Exelon Corporation

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Thank you, Mary. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our first quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Leading the call today are Chris Crane, Exelon's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Joe Nigro, Exelon's Chief Financial Officer. They're joined by other members of Exelon's senior management team. We'll be available to answer your questions following our prepared remarks. We issued our earnings release this morning along with the presentation, both of which can be found in the investor relations section of Exelon's website. The earnings release and other matters which we discussed during today's call are contain forward-looking statements and estimates that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ from our forward-looking statements based on factors and assumptions discussed in today's material and comments made during this call. Please refer to today's 8K and Exelon's other SEC filings for discussions of risk factors and other factors, including uncertainties surrounding the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic that may cause results to differ from management's projections, forecasts, and expectations. Today's presentation also includes references to adjusted operating earnings and other non-GAAP measures. Please refer to the information contained in the appendix of our presentation and our earnings release for reconciliations between the non-GAAP measures and the nearest equivalent GAAP measures. I'll now turn the call over to Chris Crane, Exelon's CEO.

Thanks, Dan, and thanks to everybody that's joined today. I'll first start off with the first quarter results. We had a strong quarter, even with one of the warmest winters we've seen in a long time. The GAAP basis earned $0.60 per share. Non-GAAP basis earned $0.87 per share. Joe's going to cover all those details in his remark. We had very solid operations throughout the first quarter. First quartile outage frequency and duration and record-setting nuclear refueling outages that I'll go into further as we continue. Hearings and working groups in Illinois on clean energy legislation, which is very critical right now, are meeting. The discussion is going on. We still haven't determined how the legislature will get back into session to resume work, but I think they all understand the priority of what needs to be done, not only for energy but the capital budgets and other issues involved. in Illinois. So we'll work and continue to work on that through May. Our number one focus throughout this pandemic has been focusing on the safety and well-being of our employees. Our employees are on a mission. They know we're mission critical in as many as possible working remotely in supporting the critical infrastructure. We have approximately 17,000 people, employees, and another 8,000 contractors working remotely and being able to execute on their tasks without any faults. So our frontline workers, the 17,000 frontline workers and the contractors that are maintaining the electric gas system and the power plants, we're protecting with PPE, social distancing, and pre-screening. We have not laid off or furloughed or reduced hours or pay as a result of the pandemic. We've done a couple things. Employees diagnosed with COVID remain in pay status and no charge to sick leave. Overall, we've had 102 employees have been diagnosed with COVID plus 25 contractors. Eighty-two of those total count have returned back to work. And so... We're continuing to focus on the health and safety and the well-being. We give full pay to employees that are being quarantined. If they've become in contact through our tracing mechanisms that we're providing at all of our facilities, we quarantine them for the required amount of time, which allows us to keep not only them and their families safe, but also other employees. We also... expanded access to backup care for dependents. So those frontline employees or supporting frontline employees that need to be in the workspace out in the field do not have to worry about their children out of school or their elderly parents. So that's another service we're providing to the employees to keep everybody focused on their own safety, the job one, keeping the grid up and keeping the gas flowing, and keeping the power plants running. A big part on slide four you'll see, a big part of what we do, what we've always been doing, and what we will continue to do is support our customers and communities. As you know and you heard, all the utilities suspended disconnects, waived new late fees, and we did reconnect or reach out to customers that had been disconnected since the 1st of March and offered to reconnect those individuals who had been disconnected. And this gives us the ability for people that are laid off or people that are in financially challenged times to have one of the most critical social and needed energy sources that we can provide. We also, at the Exelon Foundation and our companies, have contributed over more than $5.9 million to relief organizations, ensuring food banks and other programs can be supported during this time of need, and we'll continue to focus on that. But at the core of everything after safety in the community is our operational excellence, which is even more critical right now. Keeping the lights on in this crisis, keeping the hospitals with power, health care providers, grocery stores, medical food production facilities, you can see the list of the priorities that are there. And we have to, as a company and an organization, continue to have reliable service, and that is strong at the utilities. We've had spring storms already this year. We restored more than 350,000 customers across the service territories in late March and early April. We've been able to do that and test ourselves on moving in resources and being able to adequately and safely shelter our employees but allow them to work safely in the field to restore the power. On the power side, the nuclear group has completed seven of eight refueling outages, all better than planned. There's one refueling outage left to go that will be closing up later in this month, a major rewind on the Ganesh station. But if you look at the majority of the plants, it's been world-class performance with the outages being performed between 16 and 18 days. If you look about these trying times, we've only had 25 employees that have, excuse me, 29, including contractors, 25 employees have been infected with the COVID virus, and all but four have returned to work. So the work that we're doing with PPE, social distancing, and allowing the critical resources to come in and operate the facilities that are needed has been very critical to us. And as I mentioned earlier, we have expanded our care to those families that need extra resources. We've completed 26 maintenance outages at our power facilities readying for summer readiness and all done without issues. With that, that's the overall view of the operations and what we're focused on, and I'll turn it over to Joe to go through the financial.