IDACORP, Inc.

Welcome to IDACORP's third 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 will now turn the call over to Amy Shaw, Director of Investor Relations, Compliance and Risk.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining our call. This morning we issued and posted to IDACORP's website our third 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. As noted on slide two, our discussion today includes forward-looking statements, including earnings guidance, spending forecasts, and regulatory plans that reflect our current views on what the future holds but are subject to risks and uncertainties, including uncertainties surrounding the impacts 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 three, on today's call we have Lisa Groh, IDA Corp'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 third quarter 2023 earnings for diluted share were $2.07 compared with $2.10 during last year's third quarter. Year-to-date earnings for diluted share were $4.53 compared with $4.28 for the first three quarters of The year-to-date results include a total of $7.5 million of additional tax credit amortization under the Idaho regulatory stipulation, which is the amount we recorded in the first half of the year. Today, we raised the bottom end of our previously issued full-year 2023 IDA Corp earnings guidance by $0.10 to a range of $5.05 to $5.15 per diluted share. which includes our current expectation that Idaho Power will use up to $10 million of additional tax credits available to support earnings at the 9.4% return on equity level in the Idaho jurisdiction under our current Idaho regulatory settlement stipulation, which is down from the $15 million we anticipated at the end of the second quarter. Now I'll turn the call over to Lisa.

Thanks, Amy, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. I want to begin by addressing three main areas this afternoon. customer growth, infrastructure to address that growth, and rate cases. I'll start by highlighting the strong growth that continues across our region. As you can see on slide five, we've had 2.3% customer growth since last year's third quarter. This growth is in line with the trends we've seen for several years now and is readily apparent throughout our service area. There continues to be a number of power cranes visible near our headquarters in downtown Boise, 26 throughout the Treasure Valley area, to be exact, and construction is booming. You can see on the slide that Moody's GDP growth is what their growth forecast is. We're working hard to ensure we continue supplying our growing customer base with the safe, reliable, affordable, clean energy they depend on every day. On the large load front, the Stowe Company's facility in Nampa went live in October and will ramp up operations over the next several months. In addition, several dairy biogas projects in the Magic Valley completed construction and started operations in Q3. Interests remain steady from customers across a range of industries, including food processing, manufacturing, and data centers. We're continuing to work with Meta on its innovative data center in CUNA and on the Micron expansion, which had its first official concrete pour earlier this month. Micron is also making a strong push to recruit its suppliers to locate facilities near their expansion, creating the potential for additional loads. I'm happy to provide an update on the General Ray case we filed in Idaho on June 1. Parties in the case have agreed to a settlement of all issues in the case. We filed the settlement stipulation last week with the Idaho Commission, and some of the details are included on slide 6. If approved, the stipulation would provide for an increase in annual retail revenues of $54.7 million, or 4.25% on average for Idaho customers, effective January 1 of 2024. That's in addition to moving the recovery of certain costs from other regulatory mechanisms into base rates. And Brian will touch on the details of that in a moment. We believe the settlement demonstrates our continued constructive regulatory environment in Idaho. As a reminder, this is the first general rate case we've filed in 12 years. Our case focused primarily on the infrastructure investments we've made to serve our customer base, which has grown by 23% since our last rate case filing. As we look forward to our capital investment plans over the next several years, we anticipate more frequent general rate case filings. We also expect to file a general rate case in Oregon next month. In another positive regulatory outcome, the Idaho Commission recently approved Idaho Power's Clean Energy Your Way program. This program expands clean energy options available to our customers, including a construction offering that allows industrial customers to partner with Idaho Power to develop new renewable resources through a long-term arrangement. Meta and Micron have agreements in place to participate in this program, which will help them achieve their clean energy goals while also complementing our goal of providing 100% clean energy by 2045. We've also seen interest from others as well. As part of our efforts to meet customer demand and keep up with growth, we recently filed our 2023 integrated resource plan. Creating a long-term resource plan is an increasingly complex process, and we remain committed to developing a plan that keeps our system reliable while minimizing price impacts to our customers. Filed in Idaho and Oregon every other year, the IRP offers a 20-year forecast for energy demand and a preferred portfolio of resources to help us meet that demand. Slide 7 summarizes some of the notable changes from our 2021 to our 2023 IRP. I think the IRP is worth a review, and in particular the preferred portfolio that came out of that process. We've been busy with infrastructure development, and the IRP illustrates what we expect to be focused on for energy and capacity in the coming years. One infrastructure addition in particular I want to highlight is the Gateway West transmission line. In the 2023 IRP, the need for at least one segment of the transmission line moved into our five-year action planning window. And we're now working with our partner, Pacific Corps, to move that forward. This is in addition to the Boardman to Hemingway transmission line, where we have pre-construction and land acquisition activities happening, and construction is expected to begin in the first half of 2024. We believe both lines will be key to maintaining reliability across our system, particularly as we move toward a clean energy future. Beyond transmission, we're making progress on our other energy and capacity resource procurement, and we've included slide 8 to summarize our status. For the RFPs for 2023 to 2025, we've installed 120 megawatts of the 293 megawatts of company-owned storage that resulted from those RFPs. Evaluations continue on the RFPs we issued to meet approximately 350 megawatts of peak capacity needs in 2026 and 2027, which we estimated could be met by up to 1,100 megawatts of variable resources. We expect some of that energy may be transmitted by B2H. We received over 180 proposals, including Idaho Power's own self-build project, and are working to develop a short list. We expect to make the awards in the first quarter of next year. I'll note quickly that FERC recently revised its schedule for issuing supplemental environmental impact statement required for relicensing the Health Canyon complex. We continue to feel positive about the progress we've made toward relicensing, but this development likely pushes back a new long-term Health Canyon license until 2025 or later. And last but not least, as I reflect on the summer, I'd like to thank our teams for their great work maintaining reliable service for our customers throughout plenty of 100-degree days. Our employees continue to drive positive results for our customers, our owners, and our company. It's been a very busy year, with our typical workloads increasing with the general rate cases, transmission development, reliability projects, security enhancements, and a host of other objectives we've been pursuing. are remarkable employees that powered through it, and they continue to impress and inspire me. With that, I'll hand the presentation over to Brian for an overview of our financial results and some additional details on our pending RIT-K settlement. Brian.