New Year. Welcome to our Analyst Day. We know that many of you spent time with Exelon yesterday, and we very much appreciate your time and interest in both of these industry-leading companies. Listening to Exelon's presentation yesterday, it's clear that they're off to a fantastic start with a very compelling vision. On behalf of everyone at Constellation, we wish Chris and the entire team at Exelon great success. This morning, we will lay out our vision and plans to cement and expand Constellation's position as an industry leader in the production of 24/7 carbon-free energy and in providing clean energy solutions to families and businesses across America. We start from a position of enormous strength and one of the best pure-play clean energy stories in the business.
It begins with the women and men who operate the largest and best-performing 24/7 clean energy assets in the nation, and those who are in our customer-facing business, where we provide real-time solutions to customers who want to decarbonize. We produce the most zero-emission energy and have the lowest carbon intensity of any company in America by a very wide margin. Our customer-facing retail business is the second largest in the nation, first in C&I, and third in mass market. Finally, we have the ability to provide enormous amount of good support for our community. We've been doing that, and we'll continue to do that. There are a lot of slides here, but turning to slide nine, it really boils down to three key takeaways that we want you to leave with. First, that the Constellation business is durable and its future more certain than ever.
To put it in words I think we all understand, our 24/7 emissions-free power plants are not a melting ice cube. They are not the climate problem. They're a big part of the climate solution. That's why Republican and Democratic policymakers, powerful NGOs, customers, and governments around the world increasingly recognize what most experts have been saying all along. We need nuclear energy if we're gonna have any chance to curb carbon pollution in the short time we have to do it. That stakeholder support has translated into the state programs you've seen, the ZECs, the CMCs, and other programs that you've witnessed us develop with state policymakers over the last five to seven years. Programs that give us the financial certainty to keep operating assets, grow capabilities, and return value to you, our owners, in a predictable way.
In terms of asset life, we've demonstrated at Peach Bottom that we can economically extend the operations of the plants to 80 years, giving us the ability to meet America's clean energy needs beyond 2060. Now, we're all waiting to see whether Build Back Better or some smaller federal legislation passes with tax credits for renewables and nuclear. At this point, BBB remains an option for our investors. What is undeniable and what you have seen firsthand is the transition to clean energy. It's happening, and the momentum is only picking up. That momentum is behind our company, and we see signposts of it each and every day. For example, just in the last handful of weeks, we saw President Biden issue an executive order requiring all federal agencies to buy an hourly matched zero-emission energy from nuclear and renewables.
Even in Europe, we're seeing a discussion where the taxonomy rules may now recognize the key role of nuclear energy. Likewise, our customer-facing Constellation retail and wholesale business is the best position and benefits from a fleet that provides the ability like no other to meet the needs of our customers with clean energy 24/7. As Jim McHugh will cover, the Constellation business already has evolved to offer customers sustainable power products and offerings that match generation and load. Together, our durable nuclear and commercial business, along with our renewables and low emission natural gas fleet, give us unique predictability and balance sheet strength so that we can in turn deliver strong performance to you. The second point we want to leave you with is this, we expect to produce strong free cash flow that'll allow for a robust capital allocation strategy.
We will remain focused on our investment-grade balance sheet with healthy margins to our targets, a growing common dividend, opportunity to deploy growth capital into successful core business endeavors, and finally, to return excess cash flows to our shareholders through a combination of buybacks and special dividends. The third and final takeaway that we want to leave you with is this. Constellation is not a company with a bolt-on ESG strategy. At Constellation, ESG is the strategy, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. Turning to slide 10, as you can see from this collage of data points, the momentum to address the climate crisis is really evident at all levels of government. The other prong here is the customer front.
We see that push in electric mobility, we see that push in industrial processes, in residential heating, and it's a big part of our strategy with our C&I customers, who like us, want to meet the needs of America for clean and sustainable business. Turning to slide 11, I think the key point here is that any way you slice it, Constellation leads in the generation of emissions free energy. This slide provides three dimensions of our leadership. First, on the left-hand side, you see volumetrically that we produce as much clean energy nearly as our next two largest competitors combined. In the middle of the slide, you see that our total emissions are lower than any of the major investor-owned generators. Finally, on the right-hand side, our carbon intensity is lower than any other investor-owned generator, 400% better than our next closest competitor.
Let's turn to slide 12. Now, we've talked about the nuclear dynamics quite a bit already, but let's talk about the macro fundamentals of the zero emission energy market. There are really two things happening here simultaneously. First, as I've been saying, all sectors of the economy are increasingly turning to electricity to decarbonize as a common fuel. We see that growth in the transportation sector, in the industrial sectors, and even beginning in the agricultural sectors. We expect this transition to gain momentum and electricity demand to grow to be about twice as much as it is today by 2050. The other thing that's going on here is that we're also phasing out fossil fuels. As we're increasing electricity demand twofold, we're also reducing the use of coal and natural gas and oil in our generation stack.
When you put those two pieces together, what it means is that the clean energy electricity market is going to grow by about 400%-500% by 2050. We talked earlier about Constellation not being a melting ice cube. Constellation is actually a vital piece of the energy needed to power America in a rapidly growing market. Slide 13 here is a complement to what we just discussed on slide 12. What we're really trying to explain here is that nuclear energy is by definition different than other non-intermittent forms of clean energy production. While the overall market is growing by 400%-500%, nuclear actually plays an even more unique role than generic clean energy production.
That's because it could operate 24/7, 365, it has grid stability characteristics that could actually balance renewables, and because it could operate for 80 years. Turning to slide 14, the life cycle emissions for nuclear are the lowest of any clean energy resource. Slide 15 here shows a little bit of what we've been talking about with the executive order and the demand for nuclear from policymakers worldwide. One of the really interesting pieces here is that the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance recently changed their name to the Clean Energy Buyers Association. Again, recognizing that in fashioning products for families and businesses, nuclear needs to be part of the solution because of its unique qualities. Slide 16 here is fashioned as a little bit of a before and after. It really represents the journey we've been on with nuclear.
Five to seven years ago, we had nuclear resources that could only participate in the market as grid capacity and energy resources without any recognition of their clean energy attributes. The state programs have changed that. We have a little bit more work to do, but we're well underway on the journey of having nuclear recognized as a clean energy resource financially. On the right-hand side of this slide, we wanted to give you a little bit of a glimpse of our vision for how we intend to use nuclear in the future, where we intend to deploy it as a resource that could produce hydrogen, support data centers, support carbon capture, as well as its grid qualities. We think that's an exciting vision. It won't be there immediately for us. We'll be patient as these opportunities develop.
In the fullness of time, we see nuclear serving all of these purposes so that we could deploy our clean energy megawatts in the most effective means for American consumers. Turning to slide 17, Jim McHugh is going to spend a lot of time here talking about the Constellation retail and wholesale business, but it's a business we're particularly proud of. I spoke earlier about how customers are increasingly looking at clean energy solutions, and the one great thing about the Constellation business is their ability to anticipate where the customer has been going and get there first. A number of the products that are listed here on this slide are products that we developed at Constellation and are now deploying. One of the exciting new products is this hourly product to deliver 24/7 clean energy to customers to match their load.
Constellation has been figuring out how to meet the needs of families and businesses from its inception. We're excited where that pathway will take us in combination with our generation platform. Turning to slide 18. We spoke about this a little earlier, but I just want to hit it again. We intend to deliver value through our capital allocation back to shareholders by providing an annual dividend that we expect to grow at 10% annually. We anticipate returning cash to shareholders through buybacks and special dividends. We'll have organic and inorganic growth opportunities consistent with our role as America's leading clean energy company. We of course intend to support all of this by maintaining a strong investment-grade balance sheet. Turning to slide 19. We've listed here a number of growth opportunities, and we've listed them in order of when we think these opportunities might materialize.
Now, a number of these things might present themselves early, but I frankly think we're gonna have to be patient and wait to see how some of these opportunities develop. Turning to slide 20. I started by saying that ESG is not a bolt-on for Constellation. It is the strategy. We've talked about the environmental piece a great deal, but there's a great deal more to the transition that's occurring than just its effect on the environment. This transition will also affect communities, not only in terms of the air they breathe and the challenges of the climate crisis, but also in terms of the jobs and economic opportunities that will be available. At Constellation, we've done a great job ensuring that opportunities are created for communities and for people that have historically not enjoyed those opportunities. Our world-class supplier diversity program and jobs programs lead the way.
They're part of the DNA of this company and a key reason for our success. We will bring a strong governance culture to Constellation, beginning with maintaining a strong balance sheet and with unquestionable integrity and ethics. We will accept nothing less. On slide 21, you're all familiar with the expression that leadership is about more than talking the talk. It's about walking the walk. At Constellation, our people lead on clean energy every day. They walk the walk. We are proud, but we're not satisfied with what we've done. By 2040, we'll do more. We will achieve 100% carbon-free own generation by 2040. We will achieve 100% reduction in our operational emissions by 2040. By 2040, we'll provide each and every one of our customers with tailored solutions for their clean energy needs.
Turning to slide 22, before I hand this off to Kathleen Barrón, we wanna put some words on a sheet here that really reflect the conversation we're gonna have with you today. We think that Constellation is a very special company, a company poised to meet America's need for clean, reliable, and affordable electricity. It's an exciting platform where we think we have some unique opportunities, and we're excited for the future together.
