Good morning. Thank you for joining us. I have a few things to cover before we kick it off. We have Brandon from the Four Seasons, who's going to give us a safety overview. Good morning. Welcome. First things first, in case of any medical emergencies that we do have, you can contact us with four 3s, 33 33, and Security Response. We have three AEDs. One will be located inside the Magnolia Room, one at the front desk, and Security will have the other third AED. If we have alarms, we don't have none scheduled for today, but in case you do hear an alarm, it's going to be a brief alarm. Security Engineering, we investigate the alarm. If you hear it again, then that's basically going to give you instructions to evacuate. If we have to evacuate, you have two that's close nearby. Through the stairwell, Stairwell 3, we'll bring you to the second floor. We have an exterior stairwell, and we'll go to Canal and Convention Center. That's the rally point there. If you're going out the rear of the building, we have Stairwell 1, and that will bring you down to the elevator, I mean, to the hotel lobby. You evacuate that way, and then bring you to the hotel lobby to the Harrah's under the breezeway. That'll be it. Thank you, Brandon. You're welcome. So a couple other things, and then we'll start. So we will be discussing forward-looking information, and as you know, market factors and other conditions can drive actual results to vary. And then I want to go through the agenda for the morning. So we're going to start with Drew. He's going to give us a framework to think about Entergy's unique, robust growth story. And then he's going to turn it over to Rod. Rod will give a deep dive in the utility through the lens of the customer. We then have an economic development panel discussion. We have two third-party outside experts, and it'll be hosted by two of our operating company presidents. I think you'll really enjoy this discussion. It will be followed by a short break, and then we'll come back from the break. Kimberly will give the financial overview, and then it will come back to Drew, who's going to talk about our long-term growth opportunity. At the end, we'll bring back Drew, Rod, and Kimberly on stage for open mic Q&A. So if you have questions, please hold them till the end, and we'll make sure we get them answered at that point. And so now, without any further ado, I'd like to introduce Entergy's Chair and CEO, Drew Marsh. All right. Good morning. In case you were wondering, our speakers are powered by electricity. Thank you all for being here for Entergy's 2024 analyst day presentation. We're very excited to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Thank you to all of you that are online. Welcome to all of you online. Welcome to all of you that are here in person. We're really excited to have you here in the hometown of our headquarters, New Orleans. I hope that, and I've heard that some of you are going to take advantage of that, spend the weekend here, take advantage of our hometown. We're really excited to have you here. Also, thank you to some of you that made it out yesterday for our field trip. You're able to see some of the investments, your dollars being put to work for the benefit of our customers and our community. So thank you for all of that. We have a really exciting, unique, and robust story to talk about today. So let's just dive right in. I'm going to start by talking about our business philosophy. You all are familiar with our business philosophy. We talk about our vision statement of "We Power Life." Our four key stakeholders, our customers, our employees, our communities, and our owners, we aim to create value for all four of our stakeholders. We talk about them all the time. Of course, as we're creating value, we start with our customers. Our customers are at the center of everything that we do, of every decision that we make. We are on a journey to improve ourselves still in that space. In fact, we call our customers customers, of course, but that's a fairly recent thing. A few years ago, we called our customers ratepayers. And when they didn't agree with us, we called them intervenors. And so today, the journey is intervener to ratepayer to customer and ultimately to guest. And we have a lot of customers, have over 3 million customers, and they have a wide variety of needs, a lot of interests. It's a very diverse group. We need an employee base that reflects that customer base. That's the best way for us to serve our customers. Our customers come from all corners of our community. Our employees need to come from all corners of our community. And that means we got to attract a lot of talent from a lot of places. So we have to create value for our employees as well. That means we have to give them a lot of, you know, we start, of course, with competitive compensation, but we also have to give them good experiences. We need them to have a strong culture to grow and develop. And of course, these days, employees want to have impactful work, meaningful work. And that means we have to invest in our communities. These are the things that our employees care about, and that's where they're going to find sources of value. So we're aiming to create value for our employees. And as our employees want to do that impactful work, they're going to head out into our communities, and they're going to volunteer their time. We're also creating value in our communities by philanthropy, investing in our communities. But our communities want more than that. They want jobs. They want economic development. In a lot of cases, they want tax dollars to do other things in the community. So we're trying to help our communities by creating value there. So we're creating value all along the way. And of course, we're working to create value for all of you, our owners. You all are looking for return on the investments that you're making. And it may seem a little odd to start with owners at the end of this conversation. After all, this is an owners' discussion. This is an analyst day. Our debt and equity owners are here. And when you think about it, it actually makes perfect sense. Because if we do not have successful and loyal customers, if we don't have excited, engaged, included employees, if we don't have vibrant and growing communities, then our owners don't have a chance to earn their returns. So all of this fits together. In fact, it becomes core to our overall strategy. So as we put all of this together, and you can hear some of the boats going on outside, and we make these investments on behalf of our customers and we're creating value for all of our stakeholders, we're aligning everyone around where we are headed. And together, we are ultimately going to move through a regulatory process. And if we are all together, if all of our stakeholders are together, we can make that regulatory process more effective and efficient. So you can see creating value for all of our stakeholders is absolutely critical to our overall strategy. So now I want to talk about something that is really exciting to all of us here at Entergy. It's what gets us out of bed in the morning. This is the growth opportunity that's ahead of us. I'm going to talk about four macro themes that I know you're familiar with, but I want to talk about how they intersect within Entergy and how that creates more opportunity here at Entergy than anywhere else in the space. These are onshoring, clean energy, electrification, and of course, technology. I'm going to start with onshoring. You're familiar with this. Over the past 14 years, we have seen compound annual growth in our industrial space of over 5%. That is driven by what you see up here on the screen. These are key ratios that our industrial customers are paying attention to. They show the competitive advantage of the Gulf Coast. You can see the length of time associated with these trends. These are long-term, durable trends that our customers are looking at, and they're choosing to invest on the Gulf Coast. This trend, this macro trend of onshoring is what is behind our 14 years of compound annual growth, which is unmatched in the space. Now, we don't see this slowing down anytime soon. Because if you step back and you think about the global picture, the world's a challenging place. There are broken global supply chains. There's geopolitical uncertainty. And anybody anywhere in the world who's looking to invest in manufacturing capacity, they're looking for the biggest, most stable market, which of course is still the United States. And when they look at the United States, they're looking for access to the Mississippi River and the ports on the Gulf Coast that gives us access to international markets. We have abundant infrastructure for transportation, abundant infrastructure for energy. We have supportive communities, supportive governments. We have a lot of available labor. And of course, we have low energy prices. So when they're looking to the United States, they're looking to the Gulf Coast for those investments, which is pretty exciting. That means that this is going to continue on for a long time and means a lot more potential for electric infrastructure investments driven by our customers. I'm going to talk about the second one, which of course you're also familiar with, clean energy. And a lot of people are moving in this direction for good reason because their customers want them to. When you look at our customer base and you look at our industrial customers in particular, this is something we've talked about in the past, but it hasn't changed. Our industrial customers, if you add up their emissions and you rank them by state, they would be the second largest state in terms of industrial emissions. That means that they need to clean up. And not clean up because some government is telling them that they need to clean up, but because their customers are telling them they need to clean up. And that means they are having conversations with us. They have aspirations today to get clean, and we're having conversations with them about how to do that. They don't have a whole lot of options. They can do some energy efficiency, of course. They can do some electrification, which means more opportunity for electrical infrastructure investment for us. They also are increasingly looking at hydrogen and carbon capture. And of course, you don't get credit for hydrogen and carbon capture unless you actually have clean energy to go with it, which means more investment opportunity for us. And on top of that, you have the IRA and the incentives and other things that are driving opportunities for people to just greenfield clean energy, blue and green hydrogen, blue and green ammonia. We have more opportunities for that kind of clean energy investment in our service territory than anywhere else. So our customers are driving these expectations. And this is another huge opportunity for electric infrastructure investment for us. The third category I want to talk about is electrification. Now, this is, to me, I think probably the longest trend that is out there. Electrification has been going on for a long time. I think back to my own youth in San Angelo, Texas, in the 1970s. If the power went out, my mom said, "Go outside and play and don't come back until dark." And that was fine because that's probably what I was going to do anyway. But if I was at school and the power went out, it didn't matter because we had a pencil and a chalkboard. And nobody was using a computer. So our lives were not dependent upon electricity. And that meant that the infrastructure that we had reflected that customer expectation. That meant it was built to a standard, which didn't mean it had to be there all the time. Okay, hold that thought and fast forward to today. Everything that we do, however we want to learn, however we want to work, how we want to entertain ourselves depends on electricity. And it's continuing on. I talked about the potential for electrification of our industrial processes. I talked about there's the potential for electric vehicles. So there is a lot of opportunity for growth from this trend still to come. But the expectation that comes with this is that our lives are actually now much more dependent on electricity. And what that means is the expectations for reliability and resilience are much higher. Most of our infrastructure was built in the '70s, or a lot of it even before. You saw some of that on the tour when you were comparing where we are to where we are going with reliability and resilience investment. So this is a great opportunity for us. And we have been able to align with our stakeholders on a clear path to drive reliability and resilience. We already have $2 billion of approved investment between Entergy Louisiana and New Orleans. We have a pending filing in New Orleans. We have another filing on the way very soon in Texas. So we have a very clear path to make incremental investments in reliability and resilience with a lot more of that to come driven by customer expectations. So this is another place for significant electric infrastructure investments. And then the final category I want to talk about, technology. And of course, this boils down to AI and data centers, something that all of you have been reading about and writing about extensively over the last year or so. This is a significant opportunity for us, but we haven't always thought about it that way. So six or eight years ago, we were at an investor meeting. Some of you may have actually been there. We got a question, "Are you all thinking about data centers?" Well, at that time, we were in the midst of a 14-year, the past 14-year run on industrial sales growth. We were talking to LNG facilities, metals manufacturers, chlor-alkali uprates, petrochem facilities, auto manufacturers. These were big, big customers, 100 and 200 MW customers. That's what we were thinking about then. We looked at data centers. At that point in time, the key factor for data centers was speed. Actually, speed measured in nanoseconds. In order to be effective, you had to be located right next to where the data was needed. That meant you needed to be right outside New York City or right outside D.C. or maybe right outside Silicon Valley. If you were in Mississippi, the speed of light was a factor. They were too far away. So we looked at that. In fact, that day also, those data centers, a large one was maybe 30 MW. So go back to the question with that investor dinner. And we got the question, "What do you think about data centers? Are you all looking at data centers?" Our response, my response was, "Our customers eat data centers for breakfast." And that's because we had these huge customers. Now, obviously, things have changed. If you're talking about a 1 GW data center, that's everybody's largest customer. But we do have one customer who has showed up, AWS. We have a customer out there. And they are a very large customer. That's exciting for us. That's very exciting for us. The name of the game, though, in this is still speed, but it's not speed measured in nanoseconds. It's speed to market. Speed to market turns on two critical factors: availability of land and availability of electricity. Two things that we have an abundance of and have access to. So we're excited about this opportunity. And more opportunity for infrastructure investment. When you take all of these things together, a lot of our peers have opportunities in each one of these categories. But no one has the 14-year 5% compound annual growth rate that we have due to onshoring. And they don't see that we have that opportunity continuing on. Nobody has the industrial base that we have that needs to clean up, plus all of the clean energy opportunity that's available because of the existing infrastructure in the Gulf Coast already. No one has the clear line of sight to drive reliability and resilience and incremental investment for our customers. And of course, lots of people have data center opportunities. We have a significant data center opportunity as well. Looking at all of these and the opportunities that we see, the diversity, the robustness, the track record, this opportunity is more significant for us than anybody else. And it's not even close. Now, a few years ago, we stood on the stage and we talked about, "We want to be the premier utility." And you all responded saying, "That's nice." But you got to do some things first. Number one, you got to manage your storm risk a little better. Number two, you got to improve your balance sheet. Number three, you got to be more consistent. And lastly, you need regulatory outcomes to be better. So we got to work. And I'm proud to tell you today we've made significant progress on every one of these efforts. So let's start with storms. So we begin in a place where we are recovering all of our storm costs. That's a great place to start. But that isn't the whole story. Rod is going to talk to you a little bit more about the investments that we are making. And I just mentioned to you the reliability and resilience approvals that we already have. Those are very good places to start for ongoing mitigation of storm risk. And we've made really good progress. And we have a very clear line of sight. That's still not the only thing. There's more to it because we have improved the way that we actually respond to storms with technology and activities in the field, more training for our employees. So that's a great place to go. And then finally, and Kimberly is going to talk about it, we've improved our financial picture. We are much better situated to manage risk. So that's excellent progress on managing storm risk. And I'm going to go back to what I was just talking about, our improved financial picture. We've worked really hard to get our balance sheet in a place where it is very competitive with our peers and it is above critical thresholds. So we're very excited about that. And going forward, we are building in buffer against risk. But it's not just about risk. It's also about growth. We have created a really strong platform for our customer demand growth. And so this is a great place for us to be. We are very well situated going forward. Third, you asked us to be more consistent. And specifically, you were talking about our industrial sales growth. Is it durable? Can it last? What this says is 14 years, 5% compound annual growth rate. