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America’s largest renewable developer is swallowing up the utility at the heart of the data center boom.
NextEra Energy, which also owns the utility Florida Power & Light, announced Monday morning that it had agreed to acquire Dominion Energy, the utility that operates in Virginia and the Carolinas. The deal would create an energy giant valued at around $67 billion. It would also — importantly for Virginia and PJM Interconnection, the 13-state electricity market of which the state is a part — create a battery electric storage giant.
The companies said in a Monday presentation laying out the case for the merger to investors that the combined entity would be the largest power company in the United States and the third largest energy company behind just ExxonMobil and Chevron. The companies projected that, when combined, they would be the domestic leader in total generation, market capitalization, rate base, annual capital expenditure, total generation built, and, specifically, battery storage capacity.
NextEra is already a storage leader. Its Florida utility is planning to add 7.6 gigawatts of battery storage over the next decade, and its development arm added almost a gigawatt of storage to its backlog in just the first quarter of this year.
NextEra’s storage expertise couldn’t come at a better time for Dominion. Virginia passed a law in April mandating that the utility procure 16 gigawatts of short-duration storage and 4 gigawatts of long-duration storage by 2045, with 4 gigawatts of short-term storage coming by 2030. Compare that to a previous state target for Dominion of around 3 gigawatts of storage 2035 and the challenge becomes apparent.
“With NextEra Energy’s world leadership in battery storage, there’s a potential to accelerate Dominion Energy’s capital plan to meet Virginia’s storage goals,” NextEra Chief Executive John Ketchum said on a call with analysts discussing the merger plans.
The market Dominion operates in in Virginia, PJM Interconnection, has long been a laggard in bringing new storage resources onto its grid, thanks to its famously dysfunctional interconnection queue. Although its newly refreshed queue has seen a large increase in storage projects compared to when the organization closed it to new projects in 2022, the market is still well behind storage-friendly peers like California and Texas.
PJM has also become notorious more recently for its capacity market, which has fueled price increases across the region in the billions of dollars, and yet failed to procure the reserve margin PJM typically aims for in its most recent auction. “Given that we’re the world’s leader in battery storage and the legislation that was just passed by Virginia, there is a tremendous opportunity to meet that capacity short quickly by deploying battery storage in the right places,” Ketchum said Monday. “We know what a big impact battery storage can have, and how quickly it can have it on capacity-short positions. And so we look at a Dominion in Virginia with [a] short capacity position — I think there’s a real opportunity to accelerate investment.”
The proposed deal comes at a time of rising prices and public anger at utilities up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and especially in the Mid-Atlantic. Dominion’s rates in Virginia have risen around 36% in the past four years, according to the Heatmap-M.I.T. Electricity Price Hub, while typical bills have risen from about $96 per month to $146 per month. Virginia’s rates have grown faster than average in PJM, but are still well below the increases in states like Maryland and New Jersey despite serving a fast-growing data center industry.
While elected Democrats in PJM states regularly bash utilities (see: New Jersey and Pennsylvania), it’s possible that both Virginians and Virginia might look favorably on NextEra, Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients Monday. “If [NextEra] focuses on storage development under the new Democratic legislation recently passed, it could form a coalition of support; we believe this is [a] critical point that could make the deal approval process less bumpy than some other recent M&A deals.”
Morningstar analyst Andrew Bischof saw the deal as allowing each side to use the other’s expertise (and balance sheet) to ramp up investment. Dominion might be able “leverage NextEra’s strong balance sheet to accelerate investment, particularly in Virginia,” whereas NextEra “could accelerate its data center ambitions, which had trailed those of its regulated peers, by using Dominion’s expertise and relationships to expedite NextEra’s data center hub plans,” he wrote in a note to clients Monday.
Building out more storage could also be great for a regulated utility like Dominion, as it would get to put new resources into its rate base and garner a return on equity.
“The General Assembly just added new storage requirements for us, which we think are going to be great for our customers, being able to work with Nextera and this combined company on that,” Dominion chief executive Robert Blue said on the call. “I think this is really going to benefit our customers as we serve them better and will deploy capital faster that way.”
