Xcel Energy Inc.

Hello, and welcome to the Xcel Energy third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. My name is George, and I'll be a coordinator for today's event. Please note, this conference is being recorded, and for the duration of the call, your lines will be in the listen-only mode. A question at the session will follow the prepared remarks, and questions will only be taken from institutional investors and analysts. Reporters can contact media relations with inquiries and individual I call you over now to Rupesh Agarwal, Vice President, Investment Relations, to begin today's conference. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, George, and good morning. Welcome to Xcel Energy's third quarter 2025 earnings call. Joining me today are Bob Frenzel, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, and Brian Van Abel, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. In addition, we have other members of the management team in the room to answer your questions if needed. This morning we will review our third quarter 2025 results and highlights, share recent business and regulatory updates, update our five-year capital and financing plan, and provide updated 2025 assumptions and 2026 guidance. Slides that accompany today's call are available on our website. Some 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 SEC filings. Today we will discuss certain metrics that are non-GAAP measures. Information on the comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations are included in our earnings release. In the third quarter of 2025, Xcel Energy recorded a charge of $290 million, or 36 cents per share, reflecting the settlement in principle reached with plaintiffs in the Marshall wildfire. Given the non-recurring nature of this item, it has been excluded from third quarter and year-to-date ongoing earnings. As a result, our GAAP earnings for the third quarter of 2025 were 88 cents per share, while our ongoing earnings, which exclude this non-recurring charge, were $1.24 per share. All further references to earnings drivers, and variances in our discussion today will refer to ongoing earnings. For more information on this, please see the disclosure in our earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Bob.

Thank you Rupesh, and good morning everybody. In the third quarter of 2025, Xcel Energy continued our commitment to our customers, our investors, and our communities to make energy work better. During the quarter, we delivered solid earnings of $1.24 per share. We invested over $3 billion and $8 billion year to date in resilient and reliable energy infrastructure for our customers. We reached a comprehensive and constructive settlement with plaintiffs in the Marshall wildfire that helped our customers and our communities to move forward. And we accelerated our wildfire risk reduction efforts to protect our communities from volatile weather. Based on our results through the third quarter, we are reaffirming our earnings guidance for 2025 and remain confident in our ability to deliver on earnings guidance for the 21st year in a row, one of the best track records in the industry. As per our usual Q3 rhythm, today we are introducing our updated five-year infrastructure investment plan designed to serve increased energy demand, make needed investments to strengthen our transmission and distribution systems, provide a cleaner and more sustainable energy portfolio, and to keep energy safe, reliable, and affordable for all of our customers. In total, we expect this plan to deliver 7,500 megawatts of zero carbon renewable generation, 3,000 megawatts of natural gas fire generation, and almost 2,000 megawatts of energy storage to ensure system reliability. 1,500 new high-voltage transmission line miles to support demand growth and regional delivery, and approximately $5 billion of investment in our distribution and transmission systems to improve resiliency and reduce future risk from wildfires. We're able to accomplish this plan because we have one of the best utility development and supply chain teams in the industry. And in combination with our strong balance sheet, we can deliver infrastructure timely and affordably for our customers. In connection with this forecast, we have safe harbored all renewable and storage projects in our base capital plan and expect the same for the projects in our incremental plan to ensure that we can capture available tax credits and help keep customers' bills low. We also have 19 natural gas CTs on order, which will provide over 4 gigawatts of natural gas generation to help ensure reliability and affordability. Our ability to deliver infrastructure with excellence and our strategic geographic advantage allows our customers to benefit from some of the lowest energy bills in the country. Over the past five years, our residential electric and natural gas bills have been 28 and 12% below the natural average respectively. Our residential electric customers in Colorado have the lowest share of wallet out of all 50 states. And the average residential bills in our other states occupy five of the next 11 spots. Since 2014, our residential electric and natural gas bill growth has been well under the rate of inflation. In fact, a typical residential Xcel Energy electric and natural gas bill is 14 and 20% lower than it was in 2014 when adjusted for inflation. Our Steel for Fuel program has saved customers nearly $6 billion through 2025. And our One Xcel Energy Way continuous improvement program has realized over a billion dollars in cumulative savings since 2020. while improving customer and operating outcomes. Our industry-leading demand-side management programs have saved enough energy to avoid building 30 average-sized power plants. And as customers continue to electrify transportation and other parts of their lives, they can further reduce their overall monthly energy costs with low electric rates. We also continue to support critical programs to help our customers who may need assistance with their energy bills. Since 2024, Xcel Energy has connected over 200,000 customers with almost $300 million in financial resources. We're also exploring new opportunities to help even more customers across our jurisdictions, including proposals in our current Minnesota, Wisconsin, and upcoming Colorado rate cases. Moving to the topic of artificial intelligence, opportunities for Xcel Energy go well beyond our ability to power data centers. Of course, our load interconnection queue continues to grow, even as we move some of our backlog into the contracted category. But across Xcel Energy, we are in early stages of using AI in the business to bend the cost curve and to provide improvements in both customer satisfaction and operational outcomes. We're harnessing AI to empower our people, accelerate innovation, and build a smarter, more resilient energy future for our customers and communities. Automated analysis across our diverse enterprise data sources is delivering actionable insights that strengthen security, improve operations and planning, and drive process improvement. We're bridging knowledge gaps and empowering faster, more informed decision making across the organization. And we're leveraging AI built by others to advance our business, including high resolution imagery to transform how we inspect and maintain our distribution infrastructure. Through drone-based data collection and automated image analysis, AI-enabled processes can identify defects and assess risks and enable our teams to prioritize maintenance with greater speed and accuracy. And with wildfire mitigation, AI is transforming our risk models. By leveraging internal models and tools like TechnoSilva, we've significantly improved our model coverage and accuracy, as well as reduced analytical times to a fraction. This means faster, more reliable risk assessments protecting communities and infrastructure in real time. AI is truly an engine that's driving enterprise-wide innovation and transformation in Xcel Energy, making energy work better for our employees, our customers, and our communities. Moving to Marshall, on September 23rd, Xcel Energy, Quest Corporation, and Teleport Communications America reached settlement agreements in principle that resolve all claims asserted by the subrogation insurers the public entity plaintiffs, and individual plaintiffs. And while Xcel Energy does not admit any fault or wrongdoing in disputes that our equipment caused the second ignition, we believe this provides a positive outcome for our communities and our investors. Looking forward, Xcel Energy continues to make significant progress to mitigate risk from wildfires and extreme weather with public-facing wildfire mitigation plans in each of our states. This includes investments in situational awareness tools like weather stations, and PANO AI cameras, advanced meteorology, fire science, and AI-enabled risk modeling tools, hardening our systems and deploying advanced wildfire safety operations and PSPS capabilities, and operational actions including daily stand-ups to address the threat from extreme weather across every part of our system and taking proactive actions as appropriate. Finally, Each September, Xcel Energy employees and community members come together to honor the spirit of service. This year marked the 15th annual day of service for Xcel Energy with nearly 3,000 volunteers from across the company and the communities we serve coming together to support local nonprofit organizations. Together, volunteers dedicated almost 9,000 hours of service across more than 100 projects. It's one of my favorite days of the year and exemplifies the spirit and dedication of our employees and partners who show up every day to provide safe, clean, reliable, and affordable energy to our customers and our communities. With that, I'll turn it over to Brian.