Drew Marsh and the arithmetic of keeping the lights on

Drew Marsh has found advice about running meetings in a place that rarely appears on an executive education brochure: his children’s elementary school classrooms. Their teachers, he has said, gave him ideas about making meetings more effective and getting them finished on time. Anyone who has watched a roomful of adults struggle with an agenda may appreciate the choice of experts.

The detail is useful because Marsh’s public biography otherwise arrives wearing a tie. Mechanical engineering at Notre Dame. Management at Northwestern’s Kellogg school. Planning, operations and finance at Entergy. Chief financial officer, then chief executive, then chair. The classroom offers a smaller window into that procession of responsibilities: a willingness, in his own account, to pick up an idea wherever it happens to be working.

Today, the Entergy chair and CEO has a larger scheduling problem. The Gulf South wants more electricity. New industrial customers and data centers want it quickly. Existing customers want dependable service at a price they can manage. Infrastructure must last through conditions that make an annual business plan look rather optimistic. Marsh has spent much of his working life inside the company now being asked to reconcile those demands.

Twenty-four years before the corner office

Marsh joined Entergy in 1998 as an associate in strategic planning and special projects. His early work included a finance project management role in the company’s national nuclear strategy. Later responsibilities crossed strategic planning at Entergy-Koch, the joint venture with Koch Industries, and system planning and operations at Entergy.

There is something revealing about that route. A power company contains several businesses’ worth of problems: equipment, fuel, construction, capital, regulation and customer service. Working through different parts of it provides repeated opportunities to discover that a solution in one department can become an expensive question in another. Marsh’s career took him across those boundaries before he became responsible for the whole.

He became executive vice president and chief financial officer in 2013. For nine years, his remit included the financial functions that keep an infrastructure business funded and accountable. Then, in August 2022, Entergy announced a planned succession. Marsh would take over from Leo Denault as CEO on November 1. Kimberly Fontan would succeed Marsh as CFO.

Denault stayed on as executive chair during the transition. Marsh became board chair on February 1, 2023. It was an orderly handoff to someone who had helped shape the strategy he was inheriting. When the appointment was announced, Marsh described Denault as a colleague and friend. Twenty-four years after entering the company, he was taking charge of a business he had already seen from several angles.

The geography behind the growth

Entergy’s operating companies serve more than three million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. The company is headquartered in New Orleans. This is a regional footprint with connections to much larger markets: ports, pipelines, railways, manufacturing and the Mississippi River all feature in Marsh’s account of why businesses look at the Gulf South.

At his 2025 annual meeting, he pointed to electric service agreements signed the previous year with hyperscale data center customers in Mississippi and Louisiana. He also highlighted more than 700 megawatts of solar resources brought online in 2024. His argument joined two developments often discussed separately: customers arriving with substantial power requirements, and a utility changing the resources it uses to serve them.

The geography does some of the recruiting. It also sets some of the terms. An industrial facility chooses a location for practical reasons, and electricity belongs on that list. A utility executive cannot offer the river or the railway. He can offer a plan for power. That puts Marsh in conversations where economic development and engineering share a table, with the financial department waiting for a chair.

A storm has no use for a forecast

For Marsh, the growth conversation takes place in a region with a long memory of interrupted service. In his reflections on the twentieth anniversary of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, he returned to New Orleans as Entergy’s home and to the employees whose own communities had been hit. He had joined the company seven years before Katrina.

The point of remembering is practical. A grid built for one set of expectations has to work under the demands of another. In his public discussion with Axios, Marsh emphasized strengthening the Gulf Coast grid while managing customer costs, including seeking available federal and state funding. Reliability asks whether service works today. Resilience asks how well the system survives the day that goes badly.

Those questions are easy to blend into a reassuring phrase. They require different work. Preventing an equipment failure, reinforcing a structure and restoring a damaged circuit may all improve a customer’s experience, but they enter the budget differently. Someone has to decide what to build first, what protection is worth buying and how to explain the cost before the next storm supplies its own explanation.

