Welcome to the annual meeting for Xcel Energy Inc. Our host for today's call is Bob Frenzel, CEO. At this time, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. I will now turn the call over to your host. Mr. Frenzel, you may begin, sir.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Xcel Energy's 2024 annual meeting of shareholders. I wanted to begin today with a message of thanks. Thank you for your long-standing support of the company as we continue to pursue our strategic objectives of leading the clean energy transition while enhancing our customer's experience and keeping our customer bills low. Our business is capital-intensive, and we will continue to make substantial investments in our infrastructure to deliver on our customers' priorities and the company's strategic objectives. We appreciate the access to the capital markets that this group has and continues to afford us. Now, for our call today, I'll first ask Amy Schneider, our Vice President and Corporate Secretary, to lead the business portion of this meeting.
Following Amy's discussion, I'll share some comments about our 2023 results, as well as some of our priorities for 2024, and beyond. After my prepared remarks, I'll answer a number of the shareholder questions that we've received, in advance. The Xcel Energy leadership team has joined us today, as has your entire board of directors. I want to acknowledge the contributions that the board makes to help us deliver consistent, strong results while the company continues to lead in this complex and rapidly evolving industry. In 2023, we enhanced the board's expertise and capabilities, with the election of Tim Welsh, who's the vice chair of Consumer and Business Banking for U.S. Bancorp.
Tim's background in delivering excellence for customers while navigating a highly regulated business framework and cybersecurity risk provides us at Xcel Energy with valuable insight. I have appreciated the contribution that Tim has already made since joining the board and look forward to his many years of dedicated service. Tim, along with the rest of this talented and dedicated group of individuals that make up the board of directors, is nominated for election so that they can continue our long tradition of strong governance. With that, I'm going to turn the call over to Amy, who's going to lead us through the business portion of our meeting.
Thank you, Bob. Good morning, everyone. Let me start with a few procedural matters. As noted in the proxy statement, the record date for voting at this meeting was the close of business on March 25, 2024. As of that date, there were 555,470,302 shares of common stock outstanding. Each share has one vote. More than 84% of the shares of our common stock are present by proxy at this meeting, so we do have a quorum. If you've already voted your proxy, your votes will be cast as you've instructed. Anthony Caradeo from Broadridge Financial Solutions is our Inspector of Election. There are four proposals that will be voted on today, the details of which were provided in the proxy statement. Proposal number 1 is the election of 13 directors to one-year terms.
The names of the nominees are listed on the screen, and their backgrounds and credentials are detailed in the proxy statement. Proposal number 2 seeks approval on an advisory basis of our executive compensation. This is referred to as the Say on Pay vote. Proposal number 3 seeks approval of the Xcel Energy Inc. 2024 Equity Incentive Plan. Proposal number 4 seeks the ratification of the appointment of Deloitte & Touche as Xcel Energy's independent registered public accounting firm for 2024. Polls have been open for several weeks. We appreciate your participation. I now declare the polls closed. Official results, which include the ballots cast at this meeting, will be disclosed in an 8-K filing and posted on Xcel Energy's website.
Meanwhile, the Inspector of Election has provided us preliminary results showing that all director nominees were elected, our executive compensation was approved, the Xcel Energy 2024 Equity Incentive Plan was approved, and the appointment of Deloitte & Touche was ratified. With that concluded, the formal business portion of the meeting is now adjourned. Let me also remind you that we may make some forward-looking statements during this meeting. You should refer to our SEC filings for the risk factors related to our business. We may also refer to non-GAAP measures during the presentation. The nearest GAAP measure and reconciliation to the non-GAAP measure can be found in our 2023 year-end earnings release, located on the Investor Relations page of our website. Bob will now discuss the company's 2023 performance and progress towards our strategic priorities and some key priorities for 2024 and beyond.
Following his remarks, Bob will answer shareholder questions. As noted in our proxy statement, we will provide responses to questions not answered during the meeting on our Investor Relations page on our public website. Thank you for attending our business meeting, and now I will turn it back to Bob.
