Tom Webb
Analyst · UBS. Your line is open
Thank you, D.V., and good morning everyone. Thanks for joining our call. As always, we deeply appreciate your interest in our company and for spending time with us today. And John sends his regrets that he can't join us today. He is recovering from a medical procedure and we look forward to his return in a few weeks. I know he'll miss fielding your questions today. So we'll begin the call with an overview of the quarter and provide an update on the legislative process, before turning to more detail on the gas business, the fast half and our growth model, and then we'll close with Q&A. For the first half of the year, adjusted earnings per share were $0.98, down $0.07 from last year but up $0.03 on a weather-adjusted basis, were $0.13 ahead of plan. Today, we’re reaffirming our full-year adjusted earnings per share guidance of $1.86 to $1.89, and as you know, this reflects real growth of 5% to 7% of last year’s actual results. We filed our gas rate case last week for $85 million. Like our previous cases, it's small and primarily driven by capital investment. Even with this rate case, we expect total customer bills to decrease in 2016 due to lower gas commodity prices. Last month, we self-implemented our electric rate case at $110 million, and we expect an order for this case in December, which would mark 2.5 years since the last order. Our predictable growth has continued over that time and we have self-initiated many cost reductions to keep prices low for our customers. Here you can see the impact of our actions along with constructive regulatory environment. Our industrial rates are at a competitive level that's attracting new business to the state. Rates could be improved further with changes to ROA policy, creating a competitive advantage for Michigan’s business in the Midwest and in the country. As we've improved industrial rates, residential bills have remained low at about $3 a day. Recently we committed do more in Michigan and help grow businesses. Our spending on in state goods and services will be $1 billion per year over the next five years. By helping to make Michigan a competitive state in which to do business, we are seeing growth. In Grand Rapids, the largest city in our service territory, housing, GDP, population growth and unemployment are all better today than Michigan as a whole and the U.S. Overall, Michigan is moving towards becoming a top 10 state and Grand Rapids is leading the way. Michigan’s energy law update can help to drive this growth. Bills are now in committees with the house and senate. Recently Senate Committee Chairman Mike Nofs introduced a comprehensive bill after considerable research and debate. The Senator’s bill proposes to keep the ROA cap. However, the bill stipulates stringent requirements for both, ROA suppliers and customers. In order to protect all customers from reliability and price volatility, the supplier would be required to procure a minimum of three years of capacity. And ROA customers who decide to stay with alternative suppliers would be required to provide a three-year notice prior to returning to bundled utility service. Once the customer returns from ROA, they are no longer eligible to switch back. These policy leaders are broadly in agreement with the integrated resources plan process which would give the state the flexibility it needs among many things, to enable investment in needed new generation and comply with state and federal environmental regulations. The IRP would replace the existing certificate of necessity process with a more comprehensive longer term decision making process. The IRP would provide us with the assurance of recovery and allow us to plan capacity resources for a decade or more. This transparent process could include new gas capacity, renewables and efficiency programs. Now on the regulatory front, I'm please to highlight the Governor’s announcement yesterday of the appointment of Norm Saari as a new Public Service Commissioner. He has a long track record of public and private service in the utility sector and public policy space. We look forward to working with him. We continue to look at and evaluate new investment opportunities that could increase the capital spending in our 10-year plan. When we look at these opportunities, we evaluate each one by asking, does it add customer value; does it reduce O&M cost; does it help balance our fuel sources and/or is it mandated by state or federal regulations, and none of our investments in the plan or those identified as opportunities are big bets. Our gas business is one of the larger distribution systems in the country. This scale provides many investment opportunities for additional growth. We've been upgrading our compressor stations, installing new transmission lines and replacing aging infrastructure. We could do more and we could accelerate the pace. Our plan calls for doubling gas investment over the next 10 years. This brings our investment mix to over one-third gas. Our customers benefit from the safety, reliability and