Today (Halloween), the utility company Xcel Energy filed its latest quarterly financial report. The Minnesota Star Tribune headline:
Xcel will increase capital spending by $11B as data centers, climate change put pressure on system
The “B” in the headline stands for “billion.” Xcel serves customers in 8 states — from the Canadian border (Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota) to the Mexican border (New Mexico, Texas) with Colorado, South Dakota, and Wisconsin in between. So, not all of those $11 billion are earmarked for Minnesota.
The company posted a PDF of its earnings slideshow here. The headline above comes from three bullets on page 3 of the presentation:
To put Xcel’s five-year capital expenditure plans in perspective, the company’s total stock market capitalization is less than $38 billion, so this is “bet-the-company” level stuff. As for the market itself, Wall Street loves this plan, with the stock (XEL) up almost 7 percent on an otherwise down day for equities.
As the Xcel presentation points out (p. 9), the 9,000 MW of additional power demanded by new data centers across its territories is the equivalent of 9 million new residential customers. To be clear, these are data centers to be operated by third parties, not the utility itself.
The wildfire problem is mostly confined to Colorado (pp. 41-45).
Here’s the company’s specific plan for Minnesota (p. 7):
On p. 17, Xcel indicate that it will be filing a rate case for electricity next month (November) in Minnesota., looking for a $500 million rate increase over two years.