Thank you, Amy. 2023 was another strong year for Xcel Energy, our customers, our communities, and our investors. The pace of change in the energy industry and for our company was substantial, but so too were our accomplishments. You know, we made significant long-term strategic objectives for the company across clean energy, clean fuels, and clean transportation. And all the while, our customers and our employees worked hard to deliver on our commitment to serve our customers safely, reliably, affordably, and sustainably.... In 2023, we also marked the five-year anniversary of our clean energy commitment. In 2018, we made a bold, industry-leading commitment to achieve deep carbon emission reductions in our electric business by 2030, and a carbon-free electric system by 2050.
Since then, we've also taken our commitment one step further as the only energy company in the United States to establish a zero or a net zero goal for nearly all the energy used by our customers in electricity, heating, and transportation. Simply put, our commitment is to be as clean as we can, as fast as we can, recognizing that we cannot sacrifice reliability or affordability in that journey. In that vein, last year, we continued to lead and advance the clean energy transition. We reduced our electric emissions 54% over 2005 levels, with plans in place to achieve our 80% reduction targets by the end of the decade. We now have integrated more than 14,000 MW of renewable energy on our systems, and we expect to more than double that capacity by 2030.
We have the opportunity to deploy an additional 15,000MW-20,000 MW of new, clean energy across our eight states by the end of this decade. Altogether, our renewable additions have delivered approximately $4 billion in avoided fuel costs for our customers, helping to reduce customer power price volatility associated with fossil fuel price volatility. Separately, we've laid the groundwork to extend the lives of our two nuclear plants, Monticello and Prairie Island, which are the largest sources of carbon-free energy that serve our customers. On December 31, we retired the first of three units at our Sherburne County Generating Station, and it represents the 24th coal unit that we retired as a company since 2006. We are building the largest solar facility in the Midwest and one of the largest in the country, back on the site of that retiring coal plant.
In June, we broke ground on the Colorado Power Pathway, a 600-mile transmission superhighway across the eastern plains of Colorado. The Department of Energy awarded us nearly $1.5 billion to support long-duration energy storage pilots with Form Energy, transmission expansion, grid resilience, carbon-free fuels, and more. These technologies will be key to achieving our long-term zero carbon goals, and the grants help in keeping our customers' bills low. Like all utilities, we're experiencing profound changes in weather and climate-related impact on our operations. As a result, we'll continue to evolve our operations to overcome these realities. Our strategy for addressing these challenges consists of three areas of focus: immediate and near-term wildfire mitigation responses, which include accelerated risk reduction initiatives across our system, as well as operational actions such as public safety, power shutoffs, and enhanced power line safety settings.
We have regulatory activities, including delivering and executing comprehensive wildfire mitigation and resiliency plans that provide for operational alignment as well as investment in an enhanced situational awareness, system hardening, including accelerated pole inspections and replacements, technology enhancements, and expanded vegetation management. And finally, advancing sound policy solutions that provide protections for utilities that take the appropriate risk management actions. We believe that proactive legislation at a state and federal level is a potential vehicle to ensure that our customers continue to receive affordable, reliable, sustainable, and safe power service. We're working across the industry with our peer utilities and industry groups to achieve this goal. All of these efforts are aimed at protecting public safety, reducing risk in our system, and ensuring that we can deliver reliable, affordable energy in increasingly challenging weather environments.
Despite the realities of the wildfire events we've experienced recently, our fundamental business remains strong and resilient, and the strength of our business was reflected in our 2023 financial performance. We deployed more than $6 billion in capital on behalf of our customers in projects to improve resiliency, enable clean energy, while delivering economic growth and vitality for our communities. Our investments and our operations enabled ongoing earnings of $3.35 per share, representing the nineteenth consecutive year of meeting or exceeding our initial earnings guidance. At Xcel Energy, meeting our financial commitments is critical to maintaining a competitive cost of capital, which benefits our customers as we access the capital markets to fund our operations.
Because in addition to reinvesting our net earnings, in 2023, we raised almost $3 billion in external financings at attractive rates to enable the capital investments to deliver the resiliency and the clean energy outcomes. And as we look forward, we expect to deploy approximately $39 billion of capital over the next 5 years into funding a cleaner, more resilient, and technologically capable energy network in our states for our customers. These investments should maintain our long-term earnings per share growth objective of 5%-7%, and we remain confident that we can deliver at or above the top end of that earnings range over this period. We also expect to maintain dividend growth that targets the low end of the 5%-7% range, which reduces our external financing needs and provides us financial flexibility in the future.
