Exelon Corporation

Hello, and welcome to Exelon's first quarter earning fall. My name is Gigi, and I'll be your event specialist today. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. Please note that today's webcast is being recorded. During the presentation, we'll have a question and answer session. You can ask questions by pressing star 1 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to view the presentation in a full screen view, click the full screen button by hovering your computer mouse cursor over the PowerPoint screen. Press the Escape key on your keyboard to return to your original view. And finally, should you need technical assistance, as a best practice, we suggest you first refresh your browser. If that does not resolve the issue, please click on the Help option in the upper right-hand corner of your screen for online troubleshooting. It is now my pleasure to turn today's program Over to Andrew Plenge, Vice President of Investor Relations. The floor is yours.

Thank you, Gigi, and good morning, everyone. We're pleased to have you with us for our 2024 first quarter earnings call. Leading the call today are Calvin Butler, Excellence President and Chief Executive Officer, and Gene Jones, Excellence Chief Financial Officer. Other members of Excellence Senior Management Team are also with us today, and they will be available to answer your questions following our prepared remarks. Today's presentation, along with our earnings release and other financial information, can be found in the investor relations section of Exelon's website. We'd also like to remind you that today's presentation and the associated earnings release materials contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. You can find the cautionary statements on these risks on slide two of today's presentation or in our SEC filings. In addition, today's presentation includes references to adjusted operating earnings and other non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations between these measures and the nearest equivalent gap measures can be found in the appendix of our presentation and in our earnings release. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Calvin Butler, Exelon's President and CEO. Thank you, Andrew, and happy birthday.

Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for our first quarter earnings call. We continue our focus on strong execution. We have started the year with solid operational performance and are on track to meet our financial expectations. And we are making good progress on the regulatory front, having concluded ComEd's rehearing process almost two months ahead of schedule. But before I get into the details of today's call, I want to start by acknowledging all of the thoughtful outreach we received on the passing of my predecessor, Chris Crane. Exelon, and really the energy industry, wouldn't be what it is today without his leadership. All 20,000 of our employees are committed to furthering the legacy of the platform he established. and the culture of operational excellence he promoted permeates all aspects of the performance you see today. Beginning with our key messages on slide four, we earned 66 cents per share on a gap basis and 68 cents per share on a non-gap basis. We again faced well below normal weather across our jurisdictions, along with significant storm activity. But having approximately three-quarters of our revenues decoupled from load, balanced cost recovery mechanisms, and strong operating earnings guidance of $2,040 to $2,050 per share. We are on track to deliver that. We also continue to perform in the top quartile operationally across all of our operating company utilities. On the regulatory front, we have continued to make good progress. As laid out in our fourth quarter call, a key goal this year is to improve our regulatory outlook in Illinois. We took a large step forward on March 13th. when we filed our updated grid plan with the Illinois Commerce Commission. Upon hearing from the Commission in December, the ComEd team got to work the day after the order and worked tirelessly with key stakeholders over the next 90 days to create an updated grid plan that addressed the Commission's feedback. I am so proud of the ComEd team for their efforts to refile an updated grid plan that is thoroughly responsive to the ICC's direction And we look forward to a final order, which the Commission has stated should be received by the end of the year for rates effective at the beginning of next year. And in the meantime, we are pleased that the Commission approved an updated revenue requirement for ComEd in its rehearing almost two months ahead of the statutory deadline, which recognizes the investments made last year and the prudent expectations for continual investment in new business in Illinois. We also filed electric and gas rate cases at PECO in late March. These rate cases will support PECO's expanded investment in infrastructure, and they will enhance programs and services for customers, including assistance for low-income customers and support for customers embracing cleaner energy options. And lastly, the Delaware Public Service Commission approved a settlement in Delmarva Power and Light's electric distribution rate case. supporting continued investment in the reliability and resiliency of its grid. Jean will review more details around our regulatory activities shortly. Finally, we continue to reaffirm all of our long-term guidance, including an expected 5% to 7% annualized operating earnings growth going forward. This will be driven by the significant investment needed to support our jurisdiction's energy goals, which we are committed to doing as affordably and equitably as possible. Turning to slide five, our streak of operational excellence continues, despite the significant storm activity we saw across our territories in the first quarter. In both outage frequency and outage duration, ComEd and Pepco Holdings achieved top decile performance, while BGE and PECO achieved top quartile performance. This also includes extremely high performance on the gas side of the business, where gas odor response rates were perfect at both BGE and PECO. We also maintain strong performance in our customer satisfaction scores at ComEd and PECO, with ComEd achieving top decile. In light of its low performance at the start of the year, BGE has created several working groups to identify and address customer pain points highlighted in customer surveys and direct interactions. With 10 initiatives underway that include enhanced community outreach for energy efficiency programs, especially targeted towards limited and moderate income customers and a continuous improvement plan for new business. Results are trending favorably in the second quarter. Lastly, I'll spend some time speaking about our safety culture and performance. We achieved top decile performance on our metric through the first quarter at BGE and Pepco Holdings. while ComEd and PICO sit in the second quartile. As many are familiar, the measure we have historically used for safety has been OSHA recordables, in line with the industry standard. This metric has been in place for decades, resulting from legislation passed over 50 years ago. While OSHA recordables served as a useful starting point to drive safe behaviors and accountability, it has limitations in its ability to focus efforts on the most critical areas. While the total injury rate for the industry has declined, the most severe outcomes, fatalities, have not. The power sector occupies a unique space in today's economy, and the nature of our work entails significant physical risk, more than most other business sectors. In our efforts to advance our capabilities as a learning organization, we have worked with the industry to adopt a more targeted and comprehensive framework to monitor high safety risk situations to harness key learnings and further engage our employees. Such a framework is better suited for our industry to drive safety performance to the next level. And this approach not only better ensures our efforts are focused on the highest potential risk, but also helps measure the success of those efforts, evaluating the presence of safeguards as opposed to the absence of injuries. In alignment with this strategy to focus on the highest risk safety situations we are now reporting on our safety performance through the serious injury incident rate, or SEER. Given this safety metric now measures serious injuries, we're more focused than ever on doing as much as we can to operate at industry-leading levels, and any incidents are unacceptable. Based on performance to date, ComEd is refreshing all employees on serious injury prevention tools, including recognition of their empowerment to stop work if a situation is deemed unsafe. And PICO is focused on strategies to improve safety performance around motor vehicles, including a co-pilot program to identify and communicate passenger responsibilities for safe driving. I am very proud of our operations team for its industry leadership on an issue as paramount as safety, and I look forward to driving continuous improvement in this area. Jean, I'll now turn it over to you to cover our financial and regulatory update.