Welcome to the annual meeting for Xcel Energy. Our host for today's call is Bob Frenzel, Chairman, President, and CEO. I'll hand now to the call for your host. Mr. Frenzel, you may begin.
Thank you, good afternoon, everybody. For more than 150 years, Xcel Energy has energized communities and built brighter futures. Today, the increasing trend towards electrification is reshaping how we live, how we work, and how we power our world.
Growth in advanced manufacturing, in oil and gas mining, in artificial intelligence, and electric transportation are fueling our investment needs and our sales forecasts. This moment isn't without precedent and is reminiscent of the initial days of the invention of electricity and the dawn of urban electrification. For decades after the light bulb was invented, people and companies built the first power lines.
We wired the first neighborhoods. We built the first electric grid. Cities lit up and innovation flourished, and lives were fundamentally changed through a remarkable commitment to infrastructure development. Now, we face a similar transformational opportunity to lay the energy foundation for the next era.
Because we don't know all the potential use cases, we need to build infrastructure ahead of demand, so it's ready before our customers need it. We know that as energy demands accelerate, meeting this moment calls for advanced technology, disciplined investment, and a steadfast commitment to reliability, affordability, and sustainability. That's the challenge that Xcel Energy is prepared to lead, all while staying true to what matters most, making energy work better for our customers and helping them thrive.
Thank you for joining Xcel Energy 2026 annual meeting of shareholders and for the trust and confidence you place in our company and our ability to lead our industry forward. In a moment, Amy Schneider, our Vice President and Corporate Secretary, will walk us through several key business updates. I'll share how we delivered meaningful, measurable progress throughout 2025 and how we're building momentum into 2026 and beyond.
I'll also have time to address some shareholder questions that we've received. Our executive committee is here with me today, as is our board of directors. Our board provides strong governance, sound oversight, and ensures excellence every step of the way. As we begin this morning, I'd like to personally thank Richard O'Brien and James Prokopanko, who will both retire from the board after this meeting.
Each has served our company and our shareholders for more than a decade, and their steady leadership and thoughtful guidance have made a lasting impact on the company and me personally. Richard, Jim, thank you very much. I'd also like to welcome Maria Demaree to the board. Maria serves as the Senior Vice President of enterprise business and digital transformation and Chief Information Officer at Lockheed Martin.
Her expertise in technology delivery, information security, and digital innovation will be invaluable as we implement new systems that enhance the customer and the employee's experience. 10 members of our board are nominated for election today as we continue advancing Xcel Energy's long legacy of strong governance and long-term value creation for our customers and for you, our shareholders. With that, let me turn it over to Amy, who will lead us through the business portion of our meeting.
Thank you, Bob. Hello, 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 23rd, 2026. As of that date, there were 624,162,193 shares of common stock outstanding. Each share has one vote. More than 90% of the shares of our common stock are present by proxy at this meeting. We do have a quorum.
If you've already voted your proxy, your votes will be cast as you've instructed. Anthony Cardillo from Broadridge Financial Solutions is our inspector of election. There are three proposals that will be voted on today, the details of which were provided in the proxy statement. Proposal number 1 is the election of 10 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 two seeks approval on an advisory basis of our executive compensation. Proposal number three seeks the ratification of the appointment of Deloitte & Touche as Xcel Energy's independent registered public accounting firm for 2026. Polls have been open for several weeks. We appreciate your participation. I now declare the polls closed.
The official results, which will 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, and the appointment of Deloitte & Touche was ratified. With that concluded, the formal business portion of the meeting is now adjourned.
Before I hand it back over to Bob, 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 2025 year-end earnings release located on the investor relations page of our website.
Bob will now share details on the company's 2025 performance and progress towards our strategic priorities, as well as some key priorities for 2026 and beyond. Following his prepared remarks, he will answer shareholder questions. As noted in our proxy statement, we will provide responses to questions not answered during the meeting on the investor relations page of our public website. Thank you for attending our business meeting.
I will now turn it back over to Bob.
