The Bet No One Else Would Make
On a broiling afternoon in June 2001, while the rest of America's utility executives were retreating from deregulation's wreckage — Enron's collapse still months away but already casting its penumbra — a quiet, methodical engineer named Lew Hay III sat in a conference room in Juno Beach, Florida, and made a decision that would reshape the American power grid. FPL Group, the holding company he'd just been named CEO of, would not merely maintain its wind energy subsidiary as a speculative sideshow. It would invest billions — real capital, not Enron-style off-balance-sheet phantoms — into building the largest fleet of wind turbines on the continent. The thesis was simple and, at the time, borderline heretical: renewable energy was not an environmental concession. It was a cost curve. And cost curves, in the utility business, are destiny.
Two decades later, the company that bet on wind when wind was a punchline has become the most valuable utility on Earth. NextEra Energy — the name FPL Group adopted in 2010 to signal its transformation from a Florida electric company into something categorically different — commands a market capitalization that has, at various points, exceeded that of ExxonMobil. It generates more electricity from wind and solar than any other company on the planet. Its regulated subsidiary, Florida Power & Light, serves nearly six million customer accounts across one of America's fastest-growing states with some of the lowest bills and highest reliability metrics in the industry. Its unregulated subsidiary, NextEra Energy Resources, operates a renewable generation fleet of roughly 33 gigawatts — larger than the total installed capacity of many European nations. The whole apparatus runs on a management culture so relentlessly focused on cost discipline and capital allocation that one former executive described it, only half-jokingly, as "a hedge fund that happens to own power plants."
The paradox at the heart of NextEra is that it became the future of energy by mastering the most traditional thing about the utility business: the cost of capital. Every solar panel it installs, every transmission line it permits, every battery it deploys exists within a financial architecture designed to minimize the weighted average cost of capital and maximize the spread between that cost and the return on deployed assets. This is not a cleantech startup running on venture capital and vibes. This is a $160 billion infrastructure machine that discovered the single most important truth about the energy transition: in a capital-intensive industry where the marginal cost of fuel is zero, whoever deploys capital cheapest and fastest wins. Not eventually. Now.
By the Numbers
The NextEra Machine
$160B+Market capitalization (mid-2024)
~$28.1BTotal revenues, FY2024
~33 GWRenewable generation capacity (NEER)
~6MFPL customer accounts in Florida
~16,800Employees
~10%Adjusted EPS CAGR target (through 2027)
$95B+Cumulative capital invested since 2003
The Invisible Empire in Juno Beach
NextEra Energy's corporate headquarters sits in Juno Beach, Florida — not Miami, not Orlando, not even Palm Beach proper, but a quiet stretch of A1A where the Atlantic meets a town of roughly 3,500 people. The building is unremarkable. There is no campus in the Google sense, no architectural statement. This anonymity is itself a tell. NextEra is the most consequential energy company most Americans have never heard of, and its leadership has cultivated that obscurity with something approaching strategic intent.
The company traces its lineage to 1925, when Florida Power & Light was incorporated to provide electricity to a state that barely had indoor plumbing. For most of its first seven decades, FPL was what every regulated utility was: a local monopoly, a dividend aristocrat, a stock your grandmother owned. It built power plants. It strung wire. It collected rate-based returns sanctioned by the Florida Public Service Commission. The holding company, FPL Group, formed in 1984, dabbled in insurance and citrus groves and cable television — the kind of conglomerate diversification that was fashionable before anyone had invented the term "core competency." Most of these experiments failed, quietly or expensively. By the mid-1990s, FPL Group was back to basics: regulated electricity in Florida, a small and growing portfolio of independent power generation assets, and an executive suite populated by engineers who believed that running a utility well was itself a form of competitive advantage.
The seeds of the transformation were planted not in a boardroom epiphany but in a tax credit. The Production Tax Credit for wind energy, first enacted in 1992 and extended in fits and starts by Congress over the following decade, created an economic incentive structure that most utility executives regarded as temporary, distortionary, and beneath their attention. FPL Group's management saw something else: a subsidy that, combined with rapidly improving turbine technology and ruthless project-level cost management, could generate returns on equity north of 15% — in a business where the regulated side was earning 10% to 11%. The math was irresistible, if you had the operational capability to execute.
We didn't get into wind because we were environmentalists. We got into wind because the economics were compelling. We stayed in wind because we got better at it than anyone else.