Good morning. I'm thrilled to be here with all of you to cover energy policy and why our strategy makes us the premier ESG stock for you to own. Starting with policy, Joe spoke with you about the transformation in how nuclear power is viewed by stakeholders in our country, and I'd really like to pick up there with this very simple graphic. It has some data on it from the Rhodium Group. It is true that the industry has become more vocal about our role in decarbonization. Yes, nuclear enjoys broad support from our host communities and from our union workforce. Yes, we even have nuclear YouTube influencers now. In my view, that's not what's changed in the past few years. It's just this simple arithmetic.
In one of his very first acts as president, President Biden set a goal of reducing U.S. emissions 50% below 2005 levels by 2030. That will require a tremendous amount of nuclear energy to be brought onto the system. Now, if we bring new renewables in and we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, we will drive down emissions. That's the green line here. But if we bring in new renewables and all they do is replace lost nuclear generation, we'll be running in place. That's the blue line, which looks pretty much the same as doing nothing. 2021 was the year this reality came to Washington and preserving nuclear became orthodoxy. It's really now unacceptable to be a serious climate advocate and be opposed to the continued operation of our country's nuclear plants.
We've seen a sea change in perspective on nuclear, and this math has brought along the allies that we see on this page. Politicians on both sides of the aisle, academics, NGOs, including those formerly opposed to nuclear, all stating that policy needs to support the continued operation of the existing fleet. Now, there was a poll about two months ago conducted by a climate advocacy organization. In that poll, 60% of Democrats said they support existing nuclear power. That compares with 37% just three years ago. It's a stunningly fast change in perspective. You saw that in the 2020 election cycle, the Democratic platform supported nuclear power for the first time since 1972.
The number of academic studies concluding that it's far cheaper and faster to decarbonize if we use all sources of zero carbon energy rather than just renewables are really now too numerous to count. In a very short period of time, we have come a very long way. As with many issues, it has been state governments that have incubated this evolution and really pushed decarbonization policy. It's in these state capitals where science of decarbonization and the effects of economic development have been debated and resolved. The states and cities you see on this page have led the way in setting deep decarbonization goals and in requiring action across all sectors of the economy. Most recently last week, with the Governor of New York calling for a statewide ban on fossil fuels in all new buildings.
This drumbeat of states has gotten louder as the states have pushed harder with more and more aggressive targets. Too, with nuclear policy, the states have been the places where policy reforms to preserve the existing fleet have flourished. Let's turn to our core states. Again here, the math has told the story. In each of these jurisdictions, nuclear makes up a large to overwhelming percentage of the clean energy flowing to customers each hour. The cost of replacing the twenty-four-seven zero carbon megawatt continues to greatly exceed the cost of preserving the nuclear plants. These facts have led three of our states to adopt clean energy standards that include nuclear. It's led one of them to join a regional cap-and-trade program, and almost all of them to set 100% clean generation targets by mid-century.
The first state to adopt a nuclear support program, New York, is right now in the process of scoping out how it will meet its 100% clean energy goal and its 85% emission reduction goal. As part of that work, the State Research and Development Authority has calculated that the cost of reaching their goal will be $10 billion more if the nuclear plants don't continue to operate. That study concludes not just that the plants are needed through their current licensed life, but also that a second license extension to 80 years is necessary to enable New York to meet its mid-century goals. At this point, almost two-thirds of our nuclear capacity is being delivered pursuant to state programs that compensate us for producing electricity without emissions.
The goal of these programs is to ensure that the existing plants continue to operate, and thus the programs are designed to provide stable earnings to the plants during periods of low prices. Importantly, they're also designed to provide protection to customers if prices rise to the level where support is no longer needed. That really does make these programs unique among clean energy support programs, in our view, will make them more durable over time. Finally, we have started to see action at the federal level as well, with an executive order from President Biden, as Joe just mentioned, mandating that the federal government procure 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2030, at least a half of which must be locally supplied from clean energy that can meet 24/7 demand.
We saw the infrastructure bill pass, including an $8 billion grant program to fund hydrogen hubs, and the law requires at least one of them must be built around nuclear energy. Finally, Build Back Better passed the House with a $15/MWh production tax credit for existing nuclear and a $3/kg credit for producing hydrogen from zero carbon sources like nuclear. All of these innovations in policy are driven by two realities. First, preserving existing clean nuclear megawatts is universally less expensive than replacing them with new resources. Second, we know we need zero carbon power that operates during the times of the day and the days of the year when customers need electricity. Our fleet and the domestic nuclear fleet checks both of these boxes.
Before I transition to our broader strategy into ESG, I'd like to end where I began with our host communities and with the skilled workforce that has made us the leader in global nuclear operations. Because of the women and men at our stations, we create economic growth in our communities, and we contribute our time and our money to taking care of the people and the places that we're honored to serve. We're doing that with a nearly 30% diverse workforce. Constellation provides more than $10 million annually in combined company and employee philanthropic support for our communities. We think our track record speaks for itself, with our employees providing over 50,000 hours of volunteer time every year.
In our new company, we will continue the historic commitments to our communities, for example, through our E2 Energy to Educate grant program, which is one of the ways we focus on energy equity and on STEM education. Through this program, we've given grants of over $5 million for 186 different projects developed by students in our communities grades six through college. Through it, we've reached over 250,000 students with a goal of igniting STEM in young minds and creating a diverse talent workforce, ideally to come into our company and eliminating barriers to economic development. Which is a good segue into our broader corporate purpose and our commitment to ESG principles.
You heard a few minutes ago, Joe's passion about what ESG means to us, but I'd like to dig a little deeper on why our corporate strategy and our ESG strategy are the same thing. In our view, humanity needs to address the climate crisis. It needs to do so with energy equity at its center, and corporations like ours are responsible for being part of the solution in an ethical way. For us, ESG is not part of what we do. It is what we do. Starting with the environment, I've spoken about policy and in our role in making us an environmental leader through our work in the States, helping to develop and implement the comprehensive clean energy policies we just discussed. We've also been vocal, pushing the industry to support strict controls on hazardous air pollution and in pushing EPA to adopt them.
We've been active in the courts, including right now at the Supreme Court, fighting for broad authority at the federal level to regulate CO₂ under the Clean Air Act. We've been active in Congress, urging legislators to enact comprehensive legislation to address the climate crisis, including Build Back Better. Our policy advocacy goes way back. It goes back to our former chairman testifying in support of Congress, addressing climate change in 1992. That was 30 years ago. It's just been part of our DNA, and it will continue to be so. As you well know, we don't just advocate for clean energy, we also make a whole lot of it, more than any other company. We operate these plants at the highest levels of performance with a sustainable supply chain and a fuel cycle.
You'll hear more from Bryan Hanson next about how we're going to transition our generation business to meet today's decarbonization challenge of bringing down emissions across all sectors of the American economy. Our big announcement today about our new GHG goal is a part of that strategy. The third leg of this stool, in addition to policy and operations, is our customer business and how we offer customer solutions to help them reach their own carbon reduction goals, how we partner with them and with universities, with the labs, with entrepreneurs and others to advance the next generation of clean energy solutions through innovation and early-stage deployment. Jim will talk more about that. Finally, on the environment, we are very excited to announce our new carbon goal.
Joe shared some data about our emissions intensity, which for a long time has been well below the trajectory for the Paris target. This is not new to all of you. You've known us as the least carbon intensive among the large generators in the U.S. Over the years, you've seen us get even cleaner with divestitures, with retirements, all of which leave us today with emissions footprint that's 80% lower than what our own generation was in 2005. You know, we did not wake up with this picture of the cleanest supply of generation in the U.S. It's been an intentional strategy for us over the past 20 years, one that we executed because we knew our country needs clean, dispatchable power, and we can deliver that better than anyone else.
We've exceeded every carbon goal that we've set for ourselves over the years or that has been set for our industry by the Paris Agreement. Frankly, we've gone without a public goal for some years. As Joe said, we've been walking the walk and not just talking about it. We do think our actions have spoken louder than words, but today we're excited to put some new words to our commitment as we set new targets for our company. Our generation will be 95% carbon free by 2030 and 100% carbon free by 2040. We will also reduce our operations-driven greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2040. Separately, we're setting a 30% methane reduction goal by 2030, consistent with the recent Global Methane Pledge.
Finally, we're committing to providing 100% of our C&I customers with customer-specific emissions information about their electric and gas consumption and how they can economically reduce their emissions to meet their own goals, including through 24/7 clean electricity purchases. Our environmental principles go hand in hand with our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access for all of our customers and our employees to the benefits of the clean energy transition. We call that energy equity. Starting at the top, our executive committee is 45% diverse, and we know that we will succeed only if we can attract, retain, and promote the best talent at all levels of the organization, particularly colleagues who can bring different perspectives to the table. While we have highly competitive pay and benefit policies, we know the workplace is not just about those things.
It's about creating an environment and a culture where every one of us can reach our highest potential, which is why we're making a number of commitments about how we will hold ourselves accountable to creating and being transparent about a culture where employees are inspired, they're challenged, they're valued, and they're safe. We will continue the practice we started at Exelon of disclosing our EEO-1 data, of using an independent third party to conduct regular gender and racial pay equity reviews to enable us to make sure that we are achieving pay equity in our workforce. We're gonna work to maintain Exelon's industry-leading supplier diversity and workforce development programs. We will continue our philanthropic and community support that I discussed earlier to ensure the jobs and economic opportunity associated with the energy transition are available to everyone.
