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: blackhillscorp.com, under the Investor Relations heading.
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.
I'll begin on Slide 4, which lists our key achievements during the first quarter.
Our top priority of Black Hills Corporation is safety, which works hand-in-hand with reliability in our predominantly cold weather service territories.
I'm proud of our team's exceptional and resilient performance.
The Black Hills team along with our electric and natural gas systems and our generating fleet performed very well through the historic decrees of the Winter Storm Uri.
We successfully served extraordinary demand, keeping our customers safe through life threatening cold conditions across our service territory.
Our balanced mix of power generation resources, including reliable and dispatchable generation capacity allowed us to completely avoid rolling blackouts experienced in other areas of the country, even while our South Dakota electric utility served a new winter peak load.
Of course, our success in serving our customers during Winter Storm Uri didn't happen by chance, rather it was a result of our relentless focus on our customers and ongoing investments for our safe, reliable and resilient infrastructure.
Winter Storm Uri demonstrated how critical energy is to our daily lives.
The storm highlighted the need for safe, reliable natural gas utilities and reliable generation capacity when our customers experienced temperatures as low as 27 degrees below zero, setting numerous all-time record lows across our communities.
As an example, Lincoln, Nebraska reported 11 straight days of temperatures below zero in February with lows of the minus 20s.
Recognizing essential value of natural gas during these weather events, we're pleased that four of our six gas states: Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas and Wyoming, recently passed legislation that protects our customers freedom to choose a type of energy is right for them.
Last week we announced, we joined the ONE Future Coalition of gas utility companies who are voluntarily reducing emissions.
This is an addition to our previously announced participation in the EPA's Methane Challenge as we enhance our commitment to modernize and make our pipelines more resilient.
Continuing on Slide 4.
We remain encouraged by the ongoing steady growth in new customer connections driven by population migration into our service territories.
Our team also showcased our agility and the strength of our financing strategy during the first quarter.
Given the unprecedented and unforeseeable market pricing for natural gas in February, we immediately supplemented our liquidity with additional short-term financing by securing an $800 million term loan on favorable terms.
This term loan and other ongoing cash conservation initiatives ensures our ability to continue funding our strong capital investment program.
Slide 5 sets out our financial outlook.
However, absent these storm cost, our financial results were otherwise strong.
During the February storm, we immediately implemented expense and cash management initiatives and we're executing on other opportunities to mitigate the impact of the storm.
Rich will cover the details in his financial update.
Given these ongoing initiatives and the opportunities we see for the remainder of this year, our 2021 earnings guidance remains unchanged.
We also reaffirmed our 2022 earnings guidance and we remain confident in our long-term growth targets, including 5% to 7% earnings growth for 2023 through 2025 and at least 5% annual dividend growth.
Slide 6 illustrates our disciplined growth plan with upside potential.
We plan on capital investments in more than $3 billion through 2025 and we expect to identify and develop incremental projects.
We're also developing other growth opportunities including less capital intensive projects such as data center load additions and other innovative customer solutions, including renewables and other technologies.
I noted already that we're seeing accelerated population migration into our service territories and we're gaining confidence this trend will continue.
The last item on this slide is a focus on cost discipline and continuous improvement.
These are long-term initiatives for leaner more efficient processes and the use of new technologies to be better every day.
Moving to Slide 7.
We've made progress on our regulatory initiatives.
Our team is finalizing three rate review applications to be filed in the second quarter.
We plan to file a new rate review for Colorado Gas, and we recently completed a hearing before the commission regarding our ongoing safety and integrity investment rider.
In Kansas, we're filing our first rate review in seven years, which renews our five year system safety and integrity investment rider.
And in Iowa, we plan to file our first rate review in more than a decade, including a request for a new system safety and integrity investment rider.
In addition to our normal regulatory activity, we're engaged with regulators regarding recovery for costs associated with Storm Uri.
Moving to Slide 8.
For our electric utilities, resource planning is a key focus, as we determine how best to reliably and cost effectively serve growing customer demand and achieve our greenhouse gas emission goals.
We're targeting early July to submit our integrated resource plan for our jointly operated South Dakota and Wyoming electric systems.
We're modeling various scenarios to meet our growing customer demand.
Initial modeling which is always subject to change, indicates a need to add renewable, dispatchable natural gas generation, battery storage, additional transmission and upgraded pipeline capacity.
These scenarios consider customer impacts in achieving our greenhouse gas emission goals.
We are also modeling a scenario that considers the Biden Administration's economywide greenhouse gas emission goals and what that would cost customers.
I'm excited about this process as we look to provide greater clarity into these future opportunities in the upcoming months.
And finally on Slide 9, we're well positioned as an integrated utility with a strong long-term growth outlook.
We're executing our customer-focused strategy and are confident in our future.
Slide 11 summarizes earnings per share for the first quarter.
We delivered earnings per share of $1.54 compared to $1.59 as adjusted in Q1 2020.
