Utility stocks have long attracted investors for several reasons. They provide essential services – we can’t get along in the modern world without running water, reliable electricity, or safe supplies of natural gas. These necessities give the companies that provide them a secure and often predictable business foundation.

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In addition, most utility firms operate in tightly regulated markets and effectively hold monopolies within their regions. For investors, that means a key determinant of performance isn’t the going rate for services, but rather the company’s relationship with its regulatory authority. Maintain that relationship on solid footing, and the firm will remain well-positioned to appeal to investors.

Wells Fargo’s Shar Pourreza, who is rated by TipRanks in the top 2% of Wall Street’s analysts, has been giving this sector a long, hard look as 2025 winds toward its close, and he sees utility stocks as sound options for the remainder of the year.

“We continue to see the sector as discounted vs. its emerging growth attributes/opportunities, including data centers, reshoring, electrification of the system, and other economically driven load growth opportunities. In short, this is one of the strongest backdrops we have seen in the sector, which is not only leveraged to perpetual infrastructure needs, but is now further buoyed by one of the healthiest load growth environments we have seen in more than 20 years of covering this space… The defensive characteristics for the group merely create a floor, limiting downside, but the perfect storm of tailwinds creates materially higher upside opportunities,” the 5-star analyst opined.

With that bullish setup in mind, Pourreza isn’t just speaking in general terms – he pinpoints two utility stocks as his ‘best ideas’ for the rest of the year. But do his top picks align with the broader Wall Street consensus? We turned to the TipRanks database to find out. Let’s dive in.

Sempra Energy (SRE)

The first energy stock we’ll look at here, Sempra Energy, is an electric and natural gas utility operating in California and Texas. The San Diego-based company was founded in 1998 and today is one of the largest utility-scale energy networks in North America, with approximately 40 million customers. Sempra has some 20,000 employees and boasted nearly $100 billion in total assets at the end of last year.