As Joe said, our commitment to people has been a key reason for our success so far, and it will be indispensable to us going forward. Put simply, DEI and accountability for it has always been a core value at Exelon, and it will be a core value for us at Constellation. Of course, key to our people strategy is our safety record at our generating stations, which have the highest ratings at INPO and the NRC, and our environmental performance. As with all aspects of our business, we seek out new technologies to reduce risks for our employees and protect the environment, including the use of drones to inspect wind turbines. We use thermal imaging to detect invisible problems in the stations and robotic submersibles to reduce the need for divers at our nuclear plants.
Finally, I'll close out with a few words about our board of directors and governance. We have announced the seating of five new directors to join four of our legacy board members and Joe on our 10-person board. We have been able to attract a diverse and deeply experienced group of current and former leaders across many industries, industrial, commodities, finance, and legal, many with deep experience leading organizations through times of transition. Our board will be 30% female, 20% racially diverse. We'll have engineers, MBAs, PhDs, lawyers, and an admiral and former Chief of Naval Operations. Several of our board members are former officers, directors of power generation companies or utilities, and this talent will be applied to a governance structure that will ensure that we minimize risk, operate with integrity, and meet the highest ethical standards.
As in Exelon, our structure will include a committee charged with operational oversight of our nuclear stations. This committee will hold meetings that will be on-site at our nuclear stations, and it will ensure that the board is engaged in overseeing human capital management and corporate culture as part of overall risk management. I'd just like to leave you with this. This board has the background and the vision to help us transform our company from the one that makes the most clean megawatts to the one that fully takes advantage of our competitive advantage, which is our unique ability to accelerate the decarbonization of all sectors of the American economy. To talk more about that, I'd like to introduce Bryan Hanson, our Chief Generation Officer, and invite him to the stage.
Thank you, Kathleen, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Bryan Hanson, the leader of our 32,000 MW generation fleet, which is 90% clean, provides 10% of the nation's carbon-free energy and no coal. I have been with the company for 33 years, all of it in nuclear until my current role. I've also worked at six of our 12 nuclear stations and was a licensed senior reactor operator for many years. For the last 10 years, I've overseen the performance improvements in nuclear as the Chief Operating Officer and then Chief Nuclear Officer. As you can see on slide 39, we are the number one operator of nuclear plants in the United States and arguably one of the best in the world, led by a team of 10,000 women and men that are absolutely committed to excellence.
In fact, their motto is that they strive for perfection every day but will begrudgingly accept excellence along the way. That is a culture of continuous improvement. We have achieved a nuclear capacity factor of 94% or better every year since 2013, 4% better than the industry average. We have achieved an average refueling outage duration that is consistently about two weeks shorter than the industry, including world record durations for both boiling water and pressurized water reactors. We conduct 10-12 refueling outages per year and have developed a high level of proficiency in execution and are constantly working to make execution better through innovation and programmatic changes. We have achieved these incredible operational performance results all while maintaining a clear focus on cost by leveraging best practices across the nuclear sites, engaging our alliance partners, and standardization through an enduring management model.
I'm extremely proud of our employees that lead these incredible carbon-free assets. They continue to be the leaders of an industry that is performing better than it ever has in history. Our nuclear fuel supply group manages both operational and financial risk that leads to reliable supply and cost stability. Operationally, we buy uranium and processing services over a multi-year horizon to mitigate the vulnerability to supply disruption and volatility in the spot markets. The chart on the lower left illustrates the minimum action driven by our hedging strategy to secure contracting prior to a refueling year for a reactor. Our hedging strategy drives us to be at least 100% contractually covered two years prior to a refuel year, so we are never driven to buy material in the spot market and risk exposing a refueling year to unforeseen market volatility.
I can also tell you that in the recent years, while spot prices were relatively soft, we have been very successful in finding opportunities well below today's market. We accelerated our contracting coverage, and our current levels are higher than the minimums we are illustrating here. We have a management model we use to operate our fleet that is unique to us and a recognized competitive advantage by the rest of the world. It contains the policies, programs, and processes that drive consistent, predictable results from our plants. The model capitalizes on the fleet approach to continuous improvement. For example, when a new best practice is identified at one of our sites, we can quickly leverage that new best practice across all 12 sites, and we do that continuously. We have a history of improving operations of the plants we acquire, as you can see from these charts.
Applying the management model and integrating the CENG plants and Fitzpatrick into our fleet, we are able to improve their capacity factors, significantly reduce refueling days, and improve the cost structure of those plants. We have a track record of installing our management model and getting these results repetitively. Our management model is scalable and allows us to integrate any number of plants into our fleet. Being the best doesn't just give you bragging rights within our nuclear industry, it means a real difference in the world. For 19 of the last 21 years, our nuclear capacity factor has been 4% better than the industry average. That means we generate more carbon-free megawatts from our nuclear plants.
As a result, our plants generate more than 7 million MWh of additional carbon-free energy, which avoids the carbon emission equivalent of taking more than a million cars off the road. Our customers, communities, and the environment benefit from our industry-leading performance. To reach our goals that Joe and Kathleen highlighted for us, and frankly, for the United States to reach its decarbonization goals, we not only need to preserve existing nuclear, we need to extend the lives of our plants to 80 years through the subsequent license renewal process. We will apply for additional 20-year licenses for all our plants that have policy and market support. We have laid out an expected project plan in the lower left graph. They are sequenced based on a combination of timely submittal requirements of the application and recognition of when we expect clarity on continued policy and market support.
We have a clear understanding of the rules for extending the licenses as we were the industry leader for the boiling water reactor pilot at our Peach Bottom plant, which Joe mentioned. The regulator has published their expectations for what they expect in an application, and we don't see any challenges meeting those requirements. The cost for a renewed license is in the $30 million-$40 million range, and our view for the long-term investment of capital in the plant is within the current ongoing maintenance capital investments laid out in our long-range capital plan. Finally, we see additional generation opportunities from the plants through some of the typical industry improvements that have been made over the years that we had put on the shelf until we saw a clearer picture for the longevity of the plants. These include measurement, uncertainty recapture, and turbine upgrades.
Hydrogen, as we've all heard, will grow in its importance to be a key commodity in the future. Clean hydrogen generation will be key to support decarbonization of sectors that are critical to complete but difficult to accomplish, such as aviation, long-distance trucking, heavy-duty machinery, the industrial sector such as fertilizer, steel, and refineries, and in stored power generation. Clean hydrogen demand is expected to dramatically increase over time, up to 4-14 million metric tons by 2030 and 4 x that amount by 2050. As Joe highlighted in his vision for nuclear to become clean energy centers, nuclear is the ideal vehicle for clean hydrogen production. Our always-on, 24/7 nuclear plants with firm fuel supplies already have all the important attributes to clean hydrogen.
Our plants have readily accessible water supplies, transmission access, rail spurs in close proximity to interstates, high-temperature steam and waste heat that can be used to improve efficiencies of electrolyzers, and we have thousands of acres of land around our plants with excellent community support. Within 100 miles of our nuclear plants, there are almost 14 million tons of potential hydrogen demand today. That's a lot of hydrogen. In fact, we are already in the midst of proving out the theories of using nuclear energy to make clean hydrogen at our Nine Mile Point plant in Oswego, New York. In partnership with the Department of Energy, we are installing a 1 MW electrolyzer powered by the nuclear plant to generate hydrogen for its consumptive use within the systems at the Nine Mile Point plant. We expect construction to finish this year and begin making clean hydrogen by December.
Because we will only use a small percentage of that hydrogen, we have also applied to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority for a grant to use the excess hydrogen to demonstrate long-duration storage with peak power generation. We hope to hear sometime this quarter on that award. If selected, it would be the first of its kind to create clean hydrogen, store it on-site, and use it for peak power production at a nuclear plant. As you can see on slide 46, we also have a strong renewable and power fleet that provides critical support to the grid. 12 GW of capacity across 17 states, including 3 GW of hydro, wind, and solar. Our dispatch match and wind and solar energy capture performance is very strong.
Our ability to leverage operational and engineering resources across both our power and nuclear organizations allows to operate these plants very efficiently. On slide 47, we see a pipeline of opportunities to repower some of our existing wind assets to allow them to continue to provide carbon-free energy to the grid. The opportunities are attractive in that they have low risk of execution, are more efficient capturing more output for the same wind conditions, they restart the 10-year PTC clock and have very good returns. We will begin repowering some of our wind towers this year. In Texas, we have the newest CCGT plants on the ERCOT grid at our Wolf Hollow and Colorado Bend sites. They have the best heat rate in Texas, which means they deliver a lot of megawatts with lower carbon footprint than other CCGTs.
In fact, their CO₂ emission rate is 23% lower than the ERCOT average. They are fast-moving plants, which makes them valuable for the response to the changing grid conditions. The plants have had significant modifications this year to protect them against extreme cold, and they were built with air-cooled condensers, which make them immune to drought conditions in the summer. In late December, we executed a deal with data center host Compute North, co-locating a data center at one of the plants. First time in our history that we have done something like this, and it capitalizes on our competencies across operations and trading and marketing-facing functions. Finally, for me, we are the leaders in operations.
