Entergy Corporation

At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Entergy's third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Once again, star one. If you'd like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. And I will now turn the call over to Liz Hunter, Vice President of Investor Relations for Entergy Corporation. Liz, the floor is yours.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. We will begin today with comments from Entergy's Chair and CEO, Drew Marsh, and then Kimberly Fontan, our CFO, will review results. In an effort to accommodate everyone who has questions, we request that each person ask no more than two questions. In today's call, management will make certain forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements due to a number of factors which are set forth in our earnings release, our slide presentation, and our SEC filings. Entergy does not assume any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Management will also discuss non-GAAP financial information Reconciliations to the applicable GAAP measures are included in today's press release and slide presentation, both of which can be found on the investor relations section of our website. And now I will turn the call over to Drew.

Thank you, Liz. Good morning, everyone. We've had a very productive quarter and we're excited to give you an update this morning. We're reporting strong financial and business results that include important progress on our growth strategy the significant new capital investment plan to support customer requirements. I'll start with earnings. Today, we are reporting strong PS of $2.99. With our results to date and three-quarters behind us, we are raising the bottom of the guidance range by 10 cents. We're also raising our longer-term outlooks, driven by the new capital investment to support higher industrial sales and growing interest in clean energy products. Our industrial sales growth story continues to be robust. With developments since analyst day, we now see an industrial sales compound annual growth rate of 11 to 12% through 2028, 300 basis points higher. The change is primarily due to a large new customer in Louisiana with whom we have executed an electric service agreement. We don't disclose specific customer details without their consent. so we can't provide additional information at this time. In addition, many large industrial customers are looking to our operating companies for clean energy products to support their decarbonization goals. We are seeing strong customer interest in renewable green tariffs and nuclear clean tariffs. We're also working with stakeholders on a broader array of clean offerings, including technologies like CCS and advanced nuclear. Collectively, This means that our preliminary capital plan through 2028 is $7 billion higher than at Analyst Day, driven by new transmission as well as incremental generation investment, including renewables. We will have more details at EEI. There are several examples, excuse me, there are several areas where we've already made progress to support growth. For example, we continue to add renewables to our system. Entergy Arkansas's Walnut Bend Solar, a 100-megawatt project that was a build-owned transfer partnership with Invenergy, is now in service. Entergy Arkansas also closed on the 180-megawatt West Memphis Solar and 250-megawatt Driver Solar projects. We now have close to 800 megawatts of solar resources in service and more than 2,600 megawatts of specific projects that are in process, approved, or under regulatory review. Beyond this, we continue to plan for more customer-driven renewable projects, including through a recently issued RFP aimed at Entergy Louisiana's new streamlined approval process. Since Analyst Day, we've announced four very large, efficient, large-scale dispatchable generation projects, three today in Louisiana and one several weeks ago in Mississippi. The 750 megawatt dual fuel combined cycle combustion turbine units will be hydrogen ready and enabled for future carbon capture and storage. To support successful execution, each of these plants is expected to use a standardized design. We have a proven track record of successfully executing large projects. Using strong, disciplined, and standardized processes, we successfully built five major generation projects over the last decade. For the sixth project, the Orange County Advanced Power Station in Texas is currently on track. This experience and expertise are especially important to support the tremendous growth on the horizon. Preparing for CCS is an important part of the action because the Clean Air Act Section 111B currently requires new gas fire generation to have CCS in place by 2032. Additionally, we are in active discussions with customers who are interested in a variety of low carbon generation solutions, including CCS. As we previously discussed, Entergy Louisiana received a grant to complete a front-end engineering and design, or FEED, study at the Lake Charles Power Station. We are also working with Crescent Midstream to assess the technical and financial feasibility of executing carbon capture and storage at LCPS in a manner that ensures public safety and addresses the interests of our communities. Once completed, the learnings from this work will benefit future CCS projects. Ultimately, we believe CCS is a critical technology to comply with eventual federal emissions requirements. To help our customers meet their decarbonization objectives, and for us to achieve our 2050 net zero commitment safely and responsibly. Another critical source of clean and reliable energy is nuclear. Beyond our sizable existing fleet and capabilities, we are well positioned to evaluate and ultimately pursue new nuclear options. We are actively exploring