Avista Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to a Visa Corporation Q1 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will follow at that time. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your touchtone telephone. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Ms. Stacey Wentz. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Avista's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Our earnings and our first quarter 10Q were released pre-market this morning. Both are available on our website. Joining me this morning are AvistaCorp President and CEO Dennis Vermillion, Executive Vice President, Treasurer, and CFO Mark Thies, Senior Vice President, External Affairs and Chief Customer Officer, Kevin Christie, and Vice President, Controller and Principal Accounting Officer, Ryan Crassel. Some of the statements that will be made today are forward-looking statements that involve assumptions, risks, and uncertainties which are subject to change for reference to the various factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in today's call. please refer to our 10-K for 2021 and 10-Q for the first quarter of 2022, which are available on our website. I'll begin by recapping the financial results presented in today's press release. Our consolidated earnings for the first quarter of 2022 were 99 cents per diluted share compared to 98 cents for the first quarter of 2021. Now, I'll turn the discussion over to Dennis.

Well, thanks, Stacey, and good morning, everyone. Now, you know, we had a real solid start to 2022 as the VISTA utilities earnings were above our expectations, and we are pleased with the results of the first quarter. Our performance was partially the result of the timing of certain expenses, and for the remainder of 2022, we anticipate seeing higher costs based upon current economic environment. However, as we always do, we are proactively managing these issues, and we are on track to meet our consolidated earnings targets for the full year. You know, not unlike what other companies are seeing, some of these challenges that we're seeing include higher inflation than in the recent past. We have increased interest rates, uh, commodity costs that are higher than we've seen in almost 15 years and some supply chain constraints and competitive labor markets. And of course a lingering pandemic, which, you know, thankfully it looks like we're on the tail end of that. Uh, we're all real happy about that obviously. Um, So all these are contributing to a difficult operating environment. To address some of these issues, we do expect to update our authorized power supply costs towards the end of 2022 through our pending Washington electric general rate case, as well as interest costs and other changes in costs in the current and future rate cases. As always, cost management efforts are also fundamental to achieving our results. In addition, as you may have seen, we recently filed out-of-cycle purchase gas adjustments, or PGAs, in Washington and Idaho to adjust customer commodity rates to take into account the rising cost of natural gas. I'm pleased with our continued progress towards achieving our clean energy goals. In March, we entered the Western Energy Imbalance Market, or EIM, which really expands our ability to share renewable resources across the regional market to help reduce costs to our customers, all while continuing to meet their needs going forward. We also introduced a voluntary renewable natural gas program in Washington that allows customers to opt in and offset their natural gas usage with RNG for as little as $5 a month. In March, we were recognized for the third consecutive year by Ethisphere, as one of the world's most ethical companies in 2022. And we were only one of nine honorees in the energy and utilities industry, and we are honored to receive this significant recognition yet again, which acknowledges our company's rich history of corporate responsibility that spans more than 130 years. We're really proud to win this award for the third time. With respect to rate cases and regulatory filings in March, we settled our Oregon general rate case. And if approved, we would expect new rates to be effective in August. We are still awaiting the regulatory process in Washington and expect rate recovery towards the end of 2022. In Idaho, we expect to file rate cases in the first quarter of 2023. And then finally, in Alaska, we expect to file a rate case by August 30 of this year. We are confirming our 2022 earnings guidance with a consolidated range of $1.93 to $2.13. We expect to be at the lower end of this range, primarily due to higher power supply costs, and we are confirming our 2023 consolidated earnings guidance range of $2.42 to $2.62 per diluted share. So with that, I will turn this presentation over to Mark.