Entergy is a New Orleans-based electric utility holding company serving 3.1 million customers across five operating subsidiaries in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and the city of New Orleans. It is the second-largest nuclear power generator in the United States by owned capacity, with five reactors at four sites producing approximately 5,400 megawatts. CEO Drew Marsh has led the company since 2013, making him one of the longer-tenured chief executives among large U.S. regulated utilities. Entergy owns roughly 30,000 megawatts of total generating capacity — gas, nuclear, and a growing share of utility-scale solar — serving a region whose load profile is shaped by a large, heat-sensitive residential base, a significant petrochemical and refining industrial corridor along the Mississippi River, and a rapidly growing wave of data center and advanced manufacturing demand.
The geographic footprint is distinctive among major U.S. utilities. Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas rank among the states with the highest rates of poverty and energy burden in the country. Entergy's customers spend a higher percentage of their household income on electricity than customers of almost any other large U.S. utility. That reality shapes every capital spending, rate case, and affordability negotiation the company navigates with its state regulators — the Arkansas Public Service Commission, the Louisiana Public Service Commission, the Mississippi Public Service Commission, and the Public Utility Commission of Texas. Entergy Louisiana, the largest subsidiary by revenue and capital base, uses a forward-looking formula rate plan approved by the LPSC that reduces regulatory lag and allows more timely recovery of capital investments. Entergy Arkansas is transitioning back to a similar forward test year approach, with a 2027 rate case filing expected to establish new base rates effective January 2027.
Entergy sold all of its merchant nuclear plants in the Northeast between 2016 and 2021 — Vermont Yankee (closed 2014), FitzPatrick (sold to Exelon 2016), Pilgrim (closed 2019), and Indian Point (closed 2021) — completing a yearslong exit from unregulated nuclear generation outside its service territory. The remaining fleet in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi operates entirely within the regulated utility structure, where plant costs are recovered through rates and state commission oversight, rather than competing in wholesale power markets.
Entergy Louisiana is the company's largest and most consequential operating subsidiary, serving customers across most of the state outside of New Orleans and a few municipal territories. The service area includes the Louisiana Chemical Corridor — the stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that hosts approximately 25% of the nation's petrochemical production capacity — giving Entergy Louisiana an industrial load base that few utilities outside the Gulf Coast can match. That industrial base provides relatively weather-insensitive, high-load-factor demand that is growing rapidly as data centers and advanced manufacturing join the traditional chemical and refining complex.
In August 2025, the LPSC approved the generation and transmission resources needed to serve Meta's planned 2-gigawatt data center campus in northeastern Louisiana — a decision that authorized Entergy Louisiana to build approximately 2.2 gigawatts of new combined-cycle gas plants and procure up to 1.5 gigawatts of solar resources to supply a single customer. The scale of that single approval illustrates the magnitude of the load growth arriving in Entergy's service territory. The LPSC's August 2024 approval also extended Entergy Louisiana's formula rate plan for three years, providing regulatory stability for the capital program.
Entergy Arkansas serves the western portion of the system, including the Little Rock metro and the Arkansas River Valley industrial corridor, and owns Arkansas Nuclear One — the only nuclear plant in the state. Entergy Mississippi serves a predominantly rural and small-city footprint with Grand Gulf Nuclear as its primary firm capacity source through a long-standing inter-company capacity arrangement. Entergy Texas serves the Beaumont-Port Arthur area of southeastern Texas, including a significant petrochemical and refining complex along the Neches and Sabine rivers, with load characteristics similar to Entergy Louisiana's industrial base. Entergy New Orleans operates as a separate subsidiary within Orleans Parish, subject to city council approval rather than the LPSC, carrying additional regulatory complexity and a customer base with acute affordability pressures given the city's demographics.
