Earnings Labs

IDACORP, Inc. (IDA)

Q2 2019 Earnings Call· Fri, Aug 2, 2019

$145.34

-0.28%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to IDACORP’s Second Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded and webcast live. A complete replay will be available from the end of the day for a period of 12 months on the company’s website at idacorpinc.com. [Operator Instructions] Now I will turn the call over to Justin Forsberg, Director of Investor Relations and Treasury.

Justin Forsberg

Analyst

Thanks, Carrie, and welcome, everyone. Before the markets opened this morning, we issued and posted to IDACORP’s website both out second quarter 2019 earnings release and our corresponding Form 10-Q. The slides will be using to supplement today’s call are also available on our website. We will refer to those slides during the call. As noted on Slide 2, our presentation today will include forward-looking statements, including earnings guidance, which represent our current views on what the future holds. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which are listed on Slide 2. This cautionary note is also laid out in more detail in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which you should review. These risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from statements made today and we caution against placing undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. As shown on Slide 3, on today’s call we have Darrel Anderson, IDACORP’s President and Chief Executive Officer; and Steve Keen, Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. We also have other company representatives available to help answer any questions you may have after Steve and Darrel provide updates. On Slide 4, we present our quarterly financial results. IDACORP’s 2019 second quarter earnings per diluted share were $1.05, a decrease of $0.18 per share over last year’s second quarter. IDACORP’s earnings per diluted share for the first six months of 2019 were $1.90, a decrease of $0.05 per share over the first six months of 2018. Today, we also raised our full year 2019 earnings guidance estimate to the range of $4.35 to $4.50 per diluted share. I will now turn the call over to Steve.

Steve Keen

Analyst

Thanks, Justin, and welcome, everyone. Despite some challenging weather, we had a good quarter and have improved our outlook for the full year. As Justin mentioned, combined with the strong first quarter performance year-to-date, our earnings are only $0.05 less than last year. Customer growth has continued to increase Idaho Power’s – in Idaho Power service area with an annual growth rate of 2.5% over the last 12 months. This growth, along with lower expenses the last year’s second quarter, partially offset the decreases in revenues resulting from cool and wet springtime weather conditions. Turning to Slide 5, our reconciliation of changes from the second quarter of 2018 to the second quarter of this year starts with customer growth which added $4.2 million to operating income in the quarter. Overall usage per customer, mostly related to irrigation sales, decreased operating income by $13.4 million. You can see an increase of $1.8 million in fixed cost adjustment revenues next on the table which offsets most of the portion of lower usage per customer that relates to residential and small general service customers. Precipitation in the Boise area for the quarter was 85% above normal levels and 93% higher than last year. In addition, overall cooling degree days during the quarter was 13% below normal and 70% less than in 2018. Next on the table, net retail revenues per megawatt hour decreased operating income by $7 million. The settlement stipulations associated with last year’s tax reform implementation on June 1 reduced revenues more significantly in this year’s second quarter as 2019 reflects the amounts we expected for the ongoing full quarter. To a lesser extent, changes in the customer sales mix decreased retail revenues per megawatt hour as a greater percentage portion of the quarter’s sales went to industrial customers in lower…

Darrel Anderson

Analyst

Thanks, Steve. And we appreciate everyone joining us on today’s call. As Steve noted, a mild wet spring did lead to lower energy sales in the second quarter compared with last year’s. Still the company remains on track to meet our financial targets for the year, and we have made substantial progress on several important initiatives during the second quarter. On Slide 8, we see that customer growth remains strong at a rate of 2.5% over the past 12 months. This is an increase from the 2.4% growth noted at the end of the first quarter. As new customers move to our service area, our company benefits from increased energy sales and further business development opportunities. The clean, reliable, affordable energy Idaho Power provides remains a key driver for continued economic growth in our region. Idaho Power continues to experience robust growth in the pipeline of new and potential large business customers, particularly in the food processing, manufacturing and technology sectors. Several notable large load projects came online during the second quarter, including a $30 million expansion finalized by Syngenta Corp production in Nampa, east of Boise – excuse me, west of Boise. 175,000 square-foot facility will manage most of Syngenta’s North American corn trade conversion work, and it will be a winter peaking load. We also energized a large load project for Oak Valley Dairy in Burley and a major expansion of the wastewater treatment facility for Jerome, a city in the southern region of our service area that has been the recipient of a significant increase in new business. We also expect additional commercial projects to begin taking service later this year and beyond. Moody’s current forecast of gross domestic product in Idaho Power service area predicts growth at 3.6% in 2019 and 4.3% in 2020. Employment within…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from Chris Ellinghaus of Williams Capital.

