Hydro One Limited

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Hydro One Limited's first quarter 2024 Analyst Teleconference. At this time, all participants are in a listening 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 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. As a reminder, this 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, and thank you for joining us in Hydro One's quarterly earnings call. Joining us today are our President and CEO, David Liebeter, and our Chief Financial and Regulatory Officer, Chris Lopez. In the call today, we will provide an overview of our quarterly results, and then we will take some time answering questions as time permits. There are also several slides that illustrate some of the points we'll address in a moment. They should be up on the webcast now, or if you're dialed into the call, you can find them in 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, David Lieber.

Thank you, Omar. Good morning and thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2024 earnings call. Before we start, I'll touch on safety. It's at the core of our business and among the first of our corporate values. Sadly, This quarter, two employees were seriously injured while at work. While we won't discuss the specifics as the investigations are ongoing, it will take a long time for our teammates to heal physically and emotionally. These injuries are a stark reminder of the unforgiving nature of our daily jobs. At Hydro One, safety goes beyond policies and procedures and must remain firmly ingrained within our culture. We are committed to zero life altering injuries and that every employee returns home safely at the end of each day. A continued focus Eliminating all serious injuries is achievable. Moving on to our update, in today's call, I'm excited to share a refreshed corporate strategy and highlight some key accomplishments that occurred during our first quarter. Chris will then dive deeper into the financial results of the quarter. Delivering on our existing strategy has created exceptional value for Ontarians, our customers, shareholders, and partners. We made critical strategic investments in our system to build a more modern, intelligent grid, which enables evolving technologies and the increased integration of distributed energy resources. Through these investments, we play a critical role in supporting long-term, sustainable economic growth. Not only did we build a reputation for keeping the lights on and restoring power quickly, but are also delivering major transmission projects on time and on budget. These are some of the reasons why we are now entrusted to build nine transmission projects in the province. We build strong relationships and trust with many of our partners, including Indigenous communities, municipalities, residents, and the government. We advance economic reconciliation with Indigenous communities through the development of our industry-leading 50-50 First Nations equity model for major projects, ensuring economic benefits flow back to Indigenous communities. We implemented programs and tools for our customers that make it easier to do business with us and show them that we care. This resulted in the highest customer satisfaction and overall favorable impression score since the IPO. In summary, our existing strategy laid a strong foundation to prepare us as we entered a period of change within the industry. If the previous strategy had yielded such significant success, you might wonder why we would now change course. In fact, we are not fundamentally changing our direction. We are delivering a refreshed corporate strategy that builds on what we have done well and sets out the priorities that will meet the pace of changes in our industry and the evolving expectations of our customers. Emerging technologies are shaping how, when, and where our customers use electricity. From the cars they buy, how they monitor electricity consumption, to participating in the energy market, our customers are making energy-related decisions and have evolving expectations of the services they are provided. Not too long ago, visionary people used to talk about sustainable, clean energy. Today, enabling it is a business imperative. We need to remain agile and flexible to meet these changing demands and the changing landscape. Four priorities set the foundation of our Refresh strategy. They are, one, enrich our customers' experience. Two, enhance grid value needed for sustainable economic growth. Three, create new solutions for an electrified future. And four, win with partners. At the heart of this strategy is to focus on our customers. Our customers expect more proactive services and solutions and information to make informed decisions. We will ensure we understand and meet our customers' evolving needs, all the while delivering easy and exceptional customer experience. We've already made strides in the area, but there's more work to do across each different customer segment and throughout each customer's journey. With the increase in electrification of transportation, buildings, and industry, combined with population growth, we anticipate the need to deliver more for our customers in the upcoming years. We will find innovative and sustainable ways to accommodate this growth outside of the traditional solutions. In addition to optimizing our existing assets to create more value, we will look at both regulated and unregulated opportunities to meet this challenge. We also acknowledge that partners are core to this priority. Together, we will deliver sustainable growth and ensure we meet the needs of their communities now and for future generations. We have a vital role to play in enabling Ontario's transition towards the shared goal of decarbonization, whether it's connecting green steel or EV battery manufacturing, or simply enabling bidirectional movement of electrons arising from increased battery storage and EV adoption. As technology advances for both us and our customers, It's necessary that we stay ahead of the curve by anticipating, adapting, and evolving alongside these changes. Central to this will be ensuring we make informed, data-driven decisions. As such, we plan to expand our advanced analytics and digital capabilities to manage this electrified future. This also means we will collaborate with others within our sector and beyond to foster innovation and accelerate the development of new solutions to shape the future. Powerful alliances between Hydro One Indigenous communities All levels of government, regulatory bodies, associations, vendors and industry partners have been essential to provide stable and reliable and affordable electricity to Ontarians. Looking