Entergy's five reactors span three states. Arkansas Nuclear One (ANO), near Russellville, Arkansas, has two pressurized water reactor units: Unit 1 at 836 megawatts (operating since 1974) and Unit 2 at 988 megawatts (1980). River Bend Station, a 974-megawatt boiling water reactor in St. Francisville, Louisiana, has operated since 1986. Waterford 3, a 1,159-megawatt pressurized water reactor in Killona, Louisiana, has operated since 1985. Grand Gulf Nuclear Station, a 1,443-megawatt boiling water reactor in Port Gibson, Mississippi, is the largest single-unit nuclear plant in the United States and has operated since 1985. Grand Gulf is owned through System Energy Resources, Inc. (SERI), a separate Entergy subsidiary that sells the plant's capacity and energy to the four operating companies under a long-standing Availability Agreement — an arrangement that has been the subject of significant and ongoing FERC and state regulatory litigation over cost allocation between the subsidiaries.
The IRA's nuclear Production Tax Credit, which began applying in 2024, provides up to 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for zero-emission nuclear generation through 2032 and has improved the economics of the fleet at a time when data center load growth is also pushing wholesale and capacity prices higher in the regions Entergy operates. Entergy holds a Nuclear Regulatory Commission early site permit for a potential second reactor at Grand Gulf, expiring April 2027, and is seeking to renew that permit for another 20 years. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry has held public discussions with Entergy about expanding nuclear capacity in Louisiana to meet growing demand, though no formal construction commitment has been made.
No large U.S. utility has been tested by severe weather as repeatedly as Entergy. The Gulf Coast service territory sits in the path of Atlantic hurricane season every year, and the consequences of a major storm landfall are measured in hundreds of thousands of customer outages, billions of dollars of infrastructure damage, and months of restoration work. Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 left 1.9 million of Entergy's 2.7 million customers without power — the largest customer outage in U.S. utility history at the time — affecting 37,000 square miles, roughly a third of the company's service area. The storm destroyed Entergy New Orleans's financial viability entirely: the subsidiary filed for bankruptcy in September 2005, the only investor-owned U.S. utility to enter bankruptcy from a natural disaster in the modern era, and emerged in 2007 after the city council approved rate recovery and a restructuring plan.
Hurricane Ida in August 2021 struck at Category 4 intensity with 150-mile-per-hour winds at landfall — tied for the strongest storm to hit Louisiana in recorded history — and left nearly 950,000 Entergy customers without power. Restoration cost estimates reached $2.1 to $2.6 billion, with Entergy Louisiana absorbing roughly $2.0 to $2.4 billion of that total. An NPR investigation published shortly after Ida documented that Entergy had resisted regulators' calls to accelerate grid hardening in the New Orleans area in the years before the storm, contributing to the severity of outages in some neighborhoods. The coverage detailed how older transmission structures along a corridor from Port Fourchon — where Ida made landfall — performed substantially worse than newer, more resilient structures built to post-1997 design standards: more than half the structures on a seven-mile stretch of older line were destroyed, while only three of 387 newer structures on the same general path failed.
The post-Ida response was more aggressive. Entergy rebuilt the critical Mississippi River transmission crossing from Avondale to Harahan — a major link for the New Orleans metro — to withstand winds up to 175 miles per hour, placing the upgraded structure in service within a year of landfall. The company began replacing coastal distribution poles with Class 1 grade steel poles designed to withstand sustained winds above 130 miles per hour, exceeding current regulatory requirements. These investments are recoverable through rates, and Entergy pursued securitization of the Ida storm costs with state regulators to spread the recovery burden over years rather than concentrating the impact in near-term bills.
The fundamental tension has no clean resolution. The Gulf Coast service territory is physically exposed to the most severe hurricane risk in the continental United States, and building the infrastructure to withstand Category 4 and 5 storms at scale costs more than building infrastructure designed for less extreme weather. Those higher costs translate into higher rates for customers who already pay a large share of their income for electricity. The regulatory compact in Louisiana and Arkansas has generally supported storm cost recovery through securitization and rate cases, but the pressure on affordability constrains how much hardening investment can be recovered at any given time. Entergy has invested approximately $9.5 billion in transmission and distribution assets meeting or exceeding then-current resiliency standards in the five years before Ida — and Ida still caused $2-plus billion in damage.
