Hawaiian Electric Industries, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the HEI second quarter 2026 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 would like to ask a question during that time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the call over to Mateo Garcia, Director of Investor Relations. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome everyone to HEI's second quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me today are our CEO, Scott Seu, our President, Shelee Kimura, our Senior Vice President and CFO, Paul Ito, and other members of senior management. Our earnings release and our presentation for this call are available in the investor relations section of our website. As a reminder, forward-looking statements will be made on today's call. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations can be found in our presentation, our SEC filings, and in the investor relations section of our website. Today's presentation also includes references to non-GAAP financial measures, including those referred to as core items. You should refer to the information contained in the slides accompanying today's presentation for definitional information and reconciliations of historical non-GAAP measures to the closest GAAP financial measure. We will take questions from institutional investors at the end of this call. Individual investors and others can reach out to Investor Relations. Now Scott Seu will begin with his remarks.

Aloha kakou, welcome everyone. For today's call, I'll start with updates on key strategic priorities and regulatory processes. Paul Ito will walk through our financial results and then open it up for questions. As you will recall, in December of last year, The PUC approved the Utilities Three Year Wildfire Mitigation Plan, or WMP, concluding that our proposed strategy can be expected to reduce wildfire risk. In June, the PUC granted our request to recover approximately $350 million of WMP spending through the Exceptional Project Recovery Mechanism, or EPRM. This includes roughly $270 million of capital and $80 million of O&M. In addition, the PUC approved recovery of up to $11.5 million of WMP-related O&M already spent in 2025 and $3.9 million of annual ongoing WMP-related O&M spending in 2028 and beyond. Act 258, which authorizes securitization for recovery of infrastructure resilience costs were signed into law after we had submitted our request for recovery of WMP costs. We plan to request recovery of WMP costs through securitization rather than the EPRM, and we're currently working on an application requesting the Commission's issuance of a financing order. Affordability remains a core focus of ours, and securitization will allow us to implement these critical investments at the least possible cost to customers. We expect that EPRM recovery would only be used for WMP costs that may not be eligible for securitization. Turning to the next slide, as we discussed last quarter, we're in a transitional year as we prepare for our expected reset of rates in 2027. We submitted our rate rebasing request in early March, and in June, the Commission accepted our proposed rate rebasing methodology, issued a tentative procedural schedule, and directed us to refile our request in a new docket. We resubmitted our rebasing request last month and our request continues to have stakeholder support. The Commission's tentative procedural schedule allows for a final decision and order in mid to late April of 2027, with public hearings to begin soon. Our total $170 million proposed base rate increase is phased in over two years, with $125 million of the increase proposed to take effect beginning in 2027. We've requested that the Commission issue an interim decision by December 18, 2026 so that new rates reflecting this first phase of the rebasing can go into effect by January 1, 2027. Turning to the next slide, in June we filed our annual action plan update to our integrated grid plan or IGP. As a reminder, our IGP lays out a pathway that includes a short-term action plan and long-term strategy to meet the energy needs of our customers while balancing reliability, affordability, and decarbonization needs. Our June IGP update proposes actions that prioritize affordability, identifying what we can do within the next five years to stabilize rates and advance energy equity. These actions include using competitive procurements for all types of renewable generation to attract the lowest pricing for customers. Last month on July 17, we submitted the final IGP Request for Proposals, or RFP, to the PUC in advance of its issuance today, August 7. Our RFP is intended to meet our customers' growing energy needs and modernize the generation fleet. It will be one of the largest competitive procurements for generation resources in state history, seeking nearly 1,650 gigawatt hours of variable renewable energy, 465 megawatts of grid-forming resources, and 111 megawatts of firm generating capacity. We're also requesting to launch an RFP for all fuels by the end of 2026, including both liquid and gaseous fuels. to provide a competitive evaluation of price, sourcing, environmental impact, and other measures. A competitive process best serves the interests of customers. In line with this, in our July 17 requests, we also ask that the PUC allow us to issue a new RFP to consider all options for development of up to 500 megawatts of additional firm generation on Oahu, above and beyond the IGP RFP and the projects selected in the Stage 3 RFP, including our YL repowering project. On August 5, the PUC responded to our letter, informing us that a demonstration of need must be made before advancing such a significant procurement. The Commission noted that the demonstration of need should include thorough analyses of system capacity and reliability needs, consider substantial stakeholder engagement and explain how the proposed new generation aligns with the IGP. We believe the Commission's request is reasonable and prudent, and we plan to respond to the PUC accordingly. We're also continuing to move forward with bringing new resources from our previous procurements online. In June, the Commission approved two more PPAs for solar plus storage projects from our 2023 Stage 3 RFP. There are now three solar plus storage contracts approved from our Stage 3 RFP, totaling 166 megawatts of solar and 670 megawatt hours of battery storage, and multiple firm generation projects, including Wyao. Seven other Stage 3 projects have been or will be submitted to the Commission for review. While we advance our competitive procurements, we'll continue to work in parallel to grow a thriving competitive marketplace for customer-scale renewable generation, including by targeting roughly 1.2 gigawatts of private rooftop solar by 2030. We have a responsibility to plan for the holistic needs of our system, and we can't simply consider generation, transmission, or distribution requirements in isolation. Delivering safe, reliable, and resilient electricity for our customers while also meeting the state's renewable energy policy goals requires a modern and resilient grid. We've identified over $1.3 billion in investments through 2035 to build or expand interconnection points between renewable projects, nearly $60 million of investments in distribution upgrades required over the next 10 years, and $190 million over the next five years for our PUC-approved Climate Adaptation Program to harden the grid and implement other resilience measures. In summary, successfully delivering the service our customers expect while making the critical investments required in transmission, distribution, and generation, not to mention the critical need to increase resilience to wildfire and other severe weather event risk, requires holistic planning and excellent execution. Our wildfire mitigation plan and integrated grid plan have been years in the making and are designed to be dynamic and evolving. We'll continue our focus on execution of our plans to deliver safe, reliable, resilient, and affordable service to our customers. I'll now turn the call over to Paul to discuss our financial results.