You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: Leading our quarterly earnings discussion today are Linn Evans, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Rich Kinzley, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.
Although we believe that our expectations and beliefs are based on reasonable assumptions, actual results may differ materially.
As we look back at 2020, I couldn't be prouder of what our team has accomplished.
Throughout an uncertain and disruptive year, I admired how the Black Hills Energy team rose to every challenge head-on.
I'm especially pleased how our team always kept their health and safety, and our customers' health and safety at the forefront, as we successfully executed in our customer-focused utility strategy, all while delivering strong financial performance that exceeded our guidance.
I believe, most of us will look back on 2020 as a year of seemingly endless challenge and yet as these challenges that prove the character and resilience of an organization and make us stronger.
Like those before us for the past 137 years at Black Hills, we adapted, we rallied together and we worked hard, truly exemplifying our ready-to-serve commitment and the incredible spirit within our team.
The Black Hills Energy team once again delivered a long list of accomplishments for our stakeholders throughout 2020.
Slides 4 through 6 highlight the success of consistently delivering on what we said we would do.
What I'd like to refer to as delivering a high say/do ratio.
Safety is our number one priority at Black Hills each and every day.
And is this priority and our genuine concern for our fellow coworkers, our customers and our communities that gave us a solid foundation upon which to confront the pandemic and build a stronger future.
For the seventh consecutive year, our safety culture produced an injury incident rate better than the utility average, demonstrating progress on our goal to become the safest utility in the industry.
Our team, combined with our resilient infrastructure, advanced our reputation of delivering industry-leading reliability for our customers.
As outages occurred, I was impressed throughout the year as my coworkers delivered a remarkable response, safely and efficiently restoring service with a ready-to-serve attitude and dedication.
We produced strong fourth quarter and full-year financial results as the economies in our Midwestern states continue to improve.
We are fortunate to operate and stable and growing territories where most of our communities remained open during the pandemic.
As we said we would, we have provided greater clarity into our longer-term earnings outlook.
We increased our 2021 guidance, we initiated 2022 guidance and we announced long-term earnings and dividend growth targets.
Rich will cover these targets in more detail during his comments.
I'm pleased that we successfully and safely executed on our customer-focused investment program.
Through solid planning and collaboration with contractors and suppliers, our team deployed $755 million in capital projects to further harden and modernize our energy systems.
These investments included our $79 million, 52.5-megawatt Corriedale wind project, which we constructed in our strong wind resource area near Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The project now serves customers in South Dakota and Wyoming through our innovative and voluntary customer subscription-based Renewable Ready program.
We also made terrific regulatory progress with the Nebraska and Wyoming commissions approving our consolidation applications and our rate reviews on constructive terms.
Both commissions approved our applications to consolidate multiple rate structures into a single statewide rate structure.
These approvals will help streamline our regulatory strategies in both states and provide efficiencies as we continuously improve how we serve and how we interact with our customers in those states.
In addition to receiving constructive revenue increases in both states, both states also approved riders to support our programmatic investment for safety and reliability.
Throughout the pandemic, we maintained our strong financial position and investment-grade credit ratings, executing upon our debt and equity financing needs on favorable terms during the year.
And our time tested staying power as a result of environmental, social and governance matters always being a core focus.
In 2020, we provide a greater transparency into our ESG profile and journey.
We published new qualitative and quantitative reports.
We issued an updated corporate sustainability report and we announced our goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions intensity.
For our electric operations, we are on track to achieve a 40% reduction by 2030 and a 70% reduction by 2040, off a 2005 baseline.
We are currently developing our integrated resource plans for South Dakota and Wyoming, which we will complete this summer and in next year for Colorado.
These resource plans will provide detail regarding how we will achieve these goals, including options for our current resources and potential investment opportunities to meet customer demand.
For our natural gas utilities, we expect to cut greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 50% by 2035.
Again, that's off of the 2005 baseline.
We have already cut our gas utility emissions by one-third since 2005.
Slide 7 shows that we plan to invest over $600 million annually during the next five years for a total of over $3 billion.
Our base forecast of over $2.7 billion represented by the orange bars relates to projects that are fully planned and in progress.
As incremental projects are more refined for timing, cost and other factors, we will add them to our base forecast.
Incremental projects we are working on include additional electric generation and transmission projects, gas pipeline projects and additional programmatic investment.
Slides 27 through 32 in the appendix provide additional details related to our capital investment plan.
In addition, our dedicated growth team is aggressively pursuing new growth opportunities.
We are powering data centers and technology growth within our service territories and with more people moving into our service territories, we are ready-to-serve our growing customer demand.
We are adding to our reputation of delivering innovative solutions, products and technologies, including the expansion of renewables and cleaner technologies, such as electric vehicles and renewable natural gas.
Across all of our business, we continue to focus on cost discipline, along with our better every day culture to drive greater efficiency and value through continuous improvement.
Looking forward, we are confident in our future.
We are well positioned as an integrated pure-play utility serving a strong and growing region and jurisdictions with constructive regulatory environments.