Entergy reported FY2025 earnings of $1.758 billion, or $3.91 per share, on both an as-reported and adjusted basis — finishing in the top half of the company's guidance range. FY2024 adjusted EPS was $3.65 per share; the full-year 2024 as-reported figure was $2.45 per share on GAAP net income of $1.056 billion, with the divergence driven by one-time items. Industrial sales growth of approximately 12% to 13% annually through 2028 and approximately 3.5 gigawatts of new electric service agreements signed in 2025 drove the performance. Retail sales grew approximately 4% on a weather-adjusted basis in 2025.
For 2026, Entergy guided to EPS of $4.25 to $4.45, implying approximately 10% growth at the midpoint. The company targets greater than 8% compound annual EPS growth through 2029, with weather-adjusted retail sales growing at approximately 8% per year over the same period, driven by a 15% industrial growth rate. The $57 billion 2026-2029 capital plan — updated upward by more than 30% following the Meta data center commitments and other large load agreements — includes $27 billion allocated to new generation. That generation build is weighted toward combined-cycle gas and utility-scale solar, with nuclear uprate and fuel cycle investments also included.
Entergy's service territory has become one of the most actively sought locations for large industrial and hyperscale data center development in the United States. The combination of available land, relatively low-cost industrial power rates, proximity to existing fiber and logistics infrastructure, and a state government in Louisiana willing to facilitate large economic development projects has attracted commitments from Meta, AWS, Google, and multiple advanced manufacturing operators. The data center pipeline of 7 to 12 gigawatts and the separate 3 to 5 gigawatts of other industrial demand represent a demand transformation that, even if only 20% to 30% materializes, would require a sustained generation and transmission build unlike anything in the company's recent history.
The electric service agreements structure Entergy has developed for large customers — requiring them to pay direct power costs attributable to serving their facilities and providing up-front revenue support — has been designed to prevent load growth from increasing costs for existing residential and small commercial customers. The formula rate plan mechanisms in Louisiana and Mississippi, which allow timely capital recovery with minimal regulatory lag, are essential to financing the $57 billion program without waiting years for traditional rate case approvals. The nuclear fleet, with its IRA production tax credit support through 2032 and the ongoing discussions about uprates and a potential Grand Gulf Unit 2, sits at the intersection of the clean energy demand from data center customers and the baseload reliability that the regional grid requires.
Affordability is the persistent constraint on Entergy's capital program. Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi rank near the bottom of all U.S. states on median household income, and Entergy's customers already face above-average energy burden. A $57 billion capital program, even with formula rate plan recovery, translates into bill increases that regulators in these states are politically reluctant to approve without visible pushback. The electric service agreement structure protects existing customers from subsidizing large industrial load — in principle — but the indirect effects of generation overbuild, transmission upgrades, and administrative costs inevitably diffuse across the rate base. The tension between the investment required to modernize the grid, attract industrial growth, and harden the system against hurricanes on one side, and the capacity of low- and moderate-income customers to absorb the resulting rates on the other, is not a temporary condition. It is the permanent operating environment.
Hurricane season remains a financial and operational variable with no hedge. The Gulf Coast is experiencing more intense storm activity as sea surface temperatures rise, and Entergy's service territory is geographically inescapable. Post-Ida investments have meaningfully improved the system's ability to withstand major storms, but a Category 4 or 5 direct hit on the New Orleans metro or the Baton Rouge chemical corridor would still produce billions in restoration costs, months of outages in the most affected areas, and pressure on regulators for rapid securitization and rate recovery. The nuclear PTC cliff in 2032 is a secondary concern — the fleet is unambiguously more valuable today than it was in 2020 — but its expiration without renewal or replacement would reintroduce earnings uncertainty into a segment of the business that has become a meaningful growth contributor.
This profile was compiled from publicly available information including:
Entergy Investor Relations — Earnings releases, SEC filings (10-K, 10-Q), capital plan presentations, and guidance disclosures.
Entergy Nuclear — Plant-level specifications, capacity data, and license information.
FY2025 Year-End Earnings Report (February 2026), FY2024 Annual Report (Form 10-K), Q1 2026 earnings slides, August 2025 LPSC approval of Meta data center resource plan, August 2024 LPSC formula rate plan extension, Hurricane Ida storm cost estimates (September 2021), Entergy New Orleans bankruptcy filings (2005-2007), NRC Grand Gulf early site permit documentation.
This profile is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security.