Good day and welcome to the DTE Energy hosted Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today’s conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Anastasia Minor. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Dana and good morning everyone. Welcome to our 2014 year end earnings call. Before we get started, I would like to remind you to read the Safe Harbor statement on Page 2 of our presentation, including the reference to forward-looking statements. Our presentation also includes references to operating earnings, which is a non-GAAP financial measure. Please refer to the reconciliation of GAAP net income to operating earnings provided in the appendix of today’s presentation. With us this morning are Gerry Anderson, our Chairman and CEO and Peter Oleksiak, our Senior Vice President of Finance and CFO. We also have members of our management team with us to call on during the Q&A session. And with that, I would like to turn it over to Gerry to start our update this morning.

Well, thanks Anastasia and good morning to all of you and thanks for joining us. I think I am going to be able to give you a very positive assessment both of what we accomplished this past year and what we feel we are positioned to deliver this year in 2015. So, the agenda for the call is laid out on Slide 4. I am going to begin with a look back on the past year and then I will provide a summary of energy policy developments both in Michigan and in Washington. And I will wrap up my comments by taking it through a long-term growth update and then I will turn things over to Peter Oleksiak to provide a financial update and some closing thoughts. So, I am going to frame my look back on 2014 within DTE Energy’s system of priorities and those priorities are laid out on Slide 5. Those of you who have been on this call in recent years should recognize this system of properties. It does describe the way we think about our company and the way we run our company. And I will take you through it briefly just to re-familiarize you. So, we start things with our employees and this is a core focus for the company with a simple common sense that it’s hard to create a great company, if your culture and the energy of your people isn’t great. If you get that right, you can translate that into great customer service and to great continuous improvement and management of your costs and you can also translate it into people who are willing to work hard to grow your company. And if you get those right, then I think great customer service and good management of cost and growth…

Thanks, Gerry and good morning to everyone. Everyone who dialed in on a regular basis to this call knows, I would like to give a quick shot out to our Detroit Tigers, I feel compelled to do that here. Actually one week, exactly one week wake aways, saw spring training starts, so no Bowl predictions, cautiously optimistic and we will provide an update for early season update in the first quarter call. So, with that sort of commercial break, I would like to start with our financial update and our year end results in Slide 22. As Gerry mentioned earlier, DTE Energy’s 2014 operating earnings were $4.60 per share. For detailed breakdown of EPS by segment, please refer to the appendix, Slide 32. The appendix also includes a reconciliation to GAAP reported earnings. Slide 22 shows our year-over-year operating earnings by segment. I will focus on the middle column which is the 2014 results. Let me start first with the total earnings for our growth segments. 2014 operating earnings of $796 million were up $73 million or $0.37 per share. Our largest subsidiary, DTE Electric earned $528 million and was up $44 million over last year driven by our revenue decoupling amortization in the first half of the year and lower O&M expenses driven by reduced benefit cost and lean actions taken in the second half of the year. 2014 was a great year for electric utility given the weather-related challenges it faced. It was also the final year of a 4-year rate case payout strategy. DTE Gas 2014 earnings of $140 million were just below 2013 earnings as colder winter weather was more than offset by higher O&M expenses, including reinvestment. The appendix contains detailed year-over-year earning walks for our two utilities. Moving down the page, our gas storage…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And we will take our first question today from Michael Weinstein with UBS.

Good morning, it’s Julien here actually.

Hey Julien.

Good morning Julien.

Good morning. So I was particularly intrigued by your comments around full throttle if you will, can you expand on that little bit both with respect to kind of near-term opportunities, I mean how robust is that, what kind of upside versus what you have disclosed do you kind of see and then as you think about building out this business, I mean what are we talking about vis-à-vis your partnership and the ability to take that elsewhere was that also what you were getting at in that comment?

