US capital infrastructure investor NextEra Energy Resources has released its 2024 financial results, a year that saw the company’s subsidiary Florida Power and Light (FPL) commission 2.2GW of new solar capacity.
The additions are a record for the utility, which added 450MW of new solar capacity in 2022 and 1.2GW of new capacity in 2023. FPL’s solar additions made up over a third of the company’s 6GW of new renewable energy generation and storage capacity additions in 2024, which drove positive financial results for NextEra in 2024.
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The company’s adjusted full-year net income reached US$3.2 billion in 2024, up from US$2.8 billion in 2023. This translated to an adjusted earnings per share increase from US$1.36 to US$1.51. Growth was driven, in large part, by new investments in renewable energy and energy storage systems, with the company attributing US$0.48 earnings per share to new investment in these technologies, more than any other change in the company’s financial performance.
Similarly, this growth was reflected in FPL’s performance. While its Q4 2024 earnings were marginally lower than its earnings in the same quarter of the previous year, its full-year adjusted earnings increased from US$4.3 billion in 2023 to US$4.5 billion in 2024, as shown in the graph above.
NextEra’s clean energy earnings have been largely on track with its forecasts and notably larger than its other energy technologies. In Q4 2023, the company expected to generate EBITDA of between US$4,350-5,050, a figure that reached US$4,647 in 2024. This compares to earnings of US$976 and US$511 in the company’s nuclear and natural gas pipelines, respectively.
Solar and storage investments
Last June, NextEra commissioned a new solar project in Texas, part of the company’s plans to significantly increase its solar and storage capacity in the coming years. In the same month, NextEra signed an agreement with Entergy to develop 4.5GW of new solar and storage capacity in the US.
This expected growth is reflected in NextEra’s other figures. Between 2026 and 2029, FPL expects to commission around 5.4GW of new solar capacity, alongside 3.4GW of new battery projects, as solar and storage take up an increasingly large part of its total energy mix.
This shift towards solar and storage is reflected in NextEra’s plans for the coming years, with the company planning to add 7.2GW of solar by the end of this year, and a further 7.1GW of solar between 2026 and 2027.
If these forecasts are accurate, NextEra will add more solar than batteries and wind combined between now and 2027, and this is reflected in the graph above, as the company looks to meet its 81GW renewable energy capacity target by the end of 2027.
The capacity additions include the “current backlog of projects with signed long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs), build-own-transfer projects with long-term operations and maintenance (O&M) agreements and assets with expected long-term agreements including power hedging and/or the sale of environmental attributes.”
“Energy Resources also had a record year in solar origination and a record year in battery storge origination, again demonstrating the strong demand for renewables and storage because they are low cost and can be deployed now,” said John Ketchum, NextEra CEO in a conference call announcing the results. “Focusing for a moment on battery storage, we have deployed more than 3.4GW in total and currently have more than 7.2GW in our backlog.”
Last week, NextEra subsidiary NextEra Energy Partners announced that it had rebranded to ‘XPLR infrastructure’, effective immediately.