We are the leaders in driving innovation to propel energy transition, and we must stay at the forefront of technology, and that's why we have recently partnered with Rolls-Royce and others to build and operate small modular reactors in the United Kingdom. We will serve as the lead nuclear advisor and then use our expertise and management model to operate the plants in the U.K. Additionally, we were early investors in Net Power, which is a breakthrough technology company that has developed the world's first zero-emission natural gas power plant. It burns natural gas, generates electricity, and captures all emissions. It hit an important milestone in November when the pilot plant in Texas synchronized to the grid. An exciting opportunity for all of us. With that, I will turn it over to Jim McHugh, our Chief Commercial Officer.
Thanks, Bryan. Let me start with an overview of our Constellation commercial business. We are a leading competitive energy provider of clean and sustainable solutions to 2 million customers. We serve a load of 215 TWh of power on an annual basis. Our customer base includes three-quarters of the Fortune 100, approximately 250,000 business and public sector customers, and approximately 1.7 million residential customers. This slide shows the magnitude of our participation in the market and supports our position as a leading retail energy provider by volume, a national top 10 natural gas provider, and some of our emerging products and services businesses. We highlight here the many customer segments covered across our scalable platform. In our wholesale channel, we develop more highly structured transactions with our customers on both load and the generation supply side.
In our C&I channel, we have built very strong customer and association relationships, leading to stable results year in and year out. In our mass markets channel, we are using bundled products to grow and differentiate ourselves. Our geographic reach provides portfolio diversification. We have businesses in every domestic market in the lower 48. This allows us to withstand market disruptions, stabilize profitability, and return value to the shareholder. We have breadth and depth at both the customer level and the product level. This allows us to increase volumes and achieve efficiencies through both organic and acquisitive growth. We can expand both in commodity offerings as well as reaching previously inaccessible customers through non-commodity energy services and solutions. Moving to the next slide, I wanna talk about some of our industry-leading metrics. Let me start by talking about our prioritization of strong customer satisfaction.
On the C&I side, Constellation has maintained high levels of customer loyalty and net promoter scores via our long-standing customer relationships, our obsession with driving an effortless experience to do business with us, and providing energy expertise across a spectrum of decisions that our customers face. On the residential side, we also see high customer satisfaction scores associated both with our customers' purchasing decision and their direct engagement with our employees. Similar to operational excellence being a hallmark of how we run our generation plants, the Constellation commercial operations team is the best in the business and a differentiator for us. In fact, recent back-office and digital investments provide for a scalable operation at a low cost to serve. Our strong customer relationships and diverse product offerings produce the industry-leading metrics on this slide.
Renewal rates of 79% for C&I power and retention rates of 91% for C&I gas. These compare favorably to the renewal rates that we see occasionally published by others. On the right, you see consistent load volumes. This consistency drives cash flow repeatability and stability. On the next slide, we bring it all together to show our leading position in the market. By market share and by volume, we are the number one C&I competitive retail provider. We are the number three residential competitive retail supplier, and we have a strong foundation to build upon, given our dedicated customers with high retention rates, our focus on effortless operations and customer satisfaction, and our ability to simplify the complex energy markets for our customers. On this slide, I want to dive a little deeper into our C&I business for a couple of minutes.
We are differentiated from our competitors, as approximately 90% of our retail portfolio is C&I load, as compared to about half or two-thirds for other retail suppliers. This composition of business brings benefits to us. First, from a financial perspective, it provides more insulation from weather-driven volatility that is associated with a heavier residential load that others may have. This low profile also better matches our base load generation portfolio, and our geographic coverage of markets spans wide, so that better matches the basis locations of our fleet and our energy supply. It also provides more stability in the business, given our C&I customers have high retention rates. From a scale and growth perspective, the heavier concentration also has benefits. C&I customers lead the charge in sustainability, and they see the value in being clean. This enables us to sell more non-commodity solutions.
Along with our existing carbon-free energy supply, we are able to invest in and integrate new technologies to meet the demands of our customers during this energy transformation. Lastly, given our success in direct market sales, we have one of the most experienced sales teams. This provides for a greater opportunity for cross-selling and solution sales, it enhances retention and margins, and it provides a significant competitive advantage for us. The next slide moves us to where things are developing in our industry. Shown here are our capabilities to supply and manage energy products from start to finish. Regardless of customer type, we can develop a risk-managed, customized solution which can encompass many accompanying products and services. We've talked a lot today about being a market leader. The energy transformation is being led by our customers. They want to go beyond a simple commodity sale.
We have evolved with them and built the capability to drive value for them and us. The next slide is what we're hearing from businesses and customers regarding energy supply. Our new company is launching exactly at a time when the global focus on reducing carbon intensity across all economic sectors has created a durable trend for sustainability solutions. In addition to the points on this slide, I would add some recent market observations that further demonstrate this strong trend. One way to see this is in the market prices for RECs. Corporate demand has gotten so great that non-compliance or voluntary RECs that have long traded sub $1/MWh for many years are now in the $3-$5 range.
State mandates and compliance requirements are not enough to meet the demand that many corporate customers have for sustainability, and the voluntary RECs now trading at these levels prove that. Customers are feeling the pressure from multiple directions to better understand and reduce their carbon footprint. As Kathleen mentioned earlier, as part of our ESG strategy, we are committed to providing 100% of C&I customers with their specific information on their GHG footprint, as well as clean energy solutions that will help them reduce that footprint. Corporate sustainability has gone mainstream. Fortune 100 and 500 companies have a wide sphere of influence through their buying power and the impact they have on supply chains. 60% of Fortune 500 and 80% of Fortune 100 companies have set greenhouse gas reduction goals, and their focus on downstream carbon emissions is evolving.
Of our 77 customers on the Fortune 100, 63 have emissions reductions goals. Of those 63 companies, many don't yet know or have solutions on how they will achieve them. A recent customer survey of our business customers revealed that 41% of them associate sustainability with ways to reduce their carbon footprint, and that is where we have a broad range of solutions. Constellation has an opportunity to help our customers not only set sustainability goals, but also to fulfill their needs via an expanding suite of products and services. As customer needs evolve, we are at the forefront designing energy solutions with them, which brings me to my next slide. It's a slide that shows the evolution of what I was just talking about.
We understand that customers are at different stages of the decarbonization journey, and we have solutions to meet them where they are and where they may be going. Constellation is committed to delivering solutions to accelerate our customers' decarbonization goals while simultaneously driving change in public policy and carbon accounting practices, all to achieve decarbonization of the electric grid. We have a strong track record of leadership in the evolution of clean products we offer to our customers. Early on this road, we developed a now long-standing energy efficiency business that serves commercial and public sector customers. Let me highlight some sample customer deals. Our relationship with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, it's been going on for a few years, but we completed four phases of ESCO work on terminals, tunnels, bridges, and tolls over the last several years.
We integrated ChargePoint chargers into the larger deals at JFK and Newark airports. This supported their sustainability goals of base emissions reductions of 35% by 2035 and 85% by 2050. We also have a multiple product relationship with McCormick. We have a 15-year contract to build, own, operate, and maintain a chiller plant in Hunt Valley, Maryland, and a 20-year contract to own, operate, and maintain HVAC in Gretna, Louisiana. The relationship goes beyond that. Constellation serves power to their Texas plant directly from a wind farm for clean supply. In natural gas, Constellation supplies all Maryland's facilities for over 100,000 decatherms a year. We recently signed a 15-year Core contract to buy 100% of their PJM power through a new build solar farm in Virginia.
Further along the road on this slide, we also provide RECs to satisfy customers' RPS requirements, as well as carbon-free attributes for many customers. For example, in 2021, we retired 26 TWh of RECs on behalf of our customers. We also provided an additional 7 TWh of voluntary green certificates. We also took an innovative approach along the way by working with PJM to create emissions-free energy certificates or EFECs from our own nuclear generation. We retired 15 TWh for customers in 2021, leveraging our fleet of carbon-free generation. We retired 2.2 TWh to meet Constellation ESG goals and other nuclear clean attributes are committed to state-sponsored programs in Illinois, New York, and New Jersey, with additional inventory available to serve our customers via other products in the future.
Moving further along the road, we've worked with our customers to deliver both on-site renewables as well as our market leadership in developing the off-site renewable product that we call Core. With Core, we simplify the renewables contracting process for our customers. We work with third parties to find the generation that best suits their needs and that we can deliver to their facilities. We incorporate the renewable supply directly into their full requirements load contract to help them fulfill their sustainability objectives. We've contracted approximately 30 TWh of this product so far, and that number is growing. A couple of examples. With Starbucks, we entered into a long-term agreement that powers more than 340 company-operated stores in Illinois. With the State of Pennsylvania, Constellation and Lightsource bp partnered to help the state source approximately 50% of its annual consumption from solar power.
Under this contract, Pennsylvania will use solar electricity through the end of 2037. We are now focused on taking the next step in evolving our portfolio of clean energy solutions to enable full decarbonization by our customers, which will require load matching with clean generation on an hourly level. We are also advocating for the adoption of load matching requirements in clean energy procurement programs and the development of certification standards to ensure those requirements result in real carbon reductions. Through our partnership with Kevala, National Grid, and ComEd, we are pursuing a total carbon accounting framework to enable the next generation of clean energy products. This next slide details the next step in evolving our portfolio of clean energy solutions. Like I said, we're looking to enable full decarbonization for customers.