What FPL Group did next was less a strategic leap than a relentless compounding exercise. Between 1998 and 2005, the company built or acquired wind farms across the Great Plains, the Texas panhandle, the mountain passes of California and Oregon. Each project taught the development team something — about turbine procurement, about land lease negotiation, about grid interconnection, about the baroque permitting processes of two dozen different state and county jurisdictions. Institutional knowledge accumulated. Unit costs declined. The gap between FPL Group's development cost per megawatt and its competitors' widened. By the time the rest of the industry woke up to the fact that wind energy was not a fad, FPL Group had already locked up the best wind sites, the deepest turbine supplier relationships, and the most experienced development teams in North America.
The Regulated Foundation
To understand why NextEra was able to make its renewable energy bet — and why it could sustain it through the inevitable cycles of subsidy expiration, policy uncertainty, and capital market turmoil — you have to understand Florida Power & Light. FPL is not just NextEra's largest subsidiary. It is the financial bedrock that makes everything else possible.
FPL serves the eastern half of Florida, from Miami-Dade County north to the Space Coast and the Jacksonville suburbs, an area that encompasses some of the fastest-growing population centers in the United States. Florida added roughly 365,000 net new residents per year between 2019 and 2023. Every one of those transplants needs air conditioning — Florida's electricity consumption per capita is among the highest in the nation — and most of them land in FPL's service territory. The customer base is a growth annuity in a sector where most utilities would kill for flat demand.
But FPL's real competitive advantage is not demographic luck. It is operational execution. The utility consistently ranks among the top in the nation on key reliability metrics — SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index) and SAIFI (System Average Interruption Frequency Index) — while maintaining residential bills roughly 30% below the national average. This combination — cheap and reliable — is the result of decades of capital investment in grid hardening, natural gas generation efficiency, and an operational culture that obsesses over O&M (operations and maintenance) cost per customer. FPL's O&M cost per MWh has declined in real terms almost continuously since the late 1990s, a trend that the company's executives cite with the quiet pride of distance runners who have been shaving seconds off their mile time for twenty years.
The regulated model gives NextEra something priceless: earnings visibility. FPL's allowed return on equity — set by the Florida Public Service Commission through multi-year rate agreements — has ranged from roughly 10.5% to 11.8% in recent years. The company has been extraordinarily effective at negotiating these rate cases, in part because it can walk into the commission with a straightforward argument: our bills are among the lowest in the state, our reliability is among the highest, and our rate base is growing because Florida is growing. The commission has repeatedly granted favorable terms, including the ability to recover costs for solar buildout, grid hardening (critical in a state that absorbs a disproportionate share of Atlantic hurricanes), and the early retirement of older fossil fuel plants.
FPL expects to grow its rate base from approximately $40 billion in 2022 to roughly $57 billion by 2025, driven by the deployment of roughly 16 million solar panels and continued investment in grid resilience.
This rate base growth — the value of assets on which the utility earns a regulated return — is the engine. Grow the rate base. Earn the allowed ROE. Reinvest the cash flows. Repeat. It is not glamorous. It is relentlessly effective. And it provides the stable cash flow base that allows NextEra to take risk on the unregulated side of the house.
The Renewable Assembly Line
NextEra Energy Resources — NEER, in the company's shorthand — is where the story gets structurally interesting. NEER is the largest generator of wind and solar energy in the world, operating a portfolio of approximately 33 gigawatts of nameplate capacity spread across the United States and Canada. It builds wind farms, solar installations, and increasingly, battery storage projects. It sells the output under long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) to utilities, corporations, municipalities, and cooperatives. And it does all of this with a development and construction machine that has been refined over a quarter-century into something approaching an industrial assembly line for renewable energy projects.
The assembly-line metaphor is not casual. What separates NEER from other renewable energy developers is not any single technological advantage — it uses the same turbines, the same panels, the same inverters as everyone else — but the operational system that surrounds the hardware. NEER has developed proprietary processes for site selection, resource assessment (measuring wind speeds and solar irradiance with statistical rigor that would satisfy an actuary), environmental permitting, land acquisition, turbine and panel procurement at scale, construction management, and long-term asset optimization. Each of these steps has been codified, measured, improved, and repeated across thousands of projects. The learning curve effects are enormous.
