Fools

The biggest company on The Motley Fool’s updated list of the largest utility companies is in the United States. However, it is more than just a regulated electric utility, and that sets it apart from many of its U.S. peers that have made the list of largest utility companies.

And those differences are why NextEra Energy (NEE -0.54%) could be a huge long-term investment opportunity for growth investors, income investors, and (no shock) growth and income investors. Here’s what you need to know.

What does NextEra Energy do?

NextEra Energy is two businesses in one. The core of the company is its regulated electricity operations in Florida. The Sunshine State has long benefited from in-migration, as people seek out warmer weather, lower taxes, and a comfortable retirement. The company’s Florida Power & Light operation is one of the largest regulated utilities in the United States.

Image source: Getty Images.

Being regulated gives NextEra a monopoly in the areas it serves. In exchange for that monopoly, it has to have its rates and capital investment plans approved by the government.

The usual outcome is slow and steady growth over time, as regulators try to balance customer costs, reliability, and investor returns. All in all, this is a solid, slow, and steady growth foundation for NextEra.

Most utility businesses stop there. NextEra, however, has used this foundation to build one of the world’s largest solar and wind power businesses. It is a clean-energy giant, taking advantage of the world’s shift away from power based on dirtier carbon fuels and toward cleaner and renewable sources of energy. This is NextEra’s growth engine and will likely remain so for years to come.

One very big reason is that electricity demand is shifting into high gear. Between 2000 and 2020, demand increased 9%. Between 2020 and 2040, it is expected to expand by as much as 55%.

Driving that will be artificial intelligence and data centers, where demand is expected to increase 300% over a decade. And electric vehicles are expected to push another 9,000% in demand through 2050. All in, electricity is projected to grow from 21% of end power use to 32% of end use by 2050.

NextEra is positioned well on both sides of the equation

What’s exciting about NextEra Energy is that it isn’t just in the right place at the right time in one business. It is in the right place at the right time in two businesses.

Demand increases are going to push utility growth into a higher gear, helping the company’s Florida-based regulated operations. And the broader shift toward clean energy will also be a big boost to the company’s solar and wind operation. In many cases, it isn’t just more environmentally friendly to install clean energy than to build a power plant, it is also quicker and more cost effective.

This is where things start to get interesting. The average U.S. utility has a dividend yield of a little less than 2.7%. NextEra Energy’s yield is roughly 3%. In this respect, it looks like the stock is on sale right now and providing a yield well above the market on top of that.

But NextEra Energy is also growing its business by itself, in addition to outside forces. In the second quarter of 2025, revenue jumped 10% year over year, with earnings rising a little over 9%. That’s pretty impressive for a utility, since they are normally considered boring, slow growth investments.

And there’s likely more to come, highlighting that the clean energy business has 30 gigawatts worth of power projects in its backlog. Six gigawatts of that total are directly tied to technology companies and data centers.

On the dividend front, NextEra has increased its annual payout for over three decades. And the annualized growth rate over the past decade was a huge 10% a year. Management is currently projecting 10% dividend growth through at least 2026. So not only is this a high-yield story and a growth story, but it is also an attractive dividend growth story, too.

NextEra is the biggest utility and a big investment opportunity

If you are a dividend lover, a dividend growth lover, a growth lover, or a value lover, NextEra Energy will probably look attractive to you. That’s a huge amount of investment ground being covered by the world’s largest utility. And it highlights why you might just want to buy this industry giant today to take advantage of what looks like a huge long-term opportunity in the utility sector.

Helen Schulman is not afraid to make you squirm. Across her long and distinguished career as a novelist and short story writer, she has fearlessly explored the awkward collisions between our private and public selves, between what we present to the world and what we conceal from even our closest companions. Her 2011 best-selling novel “This Beautiful Life” dared to plunge headfirst into the shark-infested waters of the internet while most of us were still basking in the glow of the web’s shiny benevolence. “Fools For Love,” her latest collection of stories, finds Schulman’s characters weighing the past against the present, looking for redemption in the wrong places and occasionally coming up roses.

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

✍️ Author Chat

Helen Schulman’s new story collection, “Fools For Love,” hits bookshelves this July.

(Knopf)

When it comes to ideas, what becomes a short story and what becomes a novel?

A lot of my ideas spring forward from something Henry James called the “germ” — the bit of overheated gossip, the newspaper article, an eavesdropped conversation on a public bus, a story told by other parents when you are both pushing toddlers on the swings in a playground, which injects itself into the writerly imagination and grows — often over large swaths of time. Sometimes these obsessions entangle, too. That’s what happened in [my story] “The Revisionist.” My husband had a college buddy over for dinner who told us this story about a friend of his who was walking home from work when a strange man ran into his own house and slammed the door in his face. Why? What? Who? The reality was somewhat pedestrian — the intruder was a drunken next-door neighbor, who I guess had overshot. But the anecdote stuck with me.

For some of your characters, the past is ever-present — they are fated to live with the sum of their choices, and it engenders a lot of regret. Can you speak to that?

