Talen Energy Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Talon Energy first quarter earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You'll then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sergio Castro, Vice President and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Kathy, and welcome to Talent Energy's first quarter 2026 conference call. Speaking today are Chief Executive Officer Matt McFarland, President Terry Nutt, and Chief Financial Officer Cole Mulder. They are joined by other talent senior executives to address questions during the second part of today's call as necessary. We issued our earnings release this afternoon, along with a presentation, all of which can be found in the investor relations section of Talent's website, talentenergy.com. Today, we are making some forward-looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions. Actual results could differ due to risk factors and other considerations described in our financial disclosures and other SEC filings. Today's discussion also includes references to certain non-GAAP financial measures. We have provided information reconciling our non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in our earnings release and the appendix of our presentation. With that, I will now turn the call over to Mac.

Great. Thank you, Sergio, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate your interest and talent, and we look forward to the discussion during our Q&A. But I'll start with our first quarter results. In the first quarter, we delivered strong operational and financial results, including strong plant performance during the winter cold events, and we are off to a good start to the outage season. In fact, we are in startup at Susquehanna, slightly exceeding our planned outage duration. Terry and Cole will discuss all of this in more detail later. Also in the first quarter, we signed a cornerstone transaction, advancing our talent flywheel strategy and adding meaningful free cash flow per share growth. through acquisitions. Today we are reaffirming our 2026 guidance and providing a preliminary view of our 2027 and 2028 outlooks. Our 2026 guidance does not include the cornerstone assets. However, we expect to close as soon as this summer and we will update 2026 guidance once we close. We recently closed on the financing for the cornerstone acquisition which positions us to close as quickly as possible once we receive all regulatory approvals. COLA will explain why we acted now in more detail, but in short, the carry cost of funding now should be more than offset by closing as soon as possible. We have also reduced market volatility risk and replaced some higher cost debt. Our preliminary 27 and 28 outlooks do include the cornerstone assets as well as other updates, including higher current forward mark-to-market values from 3-31 of this year, improved financing costs, and several other changes. These outlooks show significant year-over-year growth in free cash flow per share and meaningful upside versus the outlook we shared recently this past January. This demonstrates the strength of our business and our continued ability to return cash to shareholders through meaningful share repurchases. These outlooks also imply we are trading at double-digit free cash flow yields, which we do not believe reflect our increasingly contracted portfolio. And that does not include the other levers that we have for further upside. And Cole will walk you through those later. Looking ahead, nothing has changed in our towel and flywheel strategy. Our direction of travel remains the same. We continue to believe in data center contracting for megawatts, and we are building a pipeline of both powered land and new build options. Terry will walk you through these development activities and how we see the market evolving towards what we call a hybrid model, which uses existing generation for speed to market and is supplemented by new build in later years. Some of you may remember me saying that 2025 was a year of options and 26 will be a year of market rationalization. and that we would not discuss development activities. While we're not going into specific project details, we will provide a high-level view of our development portfolio today, and we still do expect rationalization across projects in 2026. All that said, we are building a pipeline of real opportunities that can win. With that, I'll turn the call over to Terry.