Entergy 2014 Annual Report Download - page 3

Letter To Our Stakeholders:
The theme of this year’s integrated report is “Powering a New Day.”
When I talk to our stakeholders, most don’t understand just how we
do that. In fact, during many of these conversations, people are
amazed at the true meaning of our vision statement: We Power Life.
While they are familiar with us as the power and gas company, they
don’t realize how much more we do. We power job creation and
economic growth in our communities. We promote and help to
develop a skilled and educated workforce, not only for our company,
but also for the communities we serve. And we take an active role in
cleaner air and water and regional resiliency. On each of those
dimensions, we delivered strong results in 2014 and took steps to
enhance our long-term performance.
“People are
amazed at the
true meaning of
our vision
statement:
We Power Life.”
You probably know we provide electricity and natural gas, but think
what that means. Whether you are one of our 2.8 million utility
customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, or you live in a
community served by one of our Entergy Wholesale Commodities power
plants, we provide the power that lets you talk on your smartphone or
watch your TV, and we deliver natural gas to heat homes and run
appliances. We power homes, businesses, neighborhoods, schools and
hospitals. We power small towns and big cities.
Our customers expect power and natural gas to be available reliably
and on demand. That means we must continually invest in and
modernize our fleet, strengthen our reliability and comply with new
regulatory requirements. In 2014, we delivered strong operational
performance in both our utility and EWC businesses. We also took
steps to strengthen our ability to deliver reliable power and natural gas
over the long term.
In our utility business, we developed new long-range supply plans,
and we are engaged with customers, communities and regulators on
the details of those plans. In 2014, we placed Ninemile 6 in service
ahead of schedule and under budget, and we announced an agreement
to acquire Union Power Station. Both are clean, fuel-efficient natural
gas-fired resources. We also announced several transmission projects
in 2014 and early 2015 in Louisiana and Texas, including the Lake
Charles transmission project. One of our largest projects ever, the
Lake Charles project will move power efficiently and reliably into
southern Louisiana, a region with the highest projected job growth in
the state. We also developed an accelerated gas pipe replacement
program to replace about 100 miles of pipe in Baton Rouge, La., over
the next 10 years. In 2014, we restored power quickly and safely
following major storms in Arkansas and Mississippi, a critical
component of reliability. For the second year in a row, Entergy
utilities were the top five performers in proactive outage
communications, according to J.D. Power. And all our utilities
improved by several points in the annual J.D. Power residential
customer satisfaction survey in 2014.
In our EWC business, strong operational performance across our
nuclear fleet in 2014 resulted in a 91 percent capacity factor, up from
89 percent in 2013. That means we were able to provide more power
at a competitive cost to wholesale power markets in the Northeast and
Midwest. We are engaged with key stakeholders to advance the
license renewal process for Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear
plant that provides safe, low-cost and reliable power with on-site fuel
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