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 .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 10 through November 12. 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 quarter earnings discussion today are Lynn Evans, President and Chief Executive Officer, Kimberly Nooney, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Moiny 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 Moiny 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 Metta'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 V Plus or equivalent credit rating. Our team completed our major financing needs for the year as we execute our strategy in 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 continued 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 and 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?

Thank you, Lynn, and good morning, everyone. As Lynn mentioned, third quarter results were in line with our expectations and we are on track to deliver on our earnings guidance and financial targets for the year. We completed our key financing activities and achieved our net debt to capitalization target of 55%. We are executing on our strategy to deliver on the financial commitment we made to grow our compounded annual EPS growth rate by 4% to 6%. Despite mild weather and other unexpected cost pressures this year, we are delivering new margins and managing our costs to achieve our financial objectives. Slide 8 shows third quarter EPS drivers compared to the same period last year. We reported 35 cents per share compared to 67 cents per share in Q3 2023. New margins were offset by higher operating expenses, unplanned generation outages, lower off-system sales, and prior year one-time benefits. We delivered 16 cents of new margins, including new rates and rider recovery of 10 cents per from our electric utilities, 5 cents from our gas utilities, and 1 cent per share of customer growth and usage. These positive margin drivers offset unplanned generation outages, lower off-system sales, and a prior year benefit from insurance proceeds. O&M increased 23 cents, comprised of 15 cents from higher insurance premiums, employee costs, and outside services, 3 cents of expenses associated with unplanned generation outages, and 5 cents due to a prior year gain on sale of land to a data center customer. Interest expense increased 5 cents per share, driven primarily by higher interest rates, while new shares lowered EPS by 2 cents. Depreciation expense increased 5 cents per share due to new assets placed in service. Side 9 displays the earnings drivers -to-date through Q3 2024. Through three quarters, we delivered a total of 57 cents per share of new margins, driven by the successful execution of our strategy. These new margins include 35 cents per share of new rates and rider recovery from our gas utilities, and 17 cents from our electric utilities, which includes data center demand. Additionally, we continued to experience customer growth and increased usage, which contributed 5 cents per share of margin. This margin growth was partially offset by lower off-system sales, unplanned generation outages, and a prior year benefit from insurance proceeds. We experienced mild weather in our jurisdictions with 14 cents of unfavorable EPS -to-date compared to the same period last year. Compared to normal, weather was 11 cents unfavorable. As natural gas commodity prices moderated and became more stable in 2024, we recognized a -to-market benefit of 3 cents per share -to-date, -over-year. Moving to O&M, I'm extremely pleased with our team's success in managing our expenses below our projected .5% -over-year increase to mitigate mild weather, unplanned generation outages, and rising insurance costs. O&M increased 10 cents, or .8% -to-date compared to the same period last year. O&M expense benefited EPS by 9 cents per share, which was offset by 5 cents from unplanned generation outage expenses, and 14 cents of prior year benefits related to gains on the sales of assets and land. Throughout the year, we have prudently managed expenses and expect our annual O&M cost increase in 2024 to be no more than .5% over 2023. Financing costs included a 10-cent impact from new shares issued and 7 cents of interest expense driven by higher interest rates. Depreciation and amortization expense drove 12 cents of increase due to new assets placed in service. Income tax was higher due to a prior year benefit from a Nebraska State income tax rate decrease. In summary, excluding prior year one-time events, our strong margin growth and prudent O&M expense management, more than offset mild weather, lower office and sales, unplanned generation outages, and financing and depreciation costs incurred for the growth investments to serve our customers' energy needs. Our strategic execution is delivering reoccurring earnings growth, excluding prior one-time benefits of 32 cents per share. -to-date EPS grew 4% compared to the same period last year. Further details on -over-year changes can be found in our earnings release and 10Q to be filed with the SEC later today. Turning to slide 10, which depicts our solid financial position through the lens of credit quality, capital structure, and liquidity. We continue to reduce our net debt to total capitalization ratio and improve other key credit metrics in our commitment to maintain our BBB Plus credit quality target. During the quarter, we issued $109 million of new equity under our At the Market Equity program, which included a block equity trade. As a result, we have issued a total of $182 million -to-date, which is within our planned equity issuance range of $170 million to $190 million for 2024. Our liquidity remains strong at quarter end with $729 million of availability under our revolving credit facility. We repaid our $600 million notes that matured in August, and we are evaluating timing and options for refinancing our next maturity of $300 million in early 2026. Slide 11 illustrates our industry-leading dividend track record of 54 consecutive years. We anticipate growing our dividend at a rate comparable to earnings growth. A dependable and increasing dividend is an important component of our strategy for delivering long-term value for our shareholders. I will now turn the call over to Marnie for our business