Yes, that was a comment around our gathering activities and what I meant to imply was our work with Southwestern around Bluestone last year was I would just say extremely busy. They – as they disclosed on their calls really are focusing capital there because it’s a good place for them to earn returns. And as they focus their drilling there we need to – we are between them and the market. So we are extremely busy this past year. I will tell you that maybe the most important continuous improvement project we had in our company this year was driving down gathering costs for Southwestern and becoming best in industry, yet undertaking that, because your ability to earn additional opportunities with gatherers is driven by how well you do it and never being in their way in terms of getting to market and just being consistent. We did as you know I think expand our agreement with them. So that will be leading to other activity with them in that region in expanded geographies, so that’s going to keep us busy for the next couple of years. And we do in that business line have an explicit goal to take the skill set that we have developed in Michigan and are working there in Pennsylvania to places like the Utica Shale and more broadly in the Marcellus Shale. So that’s probably what I was getting at.

Got it. And then just talking a little bit turning a little bit to Vector here I mean what’s the timeline here for getting a little bit more of an update, I suppose in some sense I was looking for data points sooner, I suppose the question is you alluded to the opportunities with NEXUS and Rover when do we find out about those kind of at a higher level?

I mean future growth opportunities or the way I would characterize it is that the agreements that were signed with NEXUS and Rover if you were to look at the earnings growth guidance that we have provided, those agreements fully supported the guidance that we have out there and what we need from Vector to fulfill those. I think the future growth of Vector really now comes as NEXUS and Rover mature and as volumes grow in the Utica, if you look at anybody’s projections of the Utica, they are going to see aggressive growth there and we fully expect that those volumes to go both north and south and to the mid-Atlantic, but a healthy portion will find their way north, because they are good markets. And I recently have had a good basis differential. So, we would expect as the overall volumes of the region grow, we will get our portion of those and that’s really what will drive Vector’s growth. In terms of timeframe, most of the projections you see of that growth on Vector happen pretty – that growth in the Utica happen at a pretty aggressive pace over the next 5 years. So, we don’t have anything firm now, but we would expect as that growth comes, the Vector should benefit.

Excellent. Yes, absolutely. And then just in terms of P&I, the renewable segment, if you could comment briefly here, just when you are thinking about just ‘15 versus ‘14, what’s kind of the shift there? I know it’s a specific question here, but it seems like kind of a nice improvement there.

Hey, Julien, this is Peter. The increase in earnings year-over-year in renewables in that sub-segment is related to the ramp up that we have been describing these wood waste generating plants. We have a few of them, actually all of them in service right now, so few of them are ramping up, we are going to see sizable increase year-over-year on that. And also we have some new biomass projects that were coming online.

We had a couple of large projects in California and one in North Carolina, large for landfill gas. Landfill gas projects in general are not huge, but these are in the 10 megawatt to 20 megawatt sort of range and that’s pretty big for those. So, those are adding as well.

Great. Well, thank you guys for the time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And we will take our next question from Dan Eggers with Credit Suisse.

Hey, good morning guys. Gerry, I guess just first on kind of the Michigan legislation in that process you are looking for, can you maybe give what you think the timelines going to be between the Governor’s March speech and when we start to see formation of legislation and when it could be taken to vote and how important, I guess associated with that is, how important is going to be the EPA rules on carbon to help initiate and shape that legislation?

Well, I think just to start with where you ended that have legislators and policymakers who haven’t been closely watching energy are being educated on the EPA regulation, it’s timeframe and how big a deal it is? It’s not like a big deal for our state, it’s every state, but beginning to understand what a big deal it is for Michigan, but in addition to that, Dan, my service come out with its capacity projections for the Midwest, the upper portion of MISO. And the place where there is a capacity shortfall is Michigan. And MISO is projected at 3 gigawatts in Michigan. So, in addition to the EPA actions, Michigan needs to act, because it has a capacity shortage in 2016. And not surprisingly, the amount of that capacity short is pretty much one-to-one with what the retail access load or choice load in the state is, because we and consumers are building for our customers and nobody is planning for or building for those retail access customers. So, that’s come into the lens as well that the state needs to act to address that capacity shortfall in 2016. And it needs to be clear about who is responsible for that. So, that’s a timing driver too and I think has got a lot of people realizing that we can’t wait on the EPA. Even EPA, if you think about it, we need to move now to have the processes in place, because this EPA regulation finalizes late summer. We have probably 2 years then to submit plans. And the fact that you are submitting plans means that you have been through some process, where you believe that you come to agreement with stakeholders to actually build what you have in your plant. Well, there is a lot that…

Thank you for that. And I guess Gerry just kind of on that $7 billion to $8 billion of 111(d) related spending did you guys see it. With the rules coming this summer and relatively tight timelines when do you think that starts creeping into the CapEx program and starts eking its way onto the EPS growth rate slides?

