Xcel Energy Inc.

Hello, and welcome to the Xcel Energy 2026 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. My name is Jordan, and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. Please note, this conference is being recorded, and for the duration of the call, your lines will be in a listen-only mode. A question and answer 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 investors and others can reach out to investor relations. I'll now turn the call over to your host today, Mr. Rupesh Agarwal, Vice President, Investor Relations, to begin the conference. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Jordan. Good morning and welcome to Xcel Energy's 2026 first quarter 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 2026 first quarter results and highlights, provide updated 2026 assumptions, and share recent business and regulatory updates. 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 gap measures. Information on the comparable gap measures and reconciliations are included in our earnings release. In the first quarter of 2026, the ALJ for the Prairie Island outage case recommended an additional $41 million disallowance of replacement power costs for power procured in 2024 associated with an extended outage at the plant starting late 2023. As a result, Xcel Energy recorded a charge of $37 million, or 4 cents per share, in the first quarter. Additionally, in the first quarter of 2026, Xcel Energy recognized $22 million, or 3 cents per share, due to an increase in estimated insurance proceeds for the Marshall Wildfire litigation. Given the non-recurring nature of these items, they have been excluded from first quarter ongoing earnings. As a result, our GAAP earnings for the first quarter of 2026 were 89 cents per share, while our ongoing earnings, which exclude these non-recurring charges, were 91 cents 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 disclosures in our earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Bob.

Thank you, Repesh, and good morning, everybody. At Xcel Energy, our mission is to make energy work better for our customers, helping them thrive. Our past quarter showcased our commitment to this mission through focus, execution, and delivering on our plans to strengthen and modernize the grid to expand our energy sources and to deploy innovative technologies to ensure that the energy that we provide our customers remains reliable, affordable, and safe, both now and well into the future. And on these fronts, we are off to a great start this year. In the first quarter, Xcel Energy invested over $3 billion in new infrastructure to support our customers and state's growing energy needs for increased resilience and cleaner energy. And we're on track to deliver our most extensive capital investment plan in the company's history this year. We identified additional transmission and generation needs in our states, delivering on our expectation of incremental investment above our base plan. We announced the tails of our contract with Google for a new data center in the Upper Midwest that we believe is a model for large load development that benefits customers and communities. We filed that contract with the Minnesota PUC. continue to use our scale and our balance sheet to ensure that we have the right partnerships with critical suppliers, Tier 1 EPC firms, and developers to execute on budget, on time, and on scope on our growing portfolio of projects. We delivered strong ongoing earnings of $0.91 per share, and we remain confident in our ability to deliver on our annual investment plans and our earnings guides for the 22nd year in a row, one of the best track records in the industry. On our fourth quarter call, we announced progress on our data center pipeline with a signed ESA for a large data center in the upper Midwest. And during the first quarter, we provided further details about this groundbreaking agreement with Google. As demand for electricity accelerates across the country, we believe that utilities have a responsibility to lead with solutions that balance innovation, reliability, sustainability, and affordability. Excel Energy's customers already have some of the lowest energy bills in the country. In fact, when you adjust for inflation, the typical Excel Energy residential energy bill is almost 25% lower today than it was 10 years ago. And in nominal terms, Excel Energy residential electric bills are approximately 30% below the national average. Under a 15-year agreement, Google will cover the entire cost of its service and infrastructure requirements to power its new data center. including 1,900 megawatts of new wind and solar generation and long-duration storage using Form Energy's innovative 100-hour iron-air battery. With credit protections in place, we estimate that this new data center will save customers $1 to $1.5 billion over the term of the ESA, helping keep customer bills low long into the future. In addition, and as part of our shared sustainability goals, water needs for the data center will be limited through Google's use of air-cooled technology in lieu of water-cooled. In April, we also reached a definitive, non-exclusive agreement on our previously announced MOU with NextEra Energy to co-develop generation, storage, and interconnections to accelerate data center development across our operating companies. We expect this joint development