Sue Sturgis In 2024, investor-owned utilities paid their chief executive officers a total of over $530 million, according to an analysis by the Energy and Policy Institute based on the latest proxy statements released by the companies.
Of the 54 utilities examined, most increased the total executive compensation paid out in 2024 over the previous year’s levels. Among the companies where CEO compensation increased most dramatically were Richmond, Virginia-based Dominion Energy, where CEO Robert Blue’s payout jumped by over $6.6 million, and Dallas-based Atmos Energy, one of the nation’s largest gas distributors, where CEO Kevin Akers’ compensation increased by over $5.6 million.
Other utilities where CEO compensation increased by at least seven figures were Indiana-based NiSource (increased $3,568,290), New Orleans-based Entergy (increased $2,473,167), Chicago-based Exelon (increased $2,396,205), DTE Energy of Detroit (increased $2,313,904), South Dakota-based Northwestern Energy (increased $1,700,487), Oklahoma-based OGE Energy (increased $1,693,783), Pinnacle West headquartered in Phoenix (increased $1,652,116), New Jersey Resources (increased $1,415,429), Hawaiian Electric Industries (increased $1,149,761), Florida-based NextEra Energy (increased $1,012,474), and Berkshire Hathaway Energy of Iowa (increased $1,000,750).
The pay raises for utility executives came as many Americans struggled to pay rising electric and gas bills, with disconnections on the rise due to climbing energy rates as well as increased usage driven by climate change and extreme weather. They also came at the same time that many utilities significantly rolled back incentives in their executive pay structures for meeting diversity and environmental commitments.
In all, the CEOs for the 53 companies and the federally-run Tennessee Valley Authority included in this analysis received more than $4 billion in total compensation between 2017 and 2024.
Top earners
Atlanta-based Southern Company – the parent corporation of Alabama Power, Georgia Power, and Mississippi Power – paid CEO Christopher Womack $23,885,173 in 2024, making him the industry’s top earner. Southern’s former CEO Tom Fanning was the most highly paid utility executive in 2023.
NextEra Energy, the parent company of Florida Power & Light and Gulf Power, paid CEO John Ketchum $21,603,598. In third place was San Diego-based Sempra Energy CEO Jeffrey Martin, who was paid $21,513,802. Lynn Good of Duke Energy was fourth at $21,281,982, followed by Gregory Abel of Berkshire Hathaway Energy at $21,017,250, Patricia Poppe of PG&E at $15,823,939, Timothy Cawley of Consolidated Edison at $14,984,213, Calvin Butler of Exelon at $14,662,925, and Pedro Pizarro of Edison International at $13,809,571. Atmos Energy’s Akers rounded out the top 10 with annual compensation of $13,738,568.
Six of 2024’s 10 most highly paid utility CEOs were also on the 2023 list of top earners. Four of them received pay hikes, including Duke Energy’s Good, who has since retired.
Diversity rollbacks
Among the most notable trends EPI observed in our analysis was an almost industry-wide retreat by utilities from prior policies that sought to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion among their boards, employees, and suppliers, and that tied some small portions of executives’ compensation to company progress toward those goals. These rollbacks occurred in a political environment that saw federal and state government assaults on DEI policies at both public and private institutions.
For example, Southern Company’s latest proxy statement removed board metrics related to age, gender, and race, while Duke Energy’s board oversight section dropped discussion of “inclusive practices and equity and diversity engagement.” Other utilities that dropped DEI from their board recruitment policies were Missouri-based Ameren, Dominion, and Hawaiian Electric.
Pennsylvania-based PPL removed DEI not only from its board recruitment policies but also from goals tied to executive compensation and company objectives. Wisconsin-based Alliant Energy struck DEI factors from its executive compensation plan as well, while Pennsylvania-based UGI Corporation removed DEI as a consideration in its annual bonus awards for executives.
As part of its CEO compensation formula, Ohio-based American Electric Power eliminated the modifier for achieving supplier diversity that sought to boost both direct and indirect spending with women-, minority-, veteran-, and LGBT-owned businesses, as well as socially and economically disadvantaged companies. It also removed the compensation modifier that aimed to promote diversity as part of the corporate culture.
Exelon undertook a major deletion of DEI statements in its proxy, even eliminating the words “girls” and “women” from one section on STEM.
Environmental rollbacks
Many of the investor-owned utilities also substantially rolled back their environmental policies, including decarbonization goals and incentives to encourage executives to hit those goals.
For example, NextEra no longer considers emissions reduction a goal, but merely an aspiration, saying it aims to eliminate carbon emissions from its operations by 2045 “if cost effective and good for customers and shareholders.” And though Southern Company retained a greenhouse gas emissions reduction target, it substantially reduced the goal while admitting it was unlikely to meet it because of its projected load growth and coal plant extensions. IDACORP of Idaho also deleted climate policies in its latest proxy, including carbon reductions and even climate adaptation. And New England-based Eversource Energy scrapped its engagement with a corporate climate monitoring organization to craft an expanded decarbonization goal.