We're proud of our nearly 2-decade-long streak of serving as clean energy leaders for our customers and the country, while maintaining a premium investment for our shareholders. 2022 and early 2023 saw conflicts in Eastern Europe and brought correspondingly high natural gas commodity prices, resulting in many customers receiving higher than normal energy bills. In addition, in 2023, Xcel Energy, like many companies, faced financial headwinds from inflation and supply chain pressures and the ongoing impacts from hiring trends that started during the pandemic. I'm proud that even in a challenging financial backdrop, over the past 5 years, our customers' electric and natural gas bills have remained amongst the lowest in the country, at 28% and 14% below the national average, respectively. And residential customer bill growth has also remained well under the rate of inflation over the past decade.
2023 was also one of the busiest regulatory years on record, with more than 90% of our revenue under review in most of our states. We resolved rate cases in multiple states, and we received approval for transportation electrification programs in Colorado, in New Mexico, in Wisconsin, and in Minnesota. We received approvals for an additional 250 MW of solar, as well as our Form Energy battery pilot, both at our retiring Sherco coal facility. We progressed requests for proposals for another 2,500 MW of new generation resources across all of our operating companies, and we have pending resource plans that would add almost 6.5 MW, 6,500 MW in the Upper Midwest and between 5,000 MW and 10,000 MW to our system in Texas and New Mexico.
We also play a vital and important role in the local economies of the communities that we serve. This can be felt in the jobs that we create, the materials and supplies we purchase, and the contractors and suppliers that we employ. It's also increasingly true in our ability to partner and attract new business development in collaboration with our state and municipal leaders. 2023 was no exception. We partnered with our communities and major technology companies to develop nearly 5,000 MW of incremental AI data center-driven backlog. As part of these efforts, in February, we announced a collaboration with Microsoft to bring a new data center to the site of our retiring Sherco coal facility. And in March, Meta broke ground on its previously announced data center that will be powered by Xcel Energy.
If all the backlog is realized, these significant customers would drive approximately 6.5% annual sales growth through the end of the decade. In addition, our economic development team closed 18 major projects across our 8-state territory, which will result in almost $2.5 billion of capital investment and 1,400 jobs. As we deliver on our plan to exit coal by 2030 across all our service territories, we're committed to a just transition for our employees and our community members. Last year's retirement of Sherco is proof of that. The new energy investments at Sherco will bring 400 union construction jobs, 18 ongoing operations and maintenance jobs, and an estimated $350 million in local economic benefits.
As economic growth continues to accelerate across our service territories, we will be the trusted energy provider of choice to help these communities realize their potential and meet their business development goals. In addition, we're also helping customers, large and small, to lower costs and reduce their carbon footprint, all while ensuring they continue to have some of the lowest energy bills in the country. Last spring, we launched our new RED Truck campaign in Colorado, staffed with energy experts to provide education and immediate assistance to customers in the community. Our customer care group also connected nearly 200,000 customers with almost $200 million of public energy assistance to ease the economic burdens in an inflationary economy. We did more than keep the lights on last year. We donated $15 million across eight states through a combination of corporate and employee contributions.
And we are more than generous. We are more than just generous with our wallets. We are generous with our time. In 2023, we volunteered more than 92,000 hours, including 7,500 hours on the day of service alone, delivering $3 million in total economic impact. The safety of our customers, our communities, employees, is paramount to everything we do at Xcel Energy. Through our Safety Always program, we work to provide our employees and contractors with the resources they need to do their jobs safely and without incident. I'm pleased to share that in 2023, we achieved tremendous progress. Our significant injuries were down 34% compared to 2022. From a security standpoint, strengthening our real-time collaboration with our federal government partners to understand current and emerging threats will be critical to ensuring a secure, clean energy transition.