agreement will deliver a balance of company-owned resources and purchase power agreements with NextEra across all forms of generation, including wind, solar, battery, storage, and natural gas. We are already underway developing solutions for two gigawatts of new data center capacity with plans to expand in the near future. In April, we also followed our large load tariff in Colorado. with proposed terms that are similar in scope for our Google ESA and the Minnesota large load tariff filing. Data centers will commit to long-term contracts with minimum bills, termination fees, credit requirements, and incremental cost tests to ensure that our existing customers are protected from new large load customer needs. In the coming months, we plan to make similar filings in Texas, New Mexico, and Wisconsin. We believe our partnerships hyperscalers, regulators, communities, and developers set a high bar for responsible large load development. We're partnering to ensure large load growth strengthens our overall system, benefits our local communities, and maintains our state's clean energy goals, and doesn't increase costs for our existing customers. These collective actions give us confidence in our ability to deliver on our forecast to secure six gigawatts of data center load by year-end 2027 with in-service dates into the early 2030s. In October of last year, we outlined our plan to meet the growing infrastructure needs of our customers. We detailed a $60 billion base investment plan to continue our energy transition and to make needed investments to strengthen our transmission and distribution systems. At that time, we also expected that our base plan would likely need to be augmented based on anticipated but unimproved transmission and generation needs. Through the first quarter, we now believe we have line of sight to at least 7 plus billion of the 10 plus billion opportunity that we highlighted last year. This incremental investment includes the 765 kV crawfish draw to phantom transmission line in our SPS company that was allocated by SPP in February. Two-thirds or over 1,200 megawatts of the generation and storage needed for the Google Data Center project, and 800 megawatts of generation approved by the Colorado Commission in February and April as part of the near-term procurement portfolio. From here, we continue to see additional infrastructure investment needed to serve our growing customer needs, including active generation RFPs in PSCO, NSP, and SPS, additional regional transmission investments in SPP and MISO, and the generation to support the three gigawatts of data center demand that we added to our target plan on the Q4 earnings call. As these opportunities materialize, they will drive additional growth and investment both within and beyond our five-year capital plan. As we continue to add to capital backlog, it's also important to execute on the projects that are in the queue. And in the first quarter, Xcel Energy invested over $3 billion and new infrastructure for our customers. We brought online nearly 500 megawatts of new solar generation and utility scale battery storage in SPS and in Colorado. In total, these projects will deliver system resiliency and reliability, as well as over $425 million of tax credit benefits to our customers over the life of the projects. And across our entire portfolio of projects, from 2026 to 2030, we expect customers will see more than $7 billion in aggregate benefits from PTCs and ITCs associated with various generation and storage projects, helping keep our customer bills amongst the lowest in the country. And with continued growth across our industry, we also recognize that supply chains and qualified labor for generation, transmission, and distribution projects will become more constrained. That's why our recently announced alliances with GE Vernova and Nextera and strategic agreements with Tier 1 EPC firms across our portfolio of renewable and gas generation, transmission, and distribution projects are critical to delivering on our growing investment pipeline well into the 2030s. Finally, our field teams continue to operate at the highest levels and were recently recognized by EEI with an Emergency Recovery Award for outstanding effort to restore service quickly and safely following severe thunderstorms that came through our upper Midwest service territory in 2025. And for the seventh year in a row, Xcel Energy was named the world's most ethical company honoree by Ethisphere, which measures the company's corporate governance, culture of ethics, and environmental societal impact. As we look forward to the rest of 2026, Xcel Energy will continue our focus to deliver customers safe, clean, reliable and affordable energy to execute with excellence on our 2026 14 billion dollar capital investment plan our most extensive in the company's history to realize the unprecedented opportunities for growth that we laid out in our base and incremental investment plans secure incremental large customer loads that can benefit all customers and meet this moment in our country's growing demand for energy to reach constructive outcomes on multiple rate cases and resource solicitations, make operational and system-hardening investments to protect our communities from the risks of extreme weather, and to deliver on our earnings guidance for the 22nd year in a row. And with that, I'll turn it over to Brian.