NorthWestern Energy Group, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Northwestern Energy 2024 year-end financial results webinar. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star followed by the number one. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I will now hand today's call over to Travis Meyer. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Tamika. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Northwestern Energy Group's financial results webcast for the year ended December 31st, 2024. My name is Travis Meyer. I'm the Director of Corporate Development and Investor Relations Officer for Northwestern. Joining us today to walk you through the results and provide an overall update are Brian Bird, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Crystal Lael, Chief Financial Officer. Northwestern's results have been released, and the release is available on our website at northwesternenergy.com. We also released our 10K premarket this morning. Please note that the company's press release, this presentation, comments by presenters, and responses to your questions may contain forward-looking statements. As such, I'll direct you to the disclosures contained in our SEC filings and the safe harbor provisions included on the second slide of this presentation. Also note, this presentation includes non-GAAP financial measures. Please see the non-GAAP disclosures, definitions, and reconciliations included in the presentation as well. The presentation is being recorded. The archived replay will be available shortly after the event and remain active for one year. Please visit financial results section of our website to access the replay. With that, I'll hand the presentation over to Brian Bird for his opening remarks.

Thanks Travis. I'm going to start on page three for the 2024 year in review. First and foremost, from a critical infrastructure investment perspective, we maintain safe and reliable service while reaching new all time winter and summer electric system peaks in Montana. We safely completed over 550 million of capital investment. The Yellowstone County generating station is now online and serving customers. We strengthened Montana's presence with a planned acquisition of the Energy West Montana and Cutbank gas assets. We have an agreement for incremental coal strip ownership in Montana, which addresses remaining capacity gap and enables opportunities for new large load customers. And we've announced plans for regional transmission expansion. Moving over to regulatory and operational performance, we filed rate reviews across all jurisdictions to recover necessary investment to provide safe and reliable service. And we refreshed our wildfire mitigation plan and implemented our public safety power shutoff plan. Lastly, from Strong Financial Performance and Outlook, we reported diluted gap EPS of $3.65. And we're affirming our long-term EPS and rate-based target growth rates of 4% to 6%. We're increasing our quarterly dividend by 1.5% to 66 cents per share payable March 31st, 2025. in announcing $2.74 billion five-year capital plan, which is an 11% increase over our prior plan. Moving into the next slide from a Northwestern value proposition, if you take our 4% to 6% EPS growth rate and you add that to our 5% dividend yield, you're looking at 9% to 11% total growth. That's off of the $2.74 billion capital plan I just talked about. If you think about other incremental opportunities, some of which I'll talk about today, think about data centers and new large load opportunities for regional transmission, incremental generating capacity. If we're able to do any of those things and some others not listed here, we'd see EPS growth rate greater than 6%. Obviously, our total growth rate greater than 11%. Speaking of the $2.74 billion of capital investment that's highly executable and lowers capital investment over the next five years, And that investment is expected to drive annualized earnings rate-based growth of 4% to 6%. And again, as I mentioned earlier, that's 11% above the prior plan we shared with you last time we talked. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Crystal to go through the financial results.