Hydro One Limited

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Hydro One Limited's second quarter 2022 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 1-1. 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 in one second quarter earnings call. Joining us today are Interim President and CEO Bill Sheffield and our Chief Financial Officer, Chris Lopez. In the call today, we will go over our second quarter results and then spend most 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. This should be up on the webcast now, or if you're dialed into the call, You can also 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. We 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 turn the call over to our Interim President and CEO, Bill Sheffield.

Thanks very much, Omar. Good morning and thank you for joining us for our second quarter earnings call. I'll briefly discuss some of our notable achievements in the quarter and then pass it over to Chris to discuss the financial results in greater detail. As you'll see in this morning's release, our teams continue to operate in a very disciplined manner to serve our customers and the communities in which we operate. On June 21st, Mark Pauesca stepped down as the CEO to pursue a leadership opportunity with another utility closer to his family in Western Canada. I have to admit I had mixed emotions about his departure, but I can understand and empathize with his desire to be closer to his family. Mark leaves a great legacy at Hydro One. During his tenure, Hydro One built an executive team that successfully launched a new strategy and focused the organization on delivering results. There were renewed focus on safety, advocating for customers, being a trusted partner while emphasizing our efforts on the environment, social and governance matters, building the grid for the future, and innovating and growing the business. All of which led to a restoration of shareholder value. I'm confident that Hydro One's relentless focus on energizing life for all Ontarians is not only the right track, but also one that has been deeply ingrained in our corporate structure and culture. I would like to thank Mark for staying in an advisory role to help me transition into my role as the steward for this company and for its important assets. It's my objective to ensure there is a continuity and stability at the board as it executes and searches for a permanent CEO. We are committed to executing our current strategy without losing any momentum, and given the depth and breadth of the teams, I'm confident we will be able to continue delivering results for all our stakeholders. As a board member, I always knew we had excellent teams, but I have now seen firsthand that our employees are some of the most dedicated people in the business. An example was the way the crews mobilized on Saturday, May 21st, to respond to the devastating storm that impacted the province. With hurricane-level winds, the storm knocked out power to nearly 760,000 customers and left 2,500 broken poles and damaged approximately 500 transformers. More than 3,000 crew members got to work immediately and worked around the clock to restore power in difficult conditions. The scale of the devastation necessitated help from beyond Ontario's borders. The call for help was answered from our many partners in Manitoba, Quebec, New York, Michigan, and New Brunswick. I applaud everyone's cooperation. I personally witnessed the affected areas for both Hydro One and Hydro Ottawa, and I'm very proud that together, we were able to get our customers' lights on quickly and without any serious injuries. It's no wonder that Hydro One has been repeatedly recognized for its long history of safety and safely restoring power during emergencies. Recently, Edison Electric Institute presented Hydro One with its 12th Emergency Response Award for restoring power to its customers despite challenging conditions following a severe storm and windstorm during the Easter long weekend. Ultimately, it's our customers who are impacted by these extreme weather conditions, and I want to thank them for their patience while we restore power and for the outpouring of support and acknowledgement for our crews. These storms remind us that we must remain committed to investing in our system as well as adapting and mitigating climate change in a complex business and regulatory environment. Last year, Hydro One took significant steps to understand, balance, and make commitments to sustainably adapt our infrastructure, operations, and business to future climate changes and needs, while at the same time mitigating carbon emissions. As demonstrated in the sustainability report released this morning, we've made good progress in advancing our performance against environmental, social, and governance goals. Recall last year we made several commitments and targets that we will report against in the ESG performance scorecard, and I'm pleased to provide a transparent account of our progress. Under PLANET, We reduced GHG emissions by 9% compared to the 2018 baseline and are on track to achieve our planned goals. While supply chain disruptions affected our pace as envisioned, we converted approximately 14% of our fleet of sedans and SUVs to electric and hybrid vehicles. For community, we surpassed our Indigenous procurement target for 2021, spending $58.3 million, or 3.4% of our total sourceable spend, with Indigenous businesses, our highest to date. We also allocated 25% of our community investment donations and sponsorships to support Indigenous communities beyond our original impact goal of 20%. For people, at 9%, we exceeded our target of having 5% Black student hires. However, we know we have a lot more work to do here as we still do not have any Black executives or board members. With respect to our Catalyst Accord commitments, our 2021 annual average of executives and board members identifying as female is 31% of executives and 50% of independent board directors, both exceeding their respective targets. We're deeply committed on this path and will continue to report transparently on our progress. To further demonstrate our strong commitment to our ESG goals, we amended our syndicated lines of credit to include a pricing adjustment which can increase or decrease our cost of funding based on our performance in these three priority areas. Apart from our ESG performance scorecard that I just discussed, the sustainability report also contains several notable achievements in advancing all our areas of people, planet, and community. These include building a stronger safety culture, fundraising for charities, advancing Indigenous relations, embracing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, UNDRIP, integrating United Nations Sustainability Development Goals, UN SDGs, as it's called, into our reporting strategy and standing up for communities. I am pleased we were recognized for this progress as we won an Electricity Canada Centre of Excellence Award for our climate mitigation strategy, in addition to winning an award from the Electricity Distributors Association for our pollinator program. Finally, we were once again recognized by Corporate Knights as a best 50 corporate citizen in Canada with significant improvements on our year over year ratings. Now, one more reward to tell you about. I'm happy we are making great strides with respect to the way we interact and serve with our customers. Chartwell, a utility industry leader in research, recently granted us a gold best practices award for improving customer service and customer satisfaction. Amongst other factors, this was a recognition of the increase in our customer satisfaction scores, improvement in call handle time, and upskilling of staff to better serve our customers. We play a critical role in meeting the needs of our customers, building a grid for the future, and supporting economic growth. Guided by our purpose of energizing life in Ontario, we are living up to our responsibilities to put people, planet, and communities first. Before I pass it on to Chris, I want to share a couple of housekeeping updates. Lala Garzuzzi, our chief safety officer, has decided to pursue another opportunity. She was terrific and we wish her the very best in her new endeavor. The health, safety and environment teams will now report to Megan Telford, our chief human resources officer, who will continue on with the excellent work already underway. Finally, with respect to the results of the annual meeting of shareholders that was held on June 8, 2022, I'm happy to report that shareholders voted in favor of all items of business put forth And as mentioned in last quarter's call, Mark Budlaski was nominated for election and was subsequently elected to the Board of Directors. Mark brings a wealth of experience and skill to the Board. He is the Director of Economic Policy and Initiatives at the First Nations Major Projects Coalition, where he leads policy development at a First Nations collective seeking ownership in major projects such as pipelines, mines, and electric infrastructure, as well as improvements in project environmental practices. we will all benefit from his deep knowledge and strong track record. With that, I'll turn it over to Chris to discuss our financial results this quarter. Over to you, Chris.