NRG Energy, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the NRG Energy Inc. Second Quarter 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Kevin Cole, Head of Treasury and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to NRG Energy's second quarter 2024 earnings call. This morning's call will be 45 minutes in length and be broadcast live over the phone via webcast, which can be located in the investor section of our website at www.nrg.com. Please note that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements, which are based upon assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of this date. Actual results may differ materially. We urge everyone to review the safe harbor in today's presentation, as well as the risk factors in our SEC filings. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of future events, except as required by law. In addition, we will refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. For information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to today's presentation. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Larry Coben, NRG's chairman and CEO. Thank you, Kevin.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for your interest in NRG. I'm joined this morning by Bruce Chung, our chief financial officer. We also have members of the management team on the call, and they are all available to answer questions. First, I just want to express how excited I am to be leading NRG as chairman, president, and CEO. I'm grateful for the outpouring of support I've received from the investment community, employees, and other stakeholders over the last nine months, and again in the last week following the board's announcement of August 1st. We are laser focused on delivering exceptional shareholder value by meeting the growing and evolving needs of our customers while returning billions of dollars in capital. We believe we have the right strategy and the best team to fix the depressed valuation of our company once and for all. Let's begin with NRG's strategic positioning. For those new to NRG, we have the largest energy and smart home platform in North America. We're the trusted partner to over 8 million residential customers, offering tailored energy and smart home solutions. We are also the second largest energy and energy services provider, as well as the largest natural gas provider to commercial and industrial companies. If there's been one takeaway from today's discussion that you should have, it's that our business and financial outlook has never been stronger. We are witnessing a structural long-term tightening in power supply and demand, driving a step change improvement in fundamentals. Customers across our platform are using more of our products and increasingly requesting premium customized experiences, as well as innovative offerings focused on convenience, sustainability, and cost. Our integrated platform enables us to stabilize and increase our near-term earnings while capturing medium to long-term growth opportunities. we generate significant excess cash well beyond our current business needs, resulting in the financial flexibility to grow earnings while at the same time returning substantial capital to our shareholders and maintaining a strong balance sheet. The strength of our business and financial outlook has positioned us to capitalize on what we believe to be the beginning stages of an exceptional time for our industry and an exciting time for our company I have never been more excited about the opportunities in front of us than I am today. Let's dive into the key messages on slide five. Our business performance exceeded expectations in the second quarter and year to date. We are reaffirming our financial guidance ranges and trending toward the upper end of that guidance range. Electrification trends compounded by GenAI data center and other large load growth continue to materialize. We expect competitive markets, such as ours, to realize outsized benefits from this trend, driven by business-friendly policies, available resources, and the ability to cite projects quickly. Additionally, we have made progress on the strategic priorities discussed in our last earnings call. This includes submitting our brownfield development projects to the Texas Energy Fund and continuing to advance with our portfolio of sites. Finally, we continue to fulfill our capital allocation commitments with our share repurchase program underway and line of sight to achieving our balance sheet targets. Turning to slide six, We delivered $935 million in adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter, a 14% year-on-year increase. This brings year-to-date adjusted EBITDA to $1.784 billion, up 22% from last year. Following this strong first half, we are reaffirming our financial guidance ranges and, again, trending toward the upper part of that range. All of our businesses are excelling and demonstrating strong performance across the board. Our consumer segments demonstrated strong year-on-year growth. Home energy subscribers increased by 8% at stable margins. Smart Home had a 5% increase in subscribers and 7% growth in revenues and delivered industry-leading retention rates and expanded margins. We continue to make substantial progress toward our virtual power plant offering and look forward to sharing more about that by the time of our third quarter earnings call. On the supply side, we continue to experience significant improvements in the availability and reliability of our generation assets, thanks to the investments we have made in them in recent years. We are well prepared for the summer and winter seasons across our fleet after successfully completing our spring maintenance outages. This level of preparedness helps ensure we can meet demand and consistently deliver exceptional service to our customers. A shout out to our incredible team of plant operators as our assets delivered 97% reliability during Hurricane Beryl in July. with no storm-induced or caused outages or lost generation. I'm also happy to report that our cost and growth synergies are on track. Today, we're reaffirming our plan of $550 million in synergies by the end of 2025, and we remain on track to achieve our 15% to 20% free cash flow before growth per share growth target. even as our rising stock price means repurchasing shares at higher prices, much higher prices than projected a year ago. On share repurchases, we've completed $176 million of the current buyback program, with $649 million to be completed over the balance of the year. Lastly, we are announcing the sale of Airtron HVAC, which will result in $400 million in net cash proceeds. Turning to slide seven, I'd like to provide you a little additional context on the strong demand outlook we are seeing in Texas. In the first half of the year, Texas experienced over 3% weather normalized load growth, setting new record peaks in January, April, and May. Looking ahead, ERCOT continues to anticipate substantial load growth in the coming years. ERCOT's latest projection indicates that more than 60 gigawatts of growth through 2030 will take place, driven by onshoring, data centers, and other large load customers. Notably, many of these new loads are backed by contracts with the transmission and distribution utilities in ERCOT, or have been confirmed by an officer of a TDU, adding credibility to the projected growth. Within our own portfolio, we continue to advance our 1.5 gigawatts of brownfield natural gas development in Texas. We filed applications for all three projects with the Texas Energy Fund in June. We anticipate the PUCT will announce later this month which projects are advancing to the due diligence phase which is expected to last four to eight months depending on the quality of the projects and their applications. Following that, loan agreements will be executed. We believe our projects are well situated for a timely approval given their shovel-ready nature and the completeness of the applications that we submitted. Finally, we've received numerous questions about our site portfolio since our first quarter call. Our singularly devoted development team is diligently working to maximize the value of these sites. As a reminder, our portfolio includes 21 sites encompassing 21,000 acres of land in competitive markets. These sites are ideally suited for new large loads and power plant development, offering co-location opportunities both behind and in front of the meter. To identify the sites best suited for data centers, key factors include access to water for cooling, premium fiber channel access for low latency, and existing grid access and infrastructure for rapid market entry. As you can see, our sites possess these attributes, but also have potential for other large load applications. In this appendix, we provide several paths to value under consideration. I look forward to discussing this more with you as we progress. With that, let me turn it over to Bruce Chum for the financial review. Bruce?