Thank you, Amy. Much of today's electric grid was engineered, designed, and even in some cases, built 50 or 75 years ago for a different time, a different load profile, and for different customer expectations. That's why modernizing our system isn't optional. It's essential, Xcel Energy is built for this moment.
Throughout 2025, Xcel Energy stayed focused on what matters most: our customers, our people, and our performance. With that focus, we developed the most ambitious infrastructure investment plan in our company's history. Over the next five years, we plan to invest nearly $70 billion in infrastructure to expand and modernize the energy system that our customers depend on every day to provide safe, reliable, and sustainable energy.
We have been leaders in infrastructure development in the U.S. Today, we operate approximately 20,000 miles of transmission lines, enough to circle the globe.
Over the next five years, we expect to build an additional 3- 5,000 miles of transmission, reinforcing our 15-year leadership position as the largest builder of new transmission lines in the country. We expect to substantially increase our generation capability by 2030. We've approximately 12,000 megawatts under construction and another 7,000 megawatts moving through regulatory approval processes.
We've contracted for an additional 8,500 megawatts that we're enabling on our system for our customers, all in an effort to transition our existing generation fleet and to build new capacity for our continued customer-driven growth.
Our longstanding commitment is to ensure that our customers have the power when and where they need it. In addition to new generation, it also means hardening our grid to withstand extreme weather events and evolving national security risks while continuing to operate safely and reliably.
Electrification is driving unprecedented growth, driven by technological innovation, a resurgence in manufacturing and infrastructure development, and the electrification of our daily lives, from our vehicles to our homes to our communications. Data centers are among the most visible drivers of this transformation.
Data centers are the new manufacturing facilities of our age, not making products, but making information and intelligence, and they will become critical infrastructure of our evolving society, just as energy infrastructure or transportation systems and the internet have been for previous generations.
Of course, the codependency of electricity and artificial intelligence infrastructure is well established, and Xcel Energy is committed to scaling growth needed to power data centers thoughtfully and responsibly. Today, we have more than 2 GW of data center capacity completed, contracted, or under construction.
We expect to contract an additional 4 GW by the end of 2027 in our service territories, and we aspire to serve additional needs from our growing backlog of customer interests that currently exceeds 20 GW. Our recent partnership with Google's Pine Island Data Center is a clear example of how thoughtful data center development can provide benefits while simultaneously protecting existing customers. As part of our energy services agreement,
Google agrees to pay the full cost of its service interconnection and infrastructure needs while also funding the nearly 2,000 megawatts of new clean energy resources and battery storage needed to serve its load, as well as meaningful property tax payments and contributions to the local community. This is a smart, forward-looking model for powering the digital economy, one that supports jobs, advances clean energy leadership, and strengthens reliability for the communities we serve.
Over the past several months, we initiated innovative partnerships with companies like GE Vernova, NextEra Energy, and Quanta to further strengthen our ability to deliver the enormous capital infrastructure that we project for the next era. The strongest evidence that we're built for this moment is our 2025 performance. Across our eight-state service territory, we invested nearly $12 billion, our largest one-year total ever, to build new and maintain existing infrastructure that supports our customers' needs.
Even during this period of rapid growth, we remained intensely focused on operating efficiently. In 2025, we delivered 99.98% electric reliability across our service territory while advancing regulatory and operational initiatives that support long-term performance. 2025 was also the highest year of earnings per share growth in more than a decade.
We delivered solid, ongoing earnings for you, our shareholders, of $3.80 per share, meeting our earnings guidance for the 21st consecutive year, one of the strongest track records in our industry. All the while, we've made significant progress protecting communities from increasingly severe weather.
We upgraded grid infrastructure and enhanced maintenance, deployed preventative tools, expanded vegetation management, and increased our use of advanced technologies to improve situational awareness and real-time decision-making. Supported today by more than 200 Pano AI cameras and over 200 weather stations across our system. Together, these actions strengthen reliability and resiliency, allowing us to anticipate risk, respond more quickly, and deliver safer, more reliable service to our customers.
We keep affordability at the forefront of everything we do for our customers. Through our One Xcel Energy Way continuous improvement program, we've realized more than one billion and a half dollars of cumulative savings since 2020.