Xcel Energy, Xcel Energy is one of four private sector utilities piloting the Department of Energy's Energy Threat Analysis Center, or ETAC, based at the National Renewable Energy Lab near Denver. At ETAC, Xcel Energy threat intelligent analysts and government intelligence personnel are assessing threats to the energy sector, developing risk mitigations, and publishing recommended critical infrastructure protection actions to the industry. In 2023, we also participated in GridEx VII, a large-scale national cyber and physical threat simulation exercise. As I've said before, our employees are truly our greatest resource. In 2023, they continued to deliver for our customers, communities, and one another. Thanks to our employees, in 2023, Xcel Energy was recognized as one of Ethisphere's World's Most Ethical Companies for the fourth year in a row, as well as one of Fortune's Most Admired Companies.
We also received accolades from Military Times as a Best for Vets employer and the Human Rights Campaign for its Equality 100 Award, a leader in LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion, and a score of 100 on the Disability Index for our disability inclusion in the workplace. I couldn't be more optimistic about the next generation of leaders we have elevated throughout the company. We have new leaders in many of our operating segments: generation, transmission, distribution, as well as on our executive committee. Amanda Rome has assumed the role of Group President of Utilities and Chief Customer Officer. Ryan Long is now president of Xcel Energy, Minnesota, North and South Dakota. We welcome Rob Clark as our Senior Vice President and Chief Communications Officer, as well as Rob Berntsen as our new EVP, Chief Legal and Compliance Officer.
As we look forward, we see a future that is bright for our communities, our customers, our coworkers, and our investors. This year, and in years to come, we will continue to lead the clean energy transition, adding renewables, exploring advanced technologies, building transmission, and achieving our net zero vision, while we continue to provide safe, reliable, affordable service to our customers and sustainable growth to you, our shareholders. In 2024, we're embarking on our most ambitious capital investment plan to date, $39 billion over the next five years. We're also looking in the coming years to deploy 15,000-20,000 MW of new clean energy into our systems, expand and innovate our transmission and distribution systems, and deliver new solutions to our customers.
As the threat of wildfires continue to evolve, we will continue to focus our attention on involving our operations to prepare for and react to these new dynamics. It's a great, great honor to lead this tremendous company. We have an exciting road ahead, and I'm grateful for your ongoing support. Thank you for taking your time and joining us today. This concludes my prepared remarks. We have received some questions from our shareholders, and I'm happy, if time affords, to answer some of those now, Amy.
Thanks, Bob. For efficiency, I have consolidated questions that relate to the same topic. You may not hear your question worded exactly as submitted, but we've done our best to accurately reflect the inquiries we've received. Our first question this morning is: What role will data centers have on future load growth?
Thanks, Amy. Thanks for the question. As I commented in my prepared remarks, data centers represent a large sales growth opportunity for our electric business and likely needs incremental infrastructure investment to accompany it. We are reviewing more than a dozen individual opportunities, and as I mentioned, the backlog of our potential data center demand is in the neighborhood of 5,000 new megawatts of needed energy. That incremental energy would provide a sales growth of about 6.5% per year through the end of the decade. Now, we're working with all of the hyperscalers and data center developers in the country. So, you know, at Xcel Energy, we strive to serve all of our customers with excellence, and data centers are no different in that regard.
However, they are different types of loads. They're large, they're discrete, and they have high load factors, and which means that we need to plan for them. We need to treat them somewhat differently, and they take time and effort to plan appropriately for that new and substantial energy load, potentially including, you know, new tariffs for how we serve them. Accordingly, we've got a dedicated team inside the company of professionals to work with them, both in recruiting and educating and training, and sourcing new load, but also inside the company and how we're going to serve that new and substantial load.
Our goal, we want to be a partner of choice for these hyperscalers, these data center owners and operators, and we need to make sure that through this process, that, that all customers benefit when we build and serve new and large customers. You know, today, Amy, the data centers represent a small percentage of our sales. But if we're successful, we expect that, that number to grow materially, and that can be beneficial for our communities, our tax base, and all of our customers.
Thank you, Bob. The next question asks if you can provide an update on your recent resource plans.
