Avista Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Avista Corporation Q2 2025 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 the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Stacey Walters, Investor Relations Manager. Please go ahead.

Good morning. It's great to have you with us for Avista's second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Our earnings and second quarter 2025 Form 10-Q were released pre-market this morning. You can find both on our website. Joining me today are Avista Corp President and CEO, Heather Rosentrader, and Senior Vice President, CFO, Treasurer, and Regulatory Affairs Officer, Kevin Christie. We will be making forward-looking statements during this call. 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 2024 and our Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2025 for a full discussion of these risk factors. Both are available on our website. I'll begin with a recap of the financial results presented in today's press release. Our consolidated earnings for the first half of 2025 were $1.15 per diluted share, compared to $1.20 for the first half of 2024. For the second quarter of 2025, our consolidated earnings were 17 cents per diluted share compared to 29 cents for the second quarter of 2024. Now, I'll turn the call over to Heather. Thanks, Stacey, and hello, everyone.

The results we're sharing today reflect continued strategic progress at Avista Utilities. as well as headwinds from shifts in market sentiment related to clean technology. I'm happy to share that even with these headwinds, we are affirming our consolidated earnings guidance for 2025. At Avista Utilities, our year-to-date results of $1.25 per diluted share reflect a nearly 7% increase over 2024's year-to-date results and highlight the continued strength of our strategic execution. We also continue to make progress in activities that set us up for success going forward. In the second quarter, our all-party, all-issue settlement in Oregon was approved by the Commission, and we reached an all-party, all-issue settlement in Idaho. Both cases build on the constructive regulatory outcomes already in place through our Washington Multi-Year Rate Plan. and serve to raise our confidence and our expectations for Vista Utilities earnings in 2025. However, market conditions in the clean energy sector weighed on our consolidated earnings performance in the second quarter. Valuations within our portfolio of investments, primarily those in clean technology-focused funds, were significantly impacted by shifts in public policy and sentiment. These valuations are disappointing, and Kevin will share more about our investments in a few minutes. I want to take time to highlight the strong fundamentals of our business. Our core utility operations continue to be strong, and our solid results at Avista Utilities reflect strong performance underpinned by diligent cost management and constructive regulatory outcomes. I want to commend the efforts of each of our employees, working hard each day to position us for this strategic success. We will continue to focus on doing what we do best, serving our customers and communities with compassion and optimism for the future, providing the reliable energy our customers count on us to provide. Ensuring that we can continue to provide that safe and reliable energy is the purpose behind our current All Source Request for Proposals, or RFP. We issued our RFP in May, seeking 100 to 425 megawatts of generation to meet the needs we've identified in our Integrated Resource Plan by 2029. We received more than 80 bids for consideration, including a wide array of resource options, including wind, solar, battery storage, natural gas, distributed energy, demand response, and combinations of these resources. Equally broad in scope were the contract and ownership options included in the bids. We submitted self-billed resource bids for consideration and also received bids for bill transfer agreements, power purchase agreements, and other contract structures. Together with our independent evaluator, we are reviewing each bid. we expect to have a shortlist of preferred projects by the end of this month. We intend to request selected shortlist projects to resubmit detailed proposals that include any necessary repricing, as well as clarity on their ability to take advantage of safe harboring allowed by the budget reconciliation bill. We anticipate contract negotiations with final selected projects will begin in the fourth quarter of 2025. I continue to be optimistic about the opportunities that are ahead of us. Information from this RFP process is also crucial to inform our conversations with potential large load customers. In addition to several requests from existing large industrial customers for expansion, We have over 3,000 megawatts of requests in our pipeline of potential demand, looking for system integration within the next three to five years. For context, our peak electric native load is just under 2,000 megawatts. We continue to advance conversations with these potential customers, and our all-source RFP responses provide us with up-to-date supply resource costs and availability information to help inform those conversations. However, meeting the demand from these potential customers will entail not only additional generation, but also regional grid expansion. While we don't have available capacity to serve all the current requests in the pipeline, system impact studies indicate that we have capacity available to accommodate a portion of those requests. The level of available capacity varies by location and we are most optimistic about our ability to serve customers with scalable implementation capability. I believe in our ability to be competitive with these potential loads while also ensuring benefits for our existing customers and look forward to sharing our progress in future calls. Now, I'll hand the call to Kevin for more discussion of our earnings.