ahead, we must continue to collaborate. As an industry, we are much stronger when we work together and create mutually beneficial solutions. We all have a part to play to enable a net zero future, combining our strengths and resources We can leverage each other's unique perspectives and capabilities to drive innovation and achieve our shared goals. Of course, the successful execution of our strategy relies on our skilled employees. We have a robust pool of talent with deep expertise, matched with unwavering dedication to our customers. This is an exciting time and our people will undoubtedly be a point of strength for us as we develop new capabilities to meet the evolving energy landscape and deliver on our plans. On this note, I am pleased to announce the addition of some new talent to our executive team to help us deliver on our strategic objectives. In March, Renee McKenzie joined us as our Executive Vice President of Digital and Technology Solutions. Renee is an experienced technology executive with more than 24 years of delivering engaging applications, modern infrastructure, and personalized experiences to employees and customers. Based on her background and experience, you can see how she is the right person to implement our data-driven corporate strategy in the coming years. I'm also delighted to announce that Lisa Pearson joined Hydro One as our Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs. Lisa is a transformational executive with extensive experience advising boards and executive teams. She will apply her broad, private, public, and not-for-profit sector knowledge to continue to strengthen our reputation and deepen our relationships with customers, government, and stakeholders. In addition to Renee and Lisa's updates, I am pleased to announce that after an extensive internal and external search process, We are in the final stages of filling the CFO position. We expect to make an announcement in the very near future. Turning to the quarterly update, there are several important developments I'd like to share with you. First, I acknowledge the efforts of our Hydro One employees who were once again called upon to help our customers. In February and March, our teams quickly mobilized to restore power to approximately 190,000 customers impacted by damaging high winds in parts of central, southern, and eastern Ontario. Thank you for your outstanding efforts in assessing damage, prioritizing work, and making repairs to restore power. Second, we are pleased to have received approval from the OAB for our Section 92, or Leave to Construct, filing for our Wask and Transmission Line project. The $1.2 billion line, which spans approximately 360 kilometres, will be built in cooperation with First Nations partners to support economic growth in northwestern Ontario. As a reminder, Phase 1 is a double-circuit 230 kV line that will run from Thunder Bay to Atacocan, and Phase 2 is a single-circuit 230 kV line between Atacocan and Dryden. Third, we received OEP approval for the acquisition of Shaplow Hydro, which was announced in November of 2023. We are now working on closing and integrating the acquisition by the end of this year and are excited to join their community. We look forward to sharing best practices between us so we can be efficient in our delivery of services to the community. We are confident that this will be a positive experience for Shappalos customers and employees and will be an example for other communities who wish to do the same. More broadly, we continue to engage with other local electricity distribution companies and look for additional opportunities to facilitate further consolidation within the sector. In addition to these updates, we continue to support businesses through our critical investments. We were happy to welcome Volkswagen and Stellantis as customers and support the construction of their EV battery plant. In addition, we welcome the recent announcement by Honda for the creation of Canada's first comprehensive electric vehicle supply chain. As the largest transmitter of electricity in the province, Hydro One is ready to support Honda and other large manufacturers as we enable economic growth in Ontario. Moving on to broadband, I have some additional clarity today that I'd like to share. Hydro One continues to work with the telcos and internet service providers, or ISPs, to advance the delivery of high-speed internet to some 700,000 Ontarians. We have been ready for a while. At this stage, the existence of alternative solutions to the telcos and ISPs and the pace of orders we have received would suggest the previous expectations of approximately half a billion to $1 billion of work is unrealistic. While we don't have enough orders yet to put forward a solid forecast, our expectation is that these factors will result in $300 million to $700 million worth of work being completed. This work will take place in our distribution segment and will be additive to rate base. It is worth noting these values are not factored into our earnings guidance and represent a potential growth opportunity. That said, we continue to engage with the telcos and ISPs and will provide an update to this amount when appropriate. As I conclude my remarks, I'll highlight a few key awards that we received recently. A key to our success has been our ability to build trusted relationships with Indigenous partners and communities. This is why Hydro One was once again proud to be a sponsor for the Little Native Hockey League, or the LNHL, honouring a partnership that first began in 2003. In recognition of this historic alliance, we were humbled recently to have been inducted into the LNHL Hall of Fame as a friend of the Little NHL. This is a great honour for us and we're very touched by this significant gesture. We are also proud to have been listed in the 2024 edition of the Global Males Women Lead Here annual benchmark of gender diversity and executive roles in corporate Canada. Receiving this recognition is a testament to our continued efforts in building a strong and diverse executive leadership team, one that will lead us into the next phase of our corporate evolution. Lastly, in keeping with our efforts to enable decarbonization, we were recognized as a corporate knight in the Global 100 list, a ranking of the world's most sustainable corporations. The ranking lists the top firms that are increasing their investments in green solutions, such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, and the circular economy. The award celebrates our relentless commitment to sustainability and environmental stewardship. With that, I'll turn the call over to Chris to discuss our financial results. Over to you, Chris.