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: I'm joined here today by Steve Westhoven, our President and CEO; Pat Migliaccio, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; as well as other members of our senior management team.
This could cause results to materially differ from our expectations, as found on slide one.
We'll also be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures such as net financial earnings, or NFE.
We believe that NFE provides a more complete understanding of our financial performance.
However, it is not intended to be a substitute for GAAP.
Our non-GAAP financial measures are discussed more fully in Item seven of our 10-K.
Our agenda for today is found on slide two.
Steve will begin today's call with highlights from the quarter, followed by Pat, who will review our financial results.
Midway through fiscal 2021, NJR has delivered strong performance for our shareowners.
On slide three, I'll take you through the highlights.
During the second quarter, periods of widespread cold across the U.S. led to an unusually high demand for natural gas.
And as in the past, Energy Services strategically located in geographically diverse Storage & Transportation assets enabled that business to meet the needs of its customers during a time of unprecedented volatility.
The outsized performance of Energy Services illustrates the limited risk, high upside value proposition of our long option strategy.
The combination of this strategy and the generation of more fee-based revenues, such as the 10-year asset management agreement we announced in December, provides for a powerful business model.
Pat will provide a more detailed look at the drivers behind Energy Services' performance later in the call.
The contribution from Energy Services enabled us to increase our NFE guidance for fiscal 2021 for the second time this year to a range of $2.05 to $2.15 per share from our original guidance of $1.55 to $1.65 per share.
I'll provide more color on the next slide.
At New Jersey Natural Gas, we filed a base rate case to recover almost $850 million of infrastructure investments in the settlement of our last rate case.
This includes costs associated with the Southern Reliability Link, which is over 90% complete and expected to be placed into service this fiscal year.
New Jersey Natural Gas received approval for SAVEGREEN 2020, our largest-ever energy efficiency program.
This new program authorized $259 million in spending over three years, furthering our commitment to sustainability by helping customers lower their energy usage, save money and reduce their carbon footprint.
The rollout of the program is expected to begin this year.
At Clean Energy Ventures, we completed our first commercial solar project into service, adding 2.7 megawatts of installed capacity.
We continue to develop our pipeline of projects to achieve our goal of doubling our installed capacity by the end of fiscal 2024.
Leaf River, our storage facility located in Mississippi, performed well during the February weather event, meeting all of our customer commitments under very challenging circumstances.
And finally, we continued construction of Adelphia Gateway South zone.
Adelphia Gateway has received all necessary Pennsylvania DEP permits and is working to obtain FERC notice to proceed for construction of laterals.
We expect to place a number of the project facilities into service by the end of the year.
Turning to slide four.
We are increasing our fiscal 2021 NFE guidance to $2.05 to $2.15 per share, an increase of $0.20 per share compared to our March 15 update.
Our initial guidance's increase incorporated estimated bad debt to account for any Energy Services customers negatively impacted by the February weather event.
Today's upwards guidance revision reflects payment by all of Energy Services customers apart from one due to bankruptcy.
Our fiscal 2022 and long-term NFE guidance remains unchanged.
As a reminder, guidance for fiscal 2022 is $2.20 to $2.30 per share.
And we are maintaining our long-term annual growth rate of 6% to 10% for fiscal 2022 NFE, excluding hedged services.
slide five provides additional detail on our base rate case filing.
On March 30, we requested an increase to base rates of $165.7 million, equivalent to an increase of $118 million in operating income.
Since the conclusion of our last case in 2019, New Jersey Natural Gas has invested nearly $850 million to upgrade and enhance the safety and reliability of our transmission and distribution systems.
This includes the installation of the Southern Reliability Link at a cost of more than $300 million.
We hope that the BPU's review of our filing will be complete before the end of 2021.
We look forward to a successful conclusion announced at the interest of our customers and the company.
On slide six, I'll take you through some operational highlights of New Jersey Natural Gas.
Looking at the top left, we invested $198 million this fiscal year with about 26% of the capex providing near real-time returns.
We added almost 3,700 new customers over the first six months of the year, below our regular growth rate due to the ongoing pandemic.
However, we still expect to add approximately 28,000 to 30,000 new customers during the three-year period from fiscal 2021 to 2023.
As I mentioned earlier, construction on SRL continues to progress as well.
On slide seven, I'll take you through the operational highlights of Clean Energy Ventures.
During the quarter, we completed our first out-of-state project in Connecticut.
This is a small but noteworthy step toward executing on the regional solar investment strategy we discussed during our November Analyst Day.
We now have over 360 megawatts of installed capacity.
Total invested capital at CEV for the first six months was $38 million.
We expect to see some in-service dates shift from the beginning of fiscal 2021 to the beginning of fiscal 2022 as a result of permitting and interconnection delays related to the pandemic.
However, we remain on track to meet our goal of adding incremental 160 to 180 megawatts of capacity by the end of fiscal year 2022.