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the industry. We're excited about that. This isn't a trend anymore. This is who we are. This is what we expect. In fact, we expect this to accelerate over time. So there's a lot of opportunity there. But that consistency, and you can look, it is really consistent. Not every day, but it is very consistent over those 14 years. That has led to consistency in capital investments. We have consistently invested to meet these customer needs. And as we have made those consistent investments, we have had consistent outcomes in earnings per share. That is consistency across the board. This is what a premier utility looks like. We've made excellent progress here. Last, I want to talk about regulatory outcomes. This is going to bring us full circle. The way that we are getting to better regulatory outcomes is bringing all of our stakeholders into the conversation. This slide is telling you about all of the value that's being created for each of our stakeholders. There is value across the board. It is consistent. It is ongoing. As we are creating value, as we are responding to our customers' needs, we are creating value for our customers and every stakeholder. Together, we are moving through the regulatory process to make it more effective and efficient. That's our strategy. This is how we operate every day. We have a lot of good examples that Rod is going to get up here and tell you about in one second, how this happens boots on the ground every day. We are following the same formula. I'm going to bring Rod up. As you might guess, he's going to start with the customer. Thank you. Well, good morning, everybody. Come on, guys. Good morning, everybody. We are awfully excited about the conversation. Yes, we are going to start with the customer. I have a lot of ground to cover, a number of different topics. Let's get on. Let's dive right in. Our strategy starts with the most important stakeholder, the customer. No surprises there. The insights that we glean from our engagement with them across the customer categories, they help to inform and prioritize those major drivers of value for customers. It starts and it informs our customer-centric capital plan to deliver that customer value. Those insights also inform and help us prioritize our efforts to engage and align our stakeholders around that value. Why does that engagement conversation become so important? Why are you going to hear so much about it in my comments? Engagement is what ultimately feeds into the regulatory process. When we get alignment around those things, that helps us do what? Constructive regulatory outcomes put us in a better position to deliver on our commitments to you. We will rightfully, and for good reason, focus most of the conversation on our unique industrial growth story. But make no mistake about it. Our investment plan is tailored to meet the needs of all of our customers, reflected through those experiences and attributes that matter most to them. What are they? You always hear us talk about power quality and reliability. What does that ultimately mean? Yes, it means investment in reliability. It means investments in more resilience. But it also means the incremental infrastructure to help meet our customers' growing demands and their desire for clean and/or green attributes. We also talk about customer interactions. Those are solving the customer frictions and adding value at each interaction we have with them, whether that's in person, online, or by phone. We also talk about and incorporate this conversation around price to value. In our service territory, we usually wind up over-indexing on this price to value conversation, thinking it's just a customer affordability issue. No, it's about our ability to ensure that we're investing in delivering value. Certainly, we're driving operational efficiencies, which lowers our costs. We'll talk about that. But for our commercial industrial customers, it's about our cost input to their processes and ultimately their ongoing ability to remain competitive, whether it's domestically or globally. We are a huge component of our industrial customers' global and domestic competitiveness. That's why this price to value conversation is so important for us. Sort of that fourth dimension that we trade upon is our value as a good corporate citizen and environmental steward. We're trading on our reputation when we're engaged in stakeholder engagement. We'll connect the dots as to how that plays into our ability to ultimately create value for you. At the end of the day, the things I just described in the last 60-70 seconds is taking care of the basics. Our ability to take care of the basics is what puts us in position to capture the unique growth story that Drew just referenced. Drew laid out the macroeconomic trends that are driving customers to look to the U.S. and specifically to look to the Gulf South for all the right reasons. But building off of these natural advantages, energy brings more value to the table. Low energy costs, our ability to deliver clean energy solutions, which I will go into more detail about. But where we really differentiate ourselves, and you're starting to see it now more than ever, our ability to, on that conversation around speed to market, to deliver timely service to meet the growing demand, but our proven record of working in partnership with our customers to help them meet their own goals and working with our multiple stakeholders, sometimes who have competing interests, to achieve common objectives and thereby bring value to ensure that our communities are growing and thriving. It's a competitive advantage for us when we do it right. It facilitates, again, the growth story and the support we have from our stakeholders behind it. Playing to our strengths is how we win in the growth game. It affects our outlooks. Indeed, we've been knocking on customers' doors. Our engagement with them. But for all the reasons we've been talking about, they're knocking on ours. We have a robust pipeline of industrial growth opportunities. We've maintained a disciplined probability-adjusted approach that we wind up talking about every quarter on the earnings calls. We don't go into too much detail, but it's a probability-adjusted approach for tracking and converting those opportunities from prospect origination on the front, or I guess in your case, it'd be the left side of that funnel, all the way through to service delivery. We don't include these growth prospects in our forecasts until they reach certain milestones. You've heard us talk about it as a conservative approach. Those milestones are things that we track: reimbursement agreements when we're having to make long before we sign the ESA. We're having to make investments to make sure that we have the facilities available to them when they ultimately decide to land. We're tracking reimbursement agreements also credit accretive and helps reduce risk. We're tracking when those customers reach their final investment decisions. We're on their earnings calls. We're in their C-suite. We're talking to their board members as well. And of course, on the back end, we're always tracking ESAs. And it's not until we have a clear line of sight, again, on that probability risk-adjusted basis, do we actually put it in the plan. But that's just what we disclose to you. Our confidence in the strength and durability of our pipeline is also measured by interconnection studies. Well, and by 2024, by all accounts, we think this will actually be a record year of the number of requests for interconnection studies. Why is this an important metric for us? It's usually the first real indication, aside from our person-to-person, board-to-board, exec-to-exec engagement with customers. It's our first indication that the customer is actually serious about locating in our service territory and/or having us serve them. And it's because the company then has to make a significant investment to sort of kick off this analytical process that leads to our ability to serve them. So when we look at those types of trends, these leading indicators give us a really strong confidence that our sales growth outlook across our operating companies in that five-year planning period is both solid and durable. Last fall at EEI, we confidently shared a 6%-7% industrial growth CAGR. As we reported with the release this morning, that 6%-7% is now 8%-9%. The outlook is not only strong, it's getting more diverse. Yes, you see our long-standing strength in the traditional customer base, the energy-intensive LNG that Drew was just referencing to, the types of customers that used to eat data centers for breakfast, chemicals, petrochemicals, the industrial gas, and the like. They are there. They're still growing. They're still expanding. Clean energy projects that have shown up in the last few years are showing up in our outlook. Yes, we're seeing the very same surge in interest in large data centers that we're seeing elsewhere around the country where folks looking to develop in our region. But when looking at our five-year outlook, only AWS is in the plan. But we have more data center opportunities on the horizon. Make no mistake about it. The outlook is not only diverse by sector, but also by geography across all of our operating companies, which for us helps reduce our overall industrial growth, the overall risk in our industrial growth pipeline. I'll reiterate what Drew said. Nobody else has this unique growth opportunity. This level of growth with this much diversity is unmatched in our space for us and for you, driving a significant value with even more potential upside. Speaking of potential upside, we're engaged with these data centers across the operating companies. It can be intimidating when you think about the scale, 5-10 GW of additional load. It's intimidating, but for those of us who've been in the game for a while, it is exciting as you know what. It is for us a once-in-a-generation kind of opportunity that will require significant incremental investment. Yes, at an accelerated pace. I'll declare, and Drew holds our feet to the fire, some of that could show up in the near- term. Speed to market is critical in how we capture this opportunity. The data centers want each one of them want to be first to market, not just quick to market. They want to be first to market. We're certainly accelerating our readiness to serve them. The demand for energy is consuming so much of the conversation with them. Drew alluded to it, but the hyperscalers aren't talking about megawatts. They're talking about multiple gigawatts when they're talking about siting and/or expanding. So we are aided, though, in this process. It's not just us making changes to be able to meet speed to market. We happen to be in states that tend to be business-friendly and welcoming to economic opportunity. And you'll hear a little bit about that. Actually, you'll hear a lot about that in the panel that'll come right after me. And on the energy supply front, it does matter to these large customers, including the data centers, that we have a proven history of delivering large combined cycle facilities on time and on budget. And on top of the need for energy, the data centers have very aggressive sustainability commitments. And so timely access to clean power is really critical for them in deciding where they want to build. Those advantages are why we are in the conversation with so many of them. To that end, we're driving outcomes that accelerate the expansion of our renewables footprint. We talked about, and you heard on the last call about the Mississippi Legislature, where they passed legislation to streamline the CCN approval process. That's a big deal for us to add renewable and clean energy to support the AWS project. We talked about it on the call that for us, this was a blueprint of collaboration between Entergy, the governor of the state of Mississippi, who had a pro-business agenda, the state legislature for the state of Mississippi, the commission, the economic development partners, AWS, and all of its ancillary partners and vendors as well. We were the catalyst through our stakeholder engagement process, efforts, strategy, and ultimately the team, Haley Fisackerly and the team in Mississippi, bringing these parties together to talk about value creation. What were the headwinds that stood in front of our ability to deliver value for the people in Mississippi, for AWS to meet its objectives? And when I say the people of Mississippi, don't assume that the governor's point of view was identical to the legislature's point of view that was identical to the customer's point of view. Part of the work that Haley and his team, with the support of us, ultimately had to do was to bring these people together, identify what their primary objectives were, and then ensure, one, they had input into the process, but that the outcomes met everybody's objectives. That's what stakeholder engagement's all about. And you'll see that theme playing out. And it's supporting our ability to deliver renewables for AWS in Mississippi. But in Louisiana, for example, they recently approved—we announced it, I guess it was within the last week or so. The LPSC gave us the approval to streamline 3 gigs of renewable capacity in Louisiana. The process was the same. We had customer demand for green energy. They wanted renewables. And our current green tariffs were already oversubscribed. So it wasn't just Entergy coming and saying, "Listen, we don't want to have to go through the process of an RFP every time we want to build out additional renewables. We have customer demands today where we have to move quickly." Well, much like in the case with Mississippi, our stakeholder engagement strategy brought customers to the regulators and other stakeholders. And we delivered a significant win for Louisiana in renewables. We just announced our joint development agreement with NextEra to build out 4.5 gigs of solar and storage projects over the next 5 years, leveraging our stakeholder engagement strength, the strength of partners like NextEra, who has a capacity to develop renewables that's greater than ours. Why not? Why? Because it's customer-driven. Our objective is to deliver outcomes for our customers in the most efficient path possible. They just helped us potentially increase our capacity to deliver renewables at speed and at scale. And with the cooperation of our states, we can meet the speed-to-market equation for renewables. It all ties in together. And so aside from our ability to deliver what these customers want in terms of the reliability and the attributes around the power, I go back to this conversation around price to value and why it's so important. We're a central piece to their value proposition around their own competitiveness, and we don't take that lightly. We've been positioning ourselves to be a low-cost provider. This should not be new to any of you. We have been able to maintain our cost well below the national average. We've been focused around remaining disciplined around our O&M spend to maintain that low-cost advantage. We're not satisfied with that. We're constantly looking for ways to drive more efficiencies. I know Kimberly will discuss in detail a little bit later. Our goal with our O&M process and management is to offset the natural effects of O&M tied to us being able to serve this growth and combating or offsetting the headwinds of inflation to create headroom for all the investment that I'm going to talk about in a second. For us, keep in mind on an inflation-adjusted basis, for every $1 of O&M that we can save in terms of maintaining that cost discipline, we create $5-$7 of capital opportunity. You guys know this in and out, and we talk about it often. But it's our means of this discipline is our means of being able to put capital to work for customers while also, again, maintaining our low-rate advantage. I'll share the capital plan, more on the capital plan in a moment. But the point here is that we're looking to provide the biggest value, the biggest bang for the buck for customers. And that's what gives us credibility when we're going in front of the regulators seeking relief. Because not only are we looking to create value for customers, we're being mindful, and this is what provides air cover for regulators to make sometimes tough decisions. We're providing the conversation around price to value that we're actually paying attention to affordability and ultimately competitiveness for the C&I customers. And as we build the infrastructure to meet our customers' demand, Entergy, aside from our customers, Entergy remains committed to our path to a cleaner generation portfolio. We're already amongst the cleanest generators in the space. That's been the case for some time. But with our customers demanding more energy, we have to make sure we don't lose sight of our own North Star. We start this clean conversation, and I see our Chief Nuclear Officer sitting up front. We start with our 5 gigs of baseload nuclear from our fleet. That's a big competitive advantage. Along with the planned retirements of our remaining coal fleet, our investment plan reflects both carbon-free and carbon-managed generation through continued focus on what we consider to be the known and proven technologies such as renewables and battery storage you all are quite familiar with. Our capacity plan focuses on new efficient combined cycle generation. I want to be specific about this with the capability to