Impacts from Winter Storm Uri overshadowed what were otherwise solid financial results.
The net storm impacts were $0.15 per share, which more than offset weather favorability and the benefit of new rates.
We estimate weather benefited earnings by $0.07 per share compared to normal.
For the quarter, heating degree days were 4% higher than normal at our electric utilities and 3% higher than normal at our gas utilities, attributable primarily to extreme cold in February, offsetting warmer than normal weather in January and March.
Compared to Q1 2020, the weather impact was favorable by $0.11 per share, given a warmer than normal first quarter heating season last year.
Slide 12 details how we are addressing Winter Storm Uri impacts.
In the first quarter, we incurred approximately $571 million of incremental cost to serve our customers.
This includes $559 million of deferred utility fuel costs we booked as a regulatory asset.
We've had constructive dialog with regulators in a filed or expect to file our remaining storm-related regulatory recovery requests in the second quarter.
We've already filed requests for our gas utilities in Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming and for South Dakota Electric.
Recovery plans vary by state with proposed recovery in some states within one year while other states may take up to five years or longer.
In the first quarter, we booked storm-related net expenses of $12.55 million pre-tax or $0.15 per share after tax.
The largest contributor was $8.2 million of non-recoverable incremental gas purchase costs at Black Hills Energy Services, which serves 52,000 of our regulated utility customers in Nebraska and Wyoming through the Choice Gas program.
This program allows customers the option to choose their gas provider and is supported by a hedging and procurement plan based on demand history and forecasts.
Serving our Choice Gas customers is a small, low risk and profitable piece of our business.
However, it was subjected to the unprecedented market pricing and elevated demand caused by storm Uri.
For our electric businesses, the impact to our wholesale power margin sharing of $3.2 million was partially offset by $1.7 million of power generation benefits.
We also incurred $2.1 million of fuel costs that are outside of our regulatory cost recovery mechanisms, primarily in Montana, where we serve two industrial customers pursuant to contracts.
This small piece of our utilities is typically very low risk but was subjected to the same unprecedented market pricing and elevated demand.
In February, we immediately implemented strategies to mitigate the $0.15 earnings per share impact from Uri over the remainder of the year through cost management, ongoing wholesale power marketing opportunities and identified regulatory proceedings.
Slide 13 illustrates the drivers of change in net income year-over-year for the first quarter.
All amounts listed are after-tax.
The main drivers compared to last year were gross margin improvements at our gas utilities offset by Storm Uri impacts.
Natural gas margin increases were driven by weather favorability and new base rates and rider recovery on investments for customers.
Electric utility margins were lower than the prior year, primarily due to tax reform benefits that we passed on to our Colorado Electric customers.
We credited over $9 million of tax reform benefits, which lowered revenue and had an offsetting income tax benefit, resulting in minimal overall impact to first quarter results.
The additional quarter-over-quarter tax benefits in the far right were related primarily to additional production tax credits related to the Corriedale Wind Project that went into service in late 2020.
O&M was impacted by higher employee costs and outside services.
Outside services increased over the prior year because of higher Director fees tied to our stock price performance, which was much stronger in Q1 this year compared to last year.
The change in other income expense over the prior year was driven by market impacts on a non-qualified deferred compensation expense.
Additional first quarter detail on segment earnings can be found in the Appendix.
Slide 14 shows our financial position through the lens of capital structure, credit ratings and financial flexibility.
We have a manageable debt maturity profile and are committed to maintaining our solid investment grade credit ratings.
At the end of April, we had approximately $530 million of available liquidity on our revolving credit facility.
In February, we entered into an $800 million, nine-month term loan to bolster our liquidity in light of the increased fuel costs related to Storm Uri.
We repaid $200 million of that term loan at quarter-end and are developing the appropriate refinancing strategy for the remaining $600 million as we finalized Storm Uri recovery mechanisms.
I expect we will issue debt with a three to five year term in the second or third quarter to match the recovery period of the bulk of the dollars from the deferred Storm Uri fuel cost.
New debt and deferred recovery of fuel cost temporarily increased our debt to total capitalization ratio to 62% at the end of March.
As we recover storm costs, repay debt and execute on our equity program, we expect to reduce the debt to total capitalization ratio and continue to target a debt to total cap ratio in the mid 50s.
Our equity issuance expectations are unchanged.
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.
We will continue to evaluate financing needs as we finalize our storm cost recovery proposals.
Moving to our dividend on Slide 15.
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 an integrated utility in constructive jurisdictions with a complementary business mix across stable and growing territories.
We continue to be well positioned both operationally and financially to be ready to serve all our stakeholders.

user
qtrly earnings per share $1.54.
reaffirming our 2021 and 2022 earnings guidance and five-year capital plan of more than $3 billion.
remain confident in our strategy and opportunities ahead as we target 5% to 7% earnings growth beyond 2022.

assistant