Over the past five years, our operating expense per megawatt hour has ranked among the lowest in the country. Because of these efforts, Colorado residential electric customers devote the smallest portion of their household spending or their share of wallet, as we refer to it, to electricity in the nation. Average bills in our other states are in the best quartile nationwide.
None of this happens without the skill, the grit, and dedication of our people, and our performance reflects that every day. Our teams continue to demonstrate that our commitment goes beyond energy. It's about compassion and empathy, neighbors helping neighbors, and stepping up to build strong, resilient communities. This year, we're celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Xcel Energy Foundation.
Many companies have foundations, but what differentiates Xcel Energy is how deliberately ours is tied to our strategy: supporting STEM careers, community vitality, and directly investing time in the places where we're building and operating the grid of the future. The foundation has invested nearly $160 million since its inception.
In 2025 alone, our employees, contractors, and retirees volunteered nearly 100,000 hours with more than 1,200 nonprofit organizations across our eight-state service area. They raised nearly $3 million in support of local organizations through our Power Your Purpose campaign.
In total, Xcel Energy and the Xcel Energy Foundation contributed $13.5 million across our territories, including nearly $5 million from the foundation to support community vitality, environmental sustainability, and STEM career pathways. Our customer care teams worked with 200,000 customers to provide nearly $200 million in public energy assistance last year.
We also advanced economic development across our service territory, closing on projects that represent nearly 1,400 new jobs and more than $7 billion in capital investment. More than 50%, half of our supply chain spending, was with companies local to our service areas.
Because of our people, Xcel Energy was recognized as one of Ethisphere's World's Most Ethical Companies for the seventh consecutive year, and we were once again selected as one of Fortune's Most Admired Companies. This is in addition to recognitions from the Disability Equality Index, the Military Times, and the Human Rights Campaign. To all of my Xcel Energy teammates, thank you. Better truly begins with you.
2025, we strengthened our leadership team as well, promoting Michael Lamb to Executive Vice President and Chief Delivery Officer, Ryan Long to Executive Vice President and Chief Legal and Compliance Officer, Scott Sharp to Executive Vice President and Chief Generation Officer, and Bria Shea to President of Xcel Energy, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Today, as demand accelerates and expectations rise, we are reshaping how we plan, invest, and deliver energy so that the systems that our customers rely on is ready for whatever comes next. Over the past three years, we've been preparing for exactly this challenge. We created an industry-leading, centralized, integrated system planning team.
We established a centralized major constructions projects team. We strengthened our strategic sourcing and our vendor partnerships, and we launched our company-wide continuous improvement program, One Xcel Energy Way. Xcel Energy is ready.
Ready to build on our momentum, to deliver meaningful transformation, and to strengthen the communities that we serve. As we continue making energy work better for our customers, our communities, and our people, our collective skill, grit, and determination will turn this vision into reality.
Thank you for your continued confidence and investment in Xcel Energy and for joining us today. This concludes my prepared remarks. Amy, I'm sure we have time for a couple of shareholder questions that we received.
We do. Thanks, Bob. We will now respond to questions we have received from our shareholders. 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 is: how will you maintain affordability as you implement your five-year $60 billion investment plan?
That's a great question, Amy, and one that the leadership team spends a lot of time thinking about. As we strive to make energy work better for our customers, our priority is maintaining reliability while keeping costs as low as possible. Both of those goals are equally important to our customers. As we prepare and approach this enormous infrastructure build cycle, I think Xcel Energy starts from a great starting point with our customers.
Our average residential electric and natural gas bills are 29% and 11% below the national average, respectively. In fact, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, our residential electric customers here in Colorado have the lowest share of wallet in the country. Average electric bills in our other states occupy 6 of the top 12 spots in the country for lowest average share of wallet or percentage of household income that's spent on electricity.
A great starting point. One way that we can keep bills low for our customers is to take advantage of our very diverse energy mix to ensure reliable and affordable power as demand grows. Our customers benefit from having a very diverse generation portfolio, which includes natural gas and nuclear, and a growing portfolio of renewable assets. We have, across our service territories, some of the country's best wind and solar resources.