update. Thank you, Kimberly, and good morning, everyone. I'll start my comments on slide 13. As Lynn mentioned, we continue to demonstrate our strong culture of operational excellence during the third quarter. We upheld our reputation for industry-leading electric reliability as reflected recently by EEI with all three of our electric utilities in the top quartile of reliability for the three-year average through 2023. And while reliability is critically important to our customers, it also supports our growing data center demand. During the quarter, we also advance our plans for new generation resources to serve growth and meet our Colorado Clean Energy Plan requirements, all while maintaining strong reliability and enhancing our resiliency. I'm also proud to share that last week, the U.S. Department of Labor awarded Black Hills with the Higher Vets Medallion Award for the fifth consecutive year. This award recognizes organizations with exemplary efforts in recruiting, employing, and retaining our nation's veterans. We value our veteran colleagues and the dedication and leadership they bring to our team and culture. On slide 14, I'll provide a status update on our rate reviews. In the past two years, we continued to reach constructive results during the quarter. In Arkansas, we received approval for new rates effective in October. The approved settlement allowed 25.4 million of new annual revenue, which includes a return on equity of .85% based on 46% equity. In Iowa, we reached the settlement for our rate review request. Pending approval by the Iowa Utility Commission, the confidential settlement allows 15 million of new annual revenue based on a .21% weighted average cost of capital. The settlement provides for implementation of final rates in the first quarter of 2025, which will replace the interim rates. Our other active rate review is for Colorado Electric. We received answer testimony from the interveners in October, and we will respond with a rebuttal testimony due later this week. Our hearing on the stock exchange is scheduled for December. Slide 15 outlines our wildfire management and risk mitigation plans. We have been successful in reducing risk with our multilayered approach through asset programs, integrity programs, and operational response, which is detailed in our wildfire mitigation plan available on our website. We continue to engage stakeholders, including community and local agencies, regulators, legislative bodies, and our industry peers to define, review, and advance our wildfire management and mitigation plans, including our Public Safety Power Shutoff Program, or PSPS, which we expect to formalize in the first half of 2025. Moving on to slide 16, our largest active capital project is our Ready Wyoming Transmission Project. The 260-mile line is being constructed on schedule, and we are tracking to place and service our first segments later this year. The project is expected to be completed by year-end 2025. The investment for this project will be recovered for our Wyoming Transmission Rider, as segments are placed in service. Slide 17 provides an update on our Colorado Clean Energy Plan. Yesterday, the Colorado Commission deliberated and verbally authorized 100 megawatts of utility-owned solar, 50 megawatts of utility-owned battery storage, and a 200-megawatt solar PPA. With the recent deliberations, we expect a final written commission decision before year-end, and we expect to initiate contract negotiations with the selected counterparties following the written decision. Slide 18 outlines our South Dakota Electric Resource Plan. We continue to pursue 100 megawatts of utility-owned generation that will cost effectively and reliably serve our customers. We are targeting an in-service date in the second half of 2026 for 100 megawatts of dispatchable natural gas by generation. We filed a pre-application notice with the South Dakota PUC during the third quarter and plan to request a certificate of public convenience and necessity from the Wyoming PSC and a permit to construct from the South Dakota PUC in early 2025. With that, I will turn the call back over to Linton.

Thank you, Marnie. Once again, our team made strong progress on our strategic initiatives as we invest in safe, reliable, and resilient energy delivery for our customers. We continue to execute our regulatory plan and aggressively pursue our strategic growth opportunities, including serving data center and blockchain load growth. Finally, I want to express my sincere appreciation to the Black Hills team for effectively and efficiently serving our customers while managing through unexpected challenges of the year. And with that, we'll be happy

to take your questions. Thank you. As a reminder, 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. One moment for questions. Our first question comes from Andrew Weisel with Scotiabank. You may proceed.

Hi. Good morning, everyone. My first question is you mentioned unplanned outages a couple of times there. Can you give a little more detail on what exactly were the issues and what was the O&M impact to earnings?