Milwaukee-based WEC Energy Group deleted a reference to how its lobbying is consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement, including restricting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Duke Energy also eliminated any mention of the Paris climate goals, as did Louisiana-based CLECO Corporation.
In addition, Duke Energy struck “clean energy” from the performance metrics for all of its top executives that it had used in determining short-term cash incentives. American Electric Power’s compensation formula eliminated achieving reliability through clean energy, and PPL’s replaced environmental and climate-related metrics with broad “long-term sustainability” language focusing on worker safety and utility-owned building energy efficiency, while removing mentions of offshore wind projects. Missouri-based Evergy substantially lowered the threshold for additional renewable generation to trigger executive compensation incentives.
The federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority, headquartered in Knoxville, bucked the general trend away from environmental commitments by adding a new carbon-free indicator to its compensation formula for top executives.
Payments for reliability and safety based on novel or vague metrics
At the same time utilities were rolling back environmental commitments, some were adjusting executive compensation in ways that give CEOs pay increases that they describe as paying for performance related to reliability or safety, judged on metrics that were vague or novel.
For example, Duke Energy gave its top executives a special bonus for the intense 2024 hurricane season – which scientists say was driven by climate change to which the utility’s business practices contributed.
The company’s proxy statement said that “these storms required a new level of coordination and teamwork across our Company to restore power to over 5.5 million customers.” The utility did not change any of its objectives because of the storms, but said that “in light of the team’s extraordinary response,” it increased the payout of its short-term incentive from 72% to 80%. For Good, it meant a raise of $229,200 for her role in the “extraordinary response,” with no explanation or metrics to describe why the response, or her leadership of it, was extraordinary.
Over 1.3 million customers lost electricity when Hurricane Helene arrived in North Carolina on Sept. 27. By Oct. 11, tens of thousands of customers remained without power.
At DTE Energy, executives can now receive bonuses based on the company’s in-house metrics for “Storm Customers Restored in 48 Hours” – a new category for bonus pay that replaces a previous one that used a more industry-standard measure for outage length. Consumer advocates had criticized DTE last year for paying bonuses to executives for reliability based on the more traditional measurement, System Average Interruption Duration Index, despite the fact that the utility ranked among the bottom quartile of utilities nationally under that metric.
Like Duke and DTE, PG&E ties elements of its CEO compensation to safety and reliability related to extreme weather, but its metrics look quite different from those utilities, with more objective and measurable measurements to determine performance. That’s likely because California law requires the company to submit its executive compensation structure to a state agency to approve that it is structured to adequately prioritize safety.
An increase in PG&E’s rate of California Public Utility Commission’s weather-normalized reportable fire ignition led to a reduction to CEO Poppe’s bonus payment.
Notes on the data
This analysis is focused on the compensation paid to the CEOs of 53 investor-owned electric and gas utility companies, plus the Tennessee Valley Authority, during the eight-year period between 2017 and 2024. Four internationally-owned utilities included in EPI’s 2023 analysis are excluded here because they have not yet filed reports; they are Avangrid of Connecticut, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Spanish company Iberdrola; Emera and Algonquin Power, both headquartered in Canada; and London-based National Grid.
The analysis includes the compensation paid only to the CEOs of the parent companies of the investor-owned utilities and TVA; it does not include compensation paid to the CEOs of those companies’ subsidiaries, nor does it include compensation paid to the companies’ other top executives. Aside from TVA, it also does not include compensation paid to the CEOs of nonprofit utilities, such as electric cooperatives and municipal utilities.
When utilities had more than one CEO during the period, we showed compensation for each CEO, which sometimes includes payments to two people in the same year. For incoming CEOs that were promoted from within the company, data for their compensation for their first year as CEO may include compensation they received that year in their earlier position, because corporate filings typically do not distinguish between the compensation they received for each position.
Data are from summary compensation tables published in companies’ 14A proxy statement or 10-K forms, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or those forms’ equivalents for companies headquartered in countries other than the U.S.
Figures for CEOs paid in foreign currency were converted into and recorded in the tables in U.S. dollars using the average official rate of exchange between the two currencies for 2024.
EPI included in our analysis nearly all of the investor-owned electric utilities that are members of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), and investor-owned gas utilities that are represented on the American Gas Association (AGA) board of directors. EEI is the trade association for investor-owned electric utilities in the U.S., and AGA is the trade association for investor-owned gas utilities in the U.S.; several utility companies (or their subsidiaries) are members of both trade associations. A few EEI and AGA member companies are not included in this analysis, because their ownership structures do not require them to report this data to the SEC.
Further Reading
As Customers Struggled, Utility CEOs’ Pay Spiked Last Year
Utility CEOs received $3.2 billion in executive compensation from 2017 – 2022
Utility CEOs received $2.7 billion in executive compensation from 2017 – 2021
