After a second quarter in which Duke Energy Corp.’s weather-adjusted retail load nearly produced its year-over-year growth, executives say they expect growth to pick up steam in what remains rest of 2024.
The leadership team of Charlotte-based Duke is the latest group of utility executives to speak to the trend of growing load growth, driven by a range of factors that include electrification and a data center boom. On top of that, Chair and CEO Lynn Good hinted that Duke’s long-term load growth forecast of 1.5% to 2%—itself a big increase from 0.5% a year ago—is likely to grow once she and her team complete their financial planning process early next year.
“We’ll continue to update you every step of the way and are anxious to provide an update in February that will not only capture this economic development we’ve seen in ’24 but also give us a chance to update capital,” Good said on a conference call discussing Duke’s Q2 earnings of $921 million on operating revenues of nearly $7.2 billion. “We’ve produced a lot of cash flow. The balance sheet is strengthening in 2024 as well. So we’re very optimistic about the future.”
Duke’s second-quarter total weather-normalized volumes climbed 1.9% from a year earlier and the company’s customer count rose 2.0% since mid-2023. CFO Brian Savoy a stronger-than-expected increase of 3.1% in commercial volumes offset a drop of 1.6% from industrial customers while residential sales rose 2.8%. The pace of overall C&I growth, Savoy added, should accelerate this quarter and next thanks to economic development projects and hit a run rate of 2% by year’s end from 1.3% in Q2.
Not surprisingly, data centers figure to be a big contributor to load growth in the medium and longer terms. Such facilities are expected to account for a quarter of Duke’s load growth projected through 2028—the company’s leaders think they’ll account for 10% of total load by then—but Good told analysts that growth share should rise from 2030 on. That echoes comments made last week by American Electric Power Co. Interim CEO Ben Fowke, who told analysts that the Ohio-based utility has 15 GW of incremental load commitments on its books between now and the end of this decade.
Shares of Duke (Ticker: DUK) rose nearly 2% to about $113 after the earnings report Aug. 6. Over the past six months, they have climbed more than 15%, growing the company’s market capitalization to $87 billion.
