Black Hills Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q3 2025 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, Operator. Good morning and welcome to Black Hills Corporation's third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. You can find our earnings release and materials for our call this morning on our website at blackhillscorp.com. Leading our quarterly earnings call are Lynn Evans, President and Chief Executive Officer, Kimberly Nooney, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Marnie Jones, Senior Vice President and Chief Utility Officer. 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. With that, 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 start my comments on slide three with a summary of our quarter. and our strategic outlook, including an update on our merger with our friends at Northwestern Energy. Kimberly will provide our financial update, and Marnie will discuss our operational performance and progress on key initiatives. We're fulfilling our commitment to deliver results for our stakeholders in three key areas that we identified at the beginning of the year. First, we're delivering on our financial commitments, having reaffirmed our earnings guidance and completed our planned financing activities. Second, we're executing on our regulatory and growth initiatives, including our $1 billion capital plan to support key projects to serve our customers' growing needs. And third, we're providing excellent operational performance, including top quartile reliability and a positive customer experience. I'm proud of our team's remarkable work in delivering strong financial results and making significant progress on our key initiatives. We're on track to achieve our earnings guidance for the full year with three primary drivers, new base rates, rider recovery, and customer growth. We're also continuing to maintain a healthy balance sheet. We have made significant progress with our regulatory strategy, including securing a recent settlement for our rate review in Nebraska. Including this settlement, our team has successfully completed seven rate reviews since the beginning of last year, highlighting our expertise in managing multiple regulatory requests. We also successfully advanced several key near-term projects that will drive growth. We're on schedule to complete our 260-mile Ready Wyoming transmission expansion project by year-end, and we broke ground on our Lang II generation project in Rapid City during the quarter. Additionally, customer growth including growing demand from our large load customers such as data centers and economic development in our service territories are providing solid contributions to earnings. In addition to our current plan, we continue to be very actively engaged with high quality data center partners. We have now signed non-disclosure agreements for more than three gigawatts of demand. If and when these negotiations lead to signed agreements, Only then will we incorporate them into our plan. Our financial outlook is provided on slide four. We're reaffirming our prior 2025 earnings guidance with an adjusted EPS range of $4 to $4.20, excluding merger related costs. This represents a 5% growth rate at the midpoint over our 2024 EPS. Looking ahead, with solid progress in our regulatory and growth initiatives, We plan to deliver in the upper half of our 4% to 6% long-term EPS growth target starting in 2026. Our confidence in achieving our long-term growth target is further strengthened by our $4.7 billion capital plan and strong customer demand, including the data center opportunities I previously mentioned. We anticipate presenting an updated financial outlook during our fourth quarter and full year earnings call in February, including earnings guidance for 2026 and capital investment plans for the years 2026 to 2030. Slide five represents our current $4.7 billion capital plan. Our base annual investment is approximately $700 million, prioritizing our customers' core needs for safety, reliability, and growth. Additionally, our transformative infrastructure expansion investments will cost-effectively enhance our system's resiliency and support growing demand and evolving requirements for both our electric and natural gas systems. Some of the major capital projects in our current plan include our Ready Wyoming transmission expansion that is on schedule to be completed by year end, our 99 megawatt Lang II generation project in South Dakota that is under construction and we expect to place in service in the second half of 2026, and our battery storage project in 2027 to comply with the Colorado Clean Energy Plan. Our 2025 through 2029 capital plan does not currently include significant investments related to data center demand. We anticipate continuing to profitably serve large load demand through our market energy model with minimal capital investment at a level of approximately 500 megawatts of demand through 2029. Demand exceeding that level will likely necessitate incremental investments in generation and transmission. Marnie will provide more detailed information about data center demand in her business update. Moving to slide six. On August 19th, we announced our merger with Northwestern Energy. Although we are well positioned as standalone companies, this merger will create a stronger, more competitive entity with greater scale and enhanced financial profile and complementary strengths, enabling us to unlock additional value creation opportunities for our customers and our shareholders. In October, we submitted joint applications to our regulators in Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota, requesting their approvals of our merger. We anticipate receiving procedural schedules and commencing the discovery process this quarter. We're also diligently working through the S4 process and intends to secure all necessary approvals to finalize a merger within the second half of next year. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kimberly for our financial update. Kimberly?