The NextEra-Dominion mega-merger and a natural gas overbuild risk are reshaping how utilities plan for data center demand

Two converging developments are forcing enterprise energy buyers to rethink how they evaluate long-term power supply: the pending creation of the world's largest regulated utility and a growing warning from analysts that a rush to build natural gas infrastructure for data centers could end up costing ordinary ratepayers far more than projected demand ever justifies.

A merger that would rewrite the utility map

NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy submitted their merger applications to state and federal regulators earlier this summer, according to Energy Central. The combined entity would immediately become the largest regulated utility in the world by any standard measure.

Speaking on his Q2 2026 earnings call, NextEra CEO John Ketchum put the closing window in the second half of 2027, according to Fortune's earnings coverage. He also projected the merged company could more than double in size by 2032, a figure that implies an aggressive capital deployment program well beyond the baseline footprints of either company today.

That scale matters operationally. A utility of this size would carry unprecedented weight in regulatory proceedings, grid planning, and long-term power contracting. For large commercial and industrial customers in Dominion's Mid-Atlantic and Southeast service territory or NextEra's Florida footprint, the deal signals a fundamental shift in who controls their infrastructure options for the next decade.

The gas overbuild problem hiding inside data center demand

While the merger narrative centers on scale and growth, a separate and more immediate operational risk is emerging across the sector. The Financial Times reports that a new study, shared exclusively with its Energy Source newsletter, finds that utilities building natural gas infrastructure to serve anticipated data center load are carrying significant stranded-asset exposure.

The core concern: a meaningful share of the data centers underpinning utility capacity projections may never actually get built. Some are early-stage proposals backed by reservation agreements rather than executed construction contracts. If those facilities stall or are abandoned, the gas plants built to serve them don't disappear. The costs get embedded in rate base and recovered from whoever is left on the system, including commercial and industrial customers with no connection to data center development.

Utilities have leaned heavily on gas as the fastest path to dispatchable capacity in a market where power demand has surged faster than transmission and storage can scale. That logic is defensible in the near term, but the Financial Times notes that analysts are flagging the longer-term financial risk to customers when speculative demand doesn't materialize at the scale assumed in resource plans.

What procurement and operations teams need to evaluate now

The two stories are related. A post-merger NextEra-Dominion entity would be large enough to absorb the financial consequences of a partial gas overbuild more easily than a smaller utility. But size does not eliminate rate exposure; it may simply spread the risk across a larger and more diverse customer base.

For procurement directors and VP-level operations leaders negotiating power agreements or assessing facilities siting, the question is no longer just about price per megawatt-hour today. It is about what cost assumptions are baked into a utility's current capital plan, how much of that capital is tied to speculative load, and how those assumptions flow through to commercial rate schedules in three to five years.

The Financial Times report adds a specific dimension to that risk: the potential mismatch between projected and actual data center construction is not a hypothetical. Analysts are actively quantifying it, and regulators in states with active merger proceedings, including those reviewing the NextEra-Dominion application, are likely to scrutinize utility resource plans more closely as a result.

The regulatory timeline to watch

With a target close of late 2027, the NextEra-Dominion merger will spend the better part of the next 12 to 18 months moving through state utility commissions and federal review. Each proceeding is an opportunity for intervenors, including industrial customer groups, to challenge assumptions about future load, generation mix, and rate impacts.

That timeline overlaps directly with the period in which utilities are making final investment decisions on gas capacity additions meant to serve data center load. The two processes, merger review and resource planning, are running in parallel, and how regulators weigh stranded-asset risk in one proceeding will almost certainly influence how they treat capital recovery arguments in the other.

NextEra's projection of more than doubling in size by 2032 depends on continued strong capital deployment. Whether that capital flows into generation, transmission, or storage, and whether regulators demand more conservative load assumptions before approving new gas builds, will define the operating environment for every major energy buyer in the combined utility's service territory through the next decade.