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Text: I'm joined here today by Steve Westhoven, our President and CEO; Pat Migliaccio, our 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 in slide one.
We will also be referring to certain non-GAAP 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.
New Jersey Resources delivered strong performance in the first quarter.
And on slide three, I'll take you through the highlights.
We reported NFE of $0.46 per share, driven by the performance of our core business, New Jersey Natural Gas.
We are also reaffirming our NFE guidance for fiscal 2021 of $1.55 to $1.65 per share and increasing our fiscal 2022 NFE guidance to $2.20 to $2.30 per share, an increase of $0.15 per share from prior guidance.
At New Jersey Natural Gas, we completed almost 90% of the Southern Reliability Link and expect to place the project into service this year.
We received approval to move forward with our infrastructure Investment Program, a 5-year, $150 million accelerated recovery program that will improve the resiliency and reliability of our natural gas infrastructure.
And we filed for SAVEGREEN 2020, a new energy efficiency program that is designed to help our customers reduce their energy consumption and save money.
At Clean Energy Ventures, we acquired the 2.9 megawatt Mt. Laurel Solar Facility, which is part of our plan to invest $165 million this year.
In our Storage & Transportation business, we've begun to construct -- to convert the Southern portion of Adelphia Gateway to natural gas and expect it to be in service later this calendar year.
And just yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court granted PennEast petition to hear its appeal.
But despite this positive news, we are still excluding PennEast for our long term projections until there's more clarity on the project.
And at NJR Energy Services we entered into an asset management agreements, which will result in contracted cash proceeds of $501 million over a 10-year period.
I'll take you through the transaction in more detail on the next slide.
Turning to slide four.
Energy Services entered into a series of AMAs with an investment-grade public utility.
These transactions illustrate the value of our portfolio of natural gas storage and transportation contracts that are a testament to the hard work of our talented team.
The transactions assist our counterparty in securing needed supply, while Energy Services monetizes the value of a portion of the assets it controls.
Let me walk you through some of the specifics.
Beginning in November of 2021, which is our fiscal year 2022, NJRES will begin to release portions of our pipeline capacity.
Under the terms of the agreements, NJRES will receive payments of $261 million over the first three years of the AMAs.
After FY 2024, NJRES will receive additional payments of approximately $34 million per year through 2031.
The benefits for NJRES include, extracting value from our assets without the need for weather-related price volatility and reducing operational risks associated with the direct management of these transportation assets.
The result will be more predictable earnings and cash flows and a lower risk Energy Services business.
These transactions also allow us to increase our fiscal 2022 guidance by $0.15 per share, as we'll see on the next slide.
And later in the call, Pat will take you through other financial impacts of these transactions.
Turning to our NFE guidance for fiscal 2022 on slide five, we are increasing our overall guidance to a range of $2.20 to $2.30 per share.
This reflects the impact of the AMAs and the expected cash settlement of our equity forward.
However, our long term annual growth rate of 6% to 10% remains based off our originally communicated guidance of $2.05 to $2.15 per share, which excludes the impact of the AMAs and any other contribution from Energy Services.
As Pat will discuss later, the NFE benefits of AMAs will not be the same every year.
And on slide six, I'll take you through some of the operational highlights.
Looking at the top left, we invested $89 million in New Jersey Natural Gas during the first quarter, with about 1/3 of the capex providing near real-time returns.
Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we added over 1,900 new customers, only slightly below the customer additions from the same period a year ago, which was pre-pandemic.
This is due to the favorable growth demographics in our service territories.
Construction on the Southern Reliability Link continues to progress, and we now have almost 90% of the project complete with an in-service date expected this year.
We plan to file our rate case to recover the costs associated with the project in fiscal 2021.
And as I mentioned earlier, we received approval for our IIP program and filed for SAVEGREEN 2020.
On slide seven, I'll take you through the operational highlights of our other core business, Clean Energy Ventures.
We added 2.9 megawatts of capacity this quarter.
And as you can see on the top right, we now have 360 megawatts of installed capacity.
We have a strong project pipeline with about $260 million worth of investments, either under contract or exclusivity that are targeted for commercial operation in fiscal 2021 and 2022.
Total invested capital at CEV this quarter was $23 million with $17 million of commercial projects and $6 million at Sunlight Advantage.
The bottom right shows our expected CEV revenue for fiscal 2021, a significant portion of which is secured through our SREC hedging program.
The sustainability agenda we've outlined for our company focuses on innovation, emissions reductions, energy efficiency and transparency.
But I'm pleased to report NJR has made significant progress.
Last quarter, we announced that NJR achieved our goal of reducing our New Jersey operational emissions by 50% of 2006 levels, well ahead of schedule.
And we set a new higher target of 60% reduction by 2030.
This is a significant accomplishment that reflects the decades of investment in safety and environmental responsibility.
It reflects our strong commitment to sustainability and the hard work of our team.
Our new target ensures our company's goals are aligned with the state's 2050 statutory goals for emissions reduction.
Last month, we issued our 12th Annual Corporate Sustainability Report, which is available on our website.