His 2025 anniversary reflection described approved Louisiana work involving 2,100 additional projects and a Texas resilience investment of $137 million. Those are commitments to many individual pieces of infrastructure. They are also reminders of how a CEO’s strategy reaches the street: one project, one approval and one crew assignment at a time.

The customer who was already here

The most consequential audience for Marsh’s growth argument may be the person who has no intention of building a data center. That customer already has a meter, a monthly bill and a reasonable interest in whether someone else’s arrival will make either more troublesome.

In March 2026, Entergy announced its Fair Share Plus pledge alongside approximately $5 billion in projected savings for 2.3 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi over twenty years. The company subsequently described projected benefits of $7 billion. These are forecasts spread over two decades, rather than a sum already returned to households. Keeping the time period attached to the number is essential to understanding the promise.

The proposed logic is straightforward: large new customers contribute toward infrastructure and shared costs, helping reduce the burden that others would otherwise carry. Making that happen depends on the agreements and on the oversight around them. Marsh’s public explanation credits state leaders and public service commissions with helping shape arrangements intended to benefit the wider region.

A growing utility can show more sales and more construction. An existing customer needs a more personal explanation of value. Has the cost burden changed? Is service more dependable? How much of a promised benefit depends on what happens years from now? Those questions make affordability a continuing obligation, even after a project has secured its announcement and its photograph.

Marsh’s financial background gives this part of his story particular interest. He knows the language of capital allocation. His current job requires translating it into an account of who pays and who gains. The translation will be judged over time, including by people who have never used the phrase capital allocation and have no plans to begin.

Nuclear power, with a cost question attached

Marsh’s responsibilities now extend beyond Entergy. He chairs the Nuclear Energy Institute and Nuclear Electric Insurance Limited, and serves as vice chair of the Edison Electric Institute. Nuclear energy connects his early finance project work with a current role in the industry’s direction.

In a 2025 Energy Evolution podcast conversation with Platts reporter Abbie Bennett, he discussed rising demand, interest from data centers and uncertainty around nuclear construction costs. He described a desire to help establish the foundations for the industry’s development through 2050. The horizon is long. The customers seeking electricity have nearer deadlines.

That combination explains why his nuclear discussion belongs beside his work on affordability. Enthusiasm for a technology leaves questions about its cost and delivery schedule still to be answered. For someone whose career crossed planning and finance, those questions are central to the work. A future power supply must become a project that can be financed and completed.

Entergy’s strategy also includes modern natural gas and renewables. In 2023, when announcing an agreement to sell its Louisiana gas distribution businesses, Marsh described a focus on the regulated electric utility business. Across these choices, the company has been defining where it intends to put its attention and capital. The portfolio gives the strategy a more concrete shape than any single technology slogan could.

The photographs outside Wayne Leonard’s office

There is another set of relationships around Marsh, closer to home. He served as United Way of Southeast Louisiana’s campaign cabinet chair for 2025–26. In October 2026, Entergy reported that United Way had recognized Drew and his wife, Lynn, as its Alexis de Tocqueville Award recipients. Their documented commitments include education and literacy, alongside other community support.

At the recognition, Marsh recalled former Entergy CEO Wayne Leonard and the photographs he had placed outside his office as reminders of vulnerable customers. The photographs were still displayed. An office corridor can preserve a message longer than a presentation does; people have to walk past it on their way to the next meeting.

“Our employees are the multiplier of our impact.”

Drew Marsh, at his 2026 United Way recognition

His other service includes the board of Jobs for America’s Graduates and the advisory board of Posse New Orleans. These commitments put education and opportunity alongside the electricity business in his public record. They also bring the scale down from millions of accounts to the institutions through which people find a route into work and further study.

Marsh’s career has been unusually continuous: the same company since 1998, with the responsibilities changing around him. The work ahead is less settled. New customers, new capacity and changing expectations require choices whose consequences will outlast an earnings call. His story returns to a useful habit from those elementary school classrooms: pay attention to the people doing the work, and stay willing to learn something from them.