Evergy's Q1 2026 call was overwhelmingly positive, centered on the announcement of a new large-load ESA and amendments to existing ones that significantly increase the peak demand from its data center customers. Management raised its long-term growth outlook to be well above previous guidance, driven by a robust pipeline of opportunities and confirmed turbine reservations. The tone was confident, with management explicitly validating analyst interpretations of accelerating growth. Announced a new ESA, bringing the total to five, with peak demand from these customers increasing by 600 MW to 3,000 MW.
Evergy's Q1 2026 call was overwhelmingly positive, centered on the announcement of a new large-load ESA and amendments to existing ones that significantly increase the peak demand from its data center customers. Management raised its long-term growth outlook to be well above previous guidance, driven by a robust pipeline of opportunities and confirmed turbine reservations. The tone was confident, with management explicitly validating analyst interpretations of accelerating growth. Announced a new ESA, bringing the total to five, with peak demand from these customers increasing by 600 MW to 3,000 MW.
Evergy's Q1 2026 call was overwhelmingly positive, centered on the announcement of a new large-load ESA and amendments to existing ones that significantly increase the peak demand from its data center customers. Management raised its long-term growth outlook to be well above…
Management repeatedly emphasized strong momentum, high confidence in signing more ESAs, and upgraded growth guidance, reflecting an upbeat outlook.
Management confident in signing at least one more ESA. Management repeatedly emphasized strong momentum, high confidence in signing more ESAs, and upgraded growth guidance, reflecting an upbeat outlook.
Signaled high confidence in signing at least one more ESA in 2026, with a total pipeline of 1.0-1.5 GW for the 2030 window.
Management confident in signing at least one more ESA. Management repeatedly emphasized strong momentum, high confidence in signing more ESAs, and upgraded growth guidance, reflecting an upbeat outlook.
Management raised its rate base growth outlook to approximately 12% (from 11.5%) due to a new 500 MW ESA and increased capital investment, with additional upside expected from further ESAs. The capital plan is funded with equity issuance of $700-900 million per year through 2029, and no equity needs in 2030 as credit metrics strengthen.
Management repeatedly emphasized strong momentum, high confidence in signing more ESAs, and upgraded growth guidance, reflecting an upbeat outlook.
“We've got turbine reservations beyond what's needed from the ESA, so we have announced We continue to work with customers to be responsive to their needs, and it's typically around the transmission and generation capacity side.”
“Some of the amendments are higher levels over the interim period. So a lot of the predominant impact of the higher peak is from the new ESA. The logic for the amended ESAs is that these customers had a high appetite for basically as, I won…”
| 지표 | 기간 | 범위 | 중간값 | 상태 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EPS | FY2030 | 8%–12% | 10% | RAISED |
Google is a direct counterparty to Evergy's large load data center contracts, indicating a strong, contracted demand for electricity in Evergy's service territory.
“we have two Googles. Googles are counterparty for two of the data centers, Meta for another.”
And then just in terms of when you're signing these ESAs with maybe some of the non-A-rated counterparties, like how important is visibility into ultimately having a hyperscaler off-taker? I think you mentioned this most recent one. We should know more in the next couple of months and then I kind of go back to the one with Beal from last quarter. Where does that kind of stand? So, yeah, just if you could give us a feel for how important the visibility to a hyperscaler is.
So it's an important consideration, Michael, no doubt about it. The sophistication of the counterparty, their knowledge of how to bring it together, their ability to line up those end-use customers. The LLPS tariff has a set of collateral and credit requirements that every customer has to meet. in addition to having confidence as to who their off-taker is. So we're not announcing the counterparty today, though we did note that it's a premier developer. It actually does have a strong corporate rating, BBB+. But all of our customers have to meet the credit and collateral requirements that are in there. So if there's not a parent with an investment grade rating in the system, there's got to be letters of credit that follow the terms of the LPS. So we, in our ESA discussions, The counterparty situation, making sure we've got the right setup in terms of counterparty and credit is a key part of every discussion is how I describe it. Now, of course, we have two Googles. Googles are counterparty for two of the data centers, Meta for another. So those are companies with capitalization levels that I can't all conceive of in the multi-trillions. But with developers that have the strong offtake with hyperscalers, they're also great counterparties, but they all have to meet the credit and collateral requirements in the OLPS.
