Black Hills Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q4 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 fourth quarter and full year 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 earnings call are Lynn Evans, President and Chief Executive Officer of 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 begin my comments on slide three with a summary of our achievements in 2025 and our strategic outlook, including an update on our merger with Northwestern Energy. Kimberly will provide our financial update and Marnie will discuss our operational performance and progress on a few key initiatives. I'll start with a sincere thank you to our Black Hills team. I'm incredibly proud of our team's accomplishments in 2025. We achieved the key commitments we made at the beginning of the year setting the stage for ongoing success. We once again fulfilled our financial commitments, achieving the midpoint of our earnings guidance and long-term growth target. We successfully executed our financing strategy, maintaining our solid investment-grade credit ratings. We achieved strong earnings through the consistent execution of our long-term strategy, which drove new base rates, rider recovery, and enabled customer growth. Notably, we witnessed growing demand from our large load customers such as data centers and solid economic development in our service territories. We also increased our dividend for the 55th consecutive year in 2025 and recently extended that industry-leading track record to 56 years. Our team made strong regulatory progress, completing three rate reviews and advancing several strategic project approvals. We also advanced our plans to serve data center demand, tripling our data center pipeline during the year to more than three gigawatts. In just three years, our team successfully designed, permitted, constructed, and energized our 260-mile Ready Wyoming transmission project, delivering the project on schedule. This transformative project is a great example of our commitment to innovative and customer-centric investments. By strategically interconnecting our electric systems in South Dakota and Wyoming, we're providing value that will reliably and affordably serve our customers for generations to come. We're also constructing our LANG2 99 megawatt generation project in Rapid City. This project will replace aging resources with cutting-edge generation technology, enhancing our ability to provide resilient and reliable service to our customers and communities. Our legacy of excellent operational performance is fundamental to everything we do. We consistently achieve better than industry average safety performance, top quartile reliability, and a positive customer experience. To ensure the safety of our customers and our communities, we established an emergency public safety power shutoff program. This program serves as an additional tool in our toolbox to help mitigate the risk of wildfires. In addition to our success as a standalone business, we announced the strategic merger with Northwestern Energy in August. Slide four outlines our unwavering commitment to these critical areas in 2026 as we advance our customer-centric strategy and capitalize on emerging opportunities. We remain steadfast in our dedication to consistency, building upon last year's achievements as we embrace the exciting prospects ahead. We're already diligently working towards fulfilling our financial commitments, including achieving earnings growth in the upper half of our long-term growth target, as reflected in our 2026 earnings guidance, which anticipates 6% year-over-year growth. We anticipate delivering exceptional results for our stakeholders through executing on our customer-focused capital plan, continuing our regulatory progress through multiple rate reviews, meeting the growing demand of our customers and maintaining our positive momentum through our upside data center pipeline and completing our merger with Northwestern Energy. Slide five outlines our data center pipeline of more than three gigawatts. Our pipeline includes only high-quality data center companies under nondisclosure agreements, which we are actively negotiating to serve. Meta is ramping up its new data center, and Microsoft demand continues to grow. Their combined load represents approximately 600 megawatts to be served by 2030 under our minimal capital investment model. Viewed through a financial lens beginning in 2028, we expect this data center demand to contribute more than 10% of our growing consolidated EPS. We're also making progress in negotiations with our other high-quality partners to potentially serve the remainder of our data center pipeline. To fulfill this scale of demand, we rely upon a combination of energy resources that include the procurement of market energy, contracted generation, and investments we would make in generation and transmission. Each of these energy resources has its own distinct risks and considerations, which will individually contribute to earnings uniquely based upon negotiated contracts with each customer. Our unique tariff offers flexibility in how we serve data centers, provides speed to market, and is positively impacting affordability for our Wyoming customer base. Marnie will provide more detail in her business update. Slide six outlines our $4.7 billion capital plan. We invest in our natural gas and electric customers' core needs for safety, reliability, and growth. As I outlined earlier with our data center pipeline, Our current capital plan includes only minimal investments to support 600 megawatts of data center demand, which we expect to serve through market energy procurement and contracted generation. We are developing opportunities for investment that aren't currently in our plan. As I said before, this would include generation and transmission bills as a part of a mix of resources to serve additional data center demand. Moving to slide seven and eight for an update on our merger with Northwestern Energy. We are very committed to the merger because combining these two companies makes great sense for our stakeholders. The merger will create a stronger, more competitive utility company, providing long-term value for stakeholders created through increased scale and improved customer diversity with our existing eight-state footprint. An improved financial profile with a larger balance sheet that expands opportunities for strategic investments. Offering employees greater opportunities for growth, creating improved employee attraction and retention, and through the industrial logic of efficiencies associated with procurement and adopting best practices as a couple of examples. Importantly, the merger will enhance our capabilities and capacity to grow, especially as compared to our standalone business. In short, we are committed to this strategic merger, one we have pursued for more than two decades. Today, more than ever, the combination of these two companies will enable us to unlock additional value creation opportunities for our customers and our shareholders, which excites us. To date, we have submitted all joint applications to our regulators in Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota, requesting their approval of our merger and were involved in the discovery phase in each state. We also filed our Form S-4 with the SEC last week. with special shareholder meetings scheduled for early April and intend to secure all necessary approvals to finalize the merger within the second half of this year. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kimberly for our financial update. Kimberly?