Who Owns Entergy?

The brand traces to a handshake over sawdust. On November 13, 1913, Harvey Couch, a railroad and telephone entrepreneur, agreed with lumberman H.H. Foster to burn sawmill waste as fuel, and the Arkansas Power Company was born. Within a year the renamed Arkansas Power and Light was running 22 miles of transmission line between Malvern and Arkadelphia, the only interconnected power system in the state.

Couch built aggressively through the 1920s, merging Mississippi utilities into Mississippi Power and Light in 1923 and helping create Louisiana Power and Light in 1925. His companies combined with the Electric Power and Light Corporation that same year. Federal antitrust law then forced a reorganization, and in 1949 the four operating utilities came under a new holding company, Middle South Utilities.

Middle South bet early on nuclear, building Arkansas Nuclear One in the late 1960s and Grand Gulf in Mississippi in the 1970s. Grand Gulf's cost overruns produced a decade of litigation ending in a 1988 Supreme Court ruling on who paid for the plant. In 1989 the company renamed itself Entergy, and on January 1, 1994, it merged with Gulf States Utilities, adding Texas and southwest Louisiana to the territory.

The 2000s brought a nuclear merchant adventure. Entergy bought plants including Indian Point, Vermont Yankee, Pilgrim, Palisades, and FitzPatrick to sell power in deregulated markets, becoming the nation's second-largest nuclear operator. Cheap natural gas undercut the strategy, and Entergy exited the merchant nuclear business entirely by 2022.

The recent brand story is storm and growth. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Ida in 2021 defined its resilience record, with Ida knocking out all transmission into New Orleans. The late 2020s brought the opposite kind of attention: data center customers led by Meta's Hyperion project in Richland Parish, Louisiana, have signed multi-gigawatt service agreements that turned Entergy into one of the fastest-growing utilities in the country.