Hydro One Limited

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Hydro One Limited's third quarter 2021 Analyst Teleconference. 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 to press star one on your telephone. As a reminder, the call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Omar Javid, Vice President, Investor Relations at Hydro One. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us in Hydro One's earnings call. Joining us today are our President and CEO, Mark Poeska, and our Chief Financial Officer, Chris Lopez. In the call today, we will go over our third quarter results and then spend the majority of the call answering as many of your questions as time permits. There are also several slides that illustrate some of the points we'll address in a moment. It should be up on the webcast now, or if you're dialed into the call, you can find them on Hydro One's website in the investor relations section under events and presentations. Today's discussions will likely touch on estimates and other forward-looking information. You should review the cautionary language in today's earnings release and our MD&A, which we filed this morning. regarding the various factors, assumptions, and risks that could cause our actual results to differ as they all apply to this call. With that, I'll turn the call over to our president and CEO, Mark Poeska.

Thank you, Omar. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. Before we begin, I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone that Remembrance Day is the day after tomorrow. We remember those who have served and continue to serve our country during times of war, conflict, and peace. I'm so very grateful for our freedom and acknowledge all who have given their lives and those who continue to serve so that we can have a better and brighter future for all. Lest we forget. Thank you. Turning to our business, I'm proud of the Hydro One team and what we've accomplished not only this quarter, but throughout the challenges of the past couple of years. This quarter's earnings per share of 50 cents demonstrates our resilient business and robust fundamentals. It's the hard work of our teams that allowed us to restore power to our customers after storms hit, deploy over $500 million of capital investments, and further improve the experience for our customers. At Hydro One, we also feel a deep responsibility to the communities in which we operate, and we continue to support those who are working tirelessly to keep our community safe and healthy. Hydro One donated $150,000 to support Feed Ontario, the province's largest collective of hunger relief organizations, providing food banks with fresh food and pantry staples. At the start of the pandemic, food banks saw a 26% increase in first-time visitors. Hydro One's donation will provide the equivalent of 450,000 meals to help Ontarians who are facing hunger. In addition to our work with the food banks, we help Kidsport, a provincial charitable organization that helps children and youth aged 18 and under whose families are experiencing financial hardships. Our support will give more than 150 children and youth the opportunity to participate in sport programs by providing financial assistance for registration fees and equipment in their communities. I'm also proud of our team for their personal giving and support for charitable organizations. And I'm pleased to announce that thanks to the generosity and dedication of Hydro One employees, we raised over $725,000 for local organizations during our recent Power to Give month, surpassing our fundraising goal of $250,000. These results demonstrate our win-as-one attitude as we came together to raise much-needed funds for the charities and communities where we live and work. In support of Indigenous-owned businesses, we announced a partnership with the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business, CCAB, to provide 28 grants to businesses that are majority owned and controlled by Indigenous Canadians. We are proud to partner with the CCAB to invest in the success of Indigenous-owned businesses who play a critical role in our economy and have worked hard to persevere through the pandemic. We will continue to leverage our unique position in the province and the reach of our network to advance reconciliation and nurture respectful, positive, and mutually beneficial relationships with Indigenous communities. This partnership is part of Hydro One's commitment to ensure that 20% of our corporate donations and sponsorships are directed to Indigenous communities. Hydro One is also committed to increasing its Indigenous procurement spend to 5% of the company's purchases of materials and services by 2026. These are all examples of how Hydro One continues to give back to the communities in which we operate. For us to succeed, we must continue to serve our customers with innovative solutions. We recognize that the electricity system is the backbone of a strong economy. It powers our customers, connects us to our neighbors, and plays a vital role in energizing life for all. Our customers and our industry count on us to provide resilient and reliable power. Our customers also expect us to be ready for the future and whatever challenges it may bring. Therefore, we are investing in new technologies and supporting the shift to increased electrification of our economy. Hydro One is making strides in improving reliability and customer experience. Modernization of the grid is the gateway to achieve these positive outcomes. In the distribution segment, smart switch installation is a key element to Hydro One's modernization initiative. In 2021, we continue to deploy smart technology on our distribution grid, and we are on our way to significantly exceeding 2020 deployment by the end of 2021. In addition to smart technology installations, we're also piloting several innovative solutions to improve reliability and the experience of those customers impacted by long interruptions. In one pilot, we've successfully deployed behind the meter battery energy storage systems, Tesla Powerwalls, to customer homes. The solution is designed to maintain power supply to a household during power interruption, which improves reliability and the overall customer experience. On a different scale, and as part of our unregulated energy management services business, I'm also pleased to announce that we recently partnered with Powerflex, a division of EDF Renewables North America, to provide distributed energy resources for our commercial and industrial customers. The two projects in this partnership are battery energy storage systems with Georgia Pacific in Englehart and Great Lakes Copper in London. These two battery systems will help our customers optimize their energy consumption and reduce their overall energy bills. They're expected to go into commercial operation by the first quarter in 2022. These are just some examples of our continued work, both on the regulated and unregulated side, to innovate and strengthen the grid for the benefit of our customers. Recently, we announced an important milestone for the Hydro One telecom business. As the business has been evolving, from a provider of connectivity to a full-service information and communications technology solutions provider. We felt that we needed a new brand identity to reflect this transformation. On October 28th, we announced that Hydro One Telecom would be rebranded to Acronym Solutions. The name Acronym reflects its sharp, agile, and simple approach to complex challenges. and sends a strong message within the business community that it is the company committed to providing more choices to our customers. It signals an easier way to do business as compared to its competitors. Acronym will continue to innovate by offering a suite of value-added services that businesses can rely on. This important milestone reaffirms our commitment as Hydro One to transform the way we do business. And finally, As an update on our joint rate application that covers both transmission and distribution, we received from the regulator two procedural orders that lay out the path for the remainder of the proceeding. Interrogatories, which is the formal process of asking questions, have commenced and will run through the end of November. We've already received over 3,000 questions, and while the number of questions is as expected, The detail requested is much greater than what we've seen historically. This speaks to the thoroughness of the process and the intricacy of the responses required, and the organization has mobilized to respond to these questions. This Q&A period will be followed by technical conference in mid-December. Following the conference, we expect there will be an oral hearing in early spring with a final decision expected in the back half of 2022. We are highly confident that we put forward a robust application that will help renew and modernize our grid and ultimately deliver continued prosperity to Ontario. And with that, I'll turn it over to Chris to discuss our financial results this quarter. Over to you, Chris.