convert hydrogen and enable carbon capture and storage technology, which we expect to be viable at utility scale in the near future. I know that sounds fuzzy to say in the near future because we're seeing that for a reason. Yeah, we recognize the challenges and uncertainty, but we expect it to be relevant in our supply portfolio in the near future. I'll be a little bit more specific about that. While CCS, for our customers actually in the Gulf South, is a proven and demonstrated technology, the ecosystem that be required for utility scale application still requires further development. But our region, we believe, is really well supported to support the expansion. We have significant existing infrastructure in place, and our large customers are already investing in pipeline expansion and sequestration. We are bullish on CCS in our expansion plans, both for ourselves and our own ambitions, but as well as our customers. And we do, and we're going on record, we expect CCS technology to become viable by 2030. We plan to install CCS at the new combined cycle plants to be built in the coming years. And in our view, that ultimately includes the new Legend plant that we just announced earlier this week in Texas. I see Elie sitting there, and he's not squirming in his seat, so I'm going to assume he's still very much aligned with that statement I just made. Our customers are interested in exploring diverse solutions to meet their sustainability goals. And we're going to leverage these partnerships to pursue CCS hand in hand with our customers. We do not yet have delineated capital in our plan for CCS, to be fair. But we've received the grant from the DOE to conduct a FEED study on CCS. It's about a $10 million grant that we expect that grant to lead to a demonstration pilot at our Lake Charles Power Station. Again, just being specific about what is currently in the plan, capital plan versus what we expect to adjust the plan to accommodate. So let's lay it out there. $33 billion over five years designed to deliver outcomes that support the very customer objectives that I was alluding to, building infrastructure to support growth, upgrading our systems to make them more reliable and resilient to adverse weather, clean energy solutions to meet our customer sustainability objectives, and then other investments that ultimately drive positive customer experience. To meet the objectives, we are increasingly investing to expand the generation portfolio and to really prepare for this growth opportunity. Each new growth opportunity, regardless of the sector, is going to require generation of some sort, interconnection, new substations, and ultimately feeds into the MISO MTEP process. We continue to prioritize these capital needs across the planning horizon that drive customer value, and we are creating and maintaining flexibility to adjust to make sure that our customer needs are being met in a timely fashion. Our progress, though, is not just notional. We're measuring the impacts of the investments that we're making that benefit the stakeholders. We have a line of sight to drive improvements over the next 5 years. These are important, and Drew alluded to it, but reducing outage frequency by over 30% through those reliability improvements in asset renewal, reducing emissions by 20% through our commitment to carbon-free and carbon-neutral generation that I just referenced. It's a big deal to be able to talk about finally a pathway to reduce storm costs by 20% through a resilience plan that we know is still, despite all the success for us, is still in the early innings. And then driving improvements to our Net Promoter Score through our customer experiences. The Net Promoter Score becomes important, going back to the point that I made. Taking care of the basics in the regulatory environment with our mass customers is how we earn the right to take advantage of these growth opportunities. The benefits that we're tracking extend well beyond what we track as benefits for customers. The communities we operate in will enjoy significant benefits and multiplier effects from the billions of dollars that both we and our customers are investing in our region. Job creation and a growing tax base just to begin the conversation. As we talk about customer outcomes, we do remain very mindful of our residential customers, and I started the conversation with that, and their ability to afford their electric bills. I know that you, quarter-over-quarter, month-over-month, are constantly looking at this conversation around affordability as a proxy for our regulatory support environment. We totally get it. It's part of the reason why, and we agree, we have a history of keeping bill growth generally in line with inflation. But our customers, including those price-sensitive residential customers, have made it clear they're requiring more reliable, resilient service. And it's in part for a lot of the reasons Drew referenced about the dependency, regardless of where you are in the socioeconomic strata, and regardless of where you sit in the C&I space, the dependency on electricity is requiring a greater dependency on reliable and resilient service. So we're responding to that, which is why value becomes part of the conversation with price, even for those price-sensitive customers. Delivering the value that they're demanding reflects average bill growth slightly above our usual target that you see of 3%. But it's important to emphasize that our starting point has always been consistently below the national average and our industry peers. And so we remain competitive to the industry peers despite the fact that the outcomes are slightly above that 3%, but we expect to stay there in terms of being below the national average. That's our competitive advantage. It's a commitment we're making, and we believe it will also support our stakeholder engagement strategy in getting ongoing support for our investments. I'll also emphasize that our communities are actually seeing, and in this political environment, it becomes really relevant. They're seeing lower unemployment rates. That's a big deal in our legislative and regulatory circles when we're bringing customers to bear for regulatory support. It matters that we can translate jobs to unemployment rates going down in the regions where we operate. So as Drew highlighted, electricity has never been more important, and it has never been a smaller share of our customer's wallet net-net. That is really important to our ability to get our business done in the regulatory arena. I would be remiss if I did not have a specific conversation around a key critical stakeholder in our value proposition. The employees are. We can give you all the platitudes about our commitment to employees, but let's be really clear. The employees are the engine that powers our success. And we are as focused at creating and maintaining value for them as we are when we talk about the customers. Ensuring they have the right skills and capabilities in the key focus areas is how we win with our customers. And we've built partnerships with colleges and tradecraft to ensure the steady availability of talented and skilled employees. We focus on cultural transformation, keeping them up to date with evolving and emerging technologies and advancements in data analytics and AI. They want to remain relevant in their jobs to our stakeholders. That means more opportunities for them to grow, thrive, and ultimately support our strategic objectives and priorities. We would be remiss also to talk about the cultural transformation for our employees in the field of stakeholder engagement. Because what we're asking them in exchange for this, we believe, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to be relevant in the transformation of the Gulf South, we're asking them to play a more active role in representing the company's interests in our stakeholder engagement strategy. Historically, your title had customer, government, public policy, or regulatory or something in order for you to feel like you had a role in stakeholder engagement. Now, your commitment to stakeholder engagement begins when you have a badge that has Entergy on it. If your picture is on a badge that has Entergy on it, you have a role and expectation, not only in storm drills, but in our ability to be effective in our stakeholder engagement strategy to create value for our stakeholders. So we talk about our focus on those four key stakeholders: customers, the employees, communities, and you. But we have a broader set of stakeholders that help us drive the outcomes that matter to you. I mentioned earlier how we made progress working with our stakeholders to get results in Louisiana with the 3 gigs of renewables expansion, the improvements in Mississippi and support of Amazon Web Services. But in addition to the streamlined CCN process that helps us move to deliver the energy and attributes more quickly, the Mississippi Legislature approved our ability to recover financing costs and rates through CWIP. And just this past week, the Louisiana legislature approved a sales and use exemption tax for data centers. This didn't just happen. This happened because employees like Haley's team in Mississippi, like Phillip's team in Louisiana, we brought those stakeholders together to talk about, again, the headwinds to value creation. Bringing people together who otherwise would have just sat in their intervenor silos and staked out a position. What we were doing long before we made the filings was bringing them to the table to give them an opportunity for input into the plans we had forward. So when we actually make these filings, they already incorporate the feedback from folks, and we're not waiting around for the procedural schedule to tell us what those stakeholders' interests are or issues are. It wound up producing a set of outcomes that was not only beneficial to AWS, but was credit accretive to us in reducing the risk of financing costs for a project long before the customer was taking service. For us, effective stakeholder engagement with all of our employees is a core part of our ability to execute on the strategy. I'll go back for a moment to the $1.9 billion resilience in Louisiana. That outreach, that customer engagement strategy started when we walked off the stage, I guess it was New York, in 2022, when we told you we would know we were moving in the right direction by the time we made the filing, when the conversation would be more about the scope and the scale and the pace of resiliency versus the idea of whether we needed to spend capital on resiliency. We knew then what we know now was that it was going to require us educating and bringing into the tent at the local level all of the stakeholders who would otherwise not know that they had an interest in the outcomes of the investments we're making. At the local level with the chambers of commerce, we're in Louisiana, so we call them, we have parishes as opposed to counties, but the chambers of commerce, parish presidents, and at the state level with elected officials and the commission, we spent nearly two years having conversations with them about their concerns. How can we address your concerns, not only in the filings, but in the way in which we're executing on this capital? What types of reporting requirements will give you confidence, going back to a point I made, that customers would be getting a viable bang for the bucks that we're spending? And what do we need to show you that we're continuing to be responsible stewards in keeping our O&M low? But we didn't just keep the conversation involved with public officials. We engaged the local contracting partners, which was particularly effective because for them, resilience wasn't just about jobs and opportunities, as you would expect. By the time they got deep into the nuances of our investment plan, this was for them about protecting their communities and the state, not just electric infrastructure. And that's what the resiliency conversation in investments for us was really about. And this cacophony of messaging from all stakeholders resonated with the policymakers, as you would expect it to. Throughout their process, our community partners and these parish leaders and local communities were given opportunities to review the plan way early before there was a public filing. It made a difference that they got an opportunity to provide their critical input. Again, that's stakeholder engagement in action. With these partners, we continue to pursue federal funding to help offset the program costs. Again, energy is not just looking to grow rate-based through capital deployment. We're looking to offset the cost of this work through federal support. Again, working with our government officials to build more resilient communities is also part of the stakeholder engagement strategy. Louisiana established a public-private partnership with multiple parishes for grants from FEMA, in this instance, for hardening infrastructure, for floodwater pumping stations. That's a big deal. For emergency operations centers, fire, police stations, and water towers. Think about the public narrative as an adjunct to our traditional conversation around GT& D facilities when we're asking the federal government to help support our efforts to create a more resilient delivery system for customers when we're actually bringing our elected officials and policymakers with us in the conversation. Not only with FEMA, Louisiana submitted two applications to the DOE for infrastructure hardening. Then on, again, doing another click on this stakeholder engagement conversation, we created a community benefits working group as part of the DOE grant application process that gave us the opportunity to solicit input from various segments of the community, getting their buy-in to this resiliency conversation. We also put skin in the game for the community. Again, we didn't want just the public policymaker support. We actually wanted the community support. When we put $2 million up to support some of the administrative costs of the stakeholder engagement process, town hall meetings and the like, but also to begin to match some of the grants that the federal government would give us if we were successful with the grant application, all of a sudden, the community partners who would have otherwise been antagonistic to the process said, "Wait a minute. Entergy's not only participating in this stakeholder engagement to talk about the value of their investment, they're putting skins in the game." And we found that the conversation around resiliency adaptation, our resiliency plan, again, was no longer about fighting as to whether or not it'll happen. What's the most efficient way for Entergy to get its ability to make those investments, and how can we continue to partner with Entergy to help offset some of the costs with whatever the feds are willing to do? The point being is that the LPSC's approval of that $1.9 billion resiliency plan was part and parcel of a 360-degree view of stakeholder engagement that we had to initiate and that began when we had our conversation with you literally two years ago to talk about what mattered most. And the commission, at the end of the day, aligned around those common objectives: protecting what matters most, customers, homes, businesses, and the communities we serve. I don't want to leave out Texas. In L.A., just this past week, Texas filed for approval to build two advanced natural gas-powered plants, including the Legend CCGT that I mentioned. These investments are really important to fuel the growth in Southeast Texas and to serve large-scale economic projects in the region like Sempra's LNG facility that we've been working in close partnership with. The filing is part of a broad initiative that we named the Southeast Texas Energy Plan or STEP Ahead, which is a really cool name. This is no less a significant stakeholder engagement opportunity. It was part and parcel of an ongoing conversation that Elie created with this team called the Southeast Texas Leadership Summit. Did I get that right? We brought stakeholders together from the state of Texas, including commission leadership, the PUCT commissioner, the Texas State Comptroller, the former DOE secretary, who's now the CEO of EEI, along with public policymakers and officials and our customers from the state of Texas talking about their interest in our investment strategy to support the growth in Texas. And again, there are going to be more initiatives coming out of this STEP Ahead process. But my point to you is that the stakeholder engagement behind it isn't just happenstance. It is a deliberate part of our strategy to execute, to create greater certainty and predictability around the support we get in the regulatory environment. That's why it's so important that we talk about stakeholder engagement. It's why I'm telling you what we're sharing with our employees, that they don't get to stand by and just allow it to happen through others, that we're taking matters in our own hands, trying to drive this value conversation far beyond just the regulatory filing. Take a look at this slide. And I know for most in this room, it feels like the generic slide that you use to help inform your modeling assumptions about the timing of our regulatory processes and mechanisms. But I'm asking you to take a look at this slide through a different lens. This slide is why stakeholder engagement is so important. This is the visual illustration of how aligning together with our stakeholders on where we're going and why manifests itself in more efficient and constructive regulatory outcomes. This is the point of the execution of the strategy that Drew opened up with, where we said it starts with the customer and our capital plan being informed by what the customer tells us is important, that we, in turn, through the stakeholder engagement process, are telling that value story that we, in turn, get to bring