CenterPoint Adds Another $500M to 2025 Capex Plans
The leaders of CenterPoint Energy Inc. have added $500 million to their 2025 capital spending plans, with most of that investment dedicated to transmission infrastructure in the company’s home market of Houston.
CenterPoint’s beefed-up investment plans—this year’s capex budget now stands at $5.3 billion—are intended to help it serve booming demand that President and CEO Jason Wells is exemplified by its interconnection queue growing by 6 gigawatts just since the end of the first quarter. Earlier this year, Wells and his team cranked up their investment plans between 2026 and 2030 by $5 billion to about $31.2 billion, more than $23 billion of which will go to its electric operations in Houston and Indiana.
“We continue to believe that we have one of the most tangible long-term growth plans in the industry,” Wells said on a July 24 conference call discussing CenterPoint’s second-quarter results. “Even with these announced increases, we believe there is still further upside to our capital investment plan that runs through 2030.”
Detailing the 6 gigawatts of new interconnection requests, Wells said about two-thirds of that capacity is coming from data center developers. The remainder, he said, is spread across advanced manufacturing, energy exports and life sciences. The first of those customers, he added, should start being connected in late 2026.
“Thankfully, we’ve got excess capacity on our system,” he said. “We’ve built our transmission system, our substations, where we can move quickly address these interconnection requests. And I think that is just creating a great set of conditions where we continue to see increases in the interconnection queue quarter after quarter.”
Wells noted that selling the gas operations in Ohio should let CenterPoint executives redirect about $1 billion of spending over the next five years to the company’s growing Texas footprint. That includes a large amount of Houston-area spending on resiliency in the wake of last year’s Hurricane Beryl, projects Wells said are quickly producing results: Houston Electric’s customer outage minutes in the first half of 2025 were down about 50% from last year.
CenterPoint posted a second-quarter net profit of $198 million on total revenues of $1.94 billion. In the same period of last year, those figures were $228 million and $1.91 billion, respectively. The company’s total throughput for the quarter rose 4% while its customer base expanded by 2%.
Shares of CenterPoint (Ticker: CNP) were up nearly 2% to $37.85 after the company’s earnings report and conference call. Over the past six months, they have climbed more than 15%, growing the company’s market capitalization to about $24.7 billion.
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
Senior Editor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications T&D World, Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner and Oil & Gas Journal. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.