Black Hills Corporation

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Black Hills Corporation third quarter and 2020 earnings conference call. My name is Josh, and I will be your coordinator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to participate in this portion of the call, please press star followed by one at any time during the conference. If assistance is needed at any time during the call, please press star followed by zero, and a coordinator will be happy to assist you. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the presentation over to Mr. Jerome Nichols, Director of Investor Relations of Black Hills Corporation. Please proceed, sir.

Thank you, Josh. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Black Hills Corporation's third quarter 2020 earnings conference call. You can find our earnings release and materials for our earnings call this morning at at our website at www.blackhillscorp.com under the Investor Relations heading. Leading our quarterly earnings discussion today are Lynn Evans, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Rich Kinsley, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. During our earnings discussion today, some of the comments we make may contain forward-looking statements as defined by the Securities and Exchange Commission. and there are a number of uncertainties inherent in such comments. Although we believe that our expectations and beliefs are based on reasonable assumptions, actual results may differ materially. We direct you to our earnings release, slide two of the investor presentation on our website, and our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a list of some of the factors that could cause future results to differ materially from our expectations. I will now turn the call over to Lynn Evans.

Thank you, Jerome. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Moving to slide four, I'd like to start, as we always do at Black Hills, with a focus on safety. The safety and the well-being of the people we work with and the communities we serve is paramount, and we are committed to being on the forefront of safeguarding our coworkers, and our customers at all times, and especially now. We continue to monitor the pandemic and its impact to our business, our customers, and our communities. While some of the service territories are experiencing an increase in infection rates, we are not anticipating significant lockdowns to close our local economies. For our customers who need financial assistance, we are continuing to support them, as well as local nonprofits in our communities. I'm extremely proud of our team's dedication to support and serve our customers. They truly are going the extra mile to provide safe and reliable energy that our customers depend on as we improve life with energy every day. Overall, financial impacts from COVID-19 are trending as expected for the year. We continue to maintain strong liquidity to support our businesses, and our supply chains and capital projects are operating with little impact. Moving to slide six, we had an excellent third quarter. We executed operationally and exercised diligent expense management, delivering a 32 percent increase in earnings over the same period last year. Based on the strength of our earnings and outlook, we are increasing this year's earnings guidance to a range of $3.60 to $3.70 per share. We're also introducing guidance for next year. in a range of $3.75 to $3.95 per share, reflecting our expectation for solid growth year over year. We also increased our five-year capital forecast to continue serving the growing needs of our customers and communities. We've identified an additional $239 million of capital projects, and that increases our total five-year forecast to $2.9 billion. Ninety-five percent of that $2.9 billion will be invested in our utilities. Slide seven lists the excellent strategic progress we made this quarter. We obtained final approval from FERC for the YGEN 1 Power Purchase Agreement. The approval of this agreement allows us to continue to provide critical base load capacity and energy for our Wyoming electric utility. We filed our new rate review and rider request for Colorado Gas. Last Wednesday in Nebraska, we had a constructive hearing on a settlement agreement regarding our pending rate review. We also maintain strong liquidity to support our capital investment program. We're delivering on our promise to enhance communications on our ESG initiatives. We recently disclosed new ESG reports using the EEI and AGA qualitative and quantitative templates. and we will announce our greenhouse gas emissions reductions goals later this week in tandem with our updated corporate sustainability report. I'm very pleased that we welcomed two highly experienced corporate leaders to our board of directors, and we also marked an historic milestone for our dividend track record. Not only did we announce a 5.6% increase in our dividend track record, We also completed 50 consecutive years of annual dividend increases, a remarkable achievement that exemplifies our legacy of sustainable growth. Overall, it's been an outstanding quarter of strategic execution, and we are confident in our strong outlook and continued success in delivering what we told you we would accomplish. Now I'll turn it over to Rich for a financial update. Rich?