to the regulators to get support for our opportunity to create value for you. That's what this is all about and where the stakeholder engagement strategy kind of comes to a head. We're successful when by the time we make the filing, we've taken care of the lion's share of the work of aligning the common interest to get regulatory outcomes. I started with customers, and I'll talk about the benefits of our plan to our communities and our employees. But we always begin with the end in mind. Our customer-centric focus, strong industrial sales growth, robust investment plan, and broad and ongoing stakeholder engagement strategy means a healthy and growing utility, strong rate-based growth, and a positive earnings outlook. Demonstrating solid value for our owners, for us, is what this entire customer-led conversation is all about. I'll end as I began. We're excited about the opportunity we have before us. We think it's once in a generation. We're committed to executing for you. We're confident in our outlooks and committed to our ability to deliver value for all four of our key stakeholders. That ends it for me. Thank you for indulging me with your time. Give us a quick minute to set up the stage for the panel where Phillip May, President and CEO of Entergy Louisiana, and Haley Fisackerly, the President and CEO of Entergy Mississippi, are going to introduce our special guests. Thanks, guys. Well, good morning. I'm Haley Fisackerly, President CEO of Entergy Mississippi, and I'm excited to kick off this next panel talking about economic development. I'd like to introduce our first guest as Gray Swoope. Gray is President Founder, President CEO of Vision First Strategies, an economic development and site selection firm with clients in over 48 states and representing a good number of Fortune 500 companies. Prior to that, Gray spent a career, over 30 years in economic development in the profession in the local and the state area. Prior to Vision First, he was Secretary of Commerce and President of Enterprise Florida for then Governor Scott from 2011 to 2015, led a number of projects that led to some of the greatest outcomes during that enterprise's history. Prior to that, he was Executive Director for the Mississippi Development Authority under our good friend, Governor Haley Barbour, brought numerous projects to the state, some including Toyota, General Aviation, PACCAR, and Steel Dynamics. But Gray also will tell you, not one that he saw himself ever doing, but he also had to assist the governor in Hurricane Katrina recovery and was a fiscal agent for the then $5.4 billion HUD grant program to help recovery in the area. He spent time in local areas, but also in the state of Arkansas. So he knows our area well. He was Director of Economic and Industrial Development under then Governor Bill Clinton. So we're glad to have Gray with us. Philip? Hi, I'm Phillip May, President CEO of Entergy Louisiana. It's my pleasure to introduce the Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Economic Development, Susan Bourgeois. Susan has three decades of experience in terms of building, transforming, and sustaining teams through actions around strategic planning, project development, fundraising, and advocacy. Prior to her appointment as LED Secretary, she also served as President of SBB Consulting and was most recently President Emeritus of the Northshore Community Foundation. Susan served in multiple roles under the Louisiana Governor Foster Administration. She is active in the International Women's Forum, Northshore Business Council, and the Lakeshore Regional Medical Center. I got to know Susan from her many roles in leadership on the boards on which we serve. Most recently, she was the chair of GNO Inc., which is an organization that focuses on creating thriving communities and better quality of life through economic development. Susan has built a reputation through her visionary acumen, through collaboration, innovation, and most importantly, building meaningful alliances, all of which is critical to creating those thriving communities in a thriving state. Please join me in welcoming Susan Bourgeois. All right, Phil, let's get into it. So before we get into talking about all the opportunity and growth, Gray, you've been doing this for nearly 40 years, and you've been successful because you've evolved. Kind of give the audience here a feel for what does economic development look like today? How has it changed? What do states—what does Susan—what do states have to do to be successful? And how do utilities play a role in that? Well, first of all, it's great to be here. And Haley, I think in having the opportunity to watch economic development evolve over several decades, thanks for reminding me for. But it has become very complex. You think about the size of the projects. The Secretary will tell you that you see today, the complexity that goes around them. It's very different from what it was. Because it's complex, you have to do a lot of things on the front end now that you never did in the past. You think about product development. What do we have from a sites inventory standpoint? What are we doing from an infrastructure standpoint? All those things are very important in the site selection process. But more than anything, and Drew and Rod, y'all both hammer this home, but we always say in economic development, it's a team sport. Stakeholder involvement and putting together the right team to win these projects is critical today more so than ever. I'll look at the projects that we work with. What we see, it has to have a team of educators. It's a team of government officials. It's everybody that's involved to win the projects and the investment to be a partnership in these communities. And often now, where we see utilities, investor-owned utilities like Entergy, you're providing intellectual capital in those conversations because power is a part of that conversation. But it's also because of the network that you've built over the time with the stakeholders and the communities that's essential. And the communities that haven't done their homework and done that, they're the ones that are going to be really at a disadvantage. Susan, we have a new governor. He is keenly interested in growing the state. Tell me, what is that new approach we're seeing with the Landry administration? Yeah. Thanks, Phillip. I think saying we have a new governor is important because we have a new governor. Therefore, we have a new secretary. I'm about four months on the job here. So I say that both as sort of prior forgiveness, if you will, but also about the excitement around the opportunity and the way that the governor is approaching economic development differently. As Phillip mentioned sort of in my intro and my bio, you didn't hear a lot about specific wins, not like Gray, but you will, because my background really isn't in specific economic development. I'm not a practitioner. My background is in organizational development. It's in relationship building. And I say that, and it's in organizational transformation. And that is really the best answer to the question. This governor in Louisiana wants it to be fundamentally different. I think I was selected for this role primarily because we knew we were walking into a major transition as a state government. Most importantly, we had to transform our systems and delivering economic development in Louisiana in order to provide the opportunities that this governor is insisting we provide our people, is why we're changing things. So I will say there are two or three things. Actually, Rod used some of the words, and I like that Rod's words are now going to be echoed in mine. Number one is engagement. We are engaging the private sector in ways that government has not done in the past in Louisiana. Number two is that transformation. We are looking at everything from best practices in other states that have historically, at least in the short- term, done better than Louisiana in outcomes and economic development. We've researched best practices and said, how do we have to change it here to do it that way? Responding at the speed of business is critical to that. Partnerships, engagement, responsiveness, and frankly, just an open philosophical commitment to being A, we want to win and that we are open for business. And Susan, we have the legislature passed a restructuring bill for Louisiana Economic Development. We were active in that bill. What is that about? Yeah. So again, we're moving pretty fast right now. And so the first thing that we did was we looked at both the internal structures at LED, not to get too inside baseball, but we also looked at our governance structures. And so we have just passed a bill which we will sign, big press conference next Tuesday, talking about how we do it differently. Entergy as a company and Phillip individually have been critically important to that work. But it does three really important things. Number one is that we are going to be led, we as a department are going to be led and advised, and our work will be informed by the private sector, right? That people inside government don't actually know necessarily what the private sector needs. So we have created the Louisiana Economic Development Partnership, which will be a board that will position our department to capitalize on opportunities before us, but also to paint the path forward. The most important part of that is a mandatory strategic plan, right? Just good organizational management. And that board's responsibility, that private sector board will hold us responsible to and accountable to that plan. So that's great stuff. Energy clearly has had a role in getting us there and will continue to have a role in that space. The second thing it does, gosh, this is so inside baseball, but y'all have no idea how meaningful this is to us. It exempts our state agency out of all things state procurement, state technology restrictions. The limitations and the handcuffs we have as a department have been really remarkable to me coming from the private sector into the public sector. I'm just going to give you a quick anecdote because you need to understand the importance of this. We have 200 employees in our department, and I could only get permission to have 14 Salesforce licenses because just state government, right? The fact that we have the ability to do what we need to do to operate like a business so we can be responsive to business, the bill is changing that. There are multiple statutory reforms that are happening in the bill, but I think the greatest takeaway is that the private sector, the existing leadership in Louisiana's private sector will be driving the future of economic development in Louisiana. Yeah. I think the big thing is we expect and we'll get a much more agile, responsive organization. Absolutely. Gray, let's move over and talk about this region. You work projects in 48 states, have clients in 48 states. You know our region. You lived in Arkansas, Mississippi. You worked projects in Louisiana, Texas. Talk about the region. Drew talked earlier about the Mississippi River, the corridor here along the Gulf Coast. Give the perspective that you see working projects in these 48 states that is unique about this Gulf Coast region, Entergy Service Territory. Yeah. I listened this morning, and I found it very interesting because a lot of the conversation about the infrastructure that you have here. I kind of look at it a little bit differently in that it's really asset-rich. If you think of economic development strategy, we think often about asset value optimization. How do we use these assets in a way to go about economic development? But if you look at the legacy industries that you have in the Entergy Territory, you have strong automotive. You've got automotive suppliers. You've got timber industry. You've got in Arkansas, the unbelievable steel industry and metal fabrications now there. You cross Louisiana's platform of the legacy from a petro and chemical industry, and then even into Texas and the industry there that you know even looking at doing more distribution there with the ports and doing some things. But you've got assets more so than just infrastructure. And so when I look at that, it brings opportunity. When our clients are looking for diversification of what they do and how do you use these assets, how do they go about maximizing or optimizing those? I think that's real critical in site selection. So you have opportunities then with, for example, one of the strategies that you're working on and looking on carbon capture. If you look at the infrastructure that's here and like with the recent acquisition of Denbury and the infrastructure there for using a pipeline, it's all over your territory. And so it opens the door for more opportunity to build off that to meet clean energy goals. You also see new opportunities like in Arkansas as well as lithium mining that's coming on board. So it is an asset-rich region that we, in looking at clients and alignment of clients and where there's assets to optimize to take advantage of for their making of products. It sits very well in how you use those and having leadership to understand how to use those assets to meet objectives. When you look at that, though, when you're looking at those projects and you're working on them, are there other things like from a political or community competitive standpoint too that stand out? Well, you kind of asked me what's changed a lot. I think today, because of the complexity of the projects, that you do have to have leadership that understands that look, having served in a role as Secretary of Commerce in the state that economic development was not seen as a very positive thing. I've sat through those conversations about leadership not embracing it, but the states that are embracing and certainly in the states that your territory is in, they embrace economic development and look at it as a partnership. So it starts with having conversations and what you guys have done such a great job with is laying the groundwork to understand we got to build product. We have to have product. And that product can include sites, its workforce, its education, all those components that go together. But you do that on the front end to be successful on the back end to have the projects that have huge capital investment and have to have a highly skilled workforce to operate. And so it's very critical to build those relationships on the front end because you can't just pop in and say, "Hey, now we want to do something." You look at the example that we used in Mississippi, the conversations on the data center project, those started four or five years ago about what is the world of possible. Can the South, could Mississippi even play in that space? And so those were conversations that led to legislation that actually started in 2022 that laid the groundwork for data center space in the state of Mississippi. Thank you. So you heard the conversation of what the assets are. Why are companies coming to Louisiana? And more importantly, who is coming? What businesses and industries are coming to Louisiana? So I think the why, to Gray's point, is it's a wonderful coupling, if you will, between assets and infrastructure, right? They're the natural assets. Louisiana has some really unique ones. The Mississippi River, obviously, we have also 5 deep water ports and therefore access to the entire globe through the Gulf of Mexico. But the other piece of that is Louisiana is historically an oil and gas state. That is not going to change. That's certainly part of our future as well and our petrochemical history. But the industry infrastructure here is really unmatched. And there are people coming here. The other interesting thing I find is so many of the new processes that people are interested in. And I'll go off on a tangent on this one, but this is really the answer. Every single project that has come across my desk in the four months that I've been there, every single one has an environmental or a decarbonization component to it. Every single one. And so that's the real answer. The global pressure, the global insistence on changing the energy narrative, right? No matter what the politics are of that, that is real. And Louisiana is incredibly well positioned for that because so many of our industries marry with it or come from it, right? I give the example all the time to people to try to make it simple for them. We've been taking oil and gas out of the earth for a long time now in Louisiana. Decarbonization, there's no better place to do it because we are prepared. It's very similar pipelines. It's very similar processes. It's just sort of hitting the reverse button, right? But the supply chain, the workforce, we are trained. Our historic infrastructure and our historic industries are positioning us to respond to that global pressure, I would argue, unlike any other state. And then when you—so to the second part of your question is, what are people looking at? What kinds of industries? It's the natural gas piece. Liquefied natural gas. Nobody could have prepared for what happened in the Ukraine, obviously. But the fact that the state was positioned and the private sector was already positioning on the LNG front, and then just that geopolitical pressure that exacerbated that need. So the LNG play is huge, and it continues to grow. The commitments in that space in Louisiana, we just keep working to fulfill them. There's so much opportunity there. Ammonia. Ammonia has been part of Louisiana for a long time, and the need for it, and the need for clean ammonia, that's a huge piece of what we're doing here. There's a lithium play in Arkansas, but there's a lithium supply chain play in Louisiana. And so—but every industry, the cleanness of every industry, it's take what Louisiana has done for a long time and now put a clean component to it, and that's who's coming here. And the demand is really