Evergy has secured turbine reservations beyond what its current ESAs require, positioning it to quickly sign and serve additional large-load customers without facing long lead-time equipment constraints. — This suggests that Evergy's growth is not bottlenecked by supply chain lead times, and it implies a concrete order backlog for turbine manufacturers.
Hey, hey. So unfortunately, I'm going to follow the same direction as Nick here. Hopefully, that's okay here. But if you can, obviously, you've got these five ESAs in hand. How do you think about latitude for six and onwards? And what I'm getting at here is how do you think about spare capacity versus transposing incremental ESAs into further generation and supply resources of various flavors? I just want to understand sort of the alignment. When you see these next announcements, how much more capital intensity there might be with that? And then also how you think about sort of the cadence if you have used up
bulk of your capacity how you would set expectations on this front again obviously i'm very cognizant of how you just described things a moment ago yeah i appreciate that julian and it's and it's an insightful question because not every additional esa is going to have the exact formulaic impact on capital because we um even if you're you're going to do some good math and you'll see it okay given the amount of megawatts we added to our peak load and we've got robust improvement in the in the amount of capital we're describing that's rate based growth that goes from 11 1⁄2 to approximately 12. Some cases, if you add ESAs, it'll be in that range, but maybe a little more capital impact. What I would emphasize is that on our last call, we signaled our confidence that we'd sign one more ESA, and we've announced that ESA here on this call. So on this call, we're also announcing our confidence that we'll sign at least one additional ESA this year. We have tried to be thoughtful about the long lead time equipment from turbine capacity to the things you need on the T&D side to be in place and have basically the equipment available so that we can be able to meet that demand that we see. We're not going to meet everything in our pipeline, but we're confident in the expression that we had today that we'll sign at least one additional ESA. We've got turbine reservations beyond what's needed from the ESA, so we have announced We continue to work with customers to be responsive to their needs, and it's typically around the transmission and generation capacity side. So we've been purposeful in thinking about our queue and being positioned to continue to grow. So I described that if we have additional ESAs, as we expect to have at least one, that will have an impact on the capital plan. It will create some more upward bias and across the board. It will be under the ESA framework, so that will have all the protections and the premium rate that comes along with the LLPS tariff. But we've got high confidence that we're not done. The team's done tremendous work. We're pleased with how attractive our region is to these large customers. We'll continue to work with them to find the right locations for those opportunities. We've got execution, of course, as we bring the large customers online. But we're excited about the momentum. We really expect a continuum.
Evergy's ability to amend existing ESAs to serve customers at higher load levels indicates that previously contracted customers are scaling up their power demands faster than initially planned, a strong signal of data center expansion intensity. — This quickening in demand from existing customers underscores the rapid pace of AI data center build-outs and could correlate with higher-than-expected demand for AI hardware and networking equipment.
“Some of the amendments are higher levels over the interim period. So a lot of the predominant impact of the higher peak is from the new ESA. The logic for the amended ESAs is that these customers had a high appetite for basically as, I”
Hi, team. Thanks. Actually, this is Andrew Cadavy on for Char. Hi, Andrew. Good morning. Good morning. On the amended ESAs, was there a step up in the amount of final load you'll be serving, or is this just a change in the rank profile? And then can you offer any insight into what spurred that step up?
Sure, Andrew. You know, if you look at, in our material, we try to provide a sense, we'll give you a really good view of how the total load has changed in slide 13, so it's in Ryan's section. So we're actually detail the megawatt served each year for our total of our LPS and our non-LPS customers. So you'll see that the peak demand from these customers relative to last quarter has gone up to 3,000 megawatts, and it was 2,400 last quarter. So that's a cumulative increase of 600 megawatts. That's the impact of both the amended ESAs and the new ESA. I think it's fair to say that the new ESA is the main driver of the cumulative increase. Some of the amendments are higher levels over the interim period. So a lot of the predominant impact of the higher peak is from the new ESA. The logic for the amended ESAs is that these customers had a high appetite for basically as, I won't say as much as we could provide, but that wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say as much as we could provide. So we identified an ability to serve them at higher levels. Those customers were interested in doing that. Under the framework of the existing ESAs, we made those amendments. So it was a