This is gonna require load matching with clean generation on an hourly level, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We are developing a platform that enables us to scale carbon-free load matching solutions to help customers reduce their Scope 2 emissions and accelerate decarbonization. This platform will be powered by Microsoft, who will be an anchor client. It will have the ability to adapt to evolving certification and matching methodologies. It will incorporate emissions factors into our customers' matching strategy. It will interface to carbon emissions reporting tools. It will generate hourly emissions-free certificates, and it will optimize a supply stack of carbon-free technologies for our customers. Our always-on large baseload nuclear fleet fills generation gaps from other clean energy sources when the sun isn't shining and when the wind isn't blowing, and it does this cost-effectively.
This product and this platform will allow us to leverage our own carbon-free supply portfolio and the strength of our customer-facing platform and risk management capabilities. Most importantly, it will solve a need for our large customers who more and more are demanding sophisticated clean energy solutions. With this step, we will help move our customers from having clean energy aspirations to actually being clean. Moving on to my last slide. Like our innovative 24/7 product, Constellation will continue to invest in and commercialize new solutions. This activity is meant to build options to participate in the future trends through sponsorship in R&D efforts, internally incubated businesses, venture investing via Constellation Technology Ventures, and the expansion of our Core business. This activity allows us to participate in the very early stages of energy technology development.
This is so that we can shape, defend, support, and expand the future of our business. Bryan covered some of the examples of this activity in his generation section. We have similar examples from our R&D and venture investing, which we will maintain at a modest level. One example is shown through our commitment to solving customer electrification challenges as we invested in ChargePoint. We invested in their technology very early. We supported them all the way up until they went public last year, and they continue to be a preferred partner for customer electrification solutions for us. We've been able to integrate their technology into our commodity offerings at both the wholesale customer level and the retail and energy service customer level too.
Pear.ai is an example where we've decided to acquire a company to accelerate our in-house capabilities based on the needs of our customers. Pear.ai is an energy intelligence platform offering utility expense management and analytics to both lower bills and drive sustainability. This technology has opened opportunities to sell multiple solutions to existing and new customers. It enables us to serve customers across regulated and deregulated markets. It differentiates our offering to create stronger and stickier relationships with customers. One example of this is our relationship with Sheetz convenience stores. Pear.ai technology enables Constellation to provide a service to all Sheetz stores nationally behind all regulated and deregulated markets.
It manages their commodity invoices across power, gas, water, and waste. Where we can serve the commodity, Constellation serves 1/3 of their power supply, and the relationship led to a cross-sell of a Core deal to provide them renewable supply, too. Constellation's culture of innovation is advancing the energy transition by enabling new technology, forging strategic partnerships, considering acquisitions, and making modest investments. All of this with an eye towards commercialization to bring the next innovative products to our customers. With that, let me turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Dan Eggers.
Okay. Thanks, Jim, and thank you all for joining us today. The team has done a great job laying out the opportunities ahead of us and how Constellation is uniquely positioned to take advantage of these policy and secular trends. I'm gonna use my time today to attach some numbers to the outlook for Constellation and how we will look to deploy our strong free cash flow generation. You've heard a lot today about the need for our plants, which are being more broadly recognized and compensated for their carbon-free attributes. The policy support is contributing to an improving foundation for Constellation through additional revenues that have sustained at-risk plants while also improving the visibility and stability of our earnings. The left chart shows the amount of our generation output that is supported by policy.
We started with our renewable assets, then the ZEC programs in New York and Illinois in 2017, then in New Jersey in 2019, and finally, with the CMC contracts in Illinois that start this summer. When we get to 2023, and the CMCs have a full year impact, 56% of our total power generation output will be receiving compensation for their zero carbon attributes, which takes us to the right chart that shows our generation hedge percentages from an energy sold perspective. The CMC plants will provide a stable baseline of hedge support, and then we'll have a more traditional a third , a third, a third approach for the non-CMC generation that fits well with Jim's business. This combination results in more generation hedged than what you would have seen from us in the past.
When you put together the policy support, the energy hedging levels, and our leading commercial business, we have a good foundation for earnings visibility and stability that helps to differentiate our story. Here we show our gross margin table for the next two years, which is based on forward power prices as of November 30th. The content should be familiar to all of you who have followed Exelon over time, and the methodology remains the same. From a mechanical perspective, I draw you to the contracted revenues line. Here we include the full gross margin from the CMCs plants in Illinois based on the contracted revenue stream, which we thought better reflected the contracted nature of these plants. As a reminder, the CMCs revenues start in June of 2022, so it'll be more of an impact in 2023, when we have a full year of contribution.
We have also made an assumption around our capacity auction results for the 2023-2024 PJM capacity auction that has been further delayed. We're not gonna share our specific assumptions, but we'll say that we have been as reasonably conservative in our assumptions, which is informed by our commitment to continuing to run our Illinois nuclear fleet. Overall, we see gross margins increasing from 2022 to 2023 by about $300 million based on the November 30th prices. Shifting from gross margin to cost, you can see that we will continue to actively manage our costs, which has been a focus of the company for a long time. We've admittedly had a couple challenging years with the impact of COVID in 2020 and then the Texas weather event in 2021 that required us to take some drastic actions to help offset the top-line challenges created by these events.
In both instances, we told you that we'd be pulling levers that were specific to the year and that much of the savings would not repeat. We have made changes to our business, particularly from what we have learned around COVID, that are providing some benefits and are captured in our numbers. To help provide additional perspective, in the bars for 2020 and 2021, we show where we ended up, but the dotted tops show our original expectations coming into those years. One other adjustment to our O&M for consistency that we show in this chart relates to how pension expenses is reflected in our numbers. Moving from being a subsidiary of Exelon to a standalone company as Constellation, we are required to follow a single-employer pension accounting model rather than the multi-employer pension accounting model that ExGen was previously required to use as a subsidiary of Exelon.
Under the previous multi-employer model, our O&M expense reflected the pension service expenses as a cost as well as an offset for non-service pension costs, which work as a credit to basically reflect pension asset performance. In this view, O&M reflected what you could think of as our net pension expense. Under the single-employer model, pension costs must now be bifurcated between service costs reflected in O&M and non-service costs reflected within our other income and deductions line, consistent with the representation for Exelon. The overall financial impact is neutral to us and how we represent EBITDA, but it does impact our O&M outlook. The bars do retroactively reflect this change in accounting standard, but I point you to the footnotes where you can see that the non-service pension costs, which are a credit to expenses, are rising over time.
Taking into account the pension impacts in recalibrating the 2020, 2021 O&M numbers, we largely see O&M costs as flat over the coming years. Looking from 2017 to 2024, we see a decline in O&M CAGR of 1.5% a year. When we compare our forecast to an inflation-adjusted cost number, our 2024 costs are $1.4 billion lower than they otherwise would have been. When you look at our absolute level of O&M spending, offsetting inflation in a normal year means that we are generating over $100 million of annual savings. We will never rest on our cost position, and I can assure you that we will look to continue to look for opportunities for savings while maintaining our exceptional operating performance. In addition to O&M, we are focused on our capital spending.
This page looks at our baseline CapEx plus the small identified growth projects. I'll talk more about potential unidentified growth spending in a couple minutes. Looking to this slide, the 2020 and 2021 bars have a similar story to the O&M slide, where we took actions including spending deferrals and eliminating some investments to address business challenges. Again, we include the dotted boxes to represent where we had planned to spend in those years. Looking out over the next three years, you can see considerable control over our baseline and nuclear fuel CapEx, with these expenditures flat to declining. Bryan talked about our nuclear fuel hedging program, which affords us considerable visibility to the input cost.
The bar, the bars also call out a couple of other buckets of CapEx in the next two years that are real dollars to be spent, but I think are worth identifying as you think about the run rate baseline CapEx outlook. First, the green bar reflects deferred spending that we need to make. You can see that relative to plan, we avoided nearly $500 million of CapEx in 2020 and 2021 through outright cuts and some deferred investments in response to COVID and Texas, as well as dollars we did not spend at the Byron and Dresden plants as we transitioned to managing the plants to retirement. Now that we have reversed our retirement decisions, we have some additional capital that will need to be invested over the next couple years. Second, the orange bars reflect spending we are doing associated with the separation.
There are just some capital costs that we had to incur, including additional IT spend, a new financial system, and a litany of other projects. When you think about our future cash flows in 2024 and beyond, our efforts to manage O&M and bring down CapEx should be beneficial when calibrating your outlook. Turning to our capital allocation plan, I first just want to say how excited we are as a management team to be talking about a capital allocation strategy for our company. Over the last number of years, after supporting our balance sheet, ExGen's free cash flow has been fully dividended up to Exelon to support the remarkably strong utility growth. For us to now use our free cash flow to pursue targeted growth that addresses climate challenges and return of capital to our shareholders is a tremendous opportunity.
That said, let me firmly reiterate that all of these allocation decisions are being made with the intent to create value for you, our owners. I'm going to talk about each of these buckets on the following slides, but our priorities are as follows. Number one, the balance sheet. We will continue to support strong investment-grade credit metrics. We think being investment-grade is a competitive advantage to our business and reflective of the quality of our business. We do not want our credit metrics to be a risk to the investment thesis, and we'll stand by supporting the balance sheet. Two, the common dividend. We think you, our owners, should have a clear line to a common dividend. For existing Exelon shareholders, when you put together the Exelon and Constellation dividends, we have scaled the planned dividends to keep you whole at current levels. Three, growth.