cost effectiveness of the gas plant. If fuel costs remain low, additional headroom will allow us to make these investments without impairing price. On average, our gas customers spend about $2 a day. That's equal to their bill in 2004. Now here's a little more detail on our results. For the second quarter, our earnings were $0.25 a share on both, a reported and an adjusted basis. This is a nickel below last year or a penny on a weather-normalized basis. Weather in June was the mildest in 15 years. Cooling days where 50% lower than last year. Economic sales also were flat as one substantial low-margin customer came through a temporary supply interruption. For the first half of the year, our results were $0.98 or $0.86 on whether-normalized basis. That's $0.03 better than 2014. And at the mid-year checkpoint, we are $0.13 a share or 15% better than our plan. We have lots of room to move. As you can see here with first half weather-normalized earnings up $0.03, we’re positioned well. Even with a nickel of cost in the second half associated with new mortality tables and lower discount rates, our cost reductions of $0.12 more than offset this. For the full-year, costs are down about 3% and new rates already have been implemented. At mid-year, our earnings per share is $0.13 ahead of plan, and like last year and many of the years and the decade prior to that, we added substantial customer reliability work and still plan to hit our 5% to 7% guidance. O&M reinvestment of $18 million is underway, including more forestry work at the utility and accelerating a planned major outrage at DIG from 2016 into this year. The DIG pull ahead accomplishes a double benefit of accelerating the DIG outage cost into 2015 when we had ample room to absorb it and bringing up capacity in what will be a very tight market in 2016. In addition, we'll be increasing DIG’s capacity by 38 megawatts and these reinvestments could add $20 million to profitability next year. From time to time, some of you ask us, how we accomplish consistent earnings growth year-end and year-out and how we do it without raising customer rates above inflation. As you know, we have a robust capital investment program and a substantial opportunity to increase it. However, we build our investment plan starting with customer rates growing no faster than inflation. And here is how we do that. Our O&M cost reductions worth about 2% a year; conservatively forecast sales growth of about 0.5 point a year; avoidance of block equity dilution worth about a point and other self-funds five points of investment. This permits earnings to grow 5% to 7% and customer rate impacts stay below inflation. Here is our capital investment program for the next 10 years. Investment in our gas business grows substantially. Investment in our electric business continues to grow too but at a slower pace. And please remember that our earnings growth is not predicated on sales growth or cost reductions. Upsides from these are directed to our customers. Even without any upsides, our capital investment program over the next 10 years will be 45% larger than the last 10 years. As a percent of market cap, CMS investment was 10% over the last 10 years. It’s 16% over the next 10. This exceeds peers. The opportunity to increase that investment by as much as $5 billion to over $20 billion continues to be practical, particularly when many of the investment opportunities do not increase customer bills. A lot of the capital investment we put in place enables us to reduce O&M cost. These are down 10% since 2006, and we’ll reduce these costs another 7% by 2018. There is no magic to this cost reduction program. It’s simple. Natural changes in our business like coal to gas generation and Pole Top Hardening make the difference. Here is more detail around cost reduction actions, down 6% in two years as we switch from coal plants, which requires substantial number of people to operate, to gas generation and wind firms, which require about 10% of the workforce needed to run coal, we’ll be able to reduce our O&M by $35 million. By continuing our program to harden our Pole Tops, we reduce future storm-related damage and we capitalize rather than expense that work. These are just a couple of examples of how we’ve reduced our cost 3% last year and are in the middle of a program to do another 3% this year. Since 2006 through 2014, ours is the only utility to reduce its cost, down almost 3% a year. We forecast reductions perhaps conservatively at 2% a year between 2014 and 2018. The outlook for the economy in our utility service territory continues to be bright. As you can see here, many companies from a variety of sectors have announced new factories and businesses. This will add new growth of almost 3%. Despite this, we continue to plan conservatively, including overall sales growth at about 1.5% over the next five years and industrial growth of about 2%. While this is another opportunity in our model to minimize customer rate growth, there may be a little upset. One more element of the self-funding model