Dive Brief:
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Energy sector mergers and acquisitions totaled nearly $142 billion from November 2024 to November 2025, up from just under $28 billion during the same time period last year, according to an analysis from PwC.
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The sharp increase was driven more by growth in the scale and value of deals than by the total number of mergers and acquisitions in 2025, the firm said. It tallied 35 deals in 2025 compared to 30 in 2024. “Smaller and mid-tier utilities increasingly sought combinations to strengthen balance sheets and capture scale ahead of rising reliability and electrification needs,” the report said.
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PwC attributed the surge to “load growth opportunities” from electrification and data center demand, “continued portfolio rationalization among regulated utilities, the return of large, regulated utility mergers, and deployment of infrastructure fund capital into long-duration yield oriented assets.” It predicted sustained deal momentum into 2026.
Dive Insight:
Several larger mergers, each totaling tens of billions of dollars, reshaped the energy and utility sectors in 2025.
Deals such as Constellation Energy's $29 billion acquisition of Calpine and NRG Energy's $12.5 billion purchase of LS Power assets underscore the importance of firm, dispatchable generation — especially from natural gas — and of company scale in the face of artificial intelligence-driven demand growth, according to PwC.
Data centers want fast access to power, and long lead times for building new generation mean existing natural gas assets remain “highly sought after in the market right now,” said Kyle Long, a partner at PwC.
Those trends should continue into 2026, though the details may shift, analysts said.
In early 2025, it was cheaper to buy existing natural gas plants than it was to build new ones, and there were several desirable assets and portfolios on the market, according to Hill Vaden, executive director of energy capital insights at S&P Global Energy.
But the current pace of dealmaking can't continue forever, Vaden said, because available natural gas plants will eventually sell out.
“I think there are more assets that can move, but I think that big boom ... has to slow,” Vaden said.
When it does, Vaden anticipates the acquisition fervor will transition from gas back to solar, with an emphasis on the largest assets and portfolios.
“Scale is going to really determine the winners and losers, and there is still a huge growth story in power particularly,” Vaden said. “I think we will continue to see robust M&A activity in power in 2026.”
Renewable asset transactions slowed in 2025, dropping from 13 deals to 9 — but doubling in value from $6.9 billion to $12.5 billion, according to data provided to Utility Dive by PwC. Some of the loss of momentum in this space, according to Vaden, was triggered by the uncertainty created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
But Chris DeLucia, director of global power and renewables at S&P Global Energy, attributed the slow renewables market to the limited number of assets on the market. Many owners of renewable assets, he said, chose to sit out 2025 in hope of better valuations in the future. Market values for renewable energy assets have declined steadily since peaking in 2021, DeLucia said.
Recent stabilization of market valuations could prompt more sales of renewable assets in 2026, DeLucia said. He also expects to see more acquisitions and mergers in the regulated utility space in 2026, driven by utilities' growing need to pool resources and access capital to meet demand and fund expansion plans.