Consider procurement. NEER's scale — ordering turbines for multiple gigawatts of projects simultaneously — gives it leverage over manufacturers that no other buyer can match. It negotiates turbine supply agreements years in advance, locking in prices and delivery schedules that smaller developers cannot access. When supply chains tightened during the COVID-19 pandemic and again during the 2022 anti-circumvention tariff investigations on solar panels, NEER's long-term supply agreements and diversified sourcing insulated it from the worst disruptions. Competitors scrambled. NEER kept building.
The financial architecture is equally distinctive. NEER structures its projects using a combination of tax equity financing (monetizing Production Tax Credits and Investment Tax Credits through partnerships with banks and insurance companies), project-level debt, and parent company equity. This layered capital structure allows NEER to achieve levered returns on equity that consistently exceed 15%, sometimes approaching 20%, on a project-by-project basis — numbers that would be extraordinary in any capital-intensive industry and are almost unheard of in the traditionally staid world of power generation. The tax credit monetization capability, in particular, is a core competency: NEER has been the largest user of tax equity in the U.S. energy sector for over a decade, and the relationships and structuring expertise required to execute these transactions at scale represent a genuine barrier to entry.
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NEER's Renewable Portfolio
Scale of operations as of late 2024
| Technology | Nameplate Capacity | Approx. % of NEER Total |
|---|
| Wind | ~21 GW | ~64% |
| Solar | ~8 GW | ~24% |
| Battery Storage | ~3 GW | ~9% |
| Nuclear (legacy) | ~1 GW | ~3% |
The backlog tells the story of where this is going. At its 2024 investor day, NextEra disclosed that NEER had approximately 24 gigawatts of signed contracts in its development pipeline, with origination expectations of 7 to 10 GW of new renewables and storage annually through 2027. These are not aspirational targets; they are contracts with creditworthy counterparties, backed by interconnection queue positions and permitting timelines that NEER's team has been managing for years. The backlog represents, in effect, a multi-year visibility into future earnings growth that is unusual for any business, let alone one in the notoriously cyclical power sector.
The CEO as Capital Allocator
John Ketchum became CEO of NextEra Energy in March 2022, inheriting the mantle from Jim Robo, who had himself succeeded Lew Hay in 2012. The succession was seamless in a way that would have been unremarkable at Berkshire Hathaway or Danaher but is striking in the energy sector, where CEO transitions frequently coincide with strategic reversals, boardroom coups, or activist investor campaigns. NextEra's leadership pipeline is one of its most underappreciated assets.
Ketchum is a lawyer by training — Georgetown Law, followed by a stint at a white-shoe firm — who joined FPL Group in 2002 and spent two decades rising through the organization's finance and development functions. He led NEER's business development group during the critical 2010–2018 expansion period, overseeing the origination of tens of billions of dollars in renewable energy contracts. His background is revealing: this is not a CEO who came up through operations or engineering but through the discipline of structuring deals, managing counterparty risk, and optimizing the financial architecture of long-duration assets. In the NextEra system, the capital allocator is king.
Under Ketchum, NextEra has sharpened its focus on what it calls "Real Zero" — the goal of eliminating carbon emissions from its operations by no later than 2045. But the framing is characteristically NextEra: Real Zero is not a corporate social responsibility pledge. It is a business plan. The company argues, with considerable data behind it, that the most economic new-build generation in most of the U.S. is now solar plus storage, and that the declining cost curves of batteries and renewables will make the transition to zero-carbon generation not just feasible but inevitable — and profitable for whichever company executes it fastest.
We see the current environment as one of the most constructive for renewable energy development in the history of our company. The
Inflation Reduction Act provides long-term visibility. Demand from data centers and electrification is accelerating. And we believe our competitive advantages in development, procurement, and financing have never been wider.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — the landmark climate and energy legislation signed by President Biden — was, for NextEra, something close to a structural windfall. The IRA extended and expanded renewable energy tax credits for at least a decade, creating the kind of long-term policy certainty that a company with a multi-year development pipeline needs. It also introduced new incentives for battery storage, hydrogen production, and domestic manufacturing of clean energy components. NextEra's stock rose roughly 8% the day after the IRA passed the Senate. The market understood immediately: a law designed to accelerate the energy transition would disproportionately benefit the company best positioned to execute it.
