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Text: I'm pleased that you're able to join us today.
The slides are available on our website at investors.
We caution you that such statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially from our expectations.
Leading our discussion today are Maria Pope, President and CEO, and Jim Ajello, Senior Vice President of Finance, CFO and Treasurer.
Hot summer weather and power market volatility had a significant impact on our region and on our results this quarter.
Turning to slide four, we reported net income of $50 million or $0.56 per share for the third quarter of 2021.
This compares with the loss of $17 million or $0.19 per share for the third quarter of 2020.
Year-to-date financial performance is on track.
And despite, third quarter volatility in the energy markets and higher O&M, we are reaffirming our 2021 earnings guidance of $2.70 to $2.85 per share.
Our long-term outlook remains unchanged and we are reaffirming our 4% to 6% long-term earnings growth guidance.
Overall, our business is strong, driven by load growth from the technology and digital sectors, as well as elevated residential use due in part to the hot summer weather and continued COVID constraints.
Year-to-date revenue is up 12% versus 2020 and for the quarter, up 17% versus last year.
Jim will cover third quarter results in more detail, provide regulatory and capital updates and discuss the outlook for the rest of the year.
The ongoing impacts of climate change underscore the importance of investments and actions that we are taking to rapidly transition to a clean energy future and meet our 2030 decarbonization goals while also ensuring that we have sufficient capacity.
We estimate that our 2030 targets will require approximately 1,500 to 2,000 megawatts of additional carbon-free resources and approximately 800 megawatts of non-emitting capacity resources.
In addition to removing coal from our portfolio, we're seeking approximately 1,000 megawatts of renewables and non-emitting capacity resources as part of our RFP, which will be issued in December.
As part of this procurement, we plan to add 375 to 500 megawatts of renewables to our portfolio.
We will also bring on approximately 375 of non-emitting to special capacity.
We will work with the OPUC and parties to evaluate opportunities to procure additional resources, so the types of projects submitted in the IRP process, excuse me, the RFP process make sense for customers and are attractively priced.
We could see procuring about a third of our clean energy resources needed to meet the 2030 emissions target reductions with this RFP.
We not only need more renewables.
We need to upgrade the grid to integrate these resources, making it easier for customers to participate in demand response and distributed energy programs, helping to keep service reliable and affordable.
In our recent distributed resource, excuse me, distributed system plan.
We lay out plans for the grid of the future that supports robust two-way energy flows and better manages energy use, especially during peak periods.
We estimate that as much as 25% of flexibility needed to meet our decarbonized future would come from customers and distributed energy resources, such as solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles.
During the 2021 summer heat up, we worked with customers to save 62 megawatts of power equivalent to powering 25,000 homes.
We're working to significantly grow this program to 500 megawatts by the end of 2023.
We are very pleased to have been selected by the Department of Energy as part of their connect communities program and are working with local DE&I groups on the placement of resources, such as batteries, two-way EV charging and solar panels to ensure that our customers in underserved communities participate in this clean energy transition.
As one of the early participants in the western energy and balance market, we have been a leader in advocating for the expansion and strengthening of wholesale markets to increase reliability, accelerate decarbonization, and lower cost for customers.
PGE and our utility partners across the west are working to bolster reliability planning, advance integrated markets, and examine the benefits of a Western Regional Transmission Organization.
Throughout these processes, we'll continue to advocate for rigorous resource adequacy standards.
Sustainability is foundational to our business.
In September, we published our ESG report, building upon our number one ranked voluntary renewable program.
Sustainability is part of the fabric of everything we do, including financing.
We recently adopted a green financing framework, under which we successfully placed $150 million in green bonds.
Yesterday, we filed a rate case with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to review our third-party transmission revenue.
The revenue that we receive from these new prices, we'll offset retail customer prices through a revenue credit.
We continue to make progress on our 2022 general rate case and have reached settlements with stakeholders.
In October that resolves the cost of equity and gives at 9.5% as well as the 50/50 cash structure.
We look forward to working with stakeholders on the remaining items.
Dawn retired as President and CEO of TransAlta in March, her deep experience in the energy sector, as well as her leadership in transforming a thermal based generation company to a leading clean renewable energy company will be important as we advance our own transformation.
Our third quarter results reflect the ongoing opportunity and the challenge as the economy enters a new normal.
We experienced strong load growth from higher demand and hotter weather.
At the same time, volatility in the power markets was evident throughout the summer.
The fundamentals of our economy remained strong and are fueling strong growth in energy demand and a growing labor market with continued job growth in the region.
This quarter, we had strong deliveries across our customer segments with additional benefit from a favorable weather.
Our high tech and digital services sectors continue to grow at a rapid pace 9% higher when compared to Q3 2020.
Customers are expanding capacity and we've seen an uptick in site selection activity by data center developers and others.
Residential usage remains significantly elevated as remote work continues.
We anticipate these trends to continue and this has contributed to our strong year-over-year load growth.
Turning to slide five.
We reported GAAP income of $0.56 per share in the third quarter of 2021, compared to a GAAP loss of $0.19 per share in the third quarter of 2020.
Non-GAAP income for the third quarter of 2020 is $0.90 after removing the negative impact of the energy trading losses.
