To Our Stakeholders

elivering 11 years of affordable utility rates and constantly improving metrics in service reliability and customer satisfaction – last year, we achieved improved metrics in all these categories – that’s not by chance. Achieving operational excellence in our nuclear fleet – we generated the highest ever output across the entire fleet in 2009 – that’s not by chance. Achieving the safest year in our company’s history in an ongoing effort to create an accident-free work environment – that’s not by chance. Being listed on the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index for eight consecutive years and being one of only two U.S. utilities listed this year – none of this happens by chance.

I’m proud of the operational and financial success we’ve achieved over the past 11 years and the way we achieved it – with social conscience, hard work and transparency in everything we do, by managing our business and financial risks to appropriate levels, and by working in ways that are consistent with and supportive of the principles of sustainable development.

Advancing Sustainability at Entergy

After working steadily for 11 years to advance sustainability at Entergy, we are able to report some truly outstanding progress in the areas of safety, environmental, societal and financial performance.

Building an Ingrained Safety Culture

We have succeeded in building a strong, ingrained safety culture that makes safety everyone’s priority. We have established new safety records in seven of the last 10 years, including 2009. Also in 2009, we increased to approximately 70 the number of Entergy work sites that have earned Star status under the prestigious U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Voluntary Protection Program – the highest possible safety rating for an industrial work site. The Dow Jones Sustainability Index awarded Entergy its highest score on safety, recognizing our safety program as the best in the utility industry.

Considering Environmental Issues in Our Decision-Making

Our Board began to discuss the impact of our operations on the environment in 2000 and by 2001 had approved our first voluntary commitment to stabilize our greenhouse gas emissions at year 2000 levels for 2001 to 2005. Since then, we successfully completed our first voluntary CO₂ stabilization commitment and made a second five-year commitment to stabilize our CO₂ emissions from 2006 to 2010 at 20 percent below year 2000 levels. Last year, we met our cumulative stabilization goal for 2006 through 2009. We have built considerable organizational knowledge and experience that enables us to consider and address potential environmental risks and alternatives early in our decision-making processes.

Contributing to Our Society With Recognized Best Practices

We believe we have a moral responsibility to support our communities and help our low-income customers. We actively look for ways to increase our impact. For example, our support of a program called GrantStation.com helps our low-income partners leverage Entergy investments to raise funds from other sources. Our communities received more than 220 times Entergy’s initial investment as a result of GrantStation. We mobilized 150 Entergy employees, family members and community partners throughout Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas to weatherize homes during the first-ever We Have the Power to Care Week. Our efforts were recognized once again in 2009 by Corporate Responsibility Officer magazine, which named Entergy one of its Top 10 Corporate Citizens.

Delivering Top-Quartile Shareholder Returns

We delivered record-setting financial performance in 2009. We reported the highest earnings in Entergy’s history on both a dollar and per share basis. In 2009, our as-reported earnings were $6.30 per share. In sharp contrast, the dismal return to our shareholders, at 2.4 percent total shareholder return for 2009, was so far below our expectations that I can’t begin to put it in words. We ranked in the bottom quartile of our peer group. This disappointing result is simply not acceptable. We believe the strategies we’ve undertaken will drive long-term success and sustainability, and ultimately will enable Entergy to once again achieve top-quartile shareholder returns consistent with our long track record of success.

Restoring Trust in Vermont

Recent developments in Vermont have been frustrating for everyone at Entergy, and our missteps are simply not consistent with how we do business. In January 2010, tritium was found in a groundwater monitoring well on the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station site. In March, the source of the tritium leak was identified, the leak was stopped and initial remediation work began. With more than 25 percent of the nuclear plants in the country having had some tritium issue, we announced our intention to become an industry leader in tritium leak prevention, detection and mitigation. We launched a fleetwide initiative that emphasizes prevention or early detection as opposed to randomly drilling test wells to check for signs of a leak after the fact, which is the current industry standard.

We are also working to regain the trust of the citizens of Vermont and committed to invest the time and effort it will take to do so. We lost the trust and confidence of stakeholders when we provided conflicting information to Vermont officials regarding the existence and extent of underground pipes carrying radionuclides at Vermont Yankee. Entergy takes full responsibility for not making the record clear. We went to great effort to clarify the record and establish new management with clear direction on the need for complete transparency in everything we say or do. We value the trust and confidence that our regulators, customers and communities place in us, and we are determined to restore that trust and confidence in Vermont in the months to come.

We understand that forward progress is not linear in almost any effort, particularly one as all encompassing and evolutionary as sustainability. Knowledge grows with experience, leading to more ambitious goals and greater room for improvement. We are committed to this journey toward sustainability and promise to work diligently and transparently to meet each challenge.

Advocating for Action on Climate Change

For nearly 10 years, Entergy has been at the forefront of the climate change debate. And that most certainly is not by chance. As an organization, we are committed to reducing our impact on the environment and promoting the adoption of effective, efficient and equitable policies to address climate change.

We adamantly believe the U.S. must lead through action and must start now on multiple efforts to address climate change. Without a price on carbon emissions, we use too much fossil fuel and spend too little time and effort on ways to clean up our emissions or replace the technology as its useful life ends with either other cleaner fuels or ways to get the heat content out of carbon-based fuel.

But since CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for decades, we are burning precious daylight as we argue over the “numbers” and burning opportunities future generations cannot get back. The fact is that all indicators are the numbers have become a sideshow. We argue about the cost, but the real issue is about the return on our investment to control CO₂. The base case is not zero cost, but a huge permanent destruction in gross domestic product if we don’t act. As we look for certainty in the physical science, it becomes painfully clear the more important science at this late date is in the social area, namely, risk management. The estimated damage from climate change can be wildly wrong – and if I were a betting man, I’d say it is more likely to be under than overstated – and it’s still the right thing to reduce our greenhouse emissions.

No one I know would consciously take the kind of catastrophic risk we are taking today with their own business, even with far less likelihood of bad outcomes. But we are taking that kind of risk with our planet and with our children’s future. At the same time we must recognize the need to launch an aggressive program of adaptation. Mitigation alone will not secure our future. To reduce our cost and our risk, we have to invest in our planet in the same way we think of maintaining our home. We can always move to another house if we fail in this need. We don’t have another planet to relocate to if we neglect this endeavor. We have no choice but to get it right.

Giving Sustainability a Chance

We hope our annual sustainability report encourages and motivates individuals and organizations to give sustainability a chance. At Entergy, we realize we can only succeed as an organization when we do it in a way that positively impacts our employees’ safety, our environment and our society. In fact, we aspire to achieve positive outcomes for all our stakeholders, including our customers, employees, communities and shareholders. We hope you will join us on our journey to create a cleaner, healthier, sustainable world.

J. Wayne Leonard
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
May 19, 2010