tremendous. That's great. Well, Gray, every day in the news, we're hearing about data centers, but more AI, machine learning, hyperscale. Rod showed that the growth that's coming to our area. One of your clients is AWS. You're working these projects. Give the audience your perspective. What is the size, the timeline, the scale of this? Who are the players? More importantly, what are they looking for when they're trying to pick a location to go to? Well, I think you have to back out and say, first of all, look at whether it's hyperscale, colo, enterprise, and you share that in your graph. So I'll speak to the hyperscale, and there's four, maybe five players in that space, and that's about it. AI is driving this demand for building machine learning AI data centers. When we look at how to put that, how do you go about putting that process together to find the right locations? The first conversation is usually with utilities. And it's looking for a partnership in how that because if you it's interesting because we get to sit in a lot of conversations. You mentioned that we've done work in 48 states. If you're wondering, it's Alaska and North Dakota that don't like this. I don't understand. But not that I'm keeping track. But if you back up and you look at those conversations, when you start to sit down like someone like you or Phillip and say, "Hey, yeah, we're here. We kind of want to be able to figure out how to get to 300 MW in a year, and then we're going to be able to scale it to 5-6 years to a gig," y'all like, "Whoa, we can't have that conversation." What has been different in the process here in having that conversation is that certainly with Haley and their team and with Entergy team, it was embracing. And so that's what you're looking for when you say, "All right, let's figure this out. You need what and when. Here's what we have. How do we go about it? How can we have a partnership?" So the partnership piece on the front end is very important. The second piece of that then is, what is the tax climate? And if you look at, and again, I'm not speaking on behalf of any clients, generically, if you look at a shell, a building, they're going to be anywhere from $1 billion to $1.6 billion a shell. Well, 75% of it's going to be personal equipment. And that's going to turn over in three to four years. And so tax is a big implication of cost. And so if you don't do things like sales and use tax, and we've talked about it, then you really are limiting yourself and being able to compete in that space. And so sales and use tax is a huge player in that. So once you figure out that you've got utilities that are going to be a partner with you in the process and how to figure out to get to the power needs, the tax climate is right, then it becomes a question of land. And prepared sites, yes, they are very helpful because when you start looking around in this mad rush now for space, you see a lot of land being acquired, but due diligence hasn't really been done on it. And a lot of these places will never work. And so the communities and states and regions that have done a little bit more homework on where are the best locations, they're going to be the winners. But if a state is conceding the sale and use tax, there's a lot of debate about the jobs. Why are the communities wanting these? Yeah. Well, as a former State Director, I will tell you what makes for good state strategy is to have economically healthy communities. And if a community has an investment of $10 billion, which was recently announced, you look at the revenue that comes off of that from supporting community services, school systems, the ad valorem taxes, even through an abated model are going to be tremendous. And so it becomes a very—again, looking at a state and a community, it becomes a huge economic impact, almost catalytic impact on those communities and where they locate. But so if you look at, for instance, like the project you just mentioned, you had an issue with the wastewater system. Well, companies like the ones that we've worked with, they're looking at how do you do sustainable solutions for cooling. Well, we're going to use gray water and do improvements to a wastewater system that was needing improvements anyway. So revenue from taxes helped generate that. So it's a creative solution that's a win-win for everybody. The other thing in the economic impact when you're looking at is not just the community of the data center sitting in, but as in your announcement this morning on the partnership with NextEra and Solar, those are going to typically go in areas that do not see this type of activity. And I know in the footprint that y'all are looking at, that's going to be a huge windfall for tax revenue in these communities as well. So again, from a state perspective, if you're doing those things and you're winning those investments, yes, it's the immediate parish or county that has the investment, but the spinoff around it is tremendous. Great. Susan, we've worked with your team on getting sales and use tax, an innovative approach to get that done in this session. But tell me, why do you think data centers are going to be interested in Louisiana? You know, I think the interesting thing about Louisiana, it's almost a tale of two cities, if you will, in the state. The answer to your last question is about more of that historic legacy infrastructure, primarily in many respects, that's South Louisiana, other than the timber industry. The data center space, North Louisiana has immense opportunity because we have a lot of land. It's historical farmland. And timber's a crop, right? So I know we feel really powerful about trees. And it's also a great decarbonizer, by the way. But timber's a crop. And so the amount of available land that we have, and so we knew that there would be an absolute play for Louisiana in the data center space. And Entergy has been really a leader and a driver in that. Even in my first week on the job, there's a great story on that one. Phillip had a meeting with the governor regarding a long-term potential data center conversation. And the governor called me. I'd been on the job about two days. And he said, "Let me just apologize now. I forgot I had you. So you're not in this meeting." So honestly, right? So Phillip, they had the meeting without me. The governor forgot he had a secretary of economic development, but that's okay. At any rate, so Entergy has been at the table with us from literally me from day one on that. But the interesting piece is that while we knew, right, the sales and use tax piece was going to be critical to this, the way Louisiana does things is that we have a fiscal session every other year. So we can address tax changes, changes to our tax code itself, except for every other year. And so we really had our hands tied to some degree, waiting until next year to change that until we realized there was a bill going through this particular legislative session that was a sales tax rebate. And rebates can happen at any point. And so in typical Louisiana politics fashion, what we call that is we hijacked a bill. And we took that great bill that was originally a fiber optic rebate conversation. Sorry, AT&T, we did hijack your bill. It was the right thing to do for the state. And with partners and with Entergy's help and some others, we hijacked that bill and passed a sales tax rebate. And so now, and that was effective upon signature of the governor. So we effectively today have that opportunity because we didn't have the luxury of waiting until next legislative session to fix that. And Entergy helped us down that path. But that decision and that action, if you will, Gray, to your point, that was transformational. We couldn't compete without it. And we don't have the luxury of waiting another 18 months to get there. That's right. Susan, the other thing I think that working with you in your first four months, been very impressed with you, but the stakeholder engagement, it's at a different level. I know that you have chaired many boards, have been involved on a lot of commissions and so forth, as have I. We've used that to help move along things. Do you have some thoughts on how important stakeholder engagement has become in this process? Yeah, it's critical. I think that's, first of all, the benefit of me coming out of the private sector, not state government, right? Because one of the first things I did when I testified in committee about this bill was I said, "We are supposed to be a job creation agency as LED, but that doesn't mean jobs inside of our department, right? We don't want more government jobs. We want partnerships with the private sector where the experts are, where the expertise lies." Those of you, many of you in this room probably don't know about this thing, but it's a really cool thing. It's called Washington Mardi Gras. And every year, all of the Louisiana power base goes to Washington, D.C. for 3 or 4 days. And we have what's called Washington Mardi Gras. And that's where the governor decided to announce my appointment. And so there are 2,000 people in this entity, right, or this event, all of whom are CEOs and the major players of politics and the economy of Louisiana. And this is a true story. And within the first 36 hours, I had 300 business cards of people that put cards in my hand, not to get something from me, but to say, "What can I do for you? Use me. My company is successful here. Let me tell your story. Take me on calls. I have a friend who wants to move a company here." So it didn't take me long to realize we had to create a formal structure to capitalize on that. So the first hire I actually made as secretary was to bring somebody on from the private sector whose role is private sector engagement. And we are creating formal structures around building the relation, not building, we have the relationships, using the relationships with the private sector in a way that informs and excels economic growth in Louisiana. And so to say that we have a commitment to it, it's really sort of fundamental to everything we're building out. We are not hiring additional state employees inside of LED to be the experts. When we have access to experts like Phillip and his team, it would make no sense for us to recreate that wheel. And so we instead are formalizing the processes to use your relationships, your information, and your expertise. And we're doing that across industries. Very g ood. Haley? Yeah. Great. I do want to go back to AI, one more thing. A couple of areas, workforce, but also Drew talked about the speed to market. Is it speed or green? I know it's both. So which is first? Or is there a? Speed's important. I mean, I think from a competitive standpoint, everybody's trying to get into the space. And so each of those speed to market is important. But with that, at the same time, it's figuring out pathways, okay, how can we get up and running? And then what is the pathway to get to clean and green energy at the end of the day? Because they still have, all those companies still have their sustainability goals and metrics that they're working on. But right now, it is how can we get speed? How can we get power? How can we get started? I also should mention too that if you look at the history of the industry, latency was a big factor. And so locations that had closer to proximity to markets that were using data centers, not for machine learning or AI, those probably had a bigger advantage. But today, that latency issue is still important, but it's not as important. It opens up the door for, as the first conversation, what's the world possible? Can we even do this here? And so certainly the four states and Entergy's territory now have an opportunity that with these type data centers, you never had. In economic development, I know you focus a lot on this is the jobs, the workforce. What is it that AWS and companies like them? So now you're leaving the high population areas, putting centers where the land's available, maybe not as the population base. What are they having to do with the workforce area? So the beauty of a data center is very similar to operating a utility. You need skills of all sizes. I mean, from technical associate all the way up to graduate level. And so if you look at the people that are working in a data center, surprisingly, the two campuses of Mississippi ultimately will employ 1,000 people. The announced jobs is, I think, around $65,000 a year. It's what the market will demand, but engineers are going to be a lot higher. So it has a huge payroll impact. When you look at a payroll impact on a community from that workforce, it's going to kind of raise the bar for everybody. But having community colleges working with high schools, dual enrollment, everything from fiber splicing to computer engineering and even electrical engineering is all important in that process. And having those relationships built on the front end are very important. So as you know, often the conversation when we're in that search is, yeah, we're talking about power, we're talking about land, we're talking about how do we put it all together. That next conversation is, tell us about the workforce and what can we do as a company to invest in it and partne r with you. So it's all about partnerships. Susan, I've been with the company 38 years, and I've never seen a pipeline like what we have in front of us right now. It's a very exciting time. It's exciting also from perspective of what it means for our state. Talk to us a little bit and, Gray, I'd like your thoughts on why do we do economic development? What is this really about? Yeah. So I don't actually like calling it economic development, right? So for panels like this, it's inside baseball, it's easy, right? But when I'm talking to real people, right? Sorry, guys. When I'm talking to real people and I'm trying to explain to my 22-year-old what I do for a living, I have to use different words, right? And truth be told, it is about, and I do try to simplify it because it's the right thing to do. It's about ever-increasing wages, right? It's about improving incomes, and it's about improving outcomes. At the end of the day, to me, and I believe at its most simple form, this is about creating a quality of place and rising incomes. If we can do those two things, that is what economic development is. That is what our opportunity is, and that's the why. For me, you didn't ask, but I tell this every time I get a chance. There's one reason I'm doing this job, right? I had retired. I was retired for about 6 months. That didn't work out so well for me. But the reason is, in Louisiana, this is an inside Louisiana thing, but we're our own worst enemy oftentimes. And we don't know about the opportunity, so therefore we don't talk about the opportunity. We have long accepted this misperception that our kids have to choose between home and culture and all the things we love about this place, right? Between home and economic opportunity elsewhere. First of all, I will tell you that that's wrong. That is a perception. It's not a reality. Secondly, it's unacceptable, right? That is my why. At its most fundamental level, it's that every Louisianian deserves the right to enjoy the food, the culture, all the good stuff, the reason that y'all are here in New Orleans, right? And economic upward mobility and the opportunity to make a living wage and a better and better growing wage every day and to provide for themselves and their families in a quality place. It's pretty simple. At the end of the day, that's what we do. That's why we do it. That's why Governor Landry wants to change the way we do it, and it's why I do it. It's not more complicated than that. It really isn't. Gray, you want to add something? Yeah. First of all, I'm going to brag on this because I got to meet you on the day that you. First day. Yeah, yeah, the first day of the job. Boy, it has had a huge impression on business leadership, but also people that are in our business that are looking at locations. So you're doing a great job. I know it's only been six months, but it's. Four. Yeah, seven months. Thank you. I'm still new, right? I have to claim it as long as I can. It feels like it. Yeah, I know. It's been nonstop. But so the definition of economic development, real quick. I think everybody in this room, if we told you to write something down, you'd probably all have something very different. I kind of look at it the same way that Susan does, but I think of it in terms of local elected officials, often if they're in a rural community, their definition of economic development is, "I want a Chick-fil-A." That is not what we do. That's a market-driven approach. That's not what we do every day. Yes, it's nice. Okay, but your kids love it. Okay. It's on this, what I call the competitive project side, where the Secretary of Commerce here and the other states and the utilities play. And how do you figure out a way to partner and attract the capital investment and the type of jobs that raises the bar for everybody? It is not just osmosis. It just doesn't happen. So you figure out ways how to support your education, your workforce. How do you build the product that we talked about? But it's also laying the groundwork, as we've been hammering from the very beginning, where people are all on the team together in understanding through business leadership, government leadership. This is where we're going. Here's our strategy. Here's how we're going to work. If you do those things right, then you will get the payroll and the jobs that are game-changing for communities. And that's how you build healthy states, healthy communities from an economic standpoint. So to end on that, then, the selfish question here, we'll end on this one, is you work with utilities, you work projects, once again, all over the country, you work with AWS. Not about our region now. What is it about Entergy that you saw that stands out? Yeah. And again, I'm not speaking on behalf