Pinnacle West Capital Corporation

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Pinnacle West Capital Corporation 2022 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Amanda Ho. Ma'am, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Matt. I would like to thank everyone for participating in this conference call and webcast to review our third quarter 2022 earnings, recent developments, and operating performance. Our speakers today will be Chairman and CEO, Jeff Goldner, and our CFO, Andrew Cooper. Ted Geisser, APS President, and Jacob Tetlow, Executive Vice President, Operations, are also here with us. First, I need to cover a few details with you. The slides that we will be using are available on our Investor Relations website, along with our earnings release and related information. Today's comments and slides contain forward-looking statements based on current expectations and actual results may differ materially from expectations. Our third quarter 2022 Form 10Q was filed this morning. Please refer to that document for forward-looking statements, cautionary language, as well as the risk factors and MD&A sections, which identify risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in our disclosures. A replay of this call will be available shortly on our website for the next 30 days. It will also be available by telephone through November 10, 2022. I will now turn the call over to Jeff.

Thank you, Amanda, and thank you all for joining us today. We continue to execute well on our operating performance and financial management. So as part of my operations update, I'll share with you our success in managing through one of the most challenging summer storm seasons that we've had in recent history. I'll also provide an overview of our rate case filing, and then Andrew will review our financial performance, including an update to our earnings expectations for the year due to higher sales growth and weather. Firstly, and very importantly, I want to recognize our field teams for doing an exceptional job safely and quickly bringing customers back online after heavy storms swept through different parts of the state this summer. The extreme weather brought on damaging winds heavy rains, and flash flooding, which created a challenging environment where we saw a record number of poles damaged. And that's how we usually measure the intensity of a summer storm season. Typically, a storm season will see an average of about 300 poles damaged. This year, we replaced over 800. Many teams across the company work together to restore service from our supply chain teams, getting the necessary supplies, our field crews working day and night, and our employees communicating with customers and making sure that they were kept apprised of the restoration efforts. Our careful long-term planning, resource adequacy, flexibility, and innovative customer programs also proved beneficial through the summer. APS reached the third highest peak demand of 7,587 megawatts on July 11th, and the temperature on that day was only, and I put that in quotes, only 115 degrees compared to our typical peak temperatures of 117 degrees or higher. Generally, every degree is worth about 140 megawatts of peak demand. So had we seen 117 degrees, we would have easily set a new record for APS energy demand this year. In addition, in early September, a heat wave hit the southwest, and the region once again saw the lack of available capacity, resulting in 15 declarations of energy emergencies by other utilities across the west. During this period, we served our customers reliably and also helped our neighboring utilities by making off-system sales to the western wholesale market. Those offsets and sales directly benefit APS customers by lowering our overall costs while helping to maintain regional grid stability. For our own reliability, our baseload and fast ramping assets, including Four Corners, Ocotillo, and Palo Verde, were ready when we needed them. Our non-nuclear generation fleet's equivalent availability factor, EAF, and that's the percentage of time that a generating unit is available and ready to perform when called upon, was 95% from June through September. Palo Verde Generating Station's capacity factor for the same timeframe was 100.2%. Finally, with this completion of the summer run, Palo Verde III safely entered its planned refueling outage on October 8th, and we're getting ready to complete that outage in the next few days. I'm also happy to share that APS continues to make quartile gains in every single driver of residential customer satisfaction, and that overall satisfaction is above industry benchmarks when compared to the company's large investor-owned peers. Continuing the progress that the company has been making over the last two years, APS's J.D. Power residential ranking through the third quarter firmly places the company into second quartile for residential customer satisfaction. Our strongest performing drivers through the first three quarters of 2022 were customer care, both phone and digital, power quality and reliability, corporate citizenship, and billing and payment. Additionally, APS's JD Power business customer mid-year results puts the company in the first quartile nationally. APS continues to be one of the most improved utilities in the nation for both residential and business customer satisfaction. and we've committed to our customer shareholders and our regulators that a top focus of improvement for our team will be improving the customer experience. That's been a cornerstone of my strategy as CEO, and I'm incredibly proud of our employees, proud of our progress so far, and looking forward to closing out this year strong. Turning to a topic that's certainly top of mind to many of us, the Inflation Reduction Act. While we continue to evaluate the potential of the legislation as the regulations are being written, The tax benefits provide an opportunity to make Arizona a leader in clean investments. A few of the provisions that will benefit APS customers the most include the creation of an eight-year production tax credit for existing nuclear facilities, the inclusion of the EV and EV infrastructure tax credits, new credits for storage and hydrogen, a 10-plus year extension of the clean energy tax credits, and a three-year extension of the existing PTC and ITC. Each of these represents a big win for customers and for our industries. These incentives will help us to meet our clean energy commitment, and they'll help us to enable the clean energy transition without compromising reliability and affordability. For a regulatory update, we filed a rate case on October 28, 2022. The key components of that filing include a requested 10.25% return on equity, a 1% return on a fair value increment, 51.93% equity layer and 12 months of post-test year plan. We've requested an increase in annual revenue of approximately $460 million, and we propose that new rates go into effect on December 1, 2023. This is an important rate case. It supports investments in our energy infrastructure to ensure that all customers continue to receive the reliability that they count on and to increase resiliency under all weather conditions. We've made essential investments to maintain the health of the energy grid and to avoid outages. This rate case also helps to ensure that Arizonans have access to the energy they need when they need it as we make a reasonable and affordable transition to a clean energy future. We're securing the energy needs of Arizona without compromising on affordability or reliability. We're balancing investments that optimize existing resources with investments in cost-competitive clean energy generation that will power our state's future. Our filing contains proposals to further support our customers. After a lot of work with stakeholders, we're proposing to enhance our limited income bill discount program to provide an additional discount for customers with the greatest need. And we're also proposing to eliminate in-network credit card and in-person kiosk payment fees for all customers. Programs and proposals like this demonstrate our commitment to improve customer satisfaction and make transacting with us more seamless and convenient. And lastly, we heard the Commission's request for simplifying our adjusters, and in response, we proposed a number of modifications to our suite of adjustment mechanisms. Specifically, we proposed reducing the number of adjustment mechanisms from seven to four active adjusters with the elimination of the last fixed cost recovery mechanism, and the environmental improvement surcharge. We also propose to modify our renewable energy surcharge mechanism to allow APS to invest in clean energy projects to support Arizona's growth while reducing the frequency of rate cases and smoothing out the financial impacts of the new projects. With this adjustment mechanism, tax credits from legislation like the IRA can reduce the overall cost of these investments, and we would be able to pass those savings to customers more quickly through an adjuster. Finally, we're not proposing any changes to our current power supply adjuster transmission cost adjuster. As we look to wrap up 2022, our focus and priorities remain on improving our customer experience, continuing to engage with stakeholders to build alignment, and executing on our mission of providing clean, reliable, and affordable service to our customers. So I want to thank you all again for your time today, and I'll turn the call over to Andrew.