The bottom right shows our expected CEV revenue for fiscal 2021, a significant portion of which is secured through our SREC hedging program.
While we adjusted our capital forecast for this year, most of these projects were scheduled to be in service toward the end of the fiscal year, marginally affecting expected revenue.
In January, we issued our 2020 corporate sustainability report.
For the first time, this year's report includes disclosures in line with SASB, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, and the American Gas Association's frameworks, furthering our commitment to transparency and reporting on ESG matters.
And on Earth Day this past month, we launched a significant new sustainability program, NJR's Coastal Climate Initiative.
This program supports local-based climate solutions that have an impact on the communities we serve.
CCI's first endeavor will be to work with the New Jersey chapter The Nature Conservancy to support the restoration of saltwater tidal wetlands in the Barnegat Bay, part of New Jersey Natural Gas' service territory.
These areas of coastline are carbon sinks ecosystems that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, storing it in the ground soil.
And they also act as natural barriers that mitigate storm surge, protecting people and properties in our coastal communities.
slide 10 shows the main drivers of our NFE for the second quarter.
As a reminder, we're now utilizing the deferral method accounting for investment tax credits at CEV and, as such, recast our financials for the comparable periods.
Reported NFE of $170.6 million or $1.77 per share compared to NFE of $84.3 million or $0.88 per share in the second quarter of fiscal 2020.
NJNG's NFE was lower due to higher loan expenses partially offset by utility gross margin.
The higher loan was primarily due to increased compensation and technology expense.
CEV's NFE was basically flat compared to last year.
Storage & Transportation saw an increase in NFE during the quarter, most related to increased operating income from Leaf River relating to hub services revenue.
Energy Services improved $94 million primarily due to higher financial margin compared to last year, the details of which I'll take you through on the next slide.
Slide 11 provides the additional detail around Energy Services performance during the quarter.
And that illustrates how temperatures were partly abnormal during the February weather event in the Mid-Continent and Gulf markets and also the storage assets that Energy Services holds in these regions.
Through this period of colder weather, there was high demand for natural gas, which Energy Services was able to satisfy by using storage assets to supply natural gas to a variety of customers, and usually high demand resulted in a strong process -- operation, which in turn drove Energy Services profitability.
Turning to slide 12, we'll take you through some of the changes in our capital plan for fiscal 2021 and 2022.
As Steve mentioned earlier, we're starting to see some of the in-service dates for certain CEV projects shift to fiscal 2022 due to permitting and interconnection delays related to pandemic.
We've adjusted our capital plan accordingly.
For fiscal 2021, we now expect to spend between $96 million and $180 million at CEV compared to our prior forecast of approximately $165 million.
However, the capital is simply shifting to fiscal 2022.
We still expect to reach our goal of adding 160 to 180 megawatts of capacity over the two-year period.
It's also important to note that the NFE for fiscal 2021 were largely unaffected by the shift in capital.
Revenues will be minimally impacted given the majority of our projects have expected in-service dates toward the end of the fiscal year.
And with the change in financing accounting methods, the impact related to ITTs will be a fraction of what would have been previously.
On slide 13, you can see our product pipeline for fiscal 2021 and 2022 was about $255 million, which represents 80% of our targeted capex for the next two years.
Approximately 1/3 of our project pipeline is currently out-of-state projects.
And for the projects in New Jersey, we expect to earn an average TREC factor of 0.9 per kilowatt hour.
Turning to slide 14, you can see the update to our cash flows and financing projections.
Our cash flow from operations remained strong, with no equity needs for the foreseeable future aside from our normal DRIP program.
Demonstrating the strength of our cash flows, Fitch recently affirmed NJNG's investment-grade credit rating with a stable outlook.
On slide 15, we've highlighted the details of our SREC hedging program.
As you can see, we are well hedged in the next three energy years.
We have 93% of our 2024 volume hedge.
And for the first time, we've been able to hedge SRECs four and five years out.
The market fundamentals for energy years 2025 to 2026 are supporting strong pricing, with SREC trading at or above 85% of SACP, with 36% and 10% hedged for 2025 and 2026, respectively.
I'll now hand the call back to Steve for some closing remarks.
Before I open the call to questions, I'd like to summarize the quarter.
Through the first half of the year, NJR delivered strong results.
The overperformance from Energy Services allowed us to increase our guidance for the fiscal year and provides the flexibility to reinvest in our business.
We file the rate case to recover our infrastructure investments, including the costs associated with SRL, received approval for SAVEGREEN 2020, our largest-ever energy efficiency program.
CEV has a strong pipeline of projects that will allow us to reach our goal of adding 160 to 180 megawatts of capacity by the end of fiscal 2022.
And we received all necessary Pennsylvania DEP permits and filed with FERC for a notice to proceed for construction of laterals for Adelphia Gateway.

user
second-quarter fiscal 2021 nfe $1.77 per share.
increased nfe per share (nfeps) guidance to a range of $2.05 to $2.15 for fiscal 2021.

assistant