of any client. Just a disclaimer there. I will say that what we get the opportunity to see is a lot of investor-owned utilities. We get to see and work with TVA, Salt River Authority, a lot of federal-type organizations as well. What is different is the approach. And we saw it from the very beginning. A lot of times you'll sit down and again, you start talking about numbers of whether it's a battery facility or whether it's a data center, whatever. Capacity is the biggest issue. A lot of leadership in utilities today will not look at that as, "Oh, man, there's no way we're going to be able to do that." We've even had, and I won't say who, but we even had a group get up and walk out, said, "We just can't do it." After we sat there and set the meeting up with the state and the utility, and they just got up and walked out. That is not what you see here. You see a leadership from the very beginning that listened, that had leadership that listened, that went back and put plans together five years ago. What could this even be possible? And what does it take? What are the little things? Things that you don't think about right away. And whereas a lot of these companies run their own fiber, they don't use a bifiber from anybody else. They use proprietary systems. Right away becomes a big issue. They listened. Part of the bill that was included with Entergy, I believe, at the same time, that provided an ability to do right away for data centers on fiber. So it's listening, it's addressing it, it's knowing that this is a long-term partnership, and how can we work together with our clients, your customers, and, okay, are there ways that we can look at how do we build and invest in and guarantee, and then how do we work together to find the solutions? And that's what we've seen from day one from Entergy. Thank you. Gray and Susan, thank you for being on the panel, but more importantly, thank you for the work that you're doing. When we make our economic outcomes of our communities better, when we help the states that we do business in thrive, our business thrives as well. And that's why we're here. So thank you all for joining us today. We have a 20-minute break, and then we'll be back for the next panel. Ladies and gentlemen, our program will resume momentarily. Thank you. All right, if you'd all take your seat again, please. So it's my pleasure to introduce Kimberly Fontan, our Chief Financial Officer. Well, thank you for that, and welcome back. And I want to thank Susan and Gray again for that great discussion on the opportunities in our states. It underscores the tremendous economic development opportunity that we have and the customer-led approach that Rod described that we're taking to our business. And I'm going to show how that translates into strong financial outcomes. Rod showed you that we have a robust capital plan, and we have a pipeline of potential investments behind it. We have the financial discipline to execute that plan. Our risk management efforts are showing through an improved lower risk profile and through improved credit. And we expect to deliver steady, predictable earnings per share growth of 6%-8% throughout the forecast period. Rod talked about a $33 billion capital plan built on customer outcomes, outcomes that look like a resilient and reliable system, helping our customers grow, delivering clean energy, and enhancing the customer experience. When you translate that into a traditional utility review, you see significant spending in generation, transmission, and distribution, all for the benefit of our customers. This plan includes the accelerated resilience that was approved by the Louisiana Public Service Commission in April. It does not include the potential investments needed to support the pipeline of opportunities in the data center opportunities that Rod described. That capital plan translates into rate-based growth of 9% through the forecast period, or $57 billion in 2028. That is 50% more than in 2022. Executing on that plan requires significant cost management because we expect our O&M over this period to be approximately $2.7 billion on an annual basis. Those continuous improvement efforts help us offset the effects of inflation that we know will come. Continuous improvement efforts that look like the deployment of technology like AI in our call centers, where we're aggregating and analyzing verbal comments and then using those to better train our agents, decrease call volumes, and increase first-time call resolution. Just this year, we've reduced call volumes by 20%, and we're on track for first quartile in first-call resolution. In our operations space, we're using predictive analytics to identify in advance of a transformer failure so that we can go out and change that transformer prior to failure, providing seamless power to our customers and avoiding potential O&M. In our distribution centers, we are enhancing our processes to get our line workers into the field faster every single day, enabling us to better use every dollar, helping us to manage our cost and improve the customer experience. These are just a few of the myriad of examples of continuous improvement that's occurring across the enterprise, not just to help us manage our cost, but to develop our employees and enhance the overall customer experience. Our continuous improvement efforts extend beyond O&M and into the capital space. In our capital, consistent with our customer-led approach, we've modified our capital prioritization processes, and we've implemented capital reviews. In the capital prioritization space, we take the list of functional needs of investments and the list of outcomes that we want to deliver through our opcos, and we marry the two, creating a prioritized list of investments. Then on the capital reviews, we take that list and we select projects for review. We put together a cross-functional team and review them against their scope, their contracting strategy, and execution elements, against benchmarks, standards, and our experience, all to ensure that every dollar is spent to achieve the outcome for our customer in the most cost-efficient way. There is a clear correlation between investment dollars and customer value, and these reviews help us ensure we achieve that. Just this year, in what we've reviewed, we found efficiencies of 15%-20% in our capital, all dollars that are then redeployed to the next prioritized capital investment, enabling us to deliver more outcomes for our customers for the same dollar. In 2024, we expect to review approximately 20% of our 5-year capital plan, redeploying every dollar. This instills a strong sense of continuous improvement across the enterprise. We would expect that efficiency percentage to decline over time as the process matures and the practice is baked into the front end. Now, executing on these investments requires a significant source of funding, and our largest source is our operating cash flow at more than 60%. More importantly, that is more than $4 billion, or 20% more than just our previous five-year view, fueled by the work that Rod described at the operating companies, coupled with our regulatory bodies to ensure timely and constructive cost recovery mechanisms, mechanisms like cash on CWIP in Mississippi and the forward-looking rider in Louisiana. We closed on $1.2 billion in junior subordinated notes in May, allowing us to help fund our investments and also support our credit for their 50% equity content. And in the debt space, we're pursuing loans with the DOE to help manage our overall cost of debt. And we expect to continue to use a moderate amount of equity. For 2025 and 2026, we've sold forward approximately half of our equity needs. And for 2027 and 2028, we're establishing a run rate of approximately 10%-12% of our capital investments. More importantly, those forward sales, they help us support the long-term financing needs, but in the near- term, they provide us flexibility and capacity to manage through risks and support our credit. This translates into strong credit that's only getting stronger. In this period, we are accelerating our credit capacity against our thresholds to above 15% while continuing to support the investments and support our dividend payout ratio of 60%-65%. This forecast includes resolution of SERI, of which 85% is resolved. It includes funding investments that are 30% more than they were just in the previous five-year view, all while building capacity against our thresholds. This forecast does not include the effects of production tax credits for our nuclear plants, credits that we expect to continue to be eligible for, but which we're waiting for the Treasury to provide guidance on. We're working with our regulators to provide those back to customers in a way that is both credit-supportive and also provides customer benefits. We would expect, given those two guidelines, that we would see increased credit with those production tax credits. The important thing about this increased capacity is we are better able to manage our costs for our customers. We're better able to manage through risks, and we have the capacity to help our customers build and grow into our service territories. Now, we talked about a $33 billion capital plan, but our customers' timelines and their needs require more than that $33 billion supports. And so we've worked with a variety of partners to find alternate methods to finance, financing alternatives that look like third-party payment arrangements, deferred payment arrangements like we use for components of Orange County Advanced Power Station, and third-party project financing like we expect to use in the Legend project that was filed earlier this week in Texas as part of the STEP Ahead program. These financings enable us to meet our customers' needs, and they match the cash outlay with the timing of the recovery and the in-service dates, meeting our customers' outcomes and supporting our credit. In this period, we expect to use this type of financing for approximately $6 billion, half of which closes in the period and half of which closes out of the period. This means that we're not just deploying $33 billion of capital for our customers. We're deploying 10% more, or $36 billion, all for the benefit of our customers. We have walked down the path and are checking the boxes on supportive credit and overall risk reduction. Rod talked about the timely recovery mechanisms. I talked about the financing strategies we're pursuing. There are other efforts that continue in our overall risk reduction. In the storm recovery space, Louisiana and New Orleans have a history of accelerating their cost recovery. In Louisiana, in Hurricane Ida, they upsized and opened securitization, enabling to get dollars in faster and reducing costs to customers. Similarly, in New Orleans, they securitized in advance of the prudence finding, accelerating dollars in and supporting customer costs. In a future storm, we would expect to continue to accelerate that cost, closing that recovery period because there's real benefit here for customers. On a billion-dollar storm, customers could save as much as $50 million in avoided storm cost. We've modified our storm collection and storm estimation processes in order to support that. We announced the sale of our gas business in November, and we expect to close on that in 2025, and that continues as planned and is part of our overall de-risking. Then on May 31st, we closed on the liftout of our EWC pension plans, and we removed $1.2 billion of assets and liabilities, assets and liabilities that were fully funded and therefore required no additional funding as part of our overall pension de-risking strategy. In 2020, our pension balance was over $9 billion. Today, after this liftout, our liability is less than $5 billion. That is almost a 50% reduction. That and all of these efforts help support our overall risk reduction. On the topic of risk, if you went on the tour yesterday, Rod talked about the absolute physical risk reduction through the assets that we're deploying. But relative risk matters too. Through our sales growth and through the investments that we're deploying, the relative risk in 2028, as compared to just a few years prior, is 50% less. That means Entergy is positioned to capture the growth opportunity that you heard the panel talk about, that you heard Rod talk about, and to build and grow and deploy investments, all for the benefit of our customers. We have a history of delivering steady, predictable earnings per share growth. In 2022, we increased our trajectory to 6%-8%. We expect to continue that trajectory through 2028. We have the sales growth and the investments to support that. This forecast has overcome increased interest costs, leading to higher costs of capital, significant SERI litigation, and has built credit above our 15%. The pipeline of opportunity that Rod described that you heard the panel talk about means that that trajectory could only improve and potentially accelerate. We have a robust capital plan to deploy for the benefit of our customers. We have the financial discipline to execute against that plan. We have an improved overall risk profile and credit that gives us capacity to invest for our customers. We expect to deliver steady, predictable 6%-8% growth through the forecast period with opportunity for more. That is why this is just the beginning. I'll turn it over to Drew to close us out and talk about the long-term potential opportunity that we see here at Entergy. Thank you. All right. We are very excited again. We have been talking about our unique and robust, diverse growth strategy all morning long. I started off with our business philosophy and talked about how we are listening to our customers, putting capital to work on their behalf, creating value not just for our customers, but for all of our stakeholders, how we are aligning our stakeholders together and then moving more effectively and efficiently through the regulatory process. That is the repeatable process that we are running over and over again. You heard Rod talk about how we do that every day. He gave multiple examples of how that happens. He talked about the growth opportunity in front of us, the significant growth opportunity that's in front of us, and all the capital that we're going to deploy, and the diversity of the sales. Kimberly talked just now about the strong balance sheet that we have created and the platform that that has for additional growth going forward. And of course, you heard from our panel just a few minutes ago about how all that is actually manifesting in the broader environment and our service territory. All of that sales growth. You heard about how our strategy actually really marries up the importance of stakeholder engagement and how that gives our region a competitive advantage by pulling all of our stakeholders together and how important it is that we are part of that process. I want to come back to that sales growth opportunity one more time. And we've gone through each of these four categories. What I want to point out, though, is that these aren't flash-in-the-pan opportunities. These are sustained opportunities. They don't end in 2028, which is the end of our forecast period. Rod called it a once-in-a-generation opportunity. I would add that we expect it to go for a generation. This is going to go potentially for decades. And so that makes it really exciting. And we're talking to our customers about this today. You can see the trends that are already in here. You can see the data centers and the technology. You see that technology trend. Over here, you can see the chemical processing and the material processing. That is part of the onshoring trend. Down below, you can see LNG and ammonia and hydrogen, all part of the clean energy trend. And implicit to all of this is the expectation for reliability and resilience. That is an implicit expectation. Our customers' expectations have risen. And that supports all of the investment that you have seen, the $2 billion, plus a lot more that we already have approved and on the way that's supporting all of this. When you look at these slides, it's important to see these numbers that are up there: 5-10 GW, 2-3 GW for material processing, 4-6 GW for hydrogen and ammonia. Those are big numbers. But I want you to realize that these are not market-sizing numbers. These are actual customers that we are talking to today. They're at the front end of the funnel that Rod showed when he had the slide that he put up that showed the way that we operate and how probabilities change over time. It's at the front end. These are actual customers. And this means that we have a lot more sales growth on the way. When you look at it, there's a little bit of potential for sales growth in our forecast period. But certainly after that, we expect it to continue to expand. We see a lot of opportunity. Again, it's a very diverse opportunity such that by the time we get out to the middle of next decade, we expect that our electric sales will double from where they are today. It's a significant sales growth opportunity and is very different than the historical patterns that we've seen within the electric utility space. That is a lot of growth. And what you see on this page isn't even all of it. The dashed lines and the solid lines represent a 50% probability weighting and a 33% probability weighting for the projects that we can see today. That means that there's a lot more opportunity. That doesn't include all of the projects that are likely to show up between now and the middle of next decade. So a significant sales growth opportunity that's out there. And of course, that means significant electric infrastructure investment opportunity as well. That's what's over here at the end of this page. And that means that we believe, as Kimberly said, our 6%-8% earnings per share growth is going to continue on well past our 2028 outlook. In fact, with this kind of sales