I'll cover our financial performance quarter-over-quarter on slide six.
Beginning with the loss of $0.19 per share for the third quarter of 2020, we will add back the $1.09 one-time impact of the energy trading losses.
We experienced a $0.37 increase in total revenues, primarily due to the strong economy driving growth in our service territory with the balance due to warmer weather.
This represents a 17% year-over-year increase in total revenues.
Offsetting this was a $0.39 of unfavorable power cost.
We experience substantially higher market prices due to warmer weather and increased regional demand for capacity, as well as lower renewable generation.
As a result, we are forecast to be above the $30 million threshold to begin customer cost sharing pursuant to our power cost adjustment mechanism.
Through the quarter, we have deferred $27 million, which represents 90% of the variance above that threshold.
We anticipate the regulatory process related to this deferral will begin in 2022 after the pending rate case concludes.
Our power costs this summer were not materially impacted by rising natural gas prices.
Our portfolio is well positioned and a bit long to balance gas price fluctuation and we have significant gas storage at the 4.1 billion cubic foot North Mist facility that we can draw on as needed.
There was $0.11 decrease to earnings per share from cost associated with our fixed operating expenses, including $0.03 for enhanced wildfire mitigation, $0.04 of additional vegetation management, including work that was delayed as we focused on storm restoration during the second quarter, $0.02 of service restoration costs and $0.02 of miscellaneous other expenses.
There was an $0.18 decrease to earnings per share from administrative expense.
Half of the year-over-year increase is attributed to items that were unique to 2020, including $0.07 in adjustments to incentive programs, following the energy trading losses in the prior period and $0.02 from the deferral of bad debt following the approval of the COVID-19 deferral.
The remaining administrative expense can be attributed to $0.06 for outside services to support improvements to our customer experience, a $0.02 increase in employee benefit expenses and $0.01 from miscellaneous other expenses.
While O&M was higher this quarter when compared to Q3 2020, on a year-over-year basis our cost have increased only 2% annually since 2019.
The fact that we have reduced planned outages by 29% year-over-year, stood up a large wildfire prevention program and greatly increased vegetation management is a testament to the efficiency we built into the O&M program.
Managing consistent with inflation, while increasing wildfire resiliency, improving our customer experience and growing our digital capabilities demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our workforce, as well as the use of technology.
Finally, there was a $0.03 decrease to earnings per share from the following items; $0.03 benefit from lower depreciation and amortization due to plant retirements, $0.04 of higher tax expense due to the timing difference of asset retirements in 2020, and $0.02 from other unfavorable miscellaneous items.
Turning to slide seven.
Last month, we reached an agreement with stakeholders on cost of capital in our 2022 general rate case.
Our agreement supports a capital structure of 50% debt, 50% equity, and a 9.5% allowed ROE.
We see this as a constructive outcome and look forward to discussing remaining unsettled issues with parties in the case.
As you see saw earlier this month, we made several regulatory filings, which we shared-in which we shared our plans to advance the strategy to meet our targets for reducing greenhouse emissions in the power we serve to customers.
We still plan to bid in benchmark resources into the RFP process.
To support our bids, we filed for an affiliated interest entity that will help support our decarbonization interest.
Our proposal is intended to address certain structural tax disadvantages encountered by utilities due to the unintended consequences of tax normalization requirements.
The affiliate interest would provide a greater price benefit to our customers as PGE decarbonizes its generation portfolio.
Turning to slide eight, which shows our updated capital forecast through 2025.
We increased our capital expenditure forecast by over $100 million this quarter.
This increase is concentrated in 2022 and is primarily associated with grid-based investments.
With our recent settlement in the GRC, assuming approval by the OPC, this affirms that we will not need to issue equity in 2022 to meet our capital requirements, unless there is a significant renewable addition stemming from the aforementioned RFP.
We continue to maintain a solid balance sheet, including strong liquidity and investment grade ratings, accompanied by a stable credit outlook.
Total available liquidity at $930 million is just over $1 billion.
At PGE sustainability is woven into the fabric of who we are as a company and we stand behind that through our actions as an organization, including in our financing plans.
This quarter, we renewed and increased by $150 million our revolving credit facility to include sustainability linked performance metrics.
We also refinanced the Wheatridge renewable energy facility with low cost debt under a green bond in alignment with our green financing framework.
The demand for this was evident as it was nearly six times oversubscribed.
Our investors are keen to purchase debt linked to sustainable investments.
Going forward, we will seek out opportunities to tie our long-term debt toward our sustainability strategy through capital investments.
Not only are these actions good for our business, but they're also good for society.
Turning to slide nine.
Our year-to-date 2021 performance remains on track and we reaffirm our guidance range of $2.70 to $2.85 and remain on track to achieve long-term earnings growth guidance of 4% to 6% from the 2019 base year.
The picture for 2021 and beyond remains clear, strong growth in cost demand for clean, affordable, safe, reliable and equitable energy paves the way for us to execute on our long-term financial targets and deliver value for customers and investors alike.

user
compname reports q3 earnings per share of $0.56.
reaffirms fy earnings per share view $2.70 to $2.85.
q3 earnings per share $0.56.
reaffirming estimate for full-year 2021 earnings guidance of $2.70 to $2.85 per diluted share.

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