Black Hills Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q3 2024 Black Hills Corporation earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today. Sal Diaz, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you.

Good morning and welcome to Black Hills Corporation's third 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. Before we begin today, we would like to note that Black Hills will be attending the Edison Electric Institute's financial conference on November 10th through November 12th. Our leadership team will be meeting with investors and analysts at the conference, and the investor presentation will be posted on our website prior to the event. Leading our quarterly earnings discussion today are Lynn Evans, President and Chief Executive Officer, Kimberly Nooney, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Marnie Jones, Senior Vice President, Utilities. 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 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.

Lynn? Thank you, Sal. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today. I'll begin my comments with a brief overview of the quarter. Kimberly will provide our financial update, and Marnie will provide more detail on our team's operational performance and our strategic progress. Starting on slide three, I'm pleased with our progress on our customer-focused strategy, which is reflected in new margins and the advancement of our growth projects. As a team, we delivered excellent service to our customers, continue to execute on our financial targets, and advance our regulatory and growth initiatives. We continue to deliver on our commitment to provide our customers with safe and reliable service during the quarter, including dependable energy delivery through near peak demand levels for our South Dakota electric system. Despite unplanned generation outages, total availability for our fleet remained above the industry standard, with 98% availability for our natural gas units, and 95% total availability across our generation facilities. We also took the opportunity to bring forward and complete some future major maintenance on units that experienced unplanned outages. The reliability we delivered to our utility customers this quarter was excellent. Our focus on reliability is delivering value for all of our customers and is a key value driver in attracting new customers to our service territories. During the third quarter, we announced our plans to serve META's first data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, starting in the 2026 timeframe. As we look to the future, we are excited to serve demand for hyperscalers with our Capital Light model and continue to receive inbound requests to expand load beyond Cheyenne. We remain on track with our $800 million capital plan for the year. Our ongoing capital investment plan is critical to delivering upon the commitments we made to serve our customers and communities safely, reliably, and cost-effectively. This includes our Ready Wyoming electric transmission expansion project, which strategically interconnects our Wyoming and South Dakota transmission systems, enhancing the resiliency and capacity of our regional energy infrastructure. Notably, this will benefit our customers with cost stability, and expanded energy market access. Maintaining our solid financial position remains a focus. We reached key milestones in our financial plan as we achieved our debt to capitalization target to maintain our triple B plus or equivalent credit rating. Our team completed our major financing needs for the year as we execute our strategy and funding our customer focus growth. During the third quarter, we advanced our regulatory initiatives. We received approval of new customer rates for Arkansas Gas, which were implemented in October. We achieved a settlement for our rate review request at Iowa Gas, which is pending commission approval, and we continue through the regulatory process for new rates at Colorado Electric. We're currently targeting a cadence of three to four rate reviews annually, driven by our investments to serve our customers' growing energy needs. We remain confident in our financial outlook provided on slide four. We're on track to deliver on our earnings guidance range of $3.80 to $4 per share as originally issued in February. Our financial performance for the quarter and year to date were in line with our expectations as we successfully mitigated the impacts of mild weather, unplanned generation outages, and increased insurance expense. We entered the peak heating season with new rates or interim rates in place at four of our six gas utilities this year. Looking ahead, our strong growth opportunities and continued execution of our initiatives gives us confidence in achieving our long-term 4% to 6% EPS growth target. Slide five displays our current five-year capital investment plan. Over our five-year plan period, we expect to invest $4.3 billion. In 2026, our $1.3 billion forecast includes generation investments resulting from our recent electric resource plans. As contracts are negotiated, timing of these investments will be updated. Marnie will cover the status of our resource plans in her business update. In 2027 and 2028, we anticipate incremental opportunities to be added to our plan as we gain more clarity around timing, costs, and the energy needs of our customers, as indicated by the green arrows above the chart. As a reminder, at our fourth quarter earnings call in February, we will provide our 2025 earnings guidance and an updated capital forecast through 2029. Slide six provides a summary of our hyperscale data center and blockchain growth opportunities. For more than a decade, we have successfully served Microsoft's data center energy needs through a Capital Light market energy procurement model. Our innovative tariff is instrumental in enabling a win-win of efficiently procuring market energy while providing a return in lieu of new generation investment. We continue to expect earnings from this type of customer to grow EPS contribution from 5% in 2023 to more than 10% of total EPS by 2028. In summary, before I turn the call over to Kimberly, I'm pleased with our strategic progress. Our service territories are stable and growing, with strong electric and gas investment opportunities. Our financial position is solid, and we are executing on regulatory recovery as we pursue our growth initiatives. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kimberly for our financial update. Kimberly?