Well, we are seeing the first - kind of the first Echo’s of that whole thing right now is we are buying existing power plants that’s responding to capacity shortages in the near-term but its also beginning to position the fleet longer-term. In terms of new assets we could see some renewable build I think continuously between now and 2020 with larger projects beginning to show up in the late-teens and early-20s, those would be the combined cycle units. So our hope would be to spread this out over time as much as possible and not point load it, so that we can really manage customer rate increases in a ratable way. So I would expect that once we become a bit clearer on state policy we are going to begin to step our way into this.

So we should be looking maybe over the next year or so to seeing that CapEx number have to raise just as you guys flush out how quickly you have to respond?

I think we can be clearer on the sorts of assets that we will be investing in the timeframe once we get a plan put in place and a clear framework for that. And I do expect that if I look forward over the 5-year planning period that we will start pushing investments in to respond to this. The renewables you can move pretty quickly. The combined cycles as you know to permit and engineer and so forth take longer. So we couldn’t get those out until probably the late teens and earliest into the early-20s. But we will – that’s the timeframe we are targeting.

Okay. Thank you guys.

Thank you.

Thanks Dan.

And we will take our next question from Greg Gordon with Evercore Investment Banking.

Thanks. So I missed beginning of the call, I apologize, so if I am repeating something that you answered already forgive me. So can you quantify that this dovetails what you were just talking about and if you can quantify what the impact might be on your capital plan if you were therefore necessitated to pick up your pro rata share of the capacity shortfall?

The choice – Greg, this is Peter. The way to think about it our choice shortfall is about 900 megawatts. And we will take some short-term actions that comes back quickly, but long-term we will be feathering that into our long-term planning and base load generation.

To put it in a different way, as I said in my comments we don’t have a policy that makes it clear who is responsible for that roughly 1,000 megawatts. If that responsibility comes to us then we can’t do anything in terms of long-term assets in a short timeframe. So we will have to scramble to put together short-term solution, but it would mean that we would be building 900 more megawatts of some combination of renewable peaking and combined cycle assets. We don’t know the exact mix of that, but it would be roughly a 1,00 megawatts of additional construction that we would undertake.

Now, that was precisely my question. Thank you. Take care.

You bet.

And we will go next to Matt Tucker with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Good morning. Congrats on a great year.

Thank you.

Good morning Matt.

First question on vector, could you comment on any expected earnings uplift or degradation as you transition to the new contracts from the old ones?

No, the way this worked out is really nice for Vector. The expiring contracts have now been completely filled with the new volumes coming from Nexus to Rover. And as Gerry mentioned earlier it’s really nice with our earnings guidance and planning for Vector. And it sets up Vector nicely for future expansion. Now that it’s refilled.

Thanks Peter.

So to put it differently, no degradation and right on our plan.

Perfect. And then a couple on NEXUS, if you could just comment on the expected partnership structure, I noticed your contractor Fluor’s press release has mentioned you and Spectra as the lead sponsors? And also with respect to the potential expansion, I am just curious if you are in – if you’d say you are in active discussions even today on the possible expansion of NEXUS

So, let me start with the last question. What I would characterize on the additional open season is that at DTE and I think Spectra is very similar. We like to have 80% plus of the pipe contracted with firm contracts before we head into the engineering and construction. And with the initial open season and the work we did this past year, we achieved that, so we are moving ahead. But on any of these pipelines, the process then of expanding take really happens continuously right through the day you start the pipe. And so as our pipe has become more real and people realize we are moving ahead with it, people then begin to say well, maybe we got to look at attachments. So, we – as I mentioned in my comments, we got interest in additional load upstream of the pipe, upstream from Kensington. We also have load points along the path of the pipe that realize they could build out modest laterals and use the pipe for things that work for them. So, those are the sorts of things that are coming in. And as we think about the pipe, we are really trying now to evaluate and finalize the ultimate capacity of the pipe. And the work we are doing with these additional expressions of interest is going to help us clarify just what final capacity we want for the pipe and so forth. So, I hope that helps. I don’t know that it’s so much an expansion as it is trying to land on the capacity we built for the pipe and build additional support to undergird it.

