OGE Energy Corp

Welcome to the OGE Energy Corp Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need a telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 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, Jason Bailey, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Corinne, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to our call. With me today, I have Sean Trosky, our Chairman, President, and CEO, and Chuck Walworth, Interim CFO. In terms of the call today, we will first hear from Sean, followed by an explanation from Chuck of financial results, And finally, as always, we will answer your questions. I'd like to remind you that this conference is being webcast and you may follow along at OGE.com. In addition, the conference call and accompanying slides will be archived following the call on that same website. Before we begin the presentation, I'd like to direct your attention to the Safe Harbor Statement regarding forward-looking statements. This is an SEC requirement for financial statements and simply states, that we cannot guarantee forward-looking financial results, but this is our best estimate today. I will now turn the call over to Shawn for his opening remarks.

Shawn? Thank you, Jason. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. It's certainly great to be with you. Today I'll address our financial results as well as provide you an update on year-end guidance, regulatory items, and low growth. Before we get into the details of the quarter, I'd like to reflect on the most recent storms, including six confirmed and perhaps as many as 12 tornadoes that impacted tens of thousands of people in Oklahoma and western Arkansas over the last two days. Fortunately, no lives were lost, but many are left without homes, they're dealing with damaged property, and have countless hours ahead of them to recover. I'm incredibly proud of our team's response. Within 24 hours, 86% of the impacted customers were restored. and more than 90% of essential services were back up and running. One thing you may not have considered, our team has worked alongside state and county election officials to ensure all polling places are energized today for our citizens to vote. Our reliability investments, automated technology, and continuous improvement efforts are reducing outages before they happen and driving down outage time when they do. Now turning to our financial results, Earlier this morning, we reported third quarter consolidated earnings of $1.09 per share, including electric company earnings of $1.12 per share and a holding company loss of $0.03. Our solid performance this quarter is due to robust demand for energy across all sectors and continued customer growth outpacing historical norms combined with outstanding operational excellence and increased digital self-service technologies delivered by our team. As we noted last quarter, we're operating ahead of plan this year and now expect to be at the top of our original earnings guidance of $2.06 to $2.18 per share. And Chuck will share more about that in just a bit. On the regulatory front, we anticipate an order in our Oklahoma rate review by the end of the year. Additionally, we've reached an uncontested settlement with stakeholders on our five-year energy efficiency portfolio, which includes demand response. and we expect that order by the end of the year. As we meet our growing capacity needs for the future, energy efficiency and demand response will play a critical role in reducing overall capacity requirements. As our team continues to work through the generation capacity RFPs, we plan to file for approval in the first half of 2025. Together with our system reliability investments, We will continue to invest in generation capacity through the IRP RFP process and transmission capacity through SPP's process. And we continue to expect constructive regulatory outcomes in both states. Demand growth remains strong with our forecast for the year now at the top of the revised range of 4% to 6% that we gave you in the second quarter. We are experiencing growth across all customer classes. led by commercial followed by extraordinarily strong residential growth. We know our low rates drive broad-based business expansion, creating that future demand. Some of the most recent expansions announced include defense, manufacturing, and continued electrification across a number of sectors. We've been working on a project to solidify our supply chain and drive local business expansion that I look forward to sharing with you in the near future. We're working on a handful of data center projects, including a franchise election today in one community for OG&E to serve a new data center in the state. The economic picture in Oklahoma and Arkansas remains bright, with unemployment rates well below the national average. In addition to top line growth, we continue to manage our costs, delivering some of the best O&M for megawatt hour costs in the industry. Our relentless focus on affordability results in increased self-service digital tools for our customers to do business with us 24-7. Before I close, I'd like to recognize two milestone anniversaries our company celebrated last month. Centennials for two of our power generation sites, Muskogee and Horseshoe Lake. A century ago, these plants began generating power for communities that were just beginning to electrify. While the original units are long since retired, Today we serve an increased demand for electricity to power homes, businesses, transportation, workplaces, and lives that could not be imagined back then. And that demand has not subsided. It's only growing. And we've continued to invest in generation at these sites over the years and just broke ground on Horseshoe Lake for units 11 and 12, another 450 megawatts of hydrogen-capable natural gas units. Investing in existing sites helps keep costs low for our customers as we serve growing demand and a growing customer base. These investments also drive the local economy, with the expected economic impact of $536 million for the Horseshoe Lake investment. Recently, 110 of our employees returned from Florida, and before that, another similar-sized group returned from Georgia, where they helped rebuild after Hurricanes Milton and Helene knocked out power to millions of folks across the southeast. Mutual assistance is one of the most incredible aspects of our industry, and I'm so proud of our purpose-driven team who readily volunteer to spend weeks away from family to help others. We're also happy to go because we have our share of extreme weather, as I just mentioned a few minutes ago. As I close my remarks, I want to leave you with a couple of thoughts on this election day. As Americans, we hold the incredible right and responsibility to elect leaders at the local, state, and national level, I hope your voting plans are set for today if you haven't already voted. And we encourage our employees to vote and know they've made their voices heard. And with that sense of duty in mind, it's a good reminder to remind us that we serve all. Our obligation to equally serve customer without favor drives every person, every project, and every decision in our company. Second, stability. We do what we say we'll do, and we are driving economic prosperity for the future in Oklahoma and western Arkansas. And as we celebrate centennials at Muskogee and Horseshoe Lake, we're building business for the next century. And finally, our investment opportunities for reliability and system growth are numerous. Whether distribution, whether transmission, or generation capacity, we will remain nimble and flexible to manage for the long-term success of the company and our communities. Delivering safe, reliable, affordable, and resilient electricity to our customers is our North Star. And with these priorities in mind, I'm very pleased with how the company is positioned for the future. A consistently solid execution lays a foundation, a foundation for not only this year, a foundation for not only 25, not only 26, but many years thereafter. So thank you very much, and now I'll turn the call over to Chuck. Chuck?