David W. Crane
Analyst · Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co
Well, Brandon, the first way I'd answer that question is to punt and basically say it's the last 5 years that I've been in this industry, which is really actually like the 5 years before, that has proven one thing is that none of us have any idea what the next 5 years are going to be about. And I think what we've really done is built a company now with its natural resources that can go in either direction. I mean we actually do, I think maybe unlike some of the other companies in our sector, see a lot of opportunities across the space. And I would say right now, in terms of reinvesting in the business, I would say we've got a lot going on, on the generation side. But I guess what really animates me when I get up in the morning is what we can do on the retail space and around the customer and bringing together conventional retail and new clean energy and products, which will be appealing to the consumer. The thing though about those types of investments, Brandon, is they tend not to be as capital-intensive, and the bets are smaller. Hopefully, the payback is quicker or as they say, if you're going to fail at something, fail quickly and cheaply. And so as we move and try new things in that area, I think it will still leave a lot of capital for the return of capital to shareholders. I mean, obviously, we're excited about what we did today in terms of the increase of the dividend in particular. We'd like to do more of that in the future, but obviously, we're not committing ourselves to a particular rate of increase. And as Kirk talked about, it's going to be sort of tied to how much we get accomplished in terms of contracted investments. And I think that we will see more -- in this natural gas price environment, if there's going to be more built in the United States on the generation side, it's all going to be based on bilateral contract. We've got great sites, we've got the people, we've got the ability to repower, conventional and renewable. And so, hopefully, we can grow the dividend off the back of an ever-increasing amount of contracted revenue streams. So that's my long-winded answer. My short-winded answer is I think we can do both. We can continue to return capital to shareholders and really stakeholders in terms of debt paydown and reinvest across our portfolio of businesses.