Investment in these areas improve reliability and deliver long-term savings for our customers. Last decade, as we accelerated into renewable ownership and penetration into our states, the program that we dubbed Steel for Fuel, that strategy has saved our customers nearly $6 billion since 2017 and helped keep bills very affordable.
As we look forward at this capital plan that you mentioned, that we think across our entire portfolio of projects from 2026 through 2030, we expect customers will see over $7 billion in aggregate benefits from PTC, from production tax credits and investment tax credits associated with various generation and storage projects that we're building or operating right now.
Another thing I'm really proud of is that since 2020, our One Xcel Energy Way program, our continuous improvement program at the company, has generated more than a billion and a half dollars of cumulative savings for our customers while improving operating outcomes and reducing enterprise risk.
Something we're really proud of at the company. The result of that, or one of the results of that, is that over the past five years, our operating expenses per megawatt hour have ranked amongst the lowest in our peer utility group.
We take a very disciplined, collaborative approach with our regulators to ensure that investments are paced responsibly and aligned with customer affordability considerations. Maybe, I won't say lastly, but maybe 1 other thing to consider is the reliability side.
As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, the electric grid was largely designed, and in some cases, built over the last 50 to 75 years, and it's ripe for reinvestment. The investments outlined in our capital plan into our grid will really help us meet rising demand and maintain reliability, which is important to our customers, reducing long-term risk.
They do put pressure on the bills and affordability, 1 of the offsets of that is growth. I mentioned in my prepared remarks, I know some investor questions are in and around how are we preparing to grow in this AI and advanced manufacturing growth cycle.
That's how we keep bills affordable right now. There's a lot of mechanisms and a lot of levers for us to pull, but I'm proud of our starting point. I know we can keep bills as affordable as possible as we enhance reliability and continue to deliver on a sustainable energy product.
Thanks, Bob. The next question is: What is your data center strategy, and how will you maintain affordability and reliability?
I alluded to it in my last question. Data centers, you can't open a periodical or turn on a news station without hearing more about artificial intelligence and data centers and the impact it has on the energy systems in the U.S. The rise of data centers is really reshaping the energy map in the country. As I said, we at Xcel Energy are absolutely prepared to meet this moment with our customers firmly at the center of our strategy.
Not just new customers and AI data centers. We're really here to protect our existing customers and make sure that as we drive into this infrastructure investment cycle, as we drive to enable new economic development and new growth, particularly around AI data centers, that we're protecting our existing customers along the way.
We believe that at Xcel Energy, and utilities broadly, have a responsibility to lead with solutions that balance innovation, reliability, sustainability, and affordability. Our approach to data centers is really no different, and it's pretty simple. Our new large customers will pay their own way, and that their infrastructure needs won't increase costs for our existing customers. It's pretty simple.
We think that with our relationships with our regulators, our hyperscalers, data center developers, community leaders, that we've set a pretty high bar for responsible large load development. We believe we can protect our existing customers from increased costs and protect the company from stranded asset risk as we go into this build cycle.
We think through contracting provisions, we can avoid business risk. With terms like minimum exit fees and minimum contract length terms to make sure that as we make investments into our system, that our existing customers are protected from any changes in strategy. We think that through data center development and partnerships, we can advance innovative technologies to help support carbon reduction and benefit our communities.
Our most recent ESA that we filed with Google that I mentioned, is going to create the largest long duration energy storage project in the world. We can balance the opportunity of adding new and beneficial sales with our carbon emission goals as a company. We believe that with disciplined, forward-looking model, data centers can be good for communities. They can support jobs. We can advance clean energy leadership.
We can also strengthen reliability for all of the communities that we serve. That's just not words. We put our money where our mouth is. We've filed large load tariffs in our states to make sure that we can deliver on this commitment. We filed a large load tariff in Minnesota, and was recently approved.
We filed one here in Colorado, that's in front of the jurisdictions, and we're expecting to file large load tariffs in our other states through the back half of this year. Together, and if you take this in totality, these collective actions give us confidence in our ability to deliver on our forecast, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, to secure 6 gigawatts of data center load by year-end 2027 with in-service dates that'll drift into the 2030s.