My all-time favorite writer is William Faulkner. You must be familiar with his quote from the novel “Requiem for a Nun”: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I sometimes feel this way about existence in general, like each and every moment in a lifetime is somehow equal, and that as one ages the moments accrue and tag along wherever one goes. Certainly in my own life I don’t sweat my big choices; I’m happy about them. I think a person does the best they can with what they know at the time. But I’m infinitely curious about what could have happened instead.

There is a lot of status anxiety in your work — not just financial status, but marriage, career — the things you think will align pleasingly in middle age but often don’t.

My husband and I are both working writers. The marriage works; the financial status has gone in and out. I’m not sure I always looked to middle age as a time of “pleasing alignment,” but I also didn’t think the world would be as effed up as it is now. Some of my characters get older and wiser; some are just more wrinkled, taller kids. But there is a lot of endurance over time in these stories — love, friendship, workplace passions. I would venture to say that most of my characters have real lives, and some very real satisfactions within the stresses that inevitably go along with them.

There are also secrets in your stories. Are we as sick as our secrets, or are they simply unavoidable?

Everyone has secrets. In “The Revisionist,” the protagonist even keeps secrets from himself. One of my closest friends, after the death of her parents, found out that one was married before and that the other had two other children with someone else. Now everyone is dead, and so we don’t even know if the spouses knew this about each other. There is nothing pedestrian about “ordinary lives.” We all roil and we all excite. I feel like one of my jobs as a fiction writer is to dive down beneath the surface.

In the story “My Best Friend,” there is a shocking act of violence. Why did you take it in that direction?

That story is about two men, one an up-and-coming-actor and the other a want-to-be novelist, who fall into a deep brotherhood while sleeping with the same woman. In fact, they each marry her — sequentially, of course. At some point, the friendship goes south; the protagonist, Jake, and Jeannie, the woman, have kids together and his career dries up. The first husband, Phil, becomes a very successful TV showrunner and producer. Out of pity, he hires Jake to be a character in one of his nighttime soaps. Jake starts to become an audience favorite, and Phil tortures the character on the series. All their pent up homoerotic attachments and jealousies explode in a “manly” brawl, which I see as tragicomedic, at the end of the story. The love story is theirs, after all.

Kurt Vonnegut has a quote about, when one reaches advanced middle age, life becomes an epilogue. That is a hard thing to carry. Do you feel that this is the case? I guess I’m thinking about your story “In a Better Place,” which revisits the characters from the book’s titular story in old age.

No, honestly I don’t. That story is really about the celebration of long love between the couple at the heart of the story, its healing powers and sustaining comforts. What may make this all feel epilogue-y to you (not a word, I know) is because these two people feel happy and fulfilled by their marriage. … My own artistic hope is to go as long as I can. I live to write!

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Charlie English spotlights the CIA’s use of literature to fight communism during the Cold War in his latest book.

(Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library)

Valerie Castellanos Clark weighs in on Charlie English’s “The CIA Book Club,” about how Polish citizens fought Russian communism with books. “As with the best spy novels, we know the good guy is going to win … but how English gets us there is exciting,” Clark writes.

Melina Sempill Watts calls Josh Jackson’s book, “The Enduring Wild: A Journey Into California’s Public Lands” a timely book for a state that is in danger of losing its most precious public resource: “Jackson’s assertion that we are all landowners is a clarion call amid a GOP-led push to sell off public land.”

Leigh Haber raves on Amy Bloom’s latest novel “I’ll Be Right Here.” “As Bloom has demonstrated throughout her stellar literary career,” writes Haber, “she can train her eye on any person, place or object and render it sublime.”

Jim Ruland calls Megan Abbott’s latest thriller, “El Dorado Drive,” a novel for our present age of anxiety, propelled by Abbott’s masterful narrative drive and her skill at “rendering the hot, messy inner lives of young people.”

📖 Bookstore Faves

Ken Concepcion, owner of Now Serving, tells us what’s been flying off the shelves at his Chinatown bookstore that specializes in cookbooks.

(Shelby Moore / For The Times)

This week we are perusing the shelves at Now Serving, a cozy bookshop devoted to the culinary arts and located on the ground floor of Chinatown’s Far East Plaza. Co-owner Ken Concepcion gives us the scoop on the hot goods.

What books are selling right now?

“Umma,” “By Heart,” “Fat + Flour,” “Salsa Daddy” and “The Choi of Cooking.”

What food trend are customers excited about right now?

Being that we are in L.A., there has always been a demand for vegetarian and vegan titles. The interest in plant-based cookbooks that delve into specific cuisines such as Filipino, Vietnamese, Mexican and Japanese has definitely grown over the years, and the diversity of voices has been wonderful to see. There needs to be better representation for Ecuadorian, Guatemalan and other Central and South American cuisines as well — there is a real demand for it.

Why do you think cookbooks are still important, despite the ubiquity of recipes online?

As with anything that you can find online, recipes are no different. There are thousands upon thousands available. Most of them are copycat recipes. We think cookbooks are still unparalleled in that they can deliver a narrative, historical context and incredible imagery and stunning design in a world that is more reliant on technology than ever. Cookbooks at best are functional objects of art that can be then passed down from generation to generation. They can often become keepsakes, time capsules and family heirlooms.