We believe there will be opportunities to grow our business through investment over time. I will talk to you about where we will look to invest and how we will think about returns. Finally, return of excess cash to our shareholders. In addition to the dividend, we'll look to return the remaining cash flows to our owners, and they could come as special dividends or buybacks. Starting with the balance sheet. We are fully committed to being investment-grade, which the agencies affirmed last spring after we made the separation announcement. We see value in investment-grade because it is well-suited to a business with the stability and durability of our platform. It makes sense for collateral and other postings we make as part of our business, and it demonstrates our commitment to financial health for our communities and other key constituencies.
The core measures with the agencies, the calculations of cash flows to debt, and we will focus on these measures with you going forward. We also include our debt-to-EBITDA metric on the bottom left on both a recourse and non-recourse basis. You can see from this that we are forecasting strong credit metrics with good margins to our thresholds. After attending to the balance sheet, our next priority will be the common dividend. This is always subject to board approval, but we plan to pay a dividend at an annualized rate of $180 million or $0.55 a share. We expect to grow the absolute dividend by 10% a year, which will keep the dividend between 10% and 20% of free cash flow before growth over the next few years. We think it is a durable and reasonable calibration.
I would point out that we are not pegging the growth rate to a per-share value, but there is potential for a faster per-share dividend growth rate, depending on how we ultimately address incremental return of capital to shareholders. Over the course of the presentation today, I hope that you have all gotten a strong understanding of where we see the country going and the role that Constellation can play in that future. We expect to have opportunities to grow the company, and we'll make sure that the investments both keep us on our carbon-free energy path and earn adequate returns on capital. We'll be targeting double-digit IRRs for investments.
To help you all understand what we see as buckets of opportunity, this slide offers a clear list of our priorities and has them in pretty good chronology of when we could potentially deploy more meaningful amounts of capital. One, we will look to buy carbon-free power plants at the right value. Bryan's slides showed our competitive advantage as an operator and the success we have had in improving performance of plants after we have acquired them. We think investments like this make sense for us and for the potential sellers, so we're hopeful that we'll be successful here, but we will be disciplined on value. Two, we look for opportunities to invest in our fleet. Bryan talked about wind repowering opportunities, and we have one in our plan. We also will look at behind-the-meter opportunities where the returns can be strong.
Three, we see real opportunity to grow the products and services that we offer, most notably to our C&I customers. Jim talked about developing more advanced clean products for our customers, and there could be opportunities for investments to move this strategy along. Four, we believe that hydrogen has a lot of potential, as both Joe and Bryan discussed, and that our fleet is particularly well suited for producing hydrogen. As we are doing with the test project at Nine Mile, we plan to be an active participant in advancing hydrogen, but also see some time to ramp to a scale that would require meaningful capital. Five, the last two buckets are really consistent with what I think of right now as venture opportunities for us.
We've had a great success historically with our CTV portfolio, which was largely intended to help us better understand new technologies to then run our core businesses better. We'll keep these investments modest, but we'll continue to pursue and support investments that open up bigger potential opportunities and better position us as a company. These could take the form of direct investments in companies, as we have done with CTV, partnerships with the labs and other startups looking to advance new technology, and the work we are doing on SMRs, including a partnership with Rolls-Royce that was announced last fall. When I package together all the finance pages, here is how we anticipate the use of cash for the two-year period covering 2022 and 2023.
We forecast free cash flow before growth, so after all our base CapEx we cover on the earlier slide, around $3 billion. As you may have seen in the Form 10, we have what we refer to as the opening balance sheet adjustment of $1.75 billion. This amount is in line with the annual dividend from ExGen to Exelon and will support the strength of our balance sheet from the start. Moving to the right, we anticipate total debt reduction around $2 billion. We then have a little less than $400 million for common dividends, around $400 million of one-time costs and investments associated with the separation. Some modest identified growth investments, largely a wind repowering project and a behind-the-meter project in Texas, which brings us to about $2 billion of unallocated free cash flow.
I just walked you through our priorities for growth investments that must provide double-digit IRRs. We believe there will be opportunities for additional investment, but we will remain disciplined and recognize that some of these opportunities could take more time to develop than within this two-year window we are talking about today, which then leaves us with returning capital to our owners. We will look at using both special dividends and share buybacks. We have a good view of what we think the value of Constellation shares should be and the opportunities ahead of us, but also recognize the deficiencies in just a long-term buyback strategy, so we'll look to be open to using both tools to the benefit of our owners. We're extraordinarily excited about the outlook for our company and the capacity to generate strong and growing free cash flows into the future.
Which brings me to my last slide. We are providing 2022 operating guidance of $2.35 billion-$2.75 billion. Recognizing the drop in 2022 forward during December and more mild weather that is impacting our peakers, I want to flag that our EBITDA midpoint is $50 million lower than what the quick math my slides would imply that were based off the November 30th forward prices. When I look forward, and I think you can see it in the gross margin, cost, and CapEx slides, we'd look to see earnings and free cash flow growth off 2022 levels, assuming power prices are consistent with what we have in our disclosures.
To get ahead of an inevitable question, as a new standalone company, we plan in normal course to provide annual guidance on the fourth quarter call, update the range after the third quarter call, and do not plan to provide quarterly guidance. Thank you all for your time and attention. I'll now turn the call back to Joe Dominguez for his closing remarks.
Thanks, Dan. I wanna thank Emily, Kathleen, Bryan, Jim, and Dan for their comments. I think this slide really summarizes a lot of what you've been hearing this morning. We're incredibly excited about the unique opportunity we have. We think this business is incredibly durable and vital for America, and we look forward to your questions. We're gonna take a little bit of a break here, and we'll come back and field your questions. Thank you.
Hello, and welcome to the question-and-answer session of Constellation's Analyst Day. My name is Liz, and I will be your event specialist. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. Please note that today's session is being recorded. If you would like to ask a question, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Our first question comes from Stephen Byrd at Morgan Stanley.
Hey, good morning, and congrats on a very thorough update.
Thanks, Stephen. Good morning.
Good morning. I wanted to first explore consolidation of nuclear power plant ownership. You know, I think it's pretty clear Exelon's a leader in terms of operations.
I wanted to think about both the benefits from consolidation as well as sort of potential approaches to financing that consolidation. I guess on the benefits side, I was curious your thoughts. The most powerful from my perspective, I guess, would be, you know, improvements in capacity factors, given that, you know, a lot of the nuclear cost structure is very fixed, so even modest capacity factors can be, you know, pretty big changes in EBITDA. First wanna explore benefits. Then secondly, wanted to just get your thoughts in general on, you know, how you might finance growth. You obviously have a healthy cash balance. Dan, you've very clearly laid out your approaches to capital allocation.
You also have very healthy leverage metrics, which I would think could at least temporarily move at least somewhat lower upon acquisition, and then you can pay off debt following that. Just curious if you could add a little more color on nuclear consolidation.
Morning, Stephen, and Happy New Year. Happy New Year to everybody on the phone.
Happy New Year.
Glad to do it. I think the benefits of consolidation are exactly what you just described. We think we could operate plants as well as anyone in the world, frankly, and the numbers bear that out. Bryan just spoke about that a few minutes ago. I think the improvement in capacity factors and overall operations of the plant is one thing that we could lean on in terms of the justification here. I think the other thing is the back office synergies. We have tremendous scale, and I think one of the opportunities we always are able to deploy in the plants that we acquire is utilizing our bench strength of engineering talent, our supply chain, and other things to improve the financial operations as well as the actual operations of the plant.
In terms of financing, I think you hit the nail on the head. We anticipate having the cash to deploy in this space to the extent those opportunities come our way. I said in my remarks, and I'll say it again, we're gonna be patient. We see ourselves as one of the only natural buyers of assets that become available in the market, so we think of ourselves as the consolidator. We'll be patient and see those opportunities as they come to us. I think we'll have the cash to deploy. As you pointed out, we do have some room on our balance sheet as well.
That's very clear. Maybe just one follow-up, and I'll hand it over to others. The dividend, Dan, you gave a good discussion on the dividend. I wanted to just explore to the extent that your share count does drop because you do use cash to buy back stock. It sounds as if I was reading your commentary correctly, you have the flexibility to think about that dividend as a total dollar amount that could then essentially increase the dividend per share if your share price drops. But you do wanna leave some flexibility on exactly how you track that rather than be mechanical and say, you know, the dividend dollars are constant and therefore will automatically result in a higher dividend if the share count drops. I just wanna explore that a little bit further, Dan.
Yeah. Stephen, actually, my intent was that, you know, we have the $180 million annualized dividend to start with. Our plan from here will be to grow the dividend in absolute dollars 10% a year, and that's what we have anticipated in our plan. To the point we have capital that we choose to deploy for share repurchases, you would see a per share growth in dividend faster than that 10% a year. We tried to calibrate the starting dividend, I think also, as I said, to coordinate with Exelon's to make sure our existing shareholders were held constant to where their dividend was, and then we calibrated looking forward.
We really tried to scale the amount of absolute dividend to somewhere between 10% and 20% of the free cash flow before growth that we've laid out in these numbers, with the expectation, if you do the math on where we are, that we're probably toward the lower end of that range, at least over the next couple years.
Got it. That's clear. Thank you so much. I'll hand it over to others. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Steve Fleishman of Wolfe Research.
Yeah. Hi. Good morning. Thanks. Hopefully, you can hear me.
We hear you fine, Steve.
Great. Thanks, and congrats on the first Constellation Analyst Day.
How about that?
