Avista Corporation

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Avista Corporation Q3 2024 Earnings Conference 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 your session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You'll then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Stacey Wenz, Investor Relations Manager. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Therese. Good morning. Welcome to Avista's third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Our earnings and third quarter Form 10-Q were released pre-market this morning. You can find both on our website. Joining me this morning are Avista Corp CEO Dennis Vermillion, President and COO Heather Rosentrader, Senior Vice President CFO, Treasurer and Regulatory Affairs Officer Kevin Christie, and Vice President, Controller, and Principal Accounting Officer Ryan Crossels. Today, we will make certain statements that are forward-looking. These involve assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, which are subject to change. Various factors could cause actual results to differ materially from the expectations we discussed in today's call. Please refer to our Form 10-K for 2023 and our Form 10-Q for the third quarter of 2024, which are available on our website for a full discussion of these risk factors. I'll begin with a recap of the financial results presented in today's press release. Our consolidated earnings for the third quarter of 2024 were $0.23 per diluted share compared to $0.19 for the third quarter of 2023. Year-to-date, consolidated earnings were $1.44 per diluted share compared to $1.14 last year. Now, it's my pleasure to hand the call over to Dennis.

Well, thanks, Stacey, and good morning, everyone. It's great to be here with all of you. This is my final earnings call as CEO of Avista. As you know, Heather Rosentrader will be taking over as CEO on January 1st of next year, and I have every confidence in Heather. Throughout her career, she has demonstrated the values, the strength, acumen, and insights to position us for success. She is the right person to lead Avista into the future. You know, I've been honored to lead this company and serve alongside exceptional and dedicated employees for nearly 40 years. Our employees make Avista such a special place to work and witnessing firsthand our ability to rise to meet challenges together as a team is something I will truly miss as I retire. Throughout my five years as CEO, we've made significant progress with our regulatory strategy, making meaningful progress towards closing the gap of regulatory lag, even as we found creative ways to minimize the impact of rate increases for our customers. Serving customers is the heart of our business, and in the last five years, our team has grown our programs for targeted energy assistance from a level of $11 million to nearly $40 million a year. More importantly, we are providing that assistance to more customers than ever. We've also invested more than $2 billion in our system on behalf of our customers in the last five years. The team has done a remarkable job seeking out state and federal funding for projects that matter to our customers. Avista has been awarded over $90 million in state and federal grants in the last five years. We continue to seek out these funding opportunities because it's the right thing to do for our customers. It enables us to accomplish more work on their behalf without impacting the price that they pay for energy. In the last five years, we've also made considerable progress towards achieving our clean energy goals. We've signed four PPAs for a total of 325 megawatts of clean, renewable energy, both hydropower and wind. We're already one of the lowest-emitting electric power producers in the United States, and these agreements help ensure that by 2026, more than 70% of our peak generating capability will be from renewable non-emitting sources. Our earnings continue to improve from 2023, although our third quarter results show that we still face some headwinds, and Kevin will talk about that in a few minutes. but we have the right team in place and we are well positioned to continue executing on our regulatory strategy and to deliver on our commitments to each one of our stakeholders now and into the future. You know, one of the, one of the, the one constant in all 40 years of my career with Avista has been our capacity to adapt and consistently bring our best to the communities we serve through innovation, through hard work, through investment, and through exemplary service. I know Avista will carry these values forward through the next 40 years with the right team and the right values. I have every confidence in Avista's success. Now I'll turn the call over to Heather.