Eversource Energy (D/B/A)

Good morning. Thank you for attending today's Eversource Energy Q2 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Alexis, and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call, with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Jeff Kotkin with Eversource. You may proceed. Great.

Thank you very much, Alexis. Good morning and thank you for joining us. I'm Jeff Kotkin, Eversource Energy's Vice President for Investor Relations. During this call, we'll be referencing slides that we posted yesterday on our website. And as you can see on slide one, some of the statements made during this investor call may be forward-looking as defined within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to risk and uncertainty, which may cause the actual results to differ materially from forecasts and projections. These factors are set forth in the news release issued yesterday afternoon. Additional information about the various factors that may cause actual results to differ can be found in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st 2021 and our form 10Q for the three months ended March 31st, 2022. Additionally, our explanation of how and why we use certain non-GAAP measures and how those measures reconcile to GAAP results is contained within our news release and the slides we posted last night and in our most recent 10K and 10Q. Speaking today will be Joe Nolan, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and John Marrera, our Executive Vice President and CFO. Now I will turn the slide to and turn over the call to Joe.

Thank you, Jeff, and thank you everyone for joining us on this call this morning. I hope that our investors on this call are having a good summer and have plans for some time off after earnings season concludes in another couple of weeks. We are enjoying a glorious summer so far in New England with many sunny days along our shoreline and our mountains. If you haven't made a trek here this summer, we urge you to do so and support hundreds of thousands of businesses. Over the past few weeks, with the longest sustained heat wave in eastern Massachusetts in about a decade, our electric system has operated very well, and they have all year. Through June, the average number of months between power interruptions continues to place our reliability in the top decile of the electric industry. and our relatively short average duration of outages continues to place us in the top quartile. This is strong evidence that our investments in infrastructure to enhance reliability have been a significant benefit to our customers. Response time to natural gas service calls, a key safety and performance metric for our gas distribution business, continues to be excellent. Turning to slide three, About two weeks ago, we posted our 2021 sustainability report and linked it to our diversity, equity and inclusion report. Our DEI report is new this year. Over the past year, a number of our investors requested that we provide additional transparency about our diversity, including providing more detail about statistics around hiring, promotion and retention rates. areas of our organization that are of high focus for us. We decided that the best way to provide investors and others with this information is to create a separate report that highlights the significant and increasing diversity among our employees, our management, and our board. We welcome your feedback on both the DEI and our sustainability reports. The new sustainability reports highlights our successful accomplishments last year. in a variety of areas. We continue to enhance the report and again have third party validation of our scope one and scope two emissions. The report focuses to a major extent on Eversource's very significant efforts to support our state's goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 to 85% by 2050. From a clean energy perspective, Slide four captures three of our initiatives in this area. Our battery storage project in Provincetown on Cape Cod was commissioned in the second quarter of 2022 and almost immediately showed its value when it helped avert an outage for approximately 5,000 NSTAR electric customers. We have filed our first application under the most recent legislative authorization for regulated company solar generation investment. We are seeking approval of three different projects, all of which would combine solar with battery storage. They would be located in Brockton, Lawrence, and Yarmouth in eastern Massachusetts. And altogether, it's expected to cost an estimated $31 million to build. We continue to progress on our unique geothermal network project that Massachusetts regulators approved in the most recent NSTAR gas rate review. The project will be located in Framingham, Massachusetts, and will connect 140 apartments, homes, and businesses to a geothermal system that will provide both heating and cooling. Customer receptivity to the project has been very strong, with nearly 85% of those along the route signing up for the pilot. We continue to expect the project to be operational in 2023. Turning to offshore wind and slide five, I want to update you on the progress we have made on our strategic review of our offshore wind investments. We've been working closely with Orsted on developing the marketing materials that will be disseminated to potential buyers for our 50% interest in our joint venture. We continue to target an outcome for this review by the end of this year. Thus far, we have had very high level of interest and expect a robust sales process. We recently kicked off our buyer outreach and have had preliminary discussions with potential buyers and expect that process to continue. Key materials have been developed, including a teaser, non-disclosure agreement, confidentiality memorandum, independent engineering document, and other materials. In the meantime, we continue to make steady progress on our three projects, Southwalk is the first project to enter construction. We are virtually complete with the sections beneath the public roads in East Hampton, New York. We are now progressing rapidly on the onshore sections in the railroad right away on the substation where the 130 megawatt project will connect. As a reminder, the offshore portions of Southwalk will be built in 2023. we continue to expect the two larger projects revolution wind and sunrise wind to be fully permitted in 2023 and to be in service in 2025. on july 8th the rhode island energy facility society board issued to revolution wind a decision in final order approving the project and granting a license to construct and operate as a reminder revolution will supply a total of 704 megawatts to Rhode Island and Connecticut and tie into the New England grid in North Kingston, Rhode Island. As you can see on slide six, we've also made progress on the procurement side with 82 percent of the three project costs locked in, up from 80 percent in May. The demand for offshore wind generation continues to grow in our region. Rhode Island just recently enacted legislation that requires a solicitation by October of this year for an additional 600 to 1,000 megawatts of offshore wind. Another much larger offshore wind RFP for up to approximately 4,600 megawatts was issued this week by New York. Including projects already awarded, we are now looking at approximately 18,000 megawatts of offshore wind authorizations from New York in the states of southern New England. We are confident that this level of procurement will attract wide interest in our wind investment since we continue to believe that the ocean tracks that we share with Orsted are about the most attractive in North America due to the high average wind speeds, moderate depths, proximity to load, and incredibly deep public policy support. New legislation that passed in Massachusetts House and Senate last week should also further support a robust sales process. As you can see on slide seven, there were several elements in that bill that should help solidify Massachusetts effort to stay in the forefront of offshore wind development in the United States. They included an affirmation of the state's commitment to contract for 5600 megawatts of offshore wind by mid 2027. modification of the bidding process to encourage more competition among developers, and incentives to increase the manufacturing and assembly of offshore wind components in Massachusetts. There were also provisions to enhance the sale and leasing of electric vehicles in the state, build more energy storage, and develop grid modernization plans that would support electrification as a key path to decarbonization. There is also a pilot program that would allow up to 10 communities in the state to restrict fossil fuel installation in new buildings. Health care and research facilities, which have proliferated across Massachusetts, would be exempt from the pilot, as would certain communities with housing affordability challenges. Thanks again for your time. I will now turn over the call to John Marrera. Thank you, Joe.