The Storm Machine
Florida is a paradox for an electric utility. The state's explosive growth makes it one of the most attractive service territories in America. Its geography makes it one of the most dangerous. Hurricanes — Category 4 and 5 storms with sustained winds exceeding 130 miles per hour — strike the Florida peninsula with a regularity that would be unacceptable to the insurance actuaries if the actuaries hadn't already fled the state.
FPL has turned hurricane resilience into a competitive narrative and, more importantly, into a rate base growth engine. Following the devastating 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons — when Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne, Katrina, and Wilma collectively caused billions of dollars in damage to Florida's grid infrastructure — FPL embarked on a multi-decade grid hardening program. The numbers are staggering: the utility has invested over $7 billion in storm resilience since 2006, including the undergrounding of main power lines, the installation of concrete and steel transmission poles to replace wooden ones, the deployment of intelligent grid devices that automatically reroute power around outages, and the trimming of vegetation along millions of miles of distribution lines.
The payoff has been measurable. When Hurricane Irma, a Category 4 storm, struck Florida in September 2017, FPL restored power to half of its affected customers within two days and to substantially all customers within ten days — a dramatic improvement over the weeks-long restoration timelines following the 2004–2005 storms. When Hurricane Ian made landfall as a near-Category 5 storm in September 2022, FPL's hardened infrastructure in its service territory performed significantly better than neighboring utilities'. The narrative writes itself for rate cases: let us invest in resilience, and we will keep the lights on.
What makes this strategically elegant is that storm hardening and solar deployment are complementary capital expenditure programs. Both grow the rate base. Both earn the allowed return on equity. Both are politically popular — Floridians want cheap power and they want the lights to stay on during hurricanes, and FPL's ability to deliver both simultaneously gives the company extraordinary regulatory leverage. The Florida Public Service Commission has approved virtually every major capital program FPL has proposed in the last decade. Not because the commission is captured, but because FPL's results are genuinely hard to argue with.
The Yield Vehicle
In 2014, NextEra executed one of the more innovative financial engineering moves in the utility sector's history. It formed NextEra Energy Partners (NEP), a publicly traded limited partnership designed to acquire contracted clean energy projects from NEER's portfolio. NEP was modeled on the midstream MLP (master limited partnership) structures that had fueled the shale revolution's pipeline buildout, adapted for renewable energy's economics.
The logic was elegant. NEER builds or acquires renewable energy projects, operates them through their initial development and optimization phase, then sells — or "drops down" — stabilized, contracted assets into NEP. NEP, with its lower cost of capital (it trades at a yield that reflects its contracted cash flows rather than NEER's development risk), pays NEER for the assets, distributing most of its cash flow to unitholders. NEER recycles the capital into new development. The flywheel spins: develop, stabilize, drop down, recycle, repeat.
For a time, this worked beautifully. NEP grew its distributions at a 12% to 15% annualized rate, attracting yield-hungry investors in a zero-interest-rate world. NEER had a captive buyer for its stabilized assets, providing capital recycling velocity that accelerated development. And NextEra's consolidated earnings benefited from both the development margins at NEER and the management fees at NEP.
Then interest rates rose. The Federal Reserve's aggressive tightening cycle in 2022–2023 repriced yield instruments across the capital markets, and NEP was not spared. Its unit price declined by more than 50% from its 2021 highs, compressing the yield to levels that made new drop-down acquisitions dilutive rather than accretive. In September 2023, NEP reduced its distribution growth expectation from 12%–15% to 5%–8% — a move that sent its units plummeting further and forced a reckoning with the structural limitations of the yield vehicle model in a rising-rate environment.
NextEra's management responded with characteristic pragmatism. Ketchum acknowledged on earnings calls that NEP's growth algorithm needed to be "right-sized" for the current interest rate environment, and the company pivoted toward alternative capital recycling mechanisms — asset sales to third-party infrastructure funds, private capital partnerships, and the emerging transferability market for clean energy tax credits created by the IRA. The NEP episode revealed both the ingenuity and the fragility of NextEra's financial engineering: the company is brilliant at designing capital structures that exploit prevailing market conditions, but those structures can become liabilities when conditions shift.
