Exelon recently completed its merger with Constellation, creating incremental strategic value by matching Exelon’s clean generation fleet with Constellation’s customer-facing leading retail and wholesale platform. In addition, the merger created economies of scale through expansion across the value chain. Exelon has identified many long-term growth opportunities that will allow us to further increase our scope and scale to succeed throughout industry cycles, as well as adapt our portfolio to the changing marketplace. These factors position Exelon for sustained value for years to come.
Generation
Exelon’s value proposition and competitive advantage comes from our scope and scale across the energy value chain and our core strengths of operational excellence and financial discipline. Our generation strategy is to pursue opportunities that provide generation to load matching and expand our regional and technological generation footprint. Supporting this is an expansion of our upstream fuels business, which procures, stores and transports fuels and will enable growth of the generation as well as customer-facing retail and wholesale businesses. Additionally, we are consistently striving to provide our customers with cleaner sources of energy, whether through our nuclear fleet, the largest clean source of energy in America, our recent renewable acquisitions or natural gas generation. Our expansive scale provides the ability to be highly competitive by capturing synergies through economies of scale. Investing for growth is not new to us and we have a proven track record of demonstrating our competitive advantage, core strengths and expertise to grow our portfolio and return value to our communities and investors.
Renewables
Over the past three years, we have invested over $6 billion across the energy value chain. More than half of these investments have been in renewable generation, such as wind and solar, as exhibited by our recent acquisitions of John Deere Renewables and Antelope Valley Solar Ranch.
Building on Exelon’s success in scaling its renewable business, Exelon will pursue renewable opportunities, leveraging available tax credits, either through its own development or through acquisitions. These investments not only provide us with growth opportunities, but also further enhance our status as the nation’s largest low-carbon generation fleet.
Utilities
Exelon has identified five long-term growth opportunities that will allow us to increase our scope and scale to succeed throughout industry cycles, as well as adapt our generation, transmission, delivery and marketing portfolio to the changing marketplace. These factors position Exelon for sustained value for years to come.
- PECO
PECO’s New Technology Investment. PECO’s $650 million technology initiative is one of the largest investments in the company’s more than 100 year history. This technology will help us more efficiently operate our system and provide future new products and services to our customers. Work is underway at PECO to install new metering technology for all of our 1.6 million electric customers during the next 10 years -- 5 years earlier than required under Pennsylvania law, thanks to a $200 million stimulus grant awarded by the US Department of Energy. To date, PECO has deployed over 337,000 new meters, over 20% of our total electric customers.
- BGE
BGE’s Smart Grid Commitment. Two out of Exelon’s three utilities (BGE and PECO) were recipients of a $200 million grant from the US government to push the development and progress of smart grid and smart meter investments among our nation’s utilities. In addition to better customer engagement and satisfaction, BGE will realize operational benefits from the ambitious smart meter program through:
- Improved outage detection
- Remote connect and disconnect for customers who have relocated
- Better storm outage management.
BGE has also identified innovative ways to utilize customer data from smart meters to help lower energy consumption during peak hours and educate customers on how to better manage their daily usage.
- ComEd
ComEd’s Smart Meter Program. The Energy Infrastructure Modernization Act (EIMA), enacted in 2011, is a 10-year, $2.6 billion Infrastructure Investment Plan. EIMA authorizes ComEd to invest $1.3 billion to strengthen the electric system and another $1.3 billion to add new, digital smart grid and advanced meter technology that will transform the delivery of electricity to homes and businesses throughout northern Illinois.
ComEd is also participating in the Green Button initiative, a voluntary effort by utilities to provide energy usage data to customers in a standard format to help them make informed decisions about how to reduce energy consumption and controls costs.
Power Price Recovery
Exelon is positioned to benefit from the recovery in natural gas and coal prices, heat rates and demand growth. Although gas prices have dropped and will likely remain low for the foreseeable future, we are positioned to gain from any power price appreciation. As competitive electricity markets continue to drive costs down and improve efficiencies for generation, our world-class nuclear fleet stands to gain significantly, however, we continue to identify cost improvements to further advance our fleet and bring prices down for our customers as we wait for power prices to recover from their recent historic lows.
Minimizing Environmental Risks
Exelon believes the evidence of global climate change is compelling, and that carbon emissions must be addressed in current operations and considered in future investments in order to minimize related business risks. Exelon has focused on carbon emissions first because our industry is a chief contributor of GHG emissions. Our strong commitment to carbon emissions abatement goals and our efforts to provide low-carbon electricity at affordable prices plays an influential role within the industry to affect change. And yet as the industry begins to grapple with an expanded view of the environmental issues associated with generation options, so has Exelon 2020, which this year incorporates other pollutants in its assessment of how best to meet society's need for clean, safe, affordable, and reliable energy.
- Our carbon intensity, measured in metric tons of CO2 emitted per megawatt-hour (MWh) generated, is the lowest of all domestic generating companies.
- Exelon had retrofit all of its wholly-owned coal-fired plants with SO2 controls by 1985; by 2009, all of the other coal plants in which Exelon has an ownership stake had also installed scrubbers.
- Our low-emissions nuclear fleet is advantaged relative to coal-fired generation due to the challenges in both cost and regulation that coal faces.
- Exelon's closure of fossil units at Eddystone and Cromby and Progress Energy's announcement that it is retiring about 1,500 MW of coal-fired generation show that smaller and less efficient coal plants will be challenged by EPA's current and future regulatory actions.
- Since the release of our Exelon 2020 business strategy in 2008, we are approaching 75% of our GHG emission abatement target, and continue to identify reliable, lower-cost electric supply options that achieve both carbon and other pollution reduction objectives.
As Exelon 2020 evolves, it has become an effective roadmap for capitalizing on our uniquely constituted generation fleet, guiding our investment decisions and framing our public policy advocacy.
Exelon Transmission Company
Exelon is leveraging our transmission expertise and created Exelon Transmission Company in 2009. This is a tremendous market opportunity as the U.S. is expected to invest $60-$100 billion in transmission over the next 10 years.
New transmission projects in our historic footprint and beyond will:
- Reduce congestion
- Improve reliability
- Facilitate the movement of renewable energy from the upper midwest and the Dakotas to population centers
- Mitigate oversupply
Investments in transmission would further enhance competitive markets that have brought real benefits to consumers and will present long-term growth opportunities for our shareholders.
Investments in transmission would further enhance competitive markets that have brought real benefits to consumers and will present long-term growth opportunities for our shareholders. Exelon Transmission Company leverages existing capabilities and offers a phased approach to disciplined, high-return growth.
Learn more at the Exelon Transmission Company website.