NextEra Energy Inc. (NEE), the largest U.S. wind-energy producer, plans to spend as much as $5.8 billion in the next three years to build wind and solar projects.
The company's NextEra Energy Resources LLC unit plans to spend from $2.3 billion to $2.7 billion through 2014 on solar projects, and $2.7 billion to $3.1 billion on wind farms, Lewis Hay, chief executive officer of the Juno Beach, Florida-based power company, said today during a conference call to discuss its second-quarter results.
The projects will supply electricity for power purchase contracts it has already completed or expects to complete in the coming years.
"We have signed more long-term power purchase agreements for new wind projects thus far in the first seven months of 2011 than we did in all of 2010," Armando Pimentel, NextEra's chief financial officer, said during the call.
NextEra signed 632 megawatts of contracts for wind farms since the first quarter, including 469 megawatts for projects in Canada that received contracts from the Ontario Power Authority and are expected to enter service in 2013 and 2014.
The company has power contracts totaling more than 1.1 gigawatts of wind projects in the U.S. and Canada that entered service this year or are expected to do so by 2012, Pimentel said. NextEra said in April that it expects to add by the end of next year as much as 2 gigawatts of wind power to the 8.3 gigawatts it has in operation now.