The Data Center Catalyst
By 2024, a new demand driver had emerged that reframed the investment thesis for the entire U.S. power sector — and for NextEra in particular. The explosive buildout of data centers to support artificial intelligence workloads created, almost overnight, a surge in electricity demand that the industry had not seen in decades. After fifteen years of essentially flat U.S. electricity consumption, forecasters were suddenly projecting load growth of 2% to 4% annually through the end of the decade, driven primarily by hyperscale data center construction.
The numbers are difficult to overstate. A single large data center campus can consume 500 megawatts to 1 gigawatt of electricity — equivalent to a mid-sized city. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta collectively announced data center capital expenditure plans exceeding $200 billion for 2024 and 2025. These facilities demand two things from their power suppliers: reliability approaching 99.999% uptime, and, increasingly, carbon-free energy to meet corporate sustainability commitments. Renewables plus battery storage — NextEra's core product — fit the specification.
NextEra moved quickly. NEER began signing power purchase agreements with hyperscale computing companies at volumes and durations that dwarfed its traditional utility and corporate offtake contracts. The company disclosed in 2024 that it was seeing "unprecedented" demand from data center customers, with some individual PPA negotiations involving multi-gigawatt portfolios — deals that would have been inconceivable even two years earlier. Florida, meanwhile, was emerging as a data center hub in its own right, driven by the state's favorable tax environment, growing fiber optic connectivity, and — not incidentally — FPL's low electricity rates and reliable grid.
The data center thesis gave NextEra a second growth vector that was largely independent of government subsidy. Even if the IRA were repealed tomorrow — an unlikely but not impossible scenario given shifting political winds — the fundamental demand from AI-driven electrification would persist. The hyperscalers need power. NextEra builds power. The intermediation is direct.
The Culture of Execution
Spend time with NextEra's investor presentations, earnings call transcripts, and the accounts of former employees, and a portrait emerges of an organizational culture that is unusual in the utility sector — and arguably in corporate America more broadly. The company is obsessively metric-driven, almost fanatically focused on cost discipline, and structured to reward execution over empire-building.
Compensation is tied to total shareholder return relative to peers. Capital allocation decisions are centralized and subject to rigorous hurdle rates. The company famously runs a "disposition list" — an internal catalogue of assets and businesses that are underperforming their cost of capital and are candidates for sale or shutdown. Nothing is sacred. When NextEra determined in 2016 that its Canadian wind assets were underperforming the return thresholds it demanded, it sold them. When the company's attempted $15 billion acquisition of JEA, Jacksonville's municipal utility, collapsed in 2019 amid political opposition, management shrugged and redeployed the capital elsewhere. When NEP's growth model broke, they admitted it publicly and adjusted.
This willingness to be relentlessly honest about what is working and what is not — to treat sentimentality as the enemy of returns — is rare. Most corporate cultures develop attachments to legacy businesses, pet projects, or strategic narratives that have outlived their economic logic. NextEra's culture is, in the words of one Wall Street analyst who has covered the company for over a decade, "allergic to stories that don't show up in the numbers."
We have a very simple model. We invest capital at attractive returns. We grow earnings per share at 6 to 8 percent a year. We grow the dividend in line with earnings. And we do it every single year, regardless of the macro environment. That's it. That's the whole story.
The human cost of this culture is worth acknowledging. NextEra is not known as a warm place to work. The relentless focus on productivity metrics, the centralized decision-making, the expectation that every business unit justify its existence annually — these create an environment that some find exhilarating and others find grinding. Employee reviews on platforms like Glassdoor paint a picture of a company that demands extraordinary effort and rewards it with above-market compensation, but where work-life balance is, to put it mildly, not the priority. It is a culture built for compounding, not for comfort.
The Failed Acquisition and the Road Not Taken
In September 2020, NextEra announced a $20.4 billion offer to acquire Evergy, the Kansas City-based utility holding company. The bid — which would have created the largest U.S. electric utility by market capitalization — was classic NextEra: use the stock as currency (NextEra's shares traded at a significant premium to Evergy's on every valuation metric), apply the NextEra operational playbook to Evergy's less efficiently run utilities, and gain a massive new regulated rate base in the wind-rich Great Plains.
Evergy's board rejected the offer, arguing it undervalued the company and would face insurmountable regulatory hurdles in Kansas and Missouri, states whose utility commissions are notably protective of locally headquartered utilities. NextEra walked away within weeks — again, no sentimental attachment to the deal, no hostile bid, no public campaign. The capital was redeployed into organic growth.