that promotes robust rate base and earnings growth without allowing customer rates to grow faster than inflation is the benefit from a large stockpile of NOLs. Typically a utility would lose about 1% of its earnings growth through dilution associated with new equity to fund growth. In our case, we’re fortunate to be able to invest our cash in utility growth rather than taxes avoiding full points of dilution. So the model is simple and perhaps it's a little unique. We start our planning by keeping nominal customer rate growth below inflation, or in other words, we provide real rate reductions. With cost reductions, modest sales growth, no block equity dilution and shrinking surcharges, we’re able to grow rate base by 5% to 7% and with substantial opportunity to do more. Many of our capital investment opportunities not yet in our plan can be accomplished without any increase to customer bills. This includes replacing PPAs as they expire and the potential that customers on ROA may return to bundled service, creating more headroom to pull ahead incremental capital investment. So here's the PPA example of growth not included in our plan. We have more PPAs than our peers, and as they are replaced, we’re able to build new gas generation at a cost that's lower than the existing PPAs. What a nice way to grow our business and provide reliability for our customers without increasing their bills. And here is the opportunity should ROA customers choose to return to bundled service. As they return, which may be a better economic choice for them, all our customers can experience rate reductions of about 4%. This provides headroom for more investment to meet customer needs. Think of it by replacing expiring PPAs and building for returning ROA customers, we'd add 3,000 megawatts of new generation that's not yet in our plan. And this is without increasing customer bills at all, a clear win for our customers and a clear win for our investors. You can see the need for new generation in MISO’s most recent report. MISO updated their 2016 capacity forecast showing MISO will be short 1.5 gigawatts in Zone 7 by spring. With our newly purchased Jackson gas plant, we can provide sufficient capacity for our bundled customers. We can't however be sure if AES suppliers can do the same for those ROA customers. And by the way, our mix of coal field capacity has been reduced from over 40% to a third today, and as you can see in the appendix slide with coal plant closures next year, the mix will be below 25%. With our business model, we've been able to deliver consistent earnings growth of more than 7% each year for over a decade, through recessions, through adverse weather, through changing policy leadership and through anything else that came our way. As we do, we hope you to see this as a sustainable model for our customers and our investors for a decade ahead. As you can imagine, with this consistent investment growth, our operating cash flow as a percent of market cap has gone from less than our peers five years ago to greater than our peers today, with prospects that additional growth will provide an even larger cash flow. This is a nice place to be providing resources for the future, resources to invest more for our customers, more rate base growth and/or improve capital structure. So here is our sensitivity chart that we provide you each quarter to assist you with assessing our prospects. In this time of rising and volatile interest rates, it's comforting to know that our model is not very sensitive to changes in interest rates. At the utility, higher borrowing costs related to higher interest rates is largely offset by the impact of higher discount rates on our benefits and retiree programs and perhaps a higher return on equity in the future. At the parent, our practice includes pre-funding parent debt two years in advance and maintaining a smooth maturity schedule. This insulates us from substantial risk to change in interest rates. If for example interest rates rise from our plan by 100 basis points, the annual earnings impact would be less than a penny a share, and we already include high interest rates in our 10-year plan. Here is our report card for 2015. We’re in a good position and at the midway point with substantial benefit from the Arctic blast earlier in the year and better-than-planned cost reductions so far this year. We're putting the surplus to good use with reliability improvements for our utility customers and we’re accelerating outages to enhance the outlook for 2016. Continuing our mindset that focuses on customers and investors permits us to perform well. We hope you agree. We've achieved substantial improvements in customer value and customer satisfaction. We have the best cost reduction track record in the nation. We are in our 13th year of premium earnings and dividend growth, and we plan to continue this performance for some time. So thanks for your interest and your support. We appreciate your calling in, and we'd be delighted to take your questions. So operator, would you please open up the line?