Duke Energy (DUK) begins construction on 22 6-megawatt Cabarrus County, N C , solar project streetinsider.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from streetinsider.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
While no one buys utility stocks expecting to see strong long-term growth, stranger things have happened. As we enter into a new era of electric vehicles, the demand on power grids is going to ramp up. That could well mean more upside than usual for some of these companies.
Best Utility Stocks to Buy: AES (AES)
Source: Shutterstock
Virginia-based AES is a power generation company that operates in the U.S. and 15 other countries. AES has a long history of firsts. This includes being the first Independent Power Producer in the U.S. (1988), creating the first documented carbon offset program in the U.S. (1989) and in 2021, the AES Alamitos Battery Energy Storage System became the world’s first standalone energy storage project for local capacity.
Fotolia
In efforts to prevent a repeat of the February disaster that left millions without electricity, Texas policymakers continue to disagree over the cause and appropriate mitigation efforts. The blackouts from the storm led to spikes in power prices and the deaths of at least 151 people.
Republican leadership was quick to criticize renewables for the role they played in the blackouts, with Gov. Greg Abbott, R, claiming on national television that renewables caused the outages. They cannot be dispatched by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and therefore cannot be relied upon, said state Sen. Kelly Hancock, R, who chairs the Senate Business and Commerce committee. Hancock sponsored Senate Bill (SB) 1278, which would impose reliability costs on intermittent generation.
Elliott Investment Management L.P. ("Elliott"), which manages funds that have an investment in Duke Energy Corporation ("Duke" or the "Company") that make it a top 10 investor in the Company, today sent a letter to Duke's Board outlining a plan to create $12 to $15 billion of line-of-sight near-term value for shareholders. Elliott explained that this value upside is based on observable publicly traded market valuation metrics of Duke's closest peers and does not incorporate meaningfully higher valuations realized in recent transactions in Florida and Indiana, which would result in several billion dollars of incremental value.