Thanks. And if you could just comment on the expected partnership structure?

Yes, yes. I am sorry I forgot the first part. So, our number is still assumed that we are a third and Enbridge continues to work through. So, they have signed on to take capacity from the pipe, but I think they have this still in their capital allocation decision-making queue. And we consistently say we would love to have him on as a partner, but we and Spectra stand ready to take the project 50-50 if they decide they want to put their investments into other opportunities at the company. We don’t have clarity on that yet that’s really in their decision-making process.

Thanks. And just a final follow-up, given your long-term visibility on Vector has much improved and the visibility on the likelihood of NEXUS going forward is a lot better than at this time last year, does that impact your thinking at all about a potential MLP?

I think our statements in that are probably similar that we have done a lot of work looking at MLPs and understand that the quality of an MLP is very proportionate through the scale of assets that you have available and the length of time that those assets could be deployed over. And you see radically different quality from companies who don’t have much of a queue that they can utilize versus companies who have a long one. And the implied yields are extremely different. So, what we have concluded is that we really wouldn’t want to move at a scale that implies a low-quality MLP. And if we choose to do this, it will be after we play out at least the plan that we kind of have in front of us right now.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you.

And we will take our next question from Andrew Weisel with Macquarie Capital.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone.

Good morning, Andrew.

Just another question on Vector, it’s great that you refilled the capacity that were from expiring contracts, but I am a little curious to hear a bit more feedback from them as to why some of the existing guys didn’t renew and why we are not going to go forward with the expansion at least not now? Is that related to the pullback in gas over the past few months or any thoughts like that? And then on a related question, does that at all affect the potential for future Millennium expansions?

Andrew, this is Peter. The initial Vector pipeline you recall was really built to deliver gas from the west to the east. So, those additional foundational shippers that help underpin the economic stability in that pipe. It was really different basins in different purpose than today we are actually excited now to see that Vector has a role and purpose within the shale gas that’s in our region. And it really will be more of a producer driven pipe with our producers within our region. So I think it played out nicely for us and really we feel the pipe and it’s really a defined purpose now for Vector going forward.

Just to add to Peter’s comments back when Vector was build Canadian volumes floating to Chicago market and it was a pipe in many ways to take that gas into storage in Michigan and at Dawn. And you know what the dynamics of Canadian gas have been, they have changed pretty sharply. And so a number of the shippers and there were a couple of marketers in there as well who had capacity. That play just really wasn’t there with the same strength it had in past, so that was behind their not renewing and as Peter said the pipe really flipped through the pipe it’s now more focused on Utica. I do think it will be bidirectional so that Utica gas is going to be able to press its way into Illinois and Wisconsin markets and those are great markets as well as Michigan and Ontario.

Great. And Millennium thoughts, they did potential expansion there and when we might see some updates timing wise?

I think you asked whether there was any connection between the two, there really isn’t Millennium interestingly was initially build as a pipe to take Michigan and Dawn storage to New York and the Northeast and it’s been overwhelmed by Marcellus Shale dynamic. So it’s now a bidirectional pipe that’s all about Marcellus Shale. If we continue to expand that pipe as fast as we can because the volumes there are growing so heavily, the region is constrained for export capacity, you know that the Northeast is looking for more path so the discussions are very active about all of that.

There are some early conversations we are having with LDCs in the East Coast. So, if there is an expansion opportunity, it will be more in the ’17, ’18 timeframe.

Great.

Thanks for the question.

One more if I can, a follow-up. The electric utility CapEx came down by about $130 million compared to the EII deck is that just related to the actual purchase price from Renaissance or are there any other changes to ’15 of the longer-term outlook?

That was as we are refining our capital planning and this is what we always call – characterize it as an early outlook. There is the normal timing of it with some environmental related timing, generation related timing. It really was not related to the RFPs.

Okay. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

And we will take our next question from Jonathan Arnold with Deutsche Bank.

Good morning Jonathan.

Good morning Jonathan.