potential power upgrades at our existing facilities that could total as much as 300 megawatts. We have an early site permit that was issued by the NRC in 2007 for potential new reactor at the Grand Gulf site. We have a memorandum of understanding with Holtec to evaluate its SMR technology for use in our service area. At the same time, we are participating in several industry working groups that are evaluating other SMR technologies and potential development opportunities. And finally, we are participating in state working groups in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi that are evaluating the potential for nuclear expansion in those states. Our work in this area supports ongoing customer conversations on options that could accelerate new nuclear investments. Each of these generation technologies, solar and storage, CCS, and new nuclear, as well as potentially wind, is important to achieve reliability, affordability, and sustainability outcomes for our customers. We see significant potential customer value from each, and we are well positioned to help capture that value for our customers. We are working with a broad set of stakeholders to understand, and we are confident we will address, any safety, economic, social, or other concerns related to these technologies. And as with all investments, we will be disciplined in evaluating the risk and economic impacts before meaningful capital is deployed. Yesterday, Intergy Louisiana submitted its request to the LPSC for approval of a set of transmission and generation investments that will support the new customer in Louisiana. In order to support the customer's desired timeline, we have requested a decision in September next year. We know that many of you are interested in seeing this filing. It will not be available on the LPSC's website until closer to the time it is published in their bulletin on November 8th. Therefore, we have posted the public version of the application to the regulatory and other page on our investor relations website. The application provides an overview and summary of the filing. We plan to submit a separate filing to request approval for renewable projects to support the customer's clean energy goals. This new customer will bring substantial benefits to the state and local communities, as well as our existing customers and other key stakeholders. For example, this development will provide meaningful opportunities to grow our communities through jobs, through new sources of tax revenue, and improved quality of life. It's bringing these benefits to a region of Louisiana that has been economically disadvantaged for decades. The project will also diversify Louisiana's economy while providing significant opportunities for future development in the state. Electric sales revenue and other contributions from this customer will cover an appropriate share of the cost to serve, including the marginal costs associated with investments needed to support this customer, as well as a portion of our current costs, including investments in resilience that are so critical to Louisiana. With this approach, and our ongoing focus on efficiencies, we expect to maintain competitive rates below the national average. The stakeholder engagement model that we laid out at Analyst Day was the foundation for bringing this customer to Entergy Louisiana. As an integrated utility, we can provide generation, transmission, and retail requirements together in one solution. Our deep stakeholder relationships and history can facilitate alignment among all parties, state and local government, communities, regulators, and the customer. And our solutions can leverage existing partnerships and regulatory mechanisms to accelerate timelines. The combination of these factors allows us and our stakeholders to successfully deliver speed to market, which is a critical consideration for these large projects. The four macro trends I discussed in Analyst Day, on-shoring, clean energy, electrification, and technology, are in full force and driving strong growth in our service area. In addition to the growth already in our outlooks, we could see additional sales to large customers and associated capital investment within the outlook period. We're excited about our growth progress, and we look forward to talking to you about it at EEI. Moving beyond the growth update, I have a few more things that I want to cover. We talked about our storm preparedness, both operationally and financially. We have developed and refined plans that are purposeful, repeatable, and sustainable, and we're seeing the benefits. This year, we've had two hurricanes in our service area. We talked about Beryl last quarter. Today, I will cover Francine, a Category 2 storm. To start, we are thankful that we had zero OSHA recordable injuries with more than 550,000 work hours. And the headline is that we restored power to 90% of our customers within just three days, keeping customers and key stakeholders well informed throughout the restoration. This outstanding outcome was due to a combination of previous resilience investments, detailed planning and preparation, methodical and safe execution, and robust stakeholder communications. I thank all our employees for their hard work and dedication to restore power safely and as quickly as possible so workers could go home to their families and our customers could return to their everyday lives. Kimberly will cover the cost estimates in a moment. Our storm response efforts didn't stop with our customers. We also provided mutual assistance to our neighboring utilities for hurricanes Helene and Milton to help restore power in those communities. To that, I want to again thank our teams for the extra effort. I also want to thank the mutual assistance workers who supported our