I'll just use our most recent ESA that we signed with Google as an example of putting these guiding principles to work. Google's going to pay for all the infrastructure it takes to stand up that data center facility in South Central Minnesota. In addition, they're going to fund all the new generation, wind and storage, that supports that facility.
They're providing meaningful tax benefits to our customers, I mean, to the community. One of the benefits of adding economic development and large load to our service territories is that we can actually save all customers money. The Google example is telling.
We believe, and we filed this with our Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, we believe that by adding a data center of that size to that community, that we can reduce the cost for all customers by $1 billion-$1.5 billion over the 15-year term of that contract. That translates to about 1%-2% to our residential customers as we share the cost of our fixed infrastructure, in this case, the electric grid, over more units of production from the data center.
This is an example of how we can have property taxes to the community, we can have innovative technologies, we can preserve our clean energy goals, as well as we can protect customers, and in fact, enhance customers by offsetting some of the costs of a very large fixed infrastructure like the grid.
I'm excited about that particular contract, but we think that that's a model contract for our data center growth as we go forward. We're excited to work with hyperscalers and data center developers to deliver this important national security asset to the United States, but also it's beneficial to our communities, and to our customers, and to our shareholders.
Great. Thanks, Bob. This will be our last question. How does Xcel Energy approach cybersecurity in light of the evolving threat landscape?
Well, you said it. There's an evolving threat landscape for sure. Cybersecurity is an absolutely critical component of how we protect our customers and our employees and the reliability of the energy system that they depend on every single day. We know that our critical infrastructure is a target for would-be disruptors. Unfortunately, cyber criminals are getting more and more sophisticated every day, and we need to stay one step ahead of them.
To do so, we are constantly enhancing our security posture. I mentioned artificial intelligence, advances in AI are both a challenge and an opportunity for us. We can use AI and cybersecurity defense to protect our infrastructure from would-be disruptors. Cyber folks know how to use AI, too, and they use that to try and disrupt our systems as well.
Making sure that we have the artificial intelligence that we need, that it's embedded in our system, and that our systems are prepared for what we know is an inevitable attempt at our IT and OT environment. Protecting it really starts with strong governance and accountability. We have policies and standards that are defined.
They're executed across all of Xcel Energy with clear rules about who can access our systems, how we protect our data, and handling of sensitive customer and employee information. We have a dedicated industry-leading business risk security and enterprise security operations programs. Our cybersecurity, I think this is critical, it extends all the way to the top.
Tone at the top. My leadership team and I get regular security updates. Our board reviews our cyber posture multiple times a year, including third-party assessments of our cyber posture.
We work very diligently to protect our systems from would-be disruptors. We monitor them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with dedicated cybersecurity professionals in a dedicated facility. We deploy intrusion protection consisting of firewalls and email and web controls, continuous monitoring, and other security technologies.
We've got multiple levels of defense and controls that are closely monitored and tuned to ensure detection and prevention of new and emerging threats. We routinely analyze all the recent cyber intelligence and use it to strengthen our defenses in real time. That's the defensive posture, but resiliency is really important, too. We maintain redundant environments in geographically diverse locations, so our most critical applications can continue to operate even if a primary system is compromised.
Finally, we know there's no way we can do this all on our own, and we have an enormous amount of partnerships with our industry peers, with government agencies at the state and the federal level, sector partners. We share intelligence across them. We coordinate our responses to cyber events, material impacts across the country in real time.
I'm confident we've taken all the steps that we need to and continue to take steps to protect our critical infrastructure for the benefit of our customers. It's an evolving and emerging threat, and we are staying ever vigilant as we look to protect our nation's critical infrastructure.
Well, thank you, Bob.
Thank you, Amy. I think we're at time. I want to thank everybody on the call for participating. Thank you for all the support you give us every year. If you have any questions, as Amy said at the outset, please reach out to our IR team, or we have a great website if you want to look for answers there. Thanks again for all your support.
This now concludes the meeting. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day.