Sure. So let me start with the fact that Xcel Energy was, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, the first company to commit to being 100% clean electricity by 2050, and a substantial commitment to achieve that goal with an 80% carbon reduction by the end of this decade. At the same time, we're also committed to delivering safe and reliable and affordable service to our customers. We achieved 54% carbon reduction in our electric system based on our 2005 baseline, while we kept residential electric bills well below the industry average, and the pace of growth of those bills below the rate of inflation. So if I think about each of our systems, and let me start with the five-state Upper Midwest system.
We filed a resource plan that will reduce carbon emissions by more than 80% by the end of the decade. We're gonna file to extend the lives of our Prairie Island and our Monticello nuclear stations. Those are the largest source of carbon-free energy in the Upper Midwest. In addition, we're gonna add 3.6 GW of new wind and solar and about 600 MW of battery storage to that system by the end of this decade, as well as much-needed dispatchable resources to back that energy up when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine.
The plan projects an average estimated increase in bills of less than 1% to provide all that new infrastructure to the Upper Midwest, and we expect a decision from the Public Utilities Commission by the end of next year. Similarly, in Colorado, we proposed and received approval for the Colorado Energy Plan, and the approved portfolio calls for just over 6,000 MW of new energy resources. It breaks down a little bit like this: so about 1,800 MW of new wind, 1,700 MW of new solar, about 1,800 MW of new storage, and just a small amount of natural gas, again, to back up the generation when, you know, the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, and the batteries might not be fully charged. It keeps our system reliable and affordable.
We are working through with third-party proposals on that, and the company expects to build about 3.5, almost 3.5 GW of that generation. We're starting that process right now, and those assets will be placed in service over the next four years or so. Then, in our Southwestern business, we filed an integrated resource plan with the New Mexico PRC. As I said in my prepared remarks, we see substantial need for new generation resources in the Southwest, somewhere between 5,000 MW-10,000 MW, depending on the electrification of some of our large loads down there. The PRC accepted our IRP, and we expect to issue a request for proposal for new generation this summer.
And that process should take, you know, 6 months -12 months to work through the regulatory arena. You know, many of these plans were put into place in advance of some of that, AI-driven data center needs, that I mentioned earlier. And so, as you can imagine, some of these plans we're gonna have to reassess based on potential new load growth, but our commitment to sustainable, reliable, affordable, energy persists, even through new load growth alongside those existing resource plans.
Thank you, Bob. This will be our last question. What are Xcel Energy's plans regarding nuclear generation? Would you consider building new nuclear plants?
Well, I think it's a great segue from the last one. As we talk about resource plans and how we're gonna power our customers with clean, affordable, and reliable energy, we think of nuclear. We operate three nuclear units here in the Upper Midwest. It's a very important dispatchable, carbon-free form of generation and has been a key component of our energy mix since the 1970s. As I mentioned, we filed our resource plan for the NSP system in February, which proposes to extend the lives of our Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear facilities past 2050.
And while we don't have plans to build any new nuclear plants, we have been and are supportive in both new technology developments around nuclear, and, and you hear words like small modular reactors and the need for the advancement of those as well as national expansion of our nuclear footprint. We're also using, interestingly enough, our existing nuclear plants to learn more about clean fuel creation, and if we can create clean fuels like hydrogen from our nuclear power plant. We've received a Department of Energy grant to do just that. And obviously, we're supportive of some of the new federal legislation that looks at re-domestication of the fuel cycle for nuclear, whether that's mining or uranium enrichment or fabrication, as well as the disposal of spent fuel.
That re-domestication represents jobs, tax base, and obviously an important piece of national security as we've looked at sort of the weaponization of energy in Eastern Europe over the past two years. So, very supportive of new nuclear. No plans to build anything new, but continuing to run our existing fleet as efficiently and safely as we can for our customers.
Thank you, Bob.
All right, Amy's giving me the sign that we're at time. I wanna thank everybody again for their support of the company over the many, many years of your holdings. Thank you for the access to capital you provide. You enable us to execute on our clean energy transition on behalf of our customers, and thank you for your continued support. We'll commit to answering the rest of these questions and post them on our website, as Amy mentioned earlier. Thank you for your feedback, and thank you for your time and attention.