Robert (Bob) Frenzel
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer at Xcel Energy
Thank you, Rupesh, and good morning, everybody. At Xcel Energy, we know that economic growth and prosperity of our communities and country depends on our ability to deliver energy to our customers when and where they need it, while keeping their bills as low as possible. And in 2024, we delivered on another year of solid operational and financial progress to that end. Across our eight states, we invested more than $7.5 billion to build and maintain infrastructure that supports our customers' energy needs in areas like advanced technology for a smarter, more reliable grid.
Long-haul and regional transmission to support customer growth and system reliability needs and carbon-free generation to continue our pursuit of a cleaner energy future. We navigated considerable headwinds during the year and posted ongoing earnings of $3.50 per share, delivering within our guidance range for the 20th consecutive year, one of the best track records in our industry. Our long-term performance is attributable to our committed team at Xcel Energy, who show-up every day-on behalf of our customers with safety, affordability and reliability as their top priorities.
I recognize that this is the first time we've been below the midpoint of our target range in over 15 years. We made decisions in 2024 to make investments to improve resiliency and protect our customers throughout the year. And we coupled with December weather that was considerably warmer-than-normal and little time to adjust, the result was earnings at the low-end. But because of the operational improvements and investments we made in 2024, we remain confident in our ability to deliver on our '25 guidance range of $3.75 to $3.85 per share, the midpoint of which reflects 7% growth from the midpoint of our 2024 range. And over the next decade, we expect to invest significantly in our infrastructure to deliver reliable, resilient and cleaner energy for our customers as well as serve significant forecasted customer growth. Our five-year base capital plan delivers rate base growth in excess of 9% and should deliver long-term EPS growth in the upper half of our 6% to 8% guidance range. At Xcel Energy, our long-term strategic model and value proposition is to make smart capital investments for the benefit of our customers, which improve reliability, resiliency and sustainability. Provide excellent customer service and to keep bills as low as possible for our customers. In 2024, we reached several important milestones towards these goals.
In November, Phase-1 of our Sherco Solar project started commercial operation. Two additional phases will come online in 2025 and 2026 and once complete, Sherco's total capacity of 710 megawatts will make it the largest solar facility in the Upper Midwest. And by using existing interconnection from our retired coal unit, we saved customers money and accelerated deployment by several years, providing opportunities to serve new customers, including multiple data center projects on and around the Sherco site.
We're also near completion of the conversion of our 1,000 megawatt Harrington coal plant to natural gas, which provides essential energy, resiliency and reliability to our customers and will benefit the local community there for years to come. In 2024, our wind fleet achieved availability of 97%, marking our best performance in five years in achieving first quartile benchmarks. High turbine availability ensures our customers benefit from the zero fuel cost resource and provides production tax credits that keep their bills low. In-line with our Minnesota resource plan, the NRC approved a 20-year license renewal for our Montesello nuclear facility.
This allows customers to continue to benefit from a critical, low-cost, carbon-free energy resource through 2050. One of the keys to energy resiliency and growth is expanding our electrical grid to ensure that customers have access to the generation resources needed to meet their daily requirements. And I'm proud to say that for the past 15 years, Xcel Energy has been the leading provider of new transmission line miles in the country.
In July, we began construction on the final segment of our Colorado power pathway project, which started construction in 2023. The power pathway is a 675 mile double circuit 345 KV transmission loop that will enable Xcel Energy to connect more than 5,000 megawatts of essential energy resources in Eastern Colorado. And in the 4th-quarter, the MISO Board approved Tranche 2.1 of its long-term transmission portfolio and the SPP Board approved its 2024 ITP portfolio. These two portfolios will enhance transmission systems in our regions and interregionally, ensuring that we can meet customer growth and resiliency needs. Our portions of these transmission projects could result in $3 billion to $4 billion of capital investment in excess of our base plan.
We've also made considerable progress to protect our customers, communities and system from the increasing threats of extreme weather that we continue to see across the country. During 2024, we filed an updated wildfire mitigation plan in Colorado, a new system resiliency plan in Texas and issued wildfire mitigation plans for each of our other states. We've also accelerated a number of risk reduction efforts, including operational mitigations such as enabling public safety power shutoffs and wildfire safety operations across our entire system and making investments to better sectionalize and automate these capabilities. Physical mitigations that include the repair, replacement of Priority 1 and 2 distribution poles across our system and over 600 miles of vegetation management in Colorado, amongst other milestones. We've developed foundational tools, completing comprehensive wildfire risk mapping of our system and deployment of advanced risk modeling tools like.
And we've increased situational awareness, where in Colorado we completed installation of 42 AI-equipped cameras and completed the installation of 25 utility coal-mounted weather stations with many more planned across our system in 2025 and beyond. Equally importantly, our customer bills have remained amongst the lowest in the country. It is attributable to our thoughtful investments, access to some of the lowest-cost renewable resources in the country and focus on continuous improvement through our lean operating principles. Since 2020, our continuous improvement programs have generated nearly $500 million of sustainable savings for customers, while improving operations and reducing enterprise risk. Since 2017, our steel for fuel program has saved customers nearly $5 billion in avoided fuel costs and production tax credit benefits.
Our average residential electric and natural gas bills are 28% and 12% below the national average, with historical growth rates well below the rate of inflation. In addition, we've reduced our residential electric customer share wallet by 13% since 2014. And with our low-energy prices, customers have the further potential to reduce their energy expenditures by over 40% as they adopt electric vehicles Vehicles. At the same time, we've reduced carbon emissions on our electric system by 57% relative to 2005 levels and remain on-track to meet our goal of 80% carbon reduction by 2030, proving that our geographic advantage for renewable resources ensures that customers don't have to sacrifice costs or reliability to achieve sustainability. Looking-forward, we are focused in 2025, working to capture the unprecedented opportunities for growth we laid out in our base capital investment plan to deliver on our incremental capital opportunities, to advance our clean-energy leadership and to raise the bar on delivering a compelling experience for our customers in order to make energy work better for them and the communities we serve finally, I'd like to express my thanks to Paul Johnson. Earlier this year, Paul announced his retirement from Xcel Energy after 41 years of service. Over his career, his commitment, his integrity and his acumen have been critical to the success of our controller, our Treasury and our Investor Relations programs. He has mentored countless programs inside the company and across the investment community. I consider Paul more than just a colleague. He's become a personal friend. I know you will all miss him as will I want to extend my sincere appreciation to Paul, his wife Renee, their two sons and two dogs, and we wish him nothing but the best-in his retirement. With that, I'll turn it over to Brian.
