Black Hills Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Black Hills Corporation first quarter 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 the session, you'll 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 Dave Soderquist, Investor Relations Manager. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Liz. Good morning and welcome to Black Hills Corporation's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. You can find our earnings release and materials for our call this morning on 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 Kimberly Nooney, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Also in attendance today are Marnie Jones, Senior Vice President Utilities, and Todd Jacobs, Senior Vice President Growth and Strategy. Before we begin today, we would like to note that Black Hills will be attending the American Gas Association Financial Forum the week of May 19th. Our leadership team will be meeting with investors at the conference, and an investor presentation will be posted on our website prior to the event. During our earnings discussion today, 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 are based on reasonable assumptions, actual results may differ materially. We would 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, Dave.

Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today. I'll start this morning by congratulating Brian Iverson, our general counsel, who recently announced he intends to retire in October. Brian has worn many strategic hats over his 20-plus year career with us, and Brian's guidance, insights, and strategic mindset will be missed and we wish him and his family all the best as they begin to think about their next chapter. We have started our search for our next general counsel, but congratulations to Brian and his family. Let's transition to our comments about our great first quarter. I will provide a brief overview of the quarter, Kimberly will provide our financial update, and Marnie and Todd will provide more detail on our operational performance and strategic progress. I'll begin on slide three. We're off to a good start delivering results for our stakeholders, providing excellent operational performance, delivering on our financial targets, and advancing our regulatory and growth initiatives. Earnings per share for the quarter increased 8% compared to the same period last year. New margins and expense management more than offset headwinds from warm weather, inflation, and interest rates. We benefited from the successful execution of our regulatory plan, which delivered new rates and higher margins. We continue to advance our electric resource plans. We recently filed our 120-day report in support of our Colorado Clean Energy Plan recommending an additional 400 megawatts of renewable and battery resources to achieve our emission reduction goals. The report proposes we own 250 megawatts of the new resources. In South Dakota, we continue to pursue 100 megawatts of utility-owned generation to reliably serve the growing needs of our customers. In Wyoming, we continue construction of our ready Wyoming electric transmission project that will strategically interconnect our Wyoming electric and South Dakota electric transmission systems. Slide four provides our financial outlook. We're reaffirming our earnings guidance range of $3.80 to $4 per share. Our strong growth opportunities gives us confidence in achieving our long-term EPS growth target of 4% to 6%. We continue to expect earnings growth to accelerate, especially in the latter half of our five-year plan as we place in service new transmission and generation investments and serve growing data center and customer loads. Slide five is our 2024 scorecard. We use this scorecard to provide clarity around our strategic objectives and key results for this year and to hold ourselves accountable to you, our shareholders, and other stakeholders. I'm very pleased how we're successfully advancing each of our strategic objectives. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimberly for our financial update. Kimberly?