And Jonathan please check your mute button, we are unable to hear you.

Sorry, is that better?

Yes, we can hear you, please go ahead sir.

Okay. Good morning guys. I had noticed Gerry in the opening remarks you talked about your long-term growth goal of 5% to 6% and you have commented on the actual having being closer to 7% and then you said you were feeling confident about being able to continue with strong growth, are you – were you suggesting that you feel confident continuing to deliver about the range given the above largest CapEx plan you had in while etcetera, I was just want to make sure I didn’t take that out of context?

Well, I am happy to answer it. So you are right that whether you pick the start year 2008, 2009 the growth has been closer to 7%. And I think we have also been open with shareholders that internally we target higher than the 5% to 6% so that we are able to hit that with consistency. I have always said that if you target equals your plan that doesn’t give you any ability to offset unexpected events. So we do target higher and our goal every year is to come in higher. And in recent years we have been able to do that. So I hope we can in the future, that’s our goal, but we put the 5% to 6% out there because it’s something we are absolutely committed to achieving with a higher degree of predictability. Does that answer it?

Yes, thank you.

And we will take our final question today from Paul Patterson with Glenrock Associates.

Good morning, how are you?

Very good.

Good morning Paul.

I have – most of my questions have been answered, so just quickly on Rule 111(d) and just projected sales growth in general. As you know, the EPA sort of making a big deal about energy efficiency as being a big driver, and I was just wondering, a – what do you see sort of the normalized sales growth over the next few years? And also are there any opportunities for you guys to actually make money maybe deploying energy efficiency strategies or something for your customers and just sort of innovatively if you guys have gotten any sort of – I don’t know, I know that’s sort of – it’s not necessarily traditional, but I just thought maybe you guys might be thinking about that?

So, a couple of comments, it’s clear from the way the EPA has handled energy efficiency. And if you are in the inner workings of the rule, it’s really a carbon intensity target and they have put energy efficiency in the denominator. So, it actually behaves like megawatts. And what they are trying to do by doing that is encourage deployment. I think our state and our administration want to see good high-quality energy efficiency investments deployed in Michigan. So, I am certain that it will be a core part of our response plan and it’s one of the ways frankly you can keep the rate impacts of this and the affordability impacts with customers more manageable. So, we are working hard to think about the right energy efficiency investments. In terms of the impacts on growth, you have seen it around the country that it’s muted, slowed and in some cases put a slight negative tilt on growth. In a lot of places that have been at this time a long time, it does flatten growth, which is a good thing, but it generally doesn’t put it into some, I am talking electric now, it doesn’t put it into a kind of a secular decline like you saw in the gas industry, where there were significant volume reductions over time. I don’t expect that in the electric industry, because we keep adding electric end-use load and so the two are really offsetting each other. And so while we expect modest growth to flat growth in our electric demand, we don’t expect decline. And so we think that we are going to be – the capacity we are expecting to build out is on the order of what we are dealing with now plus a bit. That could be impacted by things like automotive load shifting. If you get close to some of folks, the cafe standards, there is a lot of thought that as you get into the later years of the cafe standards, it’s going to be hard to comply without shift of petroleum into electric. And if that happens, it really affects demand for electricity. So, all those sorts of things will affect it in the end. And I hope that answered your question?

It does. Just what – regards to flat growth, I mean, your service territory, what do you guys – could you quantify that a little bit in terms of what that sort of means in terms of just from your internal modeling kind of perspective?

We plan on about 0.5% growth in ‘15. We are forecasting now is 0.5% growth to 2014. So within that, I would say the underlying growth before energy efficiency is probably about a 1% higher, but we are counting on above 1% of efficiency in that.

Okay, thanks a lot.

Thank you.

And gentlemen, I will turn the call back over to you for any additional or closing remarks.

Well, look I will wrap up quickly just by saying that we feel great about 2014. I repeat what I said at the outset. I feel great about the way we are positioned for 2015 as well. So, as I said to our employees the other day, we have had about a half dozen years of really strong both performance and financial results here at the company and I feel good about making 2015 the seventh in the string. So, with that, we will close up look forward to talking with all of you and seeing you in the near future. Thanks for being on the call.