Good morning, Andrew. This is Marnie. And thanks for the question. I'll get us kicked off and I'll let Kimberly jump in on the financial side of it. So this quarter we had a rollover. You know, last quarter we announced that we had a couple of outages driven by some components that failed. And one of those outages just rolled over into the early part of Q3. And so that was the impact. There was no additional outages this quarter. And I'll turn it over to Kimberly from the financial impact side of it.

Yeah. Are you asking for the quarter or for the year, Andrew?

Both, if you can hear that.

Yeah, they're on the slides that you can look at. I believe it's three cents and five cents respectively. But when you look at it in total, you include the impact from the margin side as well. And so if you look at the slides, you can see the collective both from the margin impact and the O&M impact from the unplanned outages. Hopefully that will get you what you need.

Perfect. Yep, great. I appreciate that. And then along those lines, I believe you're reiterating the guidance for the year. You mentioned those negatives and you're mitigating that with some better than expected O&M trends. Are you able to comment where within the range you might be trending, high, middle, or low end?

Great question, Andrew. No, we don't comment on where we're at in the range, just the fact that we have reaffirmed the range and we expect to achieve the financial objective that we've laid out for the year.

Okay, fair enough. Next is a high level question, and I realize it's only been a little more than 24 hours since we've known the election results, but you guys are very well positioned in terms of crypto and Bitcoin and blockchain and all that. And obviously President-elect Trump has made it clear that he supports those industries and we've seen a huge spike in the price of crypto. Any early level thoughts on what the incoming administration might mean for that industry and how you and your service territory might be uniquely positioned to benefit?

Andrew, this is Lynn. Thank you for that question. We appreciate it. I'd like to, I guess I like our strategy because it's really focused on our customers and what's best for our customers with respect to how we help them serve their energy needs. And so we're, I would say we're fairly agnostic to what federal policy might be in that regard. However, you know, our states certainly have a lot of say in our policy and how we serve our customers. That's where we tend to focus the most. But I think your sentiment is indeed right and correct. We've been serving data centers for more than a decade. We're particularly good at it and we think that, yes, it could have been a foot for us going forward, or we know it will from having going forward.

Okay, you said data centers. I think you meant these other customers though, right?

I did. Yeah, it's just in general. We treat them all largely the same. We have different tariffs for each one, but we understand that reliability is critical to them. The service quality we provide them is critical, et cetera. So we kind of serve them all kind of the same way, if you will, but obviously different forms of tariffs and things of that nature.

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Chris Ellinghous with SWS. He may proceed.

Hey, everybody. How are you? Good, Chris. Lynn, you sort of persistently talked about the upside from the large load customers. Is there any kind of cadence to what you're expecting? Are there particular years you're expecting new loads? Can you give us any sort of insights on that?

Yeah, thank you, Chris, for that question. The beauty of having served one of our what I'll call our anchor tenants for over a decade is we understand their cadence. They inform us where they're headed and they meet those measurements, just kind of lockstep. So that goes very well for us. So it's actually kind of relatively smooth with the data center we're serving currently. We announced Meta last quarter. They come on the end of 2026. And so that will be they'll come on kind of gradually as well. So I think that's the beauty, frankly, of these calls that data centers that we're serving is that they come on and then they have a cadence as they grow and as they expand. And I can say I can tell you that they have bought land around Cheyenne, et cetera. So we see expansion going on for some time.

Are you seeing any sort of acceleration given the investment in AI computing at this point?

I don't know if we've seen acceleration. We've seen stronger interest in terms of the inbound calls that we take. And, you know, historically for us, Cheyenne has been such a great place for data center, still is, because of the fiber optic network that is very rich in the Cheyenne region. And my understanding is with the AI, it is less fiber dependent. And so we're actually encouraged by the possibility of having data centers and particularly AI centers and other parts of our service territory and then bringing our skill set that we gained over the last decade. We think that can give us an advantage.

Does the new intertie also factor into that?

I didn't quite understand that. The new intertie, the AC-DC tie, I'm sorry? Yeah. Are

there reliability thinking?

It certainly impacts our reliability thinking. It always does for any kind of a customer. Yes, it gives us some flexibility to take energy back and forth across the two separate grids. You know, the grid boundary is right here at Rapid City, so we're accustomed to that and know how to deal with that.

Okay. The upsides to the CAPEX slide, have you got any color that you want to add to that in terms of the types of investments that you're thinking about?

The types of investments tend to be right down the center of the fairway for us. We use the golf analogy, transmission on both electric and gas side. We have perhaps some gas storage opportunities. We've got, frankly, more capital projects than maybe you could argue that our customers could afford. So it's always a balance of what's best for a customer, what allows us to serve them effectively, cost them effectively, and then make sure we generate that return for the shareholder.

