Avista Corporation

good day and thank you for standing by welcome to the avista corporation q3 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 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 first speaker today, Stacey Walters, Investor Relations Manager. Please go ahead.

Good morning. It's great to have you with us for Avista's third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Our earnings and third quarter Form 10-Q were released pre-market this morning. You can find both documents on our website. Joining me today are VistaCorp 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 discuss in today's call. Please refer to our Form 10-K for 2024 and our Form 10-Q for the third 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. Consolidated earnings year to date in 2025 were $1.51 per diluted share compared to $1.44 year to date in 2024. For the third quarter of 2025, Our consolidated earnings were $0.36 per diluted share compared to $0.23 per diluted share for the third quarter of 2024. Now, I'll turn the call over to Heather. Thank you, Stacey.

I want to start by highlighting that our third quarter results underscore the strength of our core utility operations and our disciplined approach to cost management. Year-to-date results at Avista Utilities of $1.63 per diluted share reflect a nearly 15% increase over 2024's year-to-date results. This reflects the constructive regulatory outcomes and diligent capital deployment that continue to enhance our financial performance and advance our long-term strategy. As we pursue our strategic initiatives, including the projects shortlisted in our 2025 Request for Proposals, or RFP, we remain firmly committed to supporting reliable and affordable customer service, community investment, and shareholder value. Today, we are affirming our earnings guidance with Avista Utilities expected to be at the upper end of its guidance range and consolidated results expected at the lower end of the range due to valuation losses in our other businesses during the first half of the year. The 2025 wildfire season has ended, and I'm pleased with the significant progress we've made with our wildfire resiliency program. We concluded the season without needing to initiate a public safety power shutoff, fortunately, but we were well prepared to elevate our system into risk-responsive levels as conditions warranted. This success is the direct result of strategic grid and process improvements, continued collaboration with communities and first responders, and the dedication of our team. This summer, we completed pilot projects for both strategic undergrounding and installation of covered conductor. We'll be building on this work going forward with the lessons learned and forming our key decision-making about where and how to deploy these technologies as we advanced towards our grid-hardening goals. In addition, we began installation of weather stations throughout our service territory. These stations bring critical, real-time data to our operations teams and inform future system design decisions. Our goal was to have a weather station installed on every circuit by 2029. We also expanded our network of AI-enabled cameras giving our teams and first responders greater access to wildfire monitoring and early detection tools. By the end of 2026, we expect to have coverage of a majority of our high-risk areas through these technologically advanced cameras. All these tools continue to improve and expand the data that goes into our fire weather dashboard, which enables us to react faster to changing conditions and better understand and mitigate risk. This month, we will submit our wildfire mitigation plan to the Idaho Public Utilities Commission. We've been filing our wildfire mitigation plans with the commission for many years now. However, this will be the first wildfire mitigation plan filed after the Wildfire Standard of Care Act was passed by the Idaho legislature earlier this year. The new legislation establishes a standard of care for wildfire risk mitigation and utilities reasonably implementing their plans will now have protection against liability for wildfire in Idaho. And in Washington, we're working through the rulemaking process with other stakeholders following the Washington legislation also passed earlier this year around filing and approval of wildfire mitigation plans. We kicked off our 2025 All-Source RFP back in May. looking for up to 425 megawatts of new capacity and at least 5 megawatts of demand response. As I mentioned in last quarter's earnings call, we saw a positive response to the RFP receiving over 80 bids, with 69 supply-side bids totaling nearly 14 gigawatts of capacity and 17 demand response projects offering almost 300 megawatts. We've narrowed the responses down to a short list, And these bidders sent in more detailed proposals in October. There's one final chance for bidders to refresh their prices this month. From there, we'll make our final project selections and start negotiations before the year ends. The shortlist has diverse options with supply-side resources like wind, solar, storage, standalone and hybrid, and thermal, as well as demand response projects. There's a mix of ownership options too, including self-builds, build transfer agreements, and power purchase agreements, which gives us more financial flexibility. Some projects are in Montana and could leverage our existing transmission resources in the state as modeled in our integrated resource plan. A big focus is on taking advantage of federal tax credits before they expire. To fully qualify, selected projects need to begin construction by July 2026 and be online by 2029 to 2030. We are working with shortlist bidders to make sure everyone's on track to meet those deadlines and get the most out of any applicable tax credits. I continue to be optimistic about the opportunities ahead, particularly as we engage with potential large load customers. These conversations are increasingly central to our long-term planning and investment strategy. Our RFP is helping us evaluate new generation resources and system capacity and is playing a key role in informing our discussions with large industrial customers who are exploring expansion opportunities within our service territory. We're working closely with several of these potential customers to assess how incremental load can be integrated into our system in a way that supports reliability, affordability, and long-term value. Serving this level of demand will require not only new generation, but also regional grid expansion. System impact studies show we have capacity to accommodate a portion of these requests, with these near-term opportunities best suited to serve customers with scalable implementation capability. We are committed to being competitive in attracting these loads. and we view them as an important tool to support customer affordability and as a catalyst for innovation, infrastructure investment, and long-term value creation. We'll continue to update you on our progress and future calls. Now, I'll hand the call to Kevin for more discussion of our earnings.