I'm excited to work alongside with our highly engaged team executing our proven strategy to continue delivering strong results for all of our stakeholders.
Just like all of you, we are hopeful for a brighter year ahead, especially for our families and friends whose lives were deeply affected by the virus.
While the pandemic remains a serious issue, our business fundamentals remain strong and we are applying what we learned in 2020 to become more efficient, more responsive and more technology enabled.
I'll start on Slide 11 where you can see we delivered an 8.8% increase in earnings per share as adjusted for the fourth quarter and a 5.7% increase for the full-year compared to 2019.
2020 Adjusted earnings per share of $3.73 came in just above the top end of our guidance.
Full-year earnings were driven by strong margin growth from returns on our invested capital, new customer growth, excellent cost management and tax credits.
These positive drivers overcame net COVID impacts and higher share count.
Net full-year COVID impacts of $0.07 were consistent with our forecast.
This includes net load impacts and net expenses associated with the pandemic, which are detailed on Slide 35 in the appendix.
Net weather impacts for the fourth quarter and the full-year were fairly nominal, which we estimate as $0.01 lower than normal in Q4 and $0.05 lower than Q4 2019.
For the full-year, weather was $0.03 higher than normal, but $0.03 lower than 2019.
Slides 12 and 13 contain waterfall charts illustrating the primary drivers of our earnings results comparing Q4 2019 to Q4 2020 and full-year 2019 to 2020, all the amounts on these charts are net of income taxes.
As you can see, both the quarter and full-year show strong growth in margins that are natural gas utilities when compared to 2019.
This was driven by new rates from our constructive regulatory outcomes in Wyoming and Nebraska and by riders across our service territories.
Customer growth across our service territories also contributed nicely to margin in 2020.
Our electric utilities and non-regulated margins also increased for the full-year.
O&M increased by only 1.5% [Phonetic] for the full-year and that's including the O&M we incurred relate to COVID.
We are pleased with our team's O&M control in 2020, it really was outstanding.
DD&A increased as a result of our strong capital investment program in 2019 and 2020.
Interest expense increased due to higher debt balances resulting from new debt issued to fund our capital investment program, partially offset by lower short-term borrowing rates.
Other income expense was favorable to the prior year, reflecting expensing of project development costs in the prior year, which was partially offset by higher current year pension plan cost driven by lower interest rates.
Our effective tax rate for 2020 was 11.9%, compared to 12.2% in 2019, driven by higher tax credits.
Slide 14 shows our financial position through the lens of capital structure, credit ratings and financial flexibility.
We are in excellent shape from a debt maturity and liquidity perspective.
We continue to maintain solid investment-grade credit ratings.
Last February, we issued $100 million of equity to help support our 2020 capital investments.
You will note, in our 2021 and 2022 guidance assumptions in the appendix, we expect to issue $100 million to $120 million in 2021 and $60 million to $80 million in 2022 through our at-the-market equity offering program to support our ongoing capital investment plans.
On the debt side, in June, we issued $400 million of 2.5% 10-year notes to term out our short-term debt, further enhancing our liquidity position.
This debt issuance was a great outcome and provides our customers low-cost debt for the next decade.
At year-end, we had $234 million outstanding on our credit facility with no material debt maturities until late 2023.
As of February, we continue to maintain over $500 million of available liquidity.
While debt-to-total capitalization remained in the 58% to 59% range through 2020, we are targeting a debt-to-total cap ratio in the mid-50s.
As Linn noted, we are providing greater clarity into our long-term earnings outlook as outlined on Slide 15.
We see opportunities to continue our strong cost management into 2021 and accordingly, increased our 2021 guidance to $3.80 to $4 per share, up $0.05 on each end [Phonetic].
While issuing a second year of guidance is not our typical practice, we also provided 2022 guidance of $3.95 to $4.15 per share, which incorporates the new Wygen I contract starting January 1, 2022.
Our newly initiated 2022 guidance targets an approximate 5% earnings per share CAGR from 2019 to 2022.
Using 2022 as our base year, we expect to grow earnings per share in 2023 through 2025 at a 5% to 7% CAGR.
We are excited about our growth opportunities as we share this long-term earnings per share growth target.
Moving to our dividend on Slide 16.
In 2020, we proudly marked 50 consecutive years of annual dividend increases, one of the longest track records in our industry.
Since 2016, we have increased our dividend at an average annual rate of 6.6%.
Looking forward, we anticipate increasing our dividend by more than 5% annually through 2025, while maintaining our 50% to 60% payout target.
We are uniquely positioned as a pure-play utility in constructive jurisdictions with a complementary business mix across stable and growing territories.
These factors paired with our strong and sustainable growth outlook, provide an attractive investment opportunity.

user
increasing guidance for 2021 earnings per share available for common stock to be in the range of $3.80 to $4.00.
initiating guidance for 2022 earnings per share available for common stock in a range of $3.95 to $4.15.

assistant