Xcel Energy Inc.

And ladies and gentlemen, please stand by. Good day and welcome to Xcel Energy's first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. There will be a question and answer session following the prepared remarks. Questions will only be taken from institutional investors. Reporters can contact media relations with inquiries and individual investors and others can reach out to our investor relations. At this time, I would like to introduce your host for today's call, Paul Johnson, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to Xcel Energy's 2021 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today are Ben Folk, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bob Frenzel, President and Chief Operating Officer, Brian Van Abel, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Amanda Rome, Executive Vice President and General Counsel. This morning, we will review our 2021 2021 results, and share recent business and regulatory developments. There are slides that accompany today's call are available on our website. As a reminder, some of the comments during today's call may contain forward-looking information. Significant factors that could cause results to differ from those anticipated are described in our earnings release and our SEC filings. Today we will discuss certain metrics that are non-GAAP measures, including ongoing earnings and electric and natural gas margins, information on the compatible Comparable gap measures and reconciliations are included in our earnings release.

That will turn it over to Ben. Well, thank you, Paul, and good morning, everyone. Today we reported strong first quarter earnings of $0.67 per share compared with $0.56 per share last year. We're off to a good start, and we are reaffirming our 2021 guidance range. I want to start out by thanking our employees for their outstanding work to ensure that our customers did not experience any material outages during winter storm URI. I'm proud of our strong performance of our power plants and our electric and natural gas systems during that serious event. I think there are a lot of lessons learned from URI. The need to invest in resiliency, the increased interdependency between the gas and electric sectors, and the need to have 24-7 dispatchable generation available are a few to come to mind. So despite strong operational performance, we incurred $1 billion of incremental fuel costs during the winter storm. It's important to recognize that we followed all the policies and procedures regarding natural gas purchasing and hedging as approved by regulators in our states. We're in the process of seeking recovery for incremental fuel costs, and will propose to defer the cost recovery over a year or two to mitigate the impact on our customers. Well, turning to our investment plans, in February, we filed our proposal to buy out a repowered 120 megawatt wind PPA from Elite for $210 million. The buyout will save our customers money while extending the life of our renewable energy resource. We also filed our proposal to build 460 megawatts of solar facilities near our retiring Sherco coal plant for an estimated investment of $575 million. The project takes advantage of existing transmission and will bring good, high-paying local construction jobs to our economy. We requested a Commission decision on both projects later this year and are confident the Commission will see the customer and economic benefits. In March, we filed our resource plan in Colorado, which details our plans to reduce carbon emissions by 85% and increase renewables to 80% of our fuel mix by 2030. The plan includes the early retirement of two coal units at Hayden in 2027 and 2028, the conversion of Pawnee to natural gas in 2028, the early retirement of Comanche III in 2040, with reduced operations beginning in 2030. Now, under the plan, we will add 2,300 megawatts of wind, 1,600 megawatts of universal-scale solar, 400 megawatts of storage, 1,300 megawatts of flexible resources, and 1,200 megawatts of distributed solar resources through our renewable energy programs. In addition, we are continuing to make progress on the Minnesota Resource Plan and expect a decision later this year. Between the Minnesota and Colorado resource plans, we anticipate adding nearly 10,000 megawatts of renewables to our system to meet our 80% carbon reduction goal by 2030. We also filed our pathway transmission expansion plan in Colorado. The proposal requests approval to build 560 miles of 345 kV transmission lines, creating a backbone that will enable 5,500 megawatts of incremental renewables and help Colorado achieve its 2030 carbon reduction goals. The estimated cost of the backbone is $1.7 billion, with an incremental investment of up to $1 billion for network upgrades, voltage support, and addition transmission line and interconnection work. We expect decisions on the Colorado Pathway Project later this year. Turning to the NSP system, MISO recently presented its long-range transmission planning roadmap, which identified potential scenarios for future system development based on constrained areas and options for regional transmission expansion. This conceptual roadmap highlighted an initial set of projects in the MISO footprint, which could drive $30 billion of investment, and a full rollout could result in up to $100 billion of investment. While this is very preliminary, a high-level conceptual framework, it does highlight the need for significant transmission over the next 15 years. The transmission expansion and resource plans will provide transparency into our long-term opportunities and will likely lead to robust capital investment in the second half of this decade. Now, as you know, one of my highest priorities is ensuring Xcel Energy is a positive force for racial justice and reconciliation. We are deeply committed to supporting our communities in advancing racial equity, rebuilding following civil unrest, and addressing COVID-19 impacts, which continue to disproportionately affect black communities. I'm proud that our company is engaged in a community dialogue and that we are investing in organizations that are having a real impact. We've got more work to do as a company, community, and a country towards creating a more just society, but by working together, we can all be part of the solutions. We're also proud of the recognition we're receiving for our actions. For example, Xcel Energy was named among the world's most admired companies by Fortune Magazine for the eighth consecutive year, ranking second among gas and electric companies. And we continue to be cited as a top company for LGBTQ equality, earning a perfect score in the Human Rights Campaign's 2021 Corporate Equality Index and a best place to work for LGBTQ equality destination, for the fifth consecutive year. So with that, I'll turn it over to Brian.