At least the first Constellation Analyst Day in a while. Just one number clarification question. I know, Dan, you mentioned kind of if you updated the mark-to-market year-end for 2022, that's kinda how you got to the $2,550. I don't know if you have it handy, if you updated the mark-to-market for 2023 as well, what that change would be.
Steve, when we looked at the mark for 2023, there was very little change at all at the year. Then there's movement kind of as we've gotten into the new year and prices have come up a little bit. The 2023 movement was de minimis, to be totally honest. It was more that sharp move in 2022, and it affected both, you know, the price, but also kind of how we thought about winter dispatch for some of the assets as we saw weather come in. That combination caused us to wanna make that 2.6 midpoint come down to the $2.55 we set our guidance around.
Okay. Just on the capital allocation decision for the cash that's unallocated. Obviously, you'll see if there ends up being any growth opportunities. Just the decision between special dividend and buyback, is it just kind of the decision's basically what, you know, whether the stock's at a cheap value relative to where you see the fair value? Is that?
I think that's right, Steve.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's right, Steve. I don't think we think of it as a binary decision. I think it'll change over the course of time, depending, as you said, on how we are valued. We, you know, we're in this place, right, where we haven't gotten valued yet, so we need to understand how the market is treating us. The management team has a pretty good sense of the value of the business. On the other hand, I will tell you that, you know, as kind of I look at the history of buybacks, they're not always the things that create enduring value for our owners. I think we'll look at both of those levers, and it'll be dependent on how the market values us over the horizon of our business here.
Okay. Then maybe just combining some of the things that Jim talked about and also some of the future energy centers, so to speak. You talked about nuclear. Could you just talk to us as there's more focus on everybody wanting carbon-free power, whether it's a data center, you know, setting up next to a nuclear plant or Jim's business, you know, selling carbon-free 24/7. Just are you seeing any upward bias maybe to the margins in kind of both businesses, both the generation and retail to sell 24/7 carbon-free?
I think that product is still developing, right? We'll take a look at what the margins, you know, ultimately translate into. I think we're at a fairly nascent stage in terms of that product. What we do see in our Core products and other products, that there very clearly is a premium that our customers are willing to pay to achieve their ESG goals and to decarbonize the impact they have through their operations. One would expect that we will see that same thing play out with the 24/7 product, but we're at the very early pilot stages of both developing it as well as pricing it out.
Okay, thank you.
Our next question comes from James Thalacker of BMO Capital.
Good morning. Can you guys hear me?
Yes, we can hear you fine. Good morning.
Okay. Happy New Year. This might be a question for Dan or even Joe, but you know, I understand, Dan, that you just kind of laid out your different opportunities for the capital allocation. Given your comments that some of these could actually maybe take longer to come to fruition, e.g., you know, maybe a nuclear purchase. When do you think you're gonna be in a position, I guess, to discuss maybe the discrete capital allocation plan you have for 2022 and/or 2023? Going forward, or is this something that you're gonna update on an annual basis?
I think you could look towards the end of this year for us to provide some more clarity, so the second half of the year really. You know, we've got a lot of wood to chop in the beginning part of the year as we deploy monies into improving the balance sheet, retiring debt. That I think will be the story for the first six months of our operations. We'll have a little bit more clarity and we'll be able to provide some more guidance on how we intend to provide value back to our owners.
Okay, great. Thank you so much.
Our next question comes from Shar Pourreza of Guggenheim Partners.
Hey, good morning, guys.
Good morning.
Congrats on getting this out there for sure. I appreciate all the color on sort of the organic spending and capital allocation, but maybe just shifting gears. Does anything sort of at the moment stand out as maybe non-core? Thinking particularly around, you know, Colorado Bend or Wolf Hollow, and have you sort of updated maybe your strategy on the CTV stakes at all? Would sort of those monetizations be incremental to the cash walk?
I think on the Texas assets, we've seen what the commission has done down there in terms of improving the market design. I think some of the changes on the ORDC, reducing the price cap from 9,000 to 5,000, but expanding the applicability to the 2,000 MW-3,000 MW of shortage, I think are all good improvements, and I think will translate into positive improvements in the power price margins that we see at those units. We do believe more work needs to be done by the commission, and we've been very clear about that.
We're looking at a meeting, I think it's in the middle of February, I think February fifteenth actually, to see where the commission goes in terms of setting reserve requirements and the capacity requirements for Texas effectively. That, the way they handle those issues will drive our decision-making, and we'll see, you know, how the assets perform over the course of the winter. If we're unsatisfied with the market design there, we may make a move in Texas. There are tentacles to that that reach into Jim's business and the retail business in terms of the support and hedges and other things as we operate that business that we need to be aware of. So we'll have a bit of work to do.
I'm hopeful that the Texas Commission understands the gravity of this and will make the right moves. If they don't, we'll make some decisions around what we do with those assets. Right now, I think it's premature to say that there's anything in our plan around that. Likewise, with regard to CTV, I don't think there's anything that we're gonna be talking about this morning in connection with that. I think those continue to be opportunities for us to monetize those investments should we feel the need. We're again taking a look at the landscape of those investments and seeing how they play out here in the early part of 2022.
Okay, that's perfect. Just to follow up, the cash walk, just remind us, that includes the cash payment from Exelon as part of the separation?
It does.
Okay, perfect. Just lastly for me, you know, as we're thinking about sort of upside to the gross margin and sort of the trajectory that Dan's clearly highlighted in the slide decks. Any sort of thoughts or analysis that we should be thinking about from potential uplifts from maybe a nuclear PTC to gross margin, especially as we're thinking about potential offsetting factors like lower ZECs as a result
Just remind us the potential value for the hydrogen PTC. Thank you very much.
Yeah, sure. We're not gonna quantify this morning the value of the PTC, but it's quite obviously a positive. It results in effectively hedging our nuclear fleet at about $43/MWh. That's a significant improvement. As you noted, there's work to be done on the state programs. We have committed in the case of each of those programs to provide the value of federal support back to the customers, and we think that makes sense. It frankly makes the unique support, the unique structure of the support payments for nuclear something that I think policymakers could be proud of, and returning value to customers is always a good thing.
They leaned in at a time that we needed the support to continue to operate these really important assets, as Kathleen mentioned. We think of it as a strong positive for the business, but we're not quantifying it at this point. In terms of hydrogen, I think that will play out over a longer duration. Kathleen talked about the $3 per kilogram for hydrogen production. Bryan talked about the inherent advantages we think we have at our sites to make hydrogen. We have access to water, obviously heat from our process, which improves the electrolysis, and we have access to abundant clean energy, railcar access, all the different things you need to be a player in the hydrogen market. We have the test project that's going on at Nine Mile.
We're gonna learn a lot about that through the course of 2022. We'll continue to investigate those opportunities through the course of this year, and I think we'll provide some additional clarity to the extent that those credits are enacted into law on how we intend to approach that market. The way I think about that, though, is this. I think about the PTC for nuclear giving us near-term support for the duration of that PTC. Right now in the House version, that's 6 years. We hope that will become 10 years in the final version of the legislation. That'll give us a good bit of support. With regard to hydrogen, we could layer that on with an additional credit that has its own duration of 10 years from the day we commence operations.
It's nothing we need to rush to, because in the world that you just described, we'll already be receiving a production tax credit for nuclear. It's something that's gonna be a unique opportunity for us at our sites and something that our investors are going to find very attractive, I think.
Terrific. Congrats to you and Dan on this, massive achievement. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Paul Zimbardo, Bank of America.
Morning, Paul.
Hey, good morning to you. Thank you, Julianna. Paul, thank you guys very much for the opportunity to go over the details this morning and, congrats again on the pivot. Perhaps if I can address two bigger questions, some of which have been addressed, but I wanna ask it in a slightly different way. First is, as you think about your retail platform, especially with the litany of C&I customers that you all deal with, how do you think about capturing and more fully exploring the opportunities with regards to renewables, right? I mean, C&I has been one of the most attractive end markets of you all for renewables and green contracting writ large.
How do you think about leveraging that, whether it's in the form of renewal rates, profitability, margin expansion, as mentioned before, or frankly, just leveraging the business in that direction and expanding, the set of, you know, upsells you might have, et cetera? I just wanted to explore that a little bit more, and then you can talk also at the same time about, you know, expanding on, you know, data center type deals like, Compute North as well, if you will.
Absolutely. Let me start, then I'm gonna kick it over to Jim McHugh. Look, if we know anything about any business, whether it's the energy business or whatever, the widget business, that access to a customer base has a measurable value. We've seen that play out in the tech space where that access to millions of customers has translated into revenues that aren't always apparent at the beginning of the business, but in the fullness of time, get realized by the company that has that customer connection. We don't think that's gonna be any different in the C&I space. The key to your question, I think, is figuring out what products and services that customer base is really looking for. We think Constellation has gotten there first. It's been a real pioneer in this field.
Being able to provide renewables is going to be a piece of that. Being able to provide storage, being able to provide hydrogen and fuel cells and those different things in the fullness of time will be our opportunity with the access to this customer base and will translate into the renewal rates that we wanna see in that business, as well as the margin expansion. We're beginning to see that, I would say, and we've demonstrated success. But I think we're at, just really at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what that customer connection could actually mean. We will provide the products and services that our customers need. They're gonna tell us. You know, Jim and I were at a conference with our salespeople the other day.
