IDACORP, Inc.

Welcome to the IdaCorp second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded and our webcast is live. A replay will be available later today and for the next 12 months on the IdaCorp website. If you need assistance at any time during the presentation, please press star zero on your phone. I'll now turn the call over to Justin Forsberg, Director of Investor Relations and Treasurer.

Thank you, David, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you tuning in for our call today. This morning, we issued and posted to IDACorp's website our second quarter 2023 earnings release and the associated form 10-Q. The slides that accompany today's call are also available on IDACorp's website. We'll refer to those slides by number throughout the call today. As noted on slide two, our discussion today includes forward-looking statements, including earnings guidance, spending forecasts, and regulatory plans which reflect our current views on what the future holds, but are subject to several risks and uncertainties, including uncertainties surrounding the impact of future economic conditions. This cautionary note is also included in more detail for your review in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from statements made today, and we caution against placing undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. As shown on slide 3, on today's call we have Lisa Groh, IDACorp's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Brian Buckham, IDACorp's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. In addition to Lisa and Brian, we have other members of our management team available for a Q&A session following our prepared remarks. Slide 4 shows our quarterly financial results. IDACorp's second quarter 2023 earnings per diluted share were $1.35, compared with $1.27 during last year's second quarter. Year-to-date, earnings per diluted share were $2.46, compared with $2.18 during the first half of 2022. Those year-to-date results include additional tax credit amortization of $7.5 million under the Idaho regulatory stipulation. Today, we also reaffirmed our full year 2023 IDA Corp earnings guidance estimate in the range of $4.95 to $5.15 per diluted share, which includes our reaffirmed current expectation that Idaho Power will utilize approximately $15 million of additional tax credits that are available to support earnings at the 9.4% return on equity level in the Idaho jurisdiction under its Idaho regulatory settlement stipulations. These estimates assume normal weather conditions through the remainder of the year. I'll now turn the call over to Lisa.

Thank you, Justin, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Let me begin by expressing my profound appreciation to the entire Idaho Power team that continues to show up and deliver results for our customers, owners, and each other. I'm honored to share some of our accomplishments and future plans with all of you today. I'm going to talk about three key areas of focus, growth, rate cases, and infrastructure. I'll start with a headline of continued strong growth. We had a 2.1% customer growth since last year's second quarter, as you can see on slide five. It's a continuation of the trend we've seen over the past few years. On the large load customer front, the True West beef plant in southern Idaho went live in June and is ramping up to full operation. We're also continuing to work with Meta on its data center and Micron on its expansion project. Strong interest remains steady from customers across a range of industries, including food processing, manufacturing, and data centers. And I continue to marvel at the number of tower cranes across the Treasure Valley and the amount of infrastructure being built. Supporting that, the economy within Idaho Power's service area continues to outperform national trends. Moody's most recent GDP calculations for our service area forecast strong growth of 5.5% in 23 and 3.9% in 24. Employment in our service area has increased 1.6% since the second quarter of 22. Turning to slide 6, I'll touch on the general rate case we filed in Idaho on June 1st. Our case requests a rate increase of $111 million, or 8.61% on average, for Idaho customers, with our expectation that new rates will be effective January 1 of 2024. This case was filed 12 years to the day of Idaho Power's last general rate case in Idaho, and it's focused primarily on the more than $3 billion of infrastructure investments our company has made to serve our growing customer base and expense. In fact, our customer base has grown by about 120,000, or 23%, which has consumed the capacity length our system once had. Adding new generation, transmission, and distribution assets to meet our existing and growing demand is a key driver behind our filing of the case. Since the filing, we have been responding to discovery requests and working through the regulatory process. The Commission approved a schedule for the case this past Tuesday. showing public workshops scheduled for mid-August and technical hearings scheduled for late November. We are always mindful of the impact rate increases have on our customers, but we believe the rate case request is necessary to recover our costs, address growth, and maintain system reliability. We expect to file a general rate case in Oregon late this year or early next year. Staying with the theme of growth, The current 2023 IRP shows a five-year forecasted annual growth rate of 5.5% on retail sales and 3.7% on annual peak. These projections are premised in part on numbers provided by large load customers and are subject to change, but the continued growth underscores the importance of our ongoing efforts to strengthen and expand our system. We are on track to file our 2023 IRP in September. There are lots of moving pieces in a long-term resource plan, including changing demand, developing technology, new laws and directives, and other items. We are committed to developing a plan that directs near-term decisions to keep the system reliable while minimizing cost to customers. While planning is critical to our success, execution is what ultimately keeps the lights on. So let's turn our focus to our infrastructure project. Turning to slide seven, I'll address some key updates to our large transmission projects. The Boardman to Hemingway project recently hit major milestones when the Oregon and Idaho Public Utilities Commission granted certificates of public convenience and necessity. With those regulatory acknowledgements, we plan to break ground on B2H soon and hope to finish it in 2026. As I mentioned last quarter, Our agreement with the Bonneville Power Administration to transfer its original 24% interest in B2H to Idaho Power brings our total interest to approximately 45%. Idaho Power will provide long-term transmission service to BPA as part of the agreement. The Gateway West transmission project is also moving forward, and we expect it to be a part of our resource staff in our 2023 IRP. Majority owner Pacificor has constructed portions of the line in Wyoming, while pre-construction, which includes siting, permitting, and engineering studies, has begun in Idaho. We expect the portions of the line that are partly owned by Idaho Power to start coming online as early as 2028. Both of these transmission resources will be key to maintaining reliability across our system, particularly as we move away from coal-fired resources and toward a clean energy future. We have RSPs out to meet 350 megawatts of peak capacity needs in 2026 and 2027, which may be met by 1,100 megawatts of variable resources. Some of that energy may be transmitted on B2H. Ultimately, these projects are subject to commission approval through a competitive bidding process, which is underway. Idaho Power's first bank of 80 megawatts of utility-scale batteries came online this summer at our Hemingway substation. The 40-megawatt Black Mesa solar project is now online, and the 100-megawatt Franklin solar project is under development. The Franklin project will be paired with an additional 60 megawatts of company-owned battery storage. These projects and other planned battery and solar resources are expected to help us continue to meet peak demand during the hot summer months. This past month has brought consistently hot summer weather to our service area with temperatures in the 90s and 100s. Thankfully, we haven't had any issues meeting peak demands, and it has also been a relatively quiet wildfire season thus far. We have implemented our wildfire mitigation plan that has been a tremendous amount of work in preparation for this fire season, and we are actively monitoring the weather and our system. With that, I will stop there and hand it over to Brian for an overview of our financial results.