NextEra is largely insulated from the direct effects of the many tariffs imposed by President Trump, said CEO John Ketchum during the company’s first-quarter earnings call earlier this week.
“I feel very good about tariffs,” he said. “It’s just not going to have much of an impact at all on our business.”
The firm, which is considered the world’s largest renewable power company, has spent the last three years working to make its supply chain more resilient to potential market disruptions, Ketchum explained. For example, NextEra domesticated and otherwise “dramatically diversified” the sourcing of its solar panels, to avoid countries that are subject to heavy tariffs. And, to hear Ketchum tell it, that work is paying off.
Mere days before the earnings call, U.S. trade officials finalized tariffs on solar products imported from South Asian countries, with some individual suppliers facing levies as steep as 3,521%. These came as a result of a year-old court case, in which manufacturers including First Solar, the Korean Hanwha Qcells alleged that Chinese solar companies operating in Southeast Asia were flooding the U.S. market with products sold for less than the cost of production.
NextEra also sources wind turbines domestically, with manufacturing in Florida, where the company is headquartered.
Overall, Ketchum said, NextEra Energy Resources, the company’s renewables developer arm, has less than $150 million in tariff exposure through 2028, on over $75 billion in expected capital spend.
“That’s less than 0.2% of potential impact to our capital spend before exercising contractual trade measure protections in our contracts with customers,” he said. “Once we work with our customers, we expect our $150 million tariff exposure to be significantly reduced, potentially down to zero.”
The low exposure is partly due to NextEra’s size and buying power. Essentially, the company has been able to contractually shift tariff risk to suppliers in a significant way.
“Size and scale matter more than ever in today’s environment,” Ketchum said, adding that suppliers want to secure NextEra’s major buying power in the long run, and “don’t want to disappoint.”
Smaller developers, which don’t have as much buying power as NextEra, are less likely to be able to shift risk to suppliers in a similar way. So the supply chain tightness potentially caused by tariffs could even benefit the large company, Ketchum said, as smaller competitors stumble: “Given the position that we’re in around tariffs, I expect a lot of opportunity to come our way as small developers just aren’t in the position we are.”
‘Energy realism and energy pragmatism’
During the call, Ketchum also reiterated the importance of a dual “energy realism and energy pragmatism” philosophy, which recognizes that all types of energy are needed to meet the U.S. growing electricity demand — but that some technologies are not ready at scale.
NextEra’s portfolio includes renewables, as well as nuclear and gas generation, which it set on expanding via a partnership with GE Vernova announced earlier this year.
But renewables and storage, of which the company added more than 12 gigawatts to its backlog in 2024 and around 3.2 GW in the first quarter of 2025 alone, are still the best option for getting electrons on the grid quickly and at a low cost.
This was a message Ketchum shared in the company’s first quarter earnings call — and one that is even more salient three months later, as the economics of gas worsen despite President Trump’s best efforts to encourage the fossil fuel’s use. In February, for instance, NextEra competitor Engie withdrew a major gas project from consideration for a Texas program that provides low-interest loans for new or expanded dispatchable energy generation, citing equipment procurement delays; in the months since, several other projects have withdrawn as well.
“We should be thinking about renewables and battery storage as a critical bridge to when other technology is ready at scale like new gas-fired plants,” Ketchum said.
New gas-fired plants, while fundamental, will come online later and at a higher price than renewable and storage, Ketchum stressed, pointing to growing backlogs for new gas turbines and a shortage of skilled workers.
“Gas-fired combined cycle plants rely on approximately 1,000 workers across dozens of niche trades,” he said. “We’ve learned EPCs are hiring thousands of extra people to address high washout rates with some workers leaving earlier for higher-paying jobs building, for example, LNG terminals, data centers, semiconductor chip manufacturing facilities and other industrial facilities.”
As for nuclear, the opportunities to restart shuttered plants are limited, and “SMR technology is still 10 years away at scale in the best of scenarios and at a much higher price point than gas-fired generation,” Ketchum said. NextEra is still evaluating the viability of restarting its Duane Arnold nuclear facility in Palo, Iowa.
“Bottom line, don’t take this as picking winners and losers. It’s not nor can it be. America is going to need all forms of energy to meet this enormous demand,” Ketchum said. “But we need to be practical about when technologies will be available at scale and how much they’ll cost when they show up.”