customer restoration after Francine and Beryl. Mutual assistance is unique to our industry, and it's a great example of how utilities work together for the greater good in the moments that matter. While the investments we make every day harden our system, the launch of our resilience program marks the start of a more comprehensive grid strengthening effort. After the Commission approved Intergy Louisiana's $1.9 billion accelerated resilience plan in April, we officially kicked off phase one with the groundbreaking for the first project in the Lake Charles area where we will be investing $107 million to upgrade 148 miles of power lines. Many more projects are getting underway, and we expect to reach our full ramp early next year. We're making progress on establishing our formal accelerated resilience programs in other jurisdictions as well. The New Orleans City Council approved $100 million of investments over the next two years. This is in addition to the New Orleans East project selected for a DOE Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships or GRIP grant that the Council approved earlier this year. We are excited to start on this phase of projects to bring the benefits of a more resilient system to our customers in New Orleans. We also reached a settlement on the first phase of Entergy Texas Resilience Plan. which includes $335 million of investment, 200 million of which is contingent on a grant from the Texas Energy Fund. We expect the commission to take up the settlement by year end. In addition, two of our operating companies recently were selected for federal grants that will provide resilience benefits to our customers at a lower cost. Entergy Louisiana, successfully partnered with three parishes to be selected for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, grants that will provide $68 million in funding for projects. At nearly the same time, Entergy Texas received a $54 million GRIP award for a project that will protect communities around Port Arthur, including a major port that has been previously impacted by extreme weather. Along the way, We completed several large projects this year across the system that improve our resilience and serve as proof points for our resilience efforts. The Avenue C project in New Orleans, which many of you toured at Analyst Day, is now completed. You may recall that it showcased several resilience-oriented distribution technologies. The Port Bolivar and Palms elevated substations at Texas were completed before Beryl and easily withstood the effects of that storm. And notably, Port Bouchon and the coastal city of Grand Isle in Louisiana maintained access to power throughout Francine after resilience investments were made there following Hurricane Ida in 2021. The progress on resilience is further evidence that a customer-first approach remains the key to achieve regulatory outcomes to benefit all stakeholders. This approach has also supported our progress on other regulatory engagements. During the past quarter, the Louisiana Public Service Commission unanimously approved several items that renewed Entergy Louisiana's formula rate plan for three years. resolved all claims against system energy, approved the sale of Louisiana's LDC business, and authorized the divestiture of Louisiana's share of Grand Gulf Energy and Capacity to Mississippi. We have requested state, commission, and FERC approvals to divest Louisiana's share of Grand Gulf Energy and Capacity to Mississippi. We are targeting a January 1st effective date. New formula rate plans were effective in September for New Orleans following its normal process and for Louisiana following the Commission's approval for the three-year formula rate plan extension. These results are the foundation for the customer growth that benefits all stakeholders, which we discussed earlier. And they have not happened by accident. They're the product of the ongoing shift in the way we approach our business by embedding customer centricity and stakeholder engagement into everything we do. We've had a very successful quarter. We made steady progress across key customer operational regulatory and financial fronts. We're raising the bottom of our 2024 adjusted EPS guidance range and increasing our longer-term outlook as a result of our new customer-driven capital plan. By continuing to put our customers first, we remain focused on delivering premium value to each of our key stakeholders. Look forward to talking to all of you at EEI about Intergy's unique and robust growth story. Before I turn the call over to Kimberly, I want to acknowledge that this call also marks a couple of important transitions for us. First, Bill Abler is moving to a new role, leading the commercial planning and operations for our utilities. and Liz Hunter, who introduced this call, is stepping in. Liz comes into the role with strong experience in our treasury operations, including fixed income and rating agency interactions. We are excited for both, and both will be at EEI in a little over a week as we complete our succession plan. The second transition is personally much more bittersweet. After 25 years, The last six and a half as our utility group president, Rod West is retiring from Entergy and today marks his last earnings call. Rod has accomplished much over his career and recently he has been critical to the redesign of our customer growth and stakeholder engagement efforts. He leaves us well positioned to succeed because of the foundations he established and much of my comments today reflect those efforts. Rod will also be with us a final time at EEI, although given his track record, I suspect we haven't seen the last of him. I'll now turn the call over to Kimberly, who will review our financial results for the quarter, as well as our long-term outlooks.