"You watch next year our earnings will be down compared to this year, and the principal reason for that will be low natural gas prices," said Rowe, who was visiting Philadelphia to speak to Wharton Energy Conference 2011 at the Union League.
"Low gas prices are good for America, not quite so good for Exelon," said Rowe, who is retiring next year after his company completes a planned merger with Constellation Energy Group of Baltimore.
Rather than erecting barriers to natural gas, Rowe believes government should embrace the newfound domestic fuel source that produces less pollution than other fossil fuels such as coal or petroleum.
"What we have today in Pennsylvania, in the whole Northeast, is the great domestic blessing of cheap natural gas," he told the Wharton audience. "It gives us a bridge, at least a 10-year bridge, maybe a 20-year bridge, in which we can produce much cleaner energy at a low cost. That's a unique blessing."
Lower gas costs are suppressing more than electricity prices, said Denis P. O'Brien, Peco's chief executive, who joined Rowe at the Wharton event. O'Brien said that the utility's half-million natural gas customers in suburban Philadelphia are spending $300 million less a year - a 50 percent reduction - than when gas prices peaked in 2008.
"That's a significant energy savings," he said.
The rapid emergence of shale-gas in recent years - it now accounts for about a quarter of the nation's natural gas supply - has forced government officials and corporate planners to recalibrate their outlooks.
Exelon, the nation's largest producer of nuclear power, is no longer looking at building new reactors because of shale gas and this year's disaster of Japan's Fukushima reactors, Rowe said.