growth and this kind of investment opportunity, we think that it could be at the high end or maybe even higher. And we're working to see how much we can accelerate that into our current outlook period. So this is the story that we have. It's a very exciting story. There is a lot of opportunity ahead of us. It's a unique and robust growth opportunity. And it starts, as we started at the beginning, with our customers. Our customers are central to everything that we do. And they are following these trends. They are following the trends for onshoring and clean energy and electrification and technology. And as we are meeting those customer expectations, we are creating value. We are investing to create value for our customers and all of our stakeholders. And together, as we're creating value for all of our stakeholders, we are aligning around where we want to go, starting with our customers and moving through our communities. And together, we are going through the regulatory process, and we are doing it effectively and efficiently to get to the outcomes that benefit all of our stakeholders, including all of you as owners. This is the opportunity that's in front of us. We are super excited about it. It gets us out of bed every day. I will pause there for just a minute because we are going to reset the stage for Q&A, and then we'll wrap up after that. Pause for one minute while we get Rod and Kimberly to come on up, and we'll get the chairs up here. All right. Very good. Now, I think we have a couple of microphones that are out and about. I see some hands up over here. We got one microphone right here starting. I think it's on. Just wanted to start off on what's outside of plan, what's above plan that could be possible out there. If I look at slide 85, it looks like owned versus PPA. It might be conservative estimates there. And then if I think about data centers that are outside of plan, if I think about even MISO spending over time or accelerated resiliency spend, it seems like there's a lot of upside levers there. So just kind of curious, I guess, how you might frame the likelihood or how that could look over time, just given how substantial these buckets are. I'll start, and then I'll hand it off to Kimberly. Of course, it does start with the customers. And there is more customer opportunity, as I was just alluding to there. So there is some opportunity. As those customers start to show up, there's going to be more investment associated with that. You also mentioned MISO. I think there is a potential for a significant amount of MTEP investment. All of this customer growth and the demand that that is creating is also going to cause incremental transmission reliability investment, which will come through the MTEP process. So there should be quite a bit of transmission as well. And not all of that is reflected in here either. Yeah. In specifics, the Texas filing, the Legend filing, as I mentioned, we expect that to be alternate finance. So that's assumed during this period. It closes at the end of the period. If you think about the 3,000 MW in Louisiana or the 4,500 MW of the JDA, I think about all those as enablers, help you move faster. And as the customers come and need clean energy, then it helps us to go faster and could accelerate capital into the period. Got it. That's helpful there. And I think the slides touched on improved ROEs over time. Just wondering if you could provide a little bit more color on the drivers to earning higher returns. Yeah. We've talked before about the work that we're doing to make sure that we have constructive regulatory outcomes. I talked about the incremental operating cash flow that's being generated off of that. Certainly, the cash in Mississippi helps that. As you get cash earlier, you're helping your credit, but you're also helping your earnings as you're closing assets and meeting the recovery over time. It's across the jurisdictions. We certainly see it in Mississippi. We've spent a lot of time in Arkansas trying to optimize their mechanism. They have a cap and making sure that we are getting as much as we can associated with that cap and reducing amounts over the cap, for example. It's not a specific jurisdiction. It's across the board. But I think the easiest way to see it is that incremental operating cash flow. Great. Thank you very much. Hey, guys. It's Shar from Guggenheim. Just to maybe fine-tune Jeremy's question here, I guess, obviously, more investment at an accelerated pace could come sooner than later, especially leverage at the data centers. It's a key message of the plan. Maybe just talk a little bit about the profile and the shape of that sort of EPS guidance that you have in there, especially since you rolled forward two years. Are you trending closer to the top end? And then what happens if these sort of incremental items transpire? The base is strong. You rolled forward. What do all these mean to the plan as we're thinking about accreti on? Thanks. Yeah. We're certainly well within the range. You're spending a significant amount of capital that helps you have confidence in that range. And when you think about acceleration of that range, if you have an incremental customer that we don't have planned, if we have a new data center that comes in, for example, and they ramp up during the period, you would certainly expect that was my reference to accelerate that EPS. But what is assumed is the customer profile that we have, that 8%-9%, and then on an average customer basis, it's 4%-5% growth. And then the investments, $33 billion underneath that support that, that put us well within that range. Got it. Okay. Thanks. And then just the 5-10 GW of the pipeline. It's a big number. I guess, can you just talk about sort of customer protections and how you sort of think about exit fees should, say, a large energy-intensive customer decide to leave, especially in a state like Louisiana? So are these kind of data centers subject to sort of these exit fees that can offset stranded costs? Should these customers back out of their commitments? Yeah. And it's a great question. And it's a question that's being asked in each state. And Mississippi right now represents the best example. Our greatest opportunity to address that is in the contracting for each individual data center customer. But that is a customer-by-customer, state-by-state conversation. It'll show up in the individual negotiations. There's no boilerplate answer to that question. But you are looking at, for instance, length of years of minimum requirements, if you will, for contributions from a customer. It's not just a data center conversation. It's really any large customer that will require significant upfront capital to serve, where all of us have an interest in ensuring that there's that equity around cost causation and sort of cost allocation, if you will. So it's front and center. But it's contracting is the space where we're sitting across the table from those counterparties, managing that risk on behalf of our customers and regulators. Hi. It's Andy Levi from HITE Hedge. Just a few questions. So, Drew, I thought you said at the end of your comments that you guys were—and this is a base plan, right? So there's upside to that base plan—but that you would expect to be on the top end of that 6%-8% because Kimberly seemed to wasn't that specific to one of the questions that was answered. Okay. So I'll say what I said again, Andy, to be clear, and then we can, if I need more clarification. I was looking at the period beyond 2028 and saying, yes, we have a good foundation for continuing on our long- term. But with all of this growth, we'd expect to trend towards the upper end and maybe even towards, maybe even above. Within your forecast period, is that? No, after the forecast period. Our objective is to try to pull that forward into the forecast period. There's opportunity for that, but we weren't saying that today. I'm saying that's what we are trying to bring to you next. Okay. So your base plan is the 6%-8% with a 7% midpoint, basically. Yeah. Okay. Disappointing a little bit, but be honest. Then just on the base plan, so what is not in the base plan that, I guess, gets you to the high end in your forecast period? And then I have one follow-up question on the PTC. You want to talk about that? Yeah. So, as I said, what's in the base plan is the sales growth that we talked about and the investments to support that, so the $33 billion. But I talked about the 3,000 MW of approved solar in Louisiana and the 4,500 MW of JDAs. If those come through faster than they potentially are laid out, then they would come into the period, you'd increment investment, and you could have higher-end investments. If you have a customer that comes faster than is expected or ramps faster and requires additional investment, then those would certainly pull investments into the period that was moved us in the forecast period. So I think there is plenty of opportunity around what could come in. There's MTEP spending that Drew described that could close in the period depending on the timing and what customers it's supporting. So I think the takeaway is you've got a solid base plan, and there is a world of opportunity behind it that could accelerate in to move you well up. Yeah. Hi. It's Steve Fleishman of Wolfe. I'm going to ask Andy's follow-up question, which is just on the nuclear PTC, which you're not including in your metrics. Could you give us a little sense of, assuming it comes out as expected, a range of potential FFO to debt for that? Yeah. We calculated that a couple of years ago, and a couple of things have changed. The market capacity or the market pricing and the, as the market price increases in the capacity market in MISO, your value of your PTC decreases because you're trying to make sure that the nuclear asset is getting compensated for that. So what we had said previously was about $170 million was sort of an average potential, which could translate into credit of 50-60 basis points. That amount varies depending on the size of the capacity market and the pricing in that market, and then also how those units—we're assuming that they run. And there's also a potential for how that flows back. So if you get credit capacity, you could just move it to increase your credit, or you could deploy additional dollars against it, maintain a 15% threshold, but maybe not go way above that. So it's how you choose to use that. So I think the range varies by year, but it could be not insignif icant. Okay. And then if you don't mind, just on the alternative financings, you mentioned a few of them, but maybe specific to the Legend project. Could you go into more details on exactly what you're going to be doing there with the project financing? And since it sounds like that might be a framework for maybe some others in the future, it would be helpful. Sure. Effectively, you're using a third-party balance sheet to finance it until the project is closed. And then I would think about it as a BOT. Except that in a BOT, they traditionally build it and sell it to you. But from a structure perspective, a third party is financing it like you would a BOT. You're doing the construction the way we have on all of our assets through EPC contracts and that sort of thing. And then you buy it. You have a transaction at the end. So you buy it all at once at the same time that it goes into rates. So it hits rate base and such. And so you're not earning a return on it as it's being built, and you'll just get it all right at the end. For that $6 billion, you don't have a return on that. That's right until it's closed. And then when you close, you put it in rates. You get the return like you would with any other asset. Okay. But that project, in that example, it's online by 2028, and it should be, in theory, in your outlook for 2028 then? That's right. Okay. Awesome. Thank you. Hi. Good afternoon. Sophie Karp from KeyBanc. I have a couple of questions. On page 84 of your presentation, you're showing the outlook for sales growth, and it's pretty impressive. 8%-9% CAGR for the industrial, and it's flat for residential. I'm kind of wondering, with all these industrial customers coming in, presumably, we could see some population growth as well. So should we think about these residential projections as conservative and something that could be an upside? Yeah. When you think about residential growth, we're continuing to see effects of energy efficiency. So you do see residential growth, and we're certainly seeing it in Texas, for example. In other areas, you're not seeing as much population move in, and you do have to consider the effects of offset of energy efficiency, which we have an assumption around. So that's why you're getting to that blended, roughly flat residential. I would agree that I think there could be some conservatism in there. It's hard to tease that out, but certainly, there's a multiplier effect that comes along with this level of investment and then the subsequent jobs that should come off of that and then the reinvestment of those tax dollars in communities that make them more attractive to draw people in. So I think there is opportunity for residential growth that we haven't been seeing for quite a while. But this significant industrial growth and the investment that that's bringing could bring the residential and commercial growth along with it eventually. Thank you. And then could you talk a little bit about your partnership with NextEra Energy Resources? Kind of what led to it? Why NextEra Energy Resources? Could we see more of that? Sort of any color would be helpful. Yeah. I'll start. I'll hand it off to Rod. Rod talked about this a little bit. They're a partner that has a lot of scale and scope and supply chain capability, and we're on an accelerated timeline, so they make sense. It's not an exclusive arrangement with them, but they are a good partner, and they are helping us with our owned elements. We are looking to own these assets, and they are a good partner to have to try and get us there. They are a viable partner for us to upscale our capacity delivered for customers. It's not much more complex than that. This is one of the rare opportunities we have to align with NextEra on a constructive basis. We know that they compete in other areas for other opportunities in our service territories, but this is all part of stakeholder engagement. This was one avenue where our interests were very much aligned. So we took advantage of that for the benefit of our customers. Hey, Scott Senchak. Just a question on the dividend. What's the target payout ratio, and what is the dividend growth rate? The target payout ratio is 60%-65%, and the growth rate is roughly 6%. So we've moderated the growth rate to the bottom of the range to enable us to continue to grow the dividend but also support the growth in our customers. Gotcha. So over time, I think you were at 64 last year. So that should trend down a little bit. And then at that point, will we see the dividend more in line with earnings? I think we'll have to evaluate that. I mean, I certainly think that we continue to expect to pay a strong dividend, and we also want to support our customers' growth. And so that 6%, 60%-65%, is the balance of that. Gotcha. And then on cash taxes, what is the assumption for taxes during the plan? I th ink the ta x rate is in the back of the deck. I'm sorry. Cash taxes. Are you paying any? When are you a cash taxpayer? Well, I think if you're referencing the corporate minimum tax, that could come into effect in the back end. It keeps moving out, frankly. It's off of book income. It's a funky calculation, but I don't have the exact cash tax timing. I'm sure Anne or Bill can get that for you. Hi. Andrew Weisel, Scotiabank. First, just a quick follow-up on the NextEra. Have you gotten specific on the ownership structure of these projects? Will it be billed on transfer or PPA or a mix? It's going to be we will ultimately own these assets under this JDA. So that has been settled. They will have, I think, some ongoing participation in that because I know that they're also looking for ratable income, but we will own the assets. Okay. Great. Thanks. Then second on the resiliency, thanks for the tour yesterday. Really cool to see the stuff in person. You got approval for a portion of what you asked for, obviously. What are sort of the next steps in terms of what will it take to get more approved? Will it take demonstrating construction of the first batch? Will it take more storms, unfortunately, to prove the need or more conversations? How do you think about the process to get more of that stuff approved? Promise is made, promise is kept. At the end of the day, the reporting requirements ought to provide transparency to make it easier. It's an ongoing stakeholder engagement conversation. It was far more palatable for the regulators and other stakeholders to stomach the first three years as proof of concept in support of, and certainly from our vantage point and our stakeholder standpoint, the expectation that this is ongoing. This is not a short-term, short-shot one opportunity play. This resiliency conversation will go on for what we believe to be a decade, decade-plus. We're confident in the starting point. We're aligned with the first three years, but as we sit here today, we have an expectation that this will be ongoing. Vikram Bora, GSAM. Question for you, Rod. As far as the accelerated deployment timeline, which you highlighted, I think the 35%-40% savings in terms of getting to market, I don't know if it was getting to market or getting the ESA signed. Are there benefits outside of just, I know the focus was data centers, but just for large industrial customers? And how do you sort of, I guess, think about that within the context of where else the customer is maybe locating to site projects, right, either in the country or outside the country? And is that saving sort of in there going forward, meaning is it a competitive advantage for you? So I want to make sure I understand your question. Are you talking about the diversity of our customer base? I want to make sure. No, no, no. I'm talking about the accelerated deployment. So basically, the 30-40 months, I think, from initial conversation to ESA signing, I think, was the target. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. I think it was actually getting online to market, like serving the customer on your speed to market. Oh, okay. Okay. And we're talking about the 35%-40% reduction in time that it takes. That's right. Right. But your question relative to the reduction in timeline, is it tied to geography? I want to make sure I was understanding the. It's more tied to, is this a long-term co mpetitive advantage for you? Yes. Irrespective of whether it's of whatever type the customer is, right? It is. It is. The transformational part of that is that the traditional timeline wasn't just energy-related. The shorter timeline right now is being driven by the speed to market for the data centers. But when you think about the other areas that we highlighted, LNG and the chemicals, petrochemicals, their project life cycles are still sort of elongated. And so the objective for us is to have that timeline be aligned with the customer's expectation. So speed to market for us is customer-centric. And so if the LNG process, if they were incented to reduce a 4- to 5-year project life cycle to 3, then they'd certainly be aligned with that. But there's no benefit for us to be too early in reducing that timeline. The readiness standpoint, clarity around recovery mechanisms, the reimbursement agreements, all the things that are credit-protective for us on the front end as we're deploying capital to get ready for them, those are the things that, aside from sort of this temporal reduction in time, are going to be most important to us. But that 40% or so reduction is really sort of a proof of concept given what we saw Mississippi accomplish and then what the other states are beginning to replicate as they want to compete for data centers as well. Thank you for bearing with me to make sure I understood where you were coming from. Anthony Crowdell, Mizuho, thanks for taking me before Shelby's question. Just wanted to give us an update on a potential settlement in SERI. We had some good momentum maybe going into the first quarter call. Maybe it slowed down, and then also on the Louisiana PSC. Then second, I'm just curious. I don't know if it's specific to Entergy, but a data center question to start the day. Just I wonder that states are competing against each other. You're located in four different states. And is it this arms race of one state offering maybe more tax rebate than another? I mean, what makes Louisiana win over Mississippi or Arkansas or Texas? I mean, it looks like your states have similar attributes. Why a data center would locate in one versus the ot her? Thanks. All right. You want to go to the first re gulatory one? Yeah. On the SERI front, the starting point is 84% of SERI has been de-risked. And from our vantage point, our negotiations around SERI are critically important. The FRP settlement and extension for us takes primacy from our strategic priority standpoint. Ideally, we'd like to address them both. That's going to be ongoing. But I don't have a timeline, but I can tell you that all of the stakeholders in Louisiana recognize the importance of us creating clarity around that sooner rather than later. Without disclosing where we are with any one specific stakeholder, our point of view hasn't changed one bit to take that off the books as quickly as we can. Our priorities are definitely FRP and then SERI, with SERI being mostly addressed to date. In regards to the competition around the data centers amongst the jurisdictions, I mean, that is true, and we have to be mindful of that. Each state is in a different place. Each utility is in a different place. And so they have to bring to bear to the conversation what they can. I will say there is plenty to go around. There is enough opportunity for every jurisdiction here. And I'm saying it's really we're talking about Arkansas, North Louisiana, Northern Mississippi. There's not a lot of data center activity along the coast, to be sure. But in those areas, there is a lot of opportunity. And the communities and the governments involved want to be very competitive. So we are working hard to meet those customers' expectations. Hey, Nick Campanella at Barclays. Thanks for taking my questions. On the regulatory initiatives, you talked about credit-supportive mechanisms across the portfolio that you're working towards. So is this just what states are you going to be targeting this in? Is it about doing similar things like cash CWIP in Mississippi? And how should we think about that? Well, you should think about it as wherever there is capital deployment that is outside the normal course where we're trying to accommodate a specific customer, that we're going to ensure that there are regulatory mechanisms that help protect and complement our credit. We'd like it to be as more forward-looking and anticipating further growth than a customer-by-customer basis, but it starts with a customer-by-customer issue. The brilliance of the move in Mississippi allows us to land and accommodate AWS. And so we got no problems with that. We think it was a phenomenal and a brilliantly constructed sort of blueprint. But Louisiana, Louisiana, it might Louisiana sales and use tax conversation has a broader scope than just one customer. We like that idea, and we think that's going to be replicated to the point that Drew was making about each state's wanting to be competitive. It's not a one-customer-by-one customer play. Although for our service territory, Mississippi was out of the chute, and they set one heck of a bar in terms of checking off the things that are important that enable us to respond. So it's encouraging. It's going to be iterative. But it also is going to be dependent upon how these customers show up and deliver on the commitments they made to the state that will give the states more confidence to replicate and elongate these regulatory mechanisms. I'll just add that we are very excited about this financial opportunity and that the financial and all of our stakeholders, as we're thinking about this customer effort, they recognize that having a financial-strong electric partner is critical to the competitive advantage of the region. And so that's something that is manifesting in our stakeholder engagement conversations. I appreciate that. Then on your utility ROE outlook, you have it going from 9 to 9.5 through the plan. Is that improving your earned return, or is that authorized r eturns? Thanks. Yeah, that's your actual returns coming out, but effectively that is what we were just talking about, what he was talking about, about timely recovery, closing gaps on where you have caps, for example, managing where you are relative to the caps, accelerated mechanisms like the Louisiana accelerated, all of those play in together, but those are expected returns. No, we're not assuming that authorized returns jump up. That's right. That's what I was thinking. We're not assuming, just to clarify. Yeah. Hi, Bill Appicelli from UBS. Just on the weighted average residential bill through 2028, I think that CAGR is now 4%, which is up a little bit from the 2% you had through 2026. So maybe we can just speak to why that's trending higher. Is that just because it's further out in time or the higher capital? And maybe what are the levers that can push that up or down? Yeah. So to start, you've got a fuel cost assumption in there, and you have to have an assumption. So we have a forward curve that assumes the gas prices go up to whatever the forward curve is. So if you pull that out and sort of assumed a more moderate fuel cost, you would be much closer to 3%. You'd be just above 3%. Beyond that, you've got investments that are closing during the period, but certainly you've got incremental customers that are supporting those as well. So it's really that interplay between what are you assuming around to think a forward gas curve is a reasonable assumption, but it could go either way. And then where our customers are landing and the need, I think Rod talked about the need that our customers are asking for the deployment of dollars, they're willing to pay for some of that accelerated resilience to get on faster after an event, for example, or make sure they have power in the event of adding these economic development opportunities. Yeah. And just to drive home the first point, I think in the materials it says what our gas price assumptions are, it's up over $4.5 in 2028, which is, I don't know, in the 70% range in terms of an increase from today's prices. So that's really a big piece of the driver. Okay. Thank you. And then on the CapEx slide in terms of the incremental opportunities, is there any way you can quantify within the period what that incremental set could be? You talked about what some of the drivers would be, but in terms of the actual capital dollars, is that in the several billion-dollar range when we think about the 2024 to 2028, above the 2033? Yeah. When you're talking about the through 2028, yes, the answer is potential several billion dollars, both from the generation side and the transmission side. Both of those are going to be potentially some significant increases that are out there, depending on how the customers actually show up. And all of it is going to ultimately be customer-driven, but we think that the customers could take us down that path. Okay. Great. Thank you. Hi, Ryan Levine with Citi. As a key stakeholder in these data center conversations, do you have a preference on which state the customer moves to? And any. No. No. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. And then on the data center topic, in terms of planning, with these customers' load forecasts being somewhat uncertain, do you have any line of sight in terms of the pattern of the load contribution from these specific customers that are targeting your service territories? I'll just say they look like they are coming online, starting online fairly soon, and then they ramp for 2-3 years is a typical way that they would do it. So I mean, they are talking about getting their first, I think Gray was talking about shells, right? The first shells should be coming online in a couple of years. And then after that, they're going to be building them out. And so they should be ramping up fairly quickly after that. Do you expect any volatility in the load once they're fully ramped? Not a whole lot. The expectation is these things would be high load factor assets, typically north of 90%. Okay. And then last question. In terms of the CapEx opportunity to be accelerated, what tools would you look to manage the cash flow requirements if CapEx were to be added? Yeah. I mean, I think it's similar to tools that we talked about. You can use financing, whether that is third-party financing. The deferred payment arrangements is a nice tool where a primary vendor may be willing to work terms with you that enable you to close that when the project's completed, as opposed to sort of managing your milestone payments along the way. And then if the customer is driving significant investment, there's opportunity for we certainly have customer contributions on some projects today. So I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all. It's a variety of options that enable us to get to that overall objective. Hey, guys. It's Shar again with a quick follow-up. Just on the Texas assets that you guys are proposing to build, Legend is roughly $1,900 per kW, and then Lone Star is roughly around $1,600 per kW. It just seems like they're a little bit higher than kind of new build economics you're seeing, especially some of the asset transactions we've seen. I guess what's driving the pricing there? Is it the CCS capability? And then how do we think about this as you're going through a recommendation with the PUCT to get these approved and maybe competing assets? Yeah. So I think part of it is that prices are a little bit higher than we're seeing. I think I'm not sure exactly in the numbers that you're talking about if that is including transmission or not. So certainly there are some incremental transmission costs that are coming along with these assets, and that's going to be a key driver as well. But there's also a lot of other economic opportunity, a lot of tax dollars, a lot of multiplier effect from these companies, particularly in Texas, that are coming in. And so they appreciate the fact that we are moving quickly to get this there. And as Rod was talking about, the STEP program, all the different people that were involved, the great example of the stakeholder engagement that we're doing to lay the foundation for getting this approved in front of the commission in Texas. So yeah, it is a little bit more expensive, but I think that's reflective of where the market's actually moving right now, mostly. Perfect. Thanks. Good morning. Jeremy Tonet, JPMorgan. Thanks for squeezing me in for one more question. Just wondered any thoughts you might be able to provide on the EPA rules and how that could impact new gas-fired generation or just the uncertainty introduced and how that would, I guess, impact planning. Yeah. So we are planning that this will eventually happen. The good news for us is we believe our customers are taking us there right now. And so we are working, as Rod explained, we are working down a path to create the capability to do this in our service territory right now. We are working with customers in order to create that platform and to help us with the costs associated with that. I think it's fair to say that going through Texas or Louisiana, it might be a challenge right now to get CCS approved unless it's mandated. But if customers are demanding it, they will come with us to the commission, and they will help pay for it, right? So we're thinking of it more as a development project, a traditional merchant development project almost, in order to get our customers the attributes that they want and need, even though there's not yet a mandate out there. I will also add we're doing this because we think we're ideally situated to be able to do CCS with Louisiana and all the things that Rod had on his slide, Louisiana primacy and the existing infrastructure around CO2 pipelines and the like. All that means we think we are well positioned. If anybody is going to lead the way on this, we think it 's us. Got it. That's helpful. That makes sense. Louisiana quite ripe for CCS given everything you discussed. Thank you. Hi, Greg Rice with the Verition. Just on the alternative financing, you mentioned kind of $6 billion and $3 billion kind of closed it in this 5-year window. When's that other $3 billion come into play? Is that kind of fairly close to 2028 or further out? Yeah, it's in the next couple of years following 2028 because you're building in this period, and they're just assets that take longer to build, for example. I think we got one more question. Hi, it's Andy Levi again. So I just want to get back to my original question because I'm listening to all this, and I'm truly a little bit confused. So you have this 6%-8% growth rate. You have all this top-line growth. You have 9% rate-based growth. I understand the dilution aspect of it as far as how much equity you have to issue. But some of your peers like to point to the high end. You're at the 6%-8%. You've been at the high end over the last couple of years. Actually, if you look at your track record, you're one of the top five companies in actually meeting or exceeding your earnings per share estimates every year. So why do you feel you need to be kind of, I would say, conservative and not want to point to the high end? What is preventing you as a, whether it's a risk manager, CEO, CFO, whatever it may be, to not point to the high end? I mean, I think what we've laid out is a strong plan. 6%-8% with a 7% midpoint. We've talked about the opportunities that could drive us there. We've talked about the things that it overcame. And I talked about the investments and the customer growth that could certainly move you beyond that. But we're talking about a five-year window. And there's things that can happen in that five-year window that we would need to work through. But this is where we are right now. We think it's a really strong plan that we're excited about delivering for our customers. And to be sure, Andy, we appreciate that all this opportunity means that there could be more upside in our plan, and we are working to firm that up. And we'll bring it whenever we get that firm up. It's not lost on us or anybody on the management team here that there is an opportunity to accelerate. And so we're working hard to clean it up. I think what we've got here, as Kimberly just said, is an exciting plan that is creating a platform that has less risk and more opportunity than we've ever had before. So that really firms up what the pipeline looks like going forward. We're really excited about that. With that platform, we have an opportunity to really launch going forward. So we still owe you on that part. We are coming with it. But we have a great platform to begin with. We're very excited about it. We think there's a lot of opportunity just in the platform, just where we are. We don't know that we're getting all the credit that we deserve just for that. So we're excited. With that, I think that's the last question. Thank you all for coming today. Really appreciate you all being in person. For those of you that stayed with us online, thank you very much. Hope you all have an opportunity to enjoy the rest of your time here in New Orleans. We're very excited about the opportunity to serve you as owners. Thank you very much. Have a good day.