NextEra Energy lands in West Texas the week of its Dominion merger announcement

NextEra Energy flew from Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport to Andrews County Airport in West Texas late on June 9, a 73-minute hop in its Embraer Praetor 600, tail N47MW. The flight arrived just after midnight on June 10, landing in a region that has become central to the company’s growth strategy.

The same week, NextEra Energy announced its $67 billion all-stock acquisition of Dominion Energy, a deal that would create the world’s largest regulated electric utility, according to a May 18 press release on the company’s newsroom. The merger, which requires approval from state and federal regulators, is driven in part by surging electricity demand from data centers—especially in Virginia, where Dominion serves the world’s largest concentration of those facilities, per E&E News. West Texas, with its wind and solar resources, is a key area for NextEra Energy’s renewable development and for powering the data center hubs the company is targeting, as noted by Data Center Dynamics.

The trip to Andrews County follows a pattern of NextEra Energy flights to energy and infrastructure hubs. Earlier this week, the company’s aircraft visited Houston and London, and last week it flew to Oklahoma City, home to a major natural gas trading hub. The West Texas stop likely involves site visits for the company’s growing portfolio of generation and storage projects, which CEO John Ketchum has said are essential to meeting the 20 gigawatts of interest from large-load customers, mostly hyperscale data centers.