Portland General Electric Co

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Portland General Electric Company's first quarter 2025 earnings results conference call. Today is Friday, April 25th, 2025. This call is being recorded, and as such, all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer period. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the numbers 11 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. If you do intend to ask a question, please avoid the use of speaker phones. For opening remarks, I will turn the conference call over to Portland General Electric's Manager of Investor Relations, Nick White. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Shannon. Good morning, everyone. We're happy you could join us today. Before we begin this morning, I would like to remind you that we have prepared a presentation to supplement our discussion, which we will be referencing throughout the call. The slides are available on our website at investors.portlandgeneral.com. Referring to slide two, some of our remarks this morning will constitute forward-looking statements. We caution you that such statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from our expectations. For a description of some of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, please refer to our earnings press release and our most recent periodic reports on forms 10-K and 10-Q, which are available on our website. Turning to slide three, leading our discussion today are Maria Pope, President and CEO, and Joe Tirpik, Senior Vice President of Finance and CFO. Following their prepared remarks, we will open the line for your questions. Now, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Maria.

Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today. Portland General Electric announced advanced key priorities in the first quarter. laying the foundation for solid results, diligent cost management, and strong execution in 2025 and beyond. Beginning with slide four, I'll speak to our financial results and key drivers. For the first quarter, we reported gap net income of $100 million or $0.91 per deleted share. This compares with first quarter 2024 gap net income of $109 million or $1.08 per diluted share and non-gap net income of $123 million or $1.21 per share. Our first quarter results reflect the continuation of strong load growth from high-tech and data center customers who drove 4.6% total load growth and industrial load growth of 16.4% compared to the same quarter last year. PGE serves five large semiconductor customers and over 10 significant data center providers that are spread across dozens of sites. making up nearly a quarter of our total deliveries. This growth is driving important capital improvements and upgrades across our transmission and distribution systems. These investments advance critical energy security and resource adequacy goals shared by customers and the communities we serve, and also address aging infrastructure needs and enable the economic engine of our service territory. Many of these customers have aggressive clean energy goals that align with our municipal and residential customers who make our clean energy program number one in the country, according to NREL. Our strategy drives our work to build the reliable, affordable, and increasingly clean grid of the future, including the ongoing 2023 and 2025 RFPs and the forthcoming 2025 IRP updates. Customer prices are central to our strategy and we are paying close attention to the evolving federal policy landscape and advocating for the continuation of renewable investment and production tax credits, credit transferability, and other provisions under the IRA and IIJA, as well as closely following the ongoing tariff situation. Our commitment to address system resilience, advance clean energy priorities, and provide safe, reliable, and affordable energy for every customer we serve is as important today as ever. Turning to wildfire risk. We're actively engaged with key stakeholders, including legislators at the Governor's Office, the OPUC, the Oregon Department of Forestry, first responders, and other utilities. and customers as we work towards solutions that address the societal risk of wildfires and other extreme weather. Our mature year-round wildfire mitigation work is advancing as we deploy lessons learned from recent wildfires and sharpen our practices ahead of summer. In 2025, we plan to spend over $120 million on wildfire mitigation, including capital investments and O&M, We're working with elected officials and stakeholders on legislation to address the financial risk from wildfires. A bill was introduced in February to create a standard of care for utility wildfire mitigation and establishes a safety certificate process to be managed by the OPUC and tied to our wildfire mitigation plan. Creating clear standards for the work utilities do to prevent wildfires and keep communities safe is essential. Our clear standards reduce the likelihood of wildfires being triggered by utility equipment, as well as enhanced services liability, lowers customer costs, and provides economic stability for Oregon's communities. We're pleased to see continued progress on this important policy. While proposed legislation to create a catastrophic wildfire fund has not moved forward, The ongoing dialogue with stakeholders represents productive progress. Pacific Northwest states are just beginning to grapple with the liability issues related to wildfire risk. And as I said in our last call, these policies may take more than one session to achieve. The work we're doing to address and manage risk by executing on our wildfire mitigation plan and working to find societal solutions for the risk of wildfire and extreme weather helps with affordability and protects customers. When it comes to affordability, there are several areas that also come together to reduce upward customer bill pressure. Growth, serving a growing customer base allows us to spread out operating costs and investments over larger volumes of business. Cost management. Our company-wide work to reduce O&M costs is well underway. We're evaluating every program and reducing costs to help keep customer prices as low as possible. Joe will cover this work in greater detail in his remarks. As discussed on our previous call, we're working towards updating PGE's corporate structure to enable a holding company. This is a common structure in the industry. In fact, the most common structure. and will help enable increased flexibility in how we finance our business. As we look ahead, the Portland General Electric team is focused on managing our business with discipline and foresight, diligently controlling costs and risk management, and seeking competitive returns to effectively attract investment, delivering value to customers, communities, and shareholders. With that, I'll turn it over to Jill. Jill?