Linn Evans
Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is now open
Thank you, Jerome. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning and for your interest in Black Hills. Before I dive into the quarter's results, I'd like to start this meeting, as we do all the meetings at Black Hills, with a safety focus. First, I'd like to personally thank the teams who have been maintaining and hardening our infrastructure systems over the past several years. This winter has already hit much of our service territory within the past several weeks. In a recent snow storm, our system sustained some pretty stiff winds here in South Dakota, with wind gust greater than 80 miles per hour at one point. It's noteworthy that despite those conditions, we did not experience a single customer outage related to the storm. I believe that says a lot about the team of men and women who are designing, constructing and maintaining our systems. Many of that team are listening to this call today, or will later on and I want to take a moment to say thank you for your focus on safety, while you maintain a persistent focus on keeping yourself, your fellow teammates and our customers and our communities safe every day, well done. I'll start on slide five. I am pleased with our solid third quarter results, earnings met our expectations. Our operations team performed well and we made excellent progress executing our strategy to grow long-term value for both, our customers and our shareholders. On the left side of the slide, being ready for our customers, is what we focus on every day. We continue to deliver for the safety, reliability and the growth needs of our customers and the communities we serve. We're focused on the safety and integrity of our infrastructure systems, using a long-term programmatic approach to continuously upgrade our systems. Our teams across our company advance these programs on schedule. One of the most important focuses we have each day is the safety of our employee team and our customers and ensuring the integrity of our electric and natural gas infrastructure systems. As I indicated in my opening comments, we take great pride in our electric reliability results and this clearly demonstrates are ready-to-serve commitment. Notably, all three of our electric utilities have achieved IEEE metrics in the top 15% for reliability. This accomplishment reflects our thoughtful investment approach, our proactive planning and strong employee engagement to be ready when our customers flip the switch and expect their lights to turn on. I'm proud of our team's continued execution on capital projects for customers, particularly when you consider the weather adversities we faced this year. We have nearly completed construction on two key strategic projects during the quarter, which will enhance customer liability and capacity, enabling economic growth in the communities that we serve. In addition to safety and reliability, we are delivering for our customers' renewable energy needs. We are within weeks of commissioning the 60 megawatt Busch Ranch II wind project. I'll talk more about this and our Corriedale wind project later on. We continue to transform the customer experience. We recently upgraded our website and we continue to identify and implement ways to make it easier for our customers to do business with us. While, Rich will discuss earnings in details, let me say, I'm pleased we met our expectations despite another quarter of weather-related challenges. Our third quarter and year-to-date financial results have given us confidence so that we are narrowing our guidance range for both 2019 and for 2020. Let me now take your attention to the right side of the slide five. Our team has executed well, deploying a record level of customer-focused capital this year. Given our strong execution this year, and given our improving clarity into long-term project opportunities, we are increasing our current year and five-year forecast by more than 5%. We now expect to deploy a total of $820 million in 2019 and at least $2.9 billion through 2023. We also continue to make strides in several key regulatory initiatives, particularly on our jurisdiction consolidation efforts, which will help us streamline our business and our processes, while decreasing the number of go-forward regulatory filings we were required. And finally, our board approved an increase to our dividend last week. That increase completes our 49th consecutive year of increasing our annual dividend. All along, we had a great third quarter. Before I move on, I want to point out that we had an estimated rate based by state and by fuel type as of year end 2018. You'll find that in your disclosure in the slide deck appendix. Moving to slide six. I'll start with our notable accomplishments within the electric utilities. In September, we finished a multi-year multi-segment project on behalf of South Dakota Electric. We placed in serviced the final leg of 175-mile electric transmission line from Rapid City, South Dakota to Stegall, Nebraska. This project is a key strategic component that enhances electric reliability and will help us retain our industry-leading system reliability metrics I mentioned a few moments ago. In Colorado and Wyoming, we recorded new all-time peak loads in July, demonstrating continued overall customer demand growth in both of those states. In South Dakota and Wyoming, our Renewable Ready subscription-based program continued to advance very well. We completed the subscription period in September and had strong customer interest, exceeding the 40 megawatts of available energy from the Corriedale wind project. Last Friday, in response to that demand, we filed an amended renewable ready tariff with the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission to increase the capacity of the program. The 40-megawatt Corriedale Wind project, which is located near Cheyenne, Wyoming will be jointly owned by our South Dakota and Wyoming Electric Utilities and remains on track to be placed in service next year. Now, moving to our natural gas utilities. We have nearly completed construction of our $54 million, 35-mile Natural Bridge Pipeline project for our Wyoming Gas customers. We expect the pipeline to be placed in service in mid-November. We continue to advance efforts to consolidate and simplify our natural gas jurisdictions in Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming, to better and more efficiently serve our customers. In Wyoming, we recently reached the stipulation and settlement agreement in the consolidated rate review case and we have filed that settlement agreement with the Wyoming Public Service Commission. The stipulation and the agreement are subject to review and approved by the commission and we anticipate a decision from them by year-end. In Colorado, we continue to advance the pending consolidated rate review case and we now expect a decision by the Commission not later than first quarter of 2020. And on October 29, the Nebraska Public Utilities Commission approved our application request for legal consolidation. We expect to consolidate our Nebraska gas utilities effective January 1, 2020 and we are planning to file a consolidated rate review in mid-year 2020. Moving on to slide 7 now. As we noted last quarter, on August 2nd, we submitted request to FERC, seeking approval of our new power purchase agreement between Black Hills Wyoming and its affiliate Wyoming Electric. We are awaiting a decision from FERC now. Construction is essentially complete on our $71 million, 60-megawatt Busch Ranch II Wind project that's located near Pueblo, Colorado. We expect all turbines in the entire project be in service by the middle of this month. During the quarter, our Mining segment completed negotiating the Price Reopener with Rocky Mountain Power for the fuel supply contract for the Wyodak power plant. The price is now reset to $17.94 per ton, which is effective July 1, 2019. And this price is slightly lower compared to our last reset price of $18.25 per ton, which was set in July of 2014. In our Corporate segment, our Board recently declared a quarterly dividend of $0.535 per share, which represents a 5.9% increase over last quarter's dividend. During the quarter, we completed our 2019 equity assurance. We issued approximately 389,000 shares of common stock under our at the market equity offering program with net proceeds of approximately $30 million. During 2019, we issued net proceeds of $99 million new equity using our ATM. Shifting to debt financing, we issued a total of $700 million in 10-year and 30-year notes to refinance upcoming maturities. Fitch reaffirmed our corporate credit rating of BBB plus and maintained a stable outlook during the quarter. We are committed to maintaining our solid investment grade credit ratings. And finally, I'm excited about the two new appointments to our Board of Directors. You can review Kathleen McCallister's and Tony Jensen's outstanding background in our recent news release announcing their additions to our Board. They are excellent additions to our Board. Now, I'll turn it over to Rich for a financial update.