Entergy CEO Shares Bold Vision for Improving Stakeholder Outcomes at Annual Meeting

NEW ORLEANS, LA / ACCESSWIRE / May 6, 2024 / Entergy is supporting customer growth, expectations for cleaner energy, growing reliability and resilience needs, while balancing affordability for its customers, said Chair and Chief Executive Officer Drew Marsh, during the company's 75th annual meeting of shareholders today.

"As we look ahead, we see unprecedented growth potential for our company and our region stemming from a number of factors, including strong industrial sales," said Marsh. "This growth has been driven by industrial manufacturing investments along the Gulf Coast area, which has advantages unmatched anywhere else that are driving investment to our region."

Regarding Entergy's customers' desire to achieve their own carbon reduction goals, Marsh added that the company is "focused on capturing that tremendous growth opportunity for the benefit of all our customers. We're meeting our customers' growing reliability and resilience needs, all while balancing bill affordability for our customers. Together, we're writing a growth story for the Entergy of tomorrow."

To meet our customers' expectations, Entergy has built its capital plan across generation, transmission and distribution investments.

Entergy is focused on initiatives to improve outcomes for all stakeholders, including the completion of major rate filings and decisions, operational investments, and continued progress on several key customer solutions like green tariffs, renewable energy and other carbon-free energy projects.

Marsh cited several achievements for the business in 2023:

• "Entergy's generation fleet had an outstanding year while maintaining a focus on safety. Even with challenges from record-breaking heat last summer, we achieved our best forced outage rate since 2011. Not only did we meet our customers' demands, we also exported power to other utilities during the moments that mattered."
• "2023 was a strong year for customer growth. We signed 61 new electric service agreements, representing more than 1.3 gigawatts of generation capacity. And, driven by customer interest, we continued to invest in renewable energy and other clean technology solutions. We now have more than 900 megawatts in service and approximately 2,100 megawatts of renewable energy projects are approved or under construction."
• "Entergy Mississippi will soon provide power to support the single largest capital investment in the state of Mississippi's history. A $10 billion planned investment by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, which received supportive legislation finalized by Mississippi lawmakers earlier this year, will bring new jobs and economic development opportunities to the state."
• "Our customers are very interested in resilience investment, and our stakeholder engagement focus on resilience in 2023 has led to important milestones in early 2024. Those include approval by the New Orleans City Council to invest in important hardening, battery and microgrid investments in New Orleans East with the support of approximately $55 million of grants through the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In addition, the Louisiana Public Service Commission recently approved $1.9 billion of investment over the next five years to support roughly 2,100 individual resilience projects across the state. These are the first critical steps to improve our network to meet changing customer expectations for reliability and resilience in an information economy and an increasingly hostile weather environment."
• "We again delivered steady and predictable growth last year, with adjusted earnings per share once again exceeding our original expectations. We also grew our quarterly dividend per share by approximately 6% and, importantly, we met our credit metric targets."

Read about our growth opportunities ahead and view additional milestones from last year in our 2023 Performance Report.