One of the messages we wanted to deliver is, we wanna get the real-time feedback from you on what customers are looking for. Maybe this hourly product, it may be different things, but we're gonna move the business in that direction. Now, one final point before I turn it over to Jim is this. What we've also learned is that we don't need to own all of these adjacent businesses completely on our balance sheet in order to realize the benefit, the financial benefit of the customer relationship. In certain circumstances, whether it's renewables or storage or other things, fuel cells, being able to partner with other companies that deliver those services. But being able to realize some of that value in the margins we earn is a direction that we have the opportunity to go in and frankly, doesn't stress our balance sheet.
Those are the things we're gonna look at. Jim?
Yeah. Thanks, Joe. I think you hit a lot of it. You know, what Joe just described, in my view, is just like our grid, right? Our grid needs a little bit of each of the technologies that are clean energy providers to the grid now and into the future as that's gonna grow, whether it's our own carbon-free generation as a base load that is there when the wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine. Some of these renewables that our customers certainly want access to, and we've been able to provide. You know, as we see further expansion in storage and other type of technologies that our customers wanna build that portfolio to supply them around-the-clock clean energy. So that's kind of the product expansion piece, and with it comes the margin expansion Joe talked about.
I guess the thing I would add that maybe we didn't highlight yet is expanding into other markets where we're seeing some success early on with things like digital and products that are service-oriented as opposed to commodity-related. We're also able to go get customers we previously couldn't serve. If we can't serve the commodity behind certain regulated markets, there's certainly services and products that we're developing for our deregulated customers that are also valuable to customers behind regulated markets. That's another area of growth for us, and we're seeing that in various products that we have right now, like our Pear.ai product that I mentioned on the call. Core+ has a similar product that we've developed called REC+ for customers behind regulated markets that want exposure to RECs.
We've been able to do some of those transactions with customers that we previously couldn't access. I think we hit on the products expansion, the margin expansion, and then this last piece just about the market expansion to new customer bases is the opportunity that's in front of us.
As to your second question regarding the data centers, I think that's one dimension of the customers that we're talking about, right? What we're seeing with the data centers is, especially tier zero data centers, folks who don't need the perfect reliability of being on the grid and being interconnected in three or four different ways to the grid to ensure 99.99 whatever reliability. These tier zero data centers could be in the category of cryptocurrency, but I think increasingly we'll see them for AI and genome sequencing and other applications that have high computational needs where latency is not the real issue. Putting those facilities behind our fence line gives us some certainty in terms of the power operations of the plant, margin expansion, but it's kind of a unique application that we're playing out here in Texas.
This is our first foray, but may translate into opportunities across our fleet.
Got it. Thank you, guys, for the details there. If I can quickly, coming back to CapEx allocations strategically here, I know you referenced this earlier in some of the Q&A on M&A, but you know, how quickly would you anticipate deploying this $1.8-$2.2 of unidentified growth? I mean, what's the timeline and commitment to putting that to work, you know, kind of one way or another, if you will?
You know.
Some, you know, equal quantum.
Yeah. I think, you know, we've been very deliberate about this. I'll hit the point again about patience. We're not holding ourselves to a timeframe to deploy growth capital. We wanna see the returns that make that decision appropriate for us as opposed to returning value. Some of the things on M&A are obviously things, you know, where it takes two hands to clap, and we'll see if there are others that come forward and wanna sell assets that are attractive to us, and we'll evaluate those sorts of things on a case-by-case basis. But we don't have a timeframe right now for the deployment of growth CapEx.
Got it. All right, guys. Well, thank you very much. I'll leave it there. Cheers.
Our next question comes from Michael Lapides with Goldman Sachs.
Hey, guys. Thank you for taking my question, and congrats on today and all the work you've put in to get to today. I actually have a couple. One is, can you talk about PJM and really your views of for the next two to three years, which parts of PJM do you think market supply and demand conditions could potentially tighten the most, and which parts of PJM do you think maybe it's gonna take a lot longer to see market tighten?
You know, Michael, first of all, good morning. It's a great question. I think there are really two things that are operating independently, to answer the question. One is where we anticipate seeing load growth, either through electromobility or the data centers that I just alluded to. We're already beginning to see some signposts that those increased consumptive uses of electricity could be meaningful regionally, and we think the places that our plants are located have been able to attract a lot of the data centers. We've certainly seen that in the numbers. I think they tend to be parts of the country where electromobility, both from a public transport standpoint as well as private vehicle ownership, may take hold, in a faster way.
You know, I would point to, you know, the underlying location of our asset base as being places where we see the potential for load growth to be different than frankly we might have anticipated a couple of years ago, because of these new applications. The other piece of that, though, is really, I think, a capacity market question in disguise. To the extent that capacity market results are disappointing, where we see the impact of that is gonna be on the peaker fleet. Obviously, in terms of nuclear, what's most important to us is underlying energy price fundamentals. We're an energy play. We get a small slice of our revenue stream from the capacity market. Not so for peakers.
For peakers and other mid-market generators, what we see there is a high sensitivity to capacity market outcomes, and in those places, we might see fairly rapid movements in the reserve margins. I think it's a little bit early to tell, but I think the places that we would see action are gonna be in the RTO. We've also seen in the eastern parts of PJM some real hypersensitivity to relatively small movements in the generation stack. I think it could occur everywhere, but I like where we're located in terms of closing in on those supply-demand fundamentals.
Got it. I just wanna follow up on that last piece. Is what you're kind of hinting at there is that you think we could see, we being the region, not necessarily Exelon, could see a retirement of, like a pickup in the retirement of natural gas plants in different parts of PJM?
I do. I think, you know, lower capacity markets always bring on a supply reaction. We've seen that time and time again in these markets, and I don't think this transition we're going through is gonna be any different.
Got it. One on the retail business. Is there any way to quantify what the gross margin of C&I retail is versus residential retail in a dollar per millions or like just trying to quantify the impact of the difference between what you drive out of C&I versus what you drive out of resi?
Let me start that, Michael, and then I'll turn it over to Jim. When you're combining these two different customer bases, the one thing that often gets missed is customer acquisition costs. If we were to just talk about gross margin for mass market, we would expect to see higher gross margin there by a substantial degree because the cost of acquiring the customers is higher. That's a reason why we haven't tended to compare those two things, but I'll flip it over to Jim.
Yeah. I think you hit it. When you know, 90% of our retail load, as we said in the presentation, is C&I load. You know, Joe's hitting on the difference in gross margin and EBIT. Where with our residential load, it's a smaller piece of our overall portfolio because we're approaching in a way that we wanna be able to grow it at a profitable rate in the areas where we see line of sight to things like bundled services. That's something we're doing in mass markets where we're able to bundle our commodity offerings with energy services and home services, and that's worked out well in Texas, and we're expanding that to other markets.
By and large, our overall profitability right now is more driven by our C&I business, which is, to us, a bit more stable because it doesn't have the weather volatility of a residential load. It gives us the platform to grow with these extra products and services that we've highlighted over the course of this presentation. You know, overall, it's larger on the C&I side, and the unit margins are, of course, bigger in residential, as I think you're alluding to. Our expansion in residential and mass markets is focused on where we're having success bundling products and growing in certain markets.
Got it. Thank you, guys. Appreciate you taking my questions.
You bet, Michael. Thank you.
Our last question will come from Durgesh Chopra with Evercore ISI.
Hey, thank you for squeezing me in here. Appreciate it. Maybe just, you know, just one question from me. As we think about sort of the value of this business, and you guys have sort of talked about what you think the perceived value for Constellation is, and as we think about the capital allocation strategy, are you guys targeting or how should investors think about perhaps an EBITDA or cash flow growth rate per share, whether that is through organic growth projects, or share buybacks? Just any thoughts there. Thank you.
You know, we've had a lot of discussion about that. It's not in what we presented this morning, but we are thinking about unitizing the growth in both of those things over time. I think that'll be more of the story of the company as time goes on. At this point, you know, I think it's more exploratory thinking. Dan?
Yeah, no, I think that, you know, it was a good discussion. We think, you know, our business is different than maybe people who you wanna comp against, right? The reality is, if we look at the clean energy attributes, we look at the relationship to Jim's business, we look at the visibility that we have through the environmental payments, the visibility we have through the CMCs. Bryan talked, you know, about the opportunities to extend the license life of the nuclear assets going from 60 to 80 years, and we think we have a great duration story, right? As we make further gains in policy, and if we, you know, see action, hopefully on the PTC here in the near term, we'll have more of that to build out to even more and more transparency.
I think as we do that, you know, starting to unitize the growth story will become, you know, a more accessible opportunity for us. It, it's something certainly on our list we're hopefully able to do in the next couple of years.
Awesome. Thank you. Maybe just one quick one if I can. Just on the hedging strategy, Dan, so, should we look to sort of as we think about 2023 and 2024, you know, as you move forward in time, that those percentage of hedged capacity should move up, you know, as we go sort of, you know, go through 2022?
Yeah. And what I tried, maybe it wasn't clear enough in my prepared remarks, but, you know, basically, now that we have the CMCs in place, and if you did the math on the amount of CMC volume to total generation, it's between 25%-30% of our output is going to be under CMCs. What we've talked about is that we've historically followed kind of a third, a third, a third hedging strategy for the business. For the non-CMC generation, you should expect us to follow something, like, in line with that third, a third, a third. As we pass through time, we'll continue to add hedged volumes onto our numbers on a quarterly basis.
Understood. Thank you so much, guys. I appreciate the time.
Likewise.
That concludes today's question and answer session. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.