Chris Ellinghaus

Analyst

Hey, guys. How are you?

Darrel Anderson

Analyst

Hey, Chris. How are you doing?

Steve Keen

Analyst

Hey, Chris.

Chris Ellinghaus

Analyst

Good. Steve, if I look at the usage and the FCA adjustments, I think you said that’s primarily irrigation, which is what you would expect with the FCA. Can we impute there that the irrigation impact was something like $10 million, $11 million?

Steve Keen

Analyst

It’s certainly the majority of that number, yes. And we kind of anticipated you would be taking a look at that, and I think the one thing this year is a little unique and actually it’s been up like this. But if you look back at last year, it is fairly close to a normal weather year. It’s about as close as we get. The temperatures might have been off slightly but precip was really close to normal. And so if you look at where we are off of that this year, that’s kind of a decent proxy, not 100% of that adjustment of $13 million, but it’s a good portion of it.

Chris Ellinghaus

Analyst

Okay. Yes, I was thinking netting that against the FCA would be sort of…

Steve Keen

Analyst

Yes. You need, yes, an FCA counter piece that relates to the small business, the small commercial and residential. And it’s not 100% either, but it’s pretty close. So that gives you an idea of the magnitude of what’s in that $13 million. You take that, the math you did is pretty close.

Chris Ellinghaus

Analyst

Okay. What was July’s weather like? Did it meet NOAA’s expectations?

Steve Keen

Analyst

I don’t know if I heard an exact, but it’s – I don’t know if NOAA hit their expectations but…

Darrel Anderson

Analyst

Chris, this is Darrel. We were not as warm as last year in this July. So it was not a lot of precip, but it was still warm but not as warm as it was last year. And we don’t have the numbers as it relates to normal. But from a comparative year-over-year basis, I’ll just tell you as we sit here today, if you look at the next 10 days, it’s pretty warm. It’s coming up – we have a couple of triple-digit days come on and high 90s, and so we’re – I think summer may be riding just a little bit later than it was last year. So it’s a good heating trend that – here in the electricity business.

Steve Keen

Analyst

Chris, the one – if there’s a comforting item to it, it’s the, as Darrel mentioned, the precipitation wasn’t anything at all like it was earlier. So I don’t think that would have had an impact on irrigation, but it’s still going on. It does taper off as the season moves through. But we didn’t have the wetness that we did earlier that really that was probably the biggest thing that impacted irrigation was how moist it was.

Chris Ellinghaus

Analyst

Right. Darrel, you sort of mentioned that there was some other business development sort of in the pipeline. Can you give us any color about what you’re seeing?

Darrel Anderson

Analyst

So I may have mentioned a couple of entities that actually have – actually are coming online, new companies that are actually generating or taking energy from us now. We’ve got a series that are in the pipeline. I can’t refer to any of them directly today, but I will just tell you that our pipeline continues to be robust as I look at that. And it’s – again, as I mentioned in my comments, it’s really driven by a couple of things. One of them is price, is the affordability side of it. But also as entities are looking for clean energy, a place – the land for clean energy, they always see – they know that we are already in a good position from a clean perspective. And so that just I think enhances at least our scorecard with respect to some of these enterprises so.

Chris Ellinghaus

Analyst

And the IRP – the inquiries that you referred to that led to you doing some more modeling from the IRP, was that related to suspect load forecast or suspect growth in customers? Or what was it that was a question mark that led to the additional modeling?

Darrel Anderson

Analyst

So Chris, it was really about – remember, this is a new modeling system that we used this year. And the – what was – the question that came up were around west-wide versus Idaho-specific. And what came out of it was really we needed to run some additional scenarios on Idaho-specific versus just the west-wide applications. So I think that’s the main thing. And these are just kind of standard inquiries that came up as people ask questions about the IRP as part of the normal process. So there wasn’t anything special particularly. But we noted that it appeared that we should run some additional scenarios that focused on Idaho-specific.

Chris Ellinghaus

Analyst

Okay. Thanks, guys. I appreciate the details.

Darrel Anderson

Analyst

Thanks, Chris.

Steve Keen

Analyst

Thanks, Chris.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] That concludes the question-and-answer session for today. Mr. Anderson, I will turn the conference back to you.

Darrel Anderson

Analyst

Carrie, thank you, and thanks for all that were on the call today. We appreciate your continued interest in IDACORP. And we hope you enjoy the rest of the week. Thanks much.

Operator

Operator

That concludes today’s conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.