Power Dialogue with Joe Dominguez | CERAWeek 2026

Thanks. Morning everyone.

Well, you know, the journey hasn't been linear, really. When we spun out of Exelon, it was because there was a view at Exelon that the nuclear business was kind of dead and not going to be all that active, and it was a distraction to the other part of the business. And there were reasons for that, right? We spun out at a time where the nation was shutting down nuclear plants. So the first part of the vision of the management team was let's figure out a way to stabilize this, make sure that we're a functional entity. And so a bit of that was legislative, a lot of that was market-driven. There was a demand for nuclear, renewed interest in nuclear, climate was a big consideration in the early days, but we ended up with these bills passing where effectively we had tax credit support that put us on a par with other resources. And that was fundamentally important. So that was the stability part of the story. And then as you can imagine, especially for people who had gone through this arduous path of shutting down nuclear plants and then finally reaching a point of stability, one was starting to think, well, this is fine. Let's do our thing. We're a nuclear company and that's our role and it's an important one. And then we started to look at AI and the demands that were coming from AI, and it caused us to do something we weren't expecting in the early days, which was to be a company that then moved from that position of relative safety with a discrete portfolio and saying, hey, what other capabilities do we need to be a leading American energy company? But the ambition was different at different stages. And it's really, you know, I'm so proud of the management team because it's required us to pivot. And I think the fundamental belief of the management team today, my belief, is Constellation has to be a company that is always learning and is not defined by any one generation technology, but rather is defined by the moment and the needs of America in this moment, making sure we have the capabilities to meet those needs.

Oh, for sure. I mean, look, early days, again, the focus being so much on climate change, the idea that we would take what is today and was certainly then the cleanest, the lowest-emitting fleet in the nation and tarnish that reputation by bringing on emissions is probably something we wouldn't do. But then we said, look, let's get real. Natural gas is critically important. And we understood that, I think, before the sentiment began to change, frankly, before the Trump administration. And we had been messaging that. So we prepared our investors for a shift with a focus on some more emitting technologies and that capability. Geographic diversity was huge to us so that we could support our clients wherever they were. But we were listening to our clients and trying to be what they needed us to be.

Look, I think they're real enough. We could spend a lot of time talking about are there duplicate projects out there? Absolutely. Is the demand twice as much as what's really going to happen? Absolutely. Look, but it is so fluid. We were speaking this morning a little bit about the overnight news around Iran. One month ago we would have said that there's going to be a fairly significant data center buildout in the Middle East, right? Certainly those countries were prepared to invest. They were prepared to have the energy infrastructure to support those. Today I think we wake up and there's a question mark as to whether more critical infrastructure is going to be built in that region of the world. Hopefully, you know, we emerge from this with some sort of real lasting peace or stability in the region, but my supposition is we don't, that we end up in a situation where there's continued ambiguity, continued tension in the region. And so those data centers that were going there, those parts of the energy supply system that were going to supply Asia and Europe, and increasingly Europe was looking to that region of the world as an alternative to US LNG, I think the focus shifts back to the US. And the US is really in this kind of interesting position. So, who knows what that's going to do next to demand. But the weird thing here is you can't think about this business the way we used to, to say, hey, I have some good vision of demand three years from now, I'm going to build a strategy around that. You don't build a nimble enough system and a nimble enough company, you're going to miss it. Because today you're revisiting your strategy every six months or you're dead.

It's really finding its own balance. You know, we just completed with New York State an agreement that keeps the New York nuclear plants operating, and all of that power is going to the grid for the benefit of families and businesses in New York. So, that's not AI related, but it's like to me a perfect example of where state players say, hey, we want to lock down some of the nuclear. We haven't seen enough of that, quite frankly. But there is enough to go around, and our business is always going to have a fairly significant part of it that is supporting other grid customers. That's been our bread and butter for many years.

Yeah, I think so. But I also think there's a possibility here that we will see agreements that look like the hyperscaler agreements but they're reached with state entities like the New York example, where it's a 20-year deal, fixed-price deal. It locks in that value of clean, reliable energy for customers for an extended period of time. It gives us visibility on the revenue side of it so that we can make the necessary investments to keep the plants operating. I don't think that's going to be a unique case. I think as time unfolds, I could certainly see larger deals being done with utilities. There has been an awakening, I would say, in certain jurisdictions that the utilities themselves need to go and lock up this energy if they want it. They can't assume it's always going to be there at a fairly stable price because of volatility. They hedge everything else. Yes, there's been a failing in not hedging capacity and relying entirely on a year-to-year auction that historically has varied greatly.

I see the annual auction as being a backstop, but I'm saying something different. I think there is now a correct motivation on the part of utility players to say, hey, look, let's get some more certainty and let's hedge this over a longer period of time. That's a benefit to me and I'm willing to take a lower price in order to facilitate that.