But the Evergy episode illuminated a structural tension in NextEra's strategy. The company's growth algorithm — invest capital at attractive returns, grow earnings 6% to 10% per year — requires an ever-expanding pool of investable opportunities. Organic growth at NEER, while robust, faces its own constraints: interconnection queue delays, permitting bottlenecks, supply chain limitations, and the simple geographic reality that the best wind and solar sites are finite. Rate base growth at FPL, while aided by Florida's demographics, is bounded by the pace at which the Florida PSC approves new capital programs. At some point, the arithmetic demands either acquisitions — which are politically difficult in the regulated utility sector — or a fundamental expansion of the addressable market.
The data center demand surge arrived just in time.
The Hydrogen Question
NextEra has, with characteristic discipline, placed a series of small but strategically positioned bets on green hydrogen — the production of hydrogen through electrolysis powered by renewable electricity. The IRA's Section 45V production tax credit, which offers up to $3 per kilogram for clean hydrogen, created an economic incentive structure that NextEra's management recognized immediately as similar to the early wind PTC: a government subsidy that, combined with scale and operational expertise, could generate attractive returns for the first mover willing to invest.
The company has announced pilot projects in Florida and explored hydrogen production at scale in conjunction with its renewable energy assets in the Great Plains. The thesis is that green hydrogen will serve as both a long-duration energy storage medium — solving the intermittency problem that limits wind and solar — and a feedstock for industrial processes (steelmaking, ammonia production, refining) that are difficult to electrify directly. If the hydrogen economy develops, NextEra's position — the world's largest generator of cheap renewable electricity, with unmatched development and financing capabilities — would be nearly impossible to replicate.
But the hydrogen bet remains speculative. The electrolyzer technology is improving but not yet economically competitive without subsidies. The infrastructure for hydrogen transport and storage barely exists. And the $3/kg tax credit, while generous, is subject to complex "three pillars" rules (additionality, temporal matching, deliverability) that could constrain eligibility. NextEra, true to form, is investing enough to maintain optionality without betting the company. It is the corporate strategy equivalent of checking a raise — staying in the hand while waiting to see the next card.
The Machine at Scale
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Strategic Eras of NextEra Energy
From Florida utility to global clean energy leader
1925Florida Power & Light incorporated, serving Southeast Florida.
1984FPL Group holding company formed; diversification into non-utility businesses begins.
1998FPL Group enters wind energy development; first wind farm in Iowa.
2001Lew Hay III becomes CEO; commits to scaled wind investment.
2006FPL Group launches post-hurricane grid hardening program ($7B+ invested to date).
2010FPL Group renames itself NextEra Energy, signaling strategic transformation.
2012Jim Robo succeeds Hay as CEO; NEER backlog exceeds 10 GW.
There is a moment in the lifecycle of certain companies when the accumulated advantages — scale, cost position, institutional knowledge, financial architecture, regulatory relationships — compound into something that is no longer a competitive advantage but a competitive reality. The moat ceases to be a metaphor and becomes topography. NextEra, by the mid-2020s, has reached that point.
The company deploys roughly $15 to $20 billion in capital annually. It finances that deployment at a weighted average cost of capital that, by its own estimates, is 100 to 200 basis points below most competitors in the renewable energy development space. It originates 7 to 10 GW of new renewable and storage contracts per year — more than many national governments' annual deployment targets. It operates the largest regulated utility in one of America's fastest-growing states. And it does all of this while maintaining an investment-grade credit rating, a dividend that has grown at roughly 10% annually for over a decade, and a management team that has demonstrated, across three CEO successions, a remarkable consistency of strategic vision and execution discipline.
The question is not whether NextEra will remain the dominant force in U.S. renewable energy development. It almost certainly will, barring a catastrophic policy reversal or a capital allocation blunder of a kind the company has never made. The question is whether the returns on incremental capital can sustain the growth rate that the market prices into the stock — a stock that trades at roughly 25 to 30 times forward earnings, a premium to the utility sector that reflects both the quality of the franchise and the expectation that the growth machine will continue compounding.
On Ketchum's desk in Juno Beach, the story goes, there is a framed chart showing NextEra's total shareholder return since 2003 against the S&P 500 Utilities Index. The lines diverge so dramatically that they appear to be measuring different asset classes. The chart doesn't have a title. It doesn't need one.