For the first time, this year's report includes ESG reporting and disclosures established by SASB, which is another step to increase transparency and strengthen our communications with our investors in the financial communities on these issues.
Slide 10 shows the main drivers of our NFE for the first quarter.
As we communicated at our Analyst Day in November, this is the first quarter where we're utilizing the deferral method of accounting for CEV.
And as such, we've recast our financials for the comparable periods.
Reported NFE of $44.7 million or $0.46 per share compared to NFE of $34.9 million or $0.38 per share in the first quarter of fiscal 2020.
New Jersey Natural Gas saw an NFE improvement of $5.6 million due primarily to a full quarter of higher base rates from NJNG's fiscal 2020 rate case settlement as compared to a partial quarter a year ago.
CEV was down $2, primarily due to increased O&M expenses related to project maintenance costs, especially with new projects placed in service, which is partially offset by a decrease in depreciation expense.
Storage & Transportation saw a modest increase during the quarter, mostly related to increased operating income from Leaf River, and was offset by interest expense related to the acquisitions of Leaf River and Adelphia Gateway.
Energy services improved $6.6 million, primarily due to higher financial margin compared to last year, due to increased natural gas pricing spreads.
Home Services and Other saw slightly lower operating revenue and slightly higher interest expense.
As Steve mentioned, we reaffirmed our NFE guidance of $1.55 to $1.65 per share for fiscal 2021.
On slide 11, you can see the segment contributions with our core businesses, NJNG and CEV, accounting for 80% of total NFE.
To help understand the distribution of our net financial earnings by quarter, let me walk you through how we expect NJNG's utility gross margin and CEV's revenues will occur.
For NJNG, we expect to recognize approximately 70% of our utility gross margin in the first half of the year, in line with our historical trends.
At CEV, the majority of our revenue will come in the second half of the year, in particular the fourth quarter, when we expect to recognize the majority of our SREC revenue.
We expect the net financial earnings contributions of our Storage & Transportation business to be fairly consistent throughout the year, because of the fixed price contracts.
On slide 12, we've highlighted the details of our SREC hedging program.
We continue to actively hedge to ensure SREC revenues are largely unaffected by future changes in SREC prices.
Energy year 2023, we increased our hedge level to 75%.
Comparing year 2024, market fundamentals and pricing remained strong with SREC trading at over 85% of SACP.
And we now have 49% of our 2024 volumes hedged.
Turning to slide 13.
I'll explain some of the nuances to achieve the revenue recognition for the AMAs.
Under the terms of the agreements, NJR will initially release the transportation capacity to our counterparty, and later on, will permanently release the contracts to the utility.
The accounting standard requires to allocate revenue to both the initial and permanent release.
With the disproportionate amount of revenue signed to the permanent releases that occur in fiscal years 2024 and 2032.
Subsequently, this allocation will generate a mismatch between revenue and cash proceeds.
Finally, I will note that while the revenue provides some general indication of the NFE, it does not reflect the impact of taxes, demand charges and other items.
Importantly, though, the cash proceeds provides us with additional benefits that I'll detail shortly.
As you can see on slide 14, we now expect our cash flows from operations to grow the CAGR of approximately 25% from fiscal 2020 to 2024 compared to our previous estimate of 20%.
And as you can see from the chart on the right, the strength of our cash flows implies that our dividends are expected to become a smaller percentage, supporting our long term dividend growth rate of 6% to 10%.
Another benefit from the AMAs is the improvement to our credit metrics, which you can see on slide 15.
As we reported at our Analyst Day, our FFO to adjusted debt ratio is rising from fiscal 2022 to 2024.
And when you have the positive impact of the AMAs, our metrics are expected to increase to the high teens in fiscal 2022, and reach about 20% by fiscal 2024.
And because of these strong credit metrics, we will cash settle the equity forward we put in place during our December 2019 equity issuance.
At that time, we issued 5.3 million shares, and we entered into an equity forward to issue an additional 1.2 million shares at a later date, which we no longer need to do.
Also, as we mentioned during our Analyst Day, we have no block equity needs in foreseeable future.
Before I open the call to questions, I'd like to summarize the quarter.
NJR is off to a good start for fiscal 2021 and on track to meet our NFEPS guidance for this fiscal year.
We increased our fiscal 2022 NFEPS guidance by $0.15 per share, and we expect strong cash flow to support our dividend growth.
Our key infrastructure projects, SRL and Adelphia Gateway, continue to make progress, and we expect both to be in service this calendar year.
Our improved credit metrics allow us to cash settle our equity forward.
And as we said in our Investor Day, we have no need for further block equity issuances.
And we've made substantial progress in our commitment to de-risk the Energy Services business by providing more stable fee based revenue.

user
new jersey reaffirms nfe/share outlook of $1.55 to $1.65 for 2021.
reaffirmed nfe per share (nfeps) guidance of $1.55 to $1.65 for fiscal 2021.
increased nfeps guidance for fiscal 2022 by $0.15 to a range of $2.20 to $2.30.
qtrly consolidated net financial earnings of $44.7 million, or $0.46 per share.

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