Okay. I know this is going to suggest a pretty strong fourth quarter. Can you address any of the sort of bigger issues that you are expecting to drive the fourth quarter, and is that O&M number for the year part of that factor?

Yes. So when you think about our full year, you know, you look back at Q1 and Q2, our O&M was actually favorable, comparative to the prior year quarters. And so we've been managing O&M. You know, our year started out with pretty mild weather, and, you know, that's continued. And so that's really how we're focused on managing O&M, to cover unplanned outages, address some of the insurance expense increases that we've experienced. And so as you look forward, we're really trying to manage that O&M. As we started the year, it was about a three and a half percent year over year increase that we planned for. But with some of these, what I call unexpected challenges with weather, insurance, et cetera, that's really how we're focused on managing it right now, as well as making sure we're really diligent in how we think about our capital investments. I'm sorry, capital investments on behalf of our customers. So I think the guidance that we've given you here should help you achieve how we're thinking about that four to six percent growth and how we're thinking about earnings guidance for the year. And

Chris, this is Lynn. I could not be more proud of how our team has stepped up in an incredible way, very laser focused on how we control costs for behalf of customers and then provide the shareholders that return as well. So I just want to take a moment to say a big shout out to our team and how focused they've been and how helpful they've been this past year and going into the fourth quarter.

I don't recall who. I just probably learned. I'm not sure. Somebody mentioned that you took advantage of the outages to do some longer term maintenance. Does that have an effect on, say, 2025 or what period was some of that maintenance O&M drawn forward from?

Yeah, this is Marnie. So, you know, when we do have these larger outages, we're open for opening up more of the machine. It's an opportunity to pull forward some of that maintenance. Typically, you're looking out, you know, one to two years of pulling that forward.

OK, I know. It really, you know,

it's really dependent on what we find when we open that up.

OK, OK, I appreciate it. Thanks for the call.

Thank you. Next

question,

please. Thank you. And as a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your telephone. Our next question comes from Julian DeMullen-Smith with Jefferies. He may proceed.

Hi, it's Brian Russo on for Julian. Hey, Brian.

Hi.

Hey, is there any opportunity, given your commentary around these data center growth, the 5% of current EPS contribution growing to 10% by 2028, is that really just the anchor tenant and also the meta project announced a month or two ago, or is there more projects that are driving that now?

Yeah, Brian, this is Kimberly. A couple comments there. I would generally say it's an anchor tenant. It includes Microsoft and Meta, but as Marnie mentioned, those and Lynn mentioned, those data center loads continue to evolve over time. Lynn mentioned the land that they're purchasing. So there are future opportunities, but at this point, we're focused on that 5% to 10% growth. So we obviously work with both Meta and Microsoft to evaluate what their forecasts are, and we will be updating that as we go into Q4 and announce all of our capital and earnings guidance in February. One other thing I'd note is we are getting additional inbounds, not just in Wyoming, including conversations that we're having both in Colorado and South Dakota. So that will also inform our future EPS growth as we continue to partner with potential other data centers in our territory.

Yeah, that was actually going to be my next question outside of Wyoming. A lot of these customers you mentioned are very active in Dakotas and Colorado as well. Will you look to set up some sort of a similar kind of LPCS or BCIS tariff structure that these customers are receptive to that in Wyoming, in these other states?

Brian, this is Lynn. Thanks for that question. I think the answer is maybe. We pride ourselves in doing what we think is really good for customers and shareholders, so we'll be flexible. We have lots of different ways, multiple tariffs that we could use, multiple avenues that we can serve them. And for us, because of our size and our ability to be agile, we can modify and do what we think does well for the customer, but making sure we also protect the shareholder. So that's my approach to that.

Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you, Brian.

Thank you. I would now like to turn the call back over to Lynn Evans for any closing remarks.

Well, good morning again, and thank you for joining us today, and especially thank you for your interest in Black Hills. We'll be seeing a number of you starting this weekend at EEI, so please travel safe. We'll look forward to engaging with you there. And once again, I want to say a sincere thank you to the Black Hills team. I just really appreciate how all of us have stepped up this year to make sure we serve our customers and our shareholders excellently, and you've done that. So thank you so much. I encourage everybody on the Black Hills energy safe day. Take care. Thank

you. This concludes the conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.