A leading clean energy company headquartered in Juno Beach, Florida, NextEra Energy has an impressive portfolio that includes two substantial entities: Florida Power and Light as well as NextEra Energy Resources, recognized as "the world’s largest producer of wind and solar energy."
"In the early 2000s, we all remember the gas and turbine boom that came to an end," said John Ketchum, chairman, president and CEO with NextEra Energy. "We had about 38 gas turbines at the time and decided to pivot that position. The General Electric Company had just bought a wind business out of the Enron bankruptcy and was looking for a way to get that business up off the ground, and that really got us started on the wind side."
Speaking in Houston at CERAWeek by S&P Global, Ketchum said one pivotal factor that differentiates NextEra from other energy companies is its leaders’ unwavering eye on the future of technology, and where that technology will lead.
"We’re always looking for what’s next from a technology standpoint," he said. "We always live five or 10 years out into the future, in terms of where we place our bets, and that led us to solar. Solar all of a sudden became economic around 2012, and then after that, came battery storage which we view as the ‘Holy Grail’ of renewables."
How forward-looking NextEra lives up to its name
John Ketchum, chairman, president and CEO with NextEra Energy.
Photo courtesy CERAWeek by S&P Global
Citing the fact that batteries currently provide a "huge part of the energy solution throughout the country," Ketchum said, battery demand is escalating substantially, placing "NextEra in a unique position because we have a very large operating fleet.
"We have 34 giga-watts in operation today and expect, by the end of 2026, to have doubled our operating fleet to around 64 gigawatts," Ketchum continued. "At all of our solar and wind facilities, we have an interesting interconnection agreement that we can then tie a battery into. And that really allows us to jump the interconnection queue — a big deal because by being able to do that, you save yourselves five or seven years on development."
"Sixty-four gigawatts," Ketchum added, "is massive. It’s substantial. You can imagine the scale benefits we get by operating a fleet that size."
In addition to transportation and permitting, Ketchum pointed to the labor shortage as a particularly daunting challenge to keeping up with the pace of technology. But NextEra, he explained, found a way around the personnel challenge.
"We’ve heard a lot about labor shortages around the U.S., and particularly supporting new generation build-out," Ketchum said. "We do things a little bit differently."
NextEra begins working with its EPC contractors "generally, about three years in advance," Ketchum said. "What that does for us is, we can sign up large buildouts with those contractors. We’re usually entering into agreements with them for roughly two gigawatts of build-out within a region."
This approach, Ketchum said, allows contractors to rotate crews around those regions and get significant economy to scale.
"We know we’ll never be short on labor," Ketchum said. "I’ve read a lot about and heard from analysts that labor is in short supply and impacting projects, but this is not the case for us."
Ketchum cited another pervasive industry challenge that NextEra has avoided.
"I’ve heard a lot about a shortage of key interconnection equipment, like transformers and switch gears and things of that nature," he said. "We saw that coming a couple of years ago, so we went long on transformers and switch gears," Ketchum concluded. "We basically bought out transmission interconnection into the middle of 2028, so we just don’t have the same issues because of our scale."
