Submitted Photo Xcel Energy President and CEO Bob Frenzel, left, talks with Neel Kashkari, president and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Friday, Jan. 9, during an interview that was among presentations at the 2026 Regional Economic Conditions Conference. Photo from Xcel Energy.

Xcel Energy has grown for about the past 15 years at a rate of half percent a year while accommodating both population growth and energy efficiency measures, according to the company’s president and CEO.

However, increasing demands from data centers, the need for a new national initiative for nuclear power and the growing landowner resistance to transmission lines are among issues that could impact that growth in the future, Xcel Energy’s Bob Frenzel shared at the 2026 Regional Economic Conditions Conference, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis on Friday, Jan. 9.

Frenzel said Xcel Energy is in daily conversations with development teams for new data centers.

“They’re knocking on our door in all of our regions,” he said. “And then, they’re putting real money after this as well. So, when we talk about principles for how we do data center development with these folks, one of our core principles is protecting the existing customer base.

“If we overbuild, that means that people overpay, and we’re very protective of that,” he explained. “We want to make sure that our existing customers don’t bear the burden of these very large development activities that we do believe need to happen.”

Protection comes from longer term contracts with data center developers that amortize the cost of infrastructure over the life of that contract, he said.

Frenzel also called nuclear power an important part of the national energy makeup, supplying about 20% of electricity.

“The existing nuclear fleet runs incredibly well. It’s carbon free. It’s relatively low cost,” he said. Nuclear needs to be revitalized as a core energy source in national policy, but it also needs a matching industrial policy, said Frenzel, who serves on the board of the Nuclear Energy Institute.

“It has to be an all-parts-of-government and an all-parts-of-industry effort to bring a national nuclear renaissance forward. I think we can do it. I think we should do it,” he said.

Frenzel also spoke about landowners’ growing hesitancy to accept additional transmission infrastructure, needed by electrical companies to bring produced energy to the populations that need it.

“As a company, Xcel Energy has been the number one builder of new line-miles of transmission in the country over the past 15 years, So, the great part about it is we’ve had stakeholders and partners and our regulators and our state leadership that have recognized the need for this, and we’ve been building. We’ve got to keep building,” he said.