Thank you for holding, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to your Alliant Energy's Third Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Susan Gille, Investor Relations Manager at Alliant Energy.

Good morning. I would like to thank all of you on the call and webcast for joining us today. We appreciate your participation. With me here today are John Larsen, Chairman, President and CEO; and Robert Durian, Senior Vice President and CFO; as well as other members of the senior management team. Following prepared remarks by John and Robert, we will have time to take questions from the investment community. We issued a news release last night, announcing Alliant Energy's third quarter and year-to-date financial results, updated our 2019 earnings guidance range, and announced the 2020 earnings guidance and common dividend target. The earnings release also provided our annual capital expenditure plan through 2023. This release, as well as supplemental slides that are referenced during today's call are available on the investor page of our website at www.alliantenergy.com. Before we begin, I need to remind you the remarks we make on this call and our answers to your questions include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks that could cause actual results to be materially different. Those risks include, among others, matters discussed in Alliant Energy's press release issued last night and in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. In addition, this presentation contains references to non-GAAP financial measures. The reconciliation between non-GAAP and GAAP measures are provided in the earnings release and our quarterly report on Form 10-Q, which is available on our website at www.alliantenergy.com. At this point, I will turn the call over to John.

Thank you, Sue. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I look forward to sharing highlights of our strong year-to-date financial and operational performance, along with sharing key elements of our plan to power what's next for our customers and communities. Robert will provide more details on our financial results, our financing plans, and our capital expenditure plan. Last night in our earnings release, we increased our earnings guidance for 2019, based on the sales performance experienced so far this year, which has been largely driven by weather. Our updated guidance reflects a $0.06 per share increase from the previous midpoint. We are forecasting another year of 5% to 7% growth, our ninth year in a row, and a track record we intend to keep up. For 2020, we expect earnings between $2.34 and $2.48 per share. The midpoint of this range dollars, $2.41, is a 7% increase from our forecasted 2019 temperature-normalized earnings per share of $2.25. Keeping with our plan to grow dividends commensurate with earnings growth, our Board of Directors has approved a 7% increase in our targeted annual common stock dividend to $1.52 per share. Later in this call, Robert will share more details about our financial results and guidance targets. Last night, we also shared our five-year investment forecast, which totals $6.8 billion. Our investment plan reflects our continued journey to accelerate renewable energy, a path we've been on for more than a decade. Over the last year, we've been developing a clean energy blueprint. The first phase of this blueprint outlined several areas of investment, with a focus on putting renewable energy to work for our Wisconsin customers and communities. Improving economics, sustainability goals, and delivering on customer expectations are key drivers for our transition to renewable energy. Last week, we announced…

Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. Yesterday, we announced third quarter earnings of $0.94 per share, compared to non-GAAP earnings of $0.85 per share in the third quarter of 2018. Our higher earnings year over year were driven by higher revenue requirements due to an increasing rate base, and the timing of income tax expense. These higher earnings were partially offset by higher depreciation and financing expenses. We provided additional details on the earnings variance drivers for the quarter on Slides 2 and 3. In the first nine months of this year, temperatures in our service territory have increased retail electric and gas margins by approximately $0.05 per share. In 2018, the year-to-date temperature impacts, net of reserves, for WPL's earnings sharing mechanism and additional performance pay expense were also a $0.05 per share increase in earnings. As John mentioned, last night we issued our consolidated 2020 earnings guidance range of $2.34 to $2.48 per share. The key drivers of the 7% growth in EPS are related to investments in our core utility business, including WPL's West Riverside generating facility and IPL's wind expansion program. These investments were reflected in WPL's approved electric rates for 2020, and IPL's retail electric rate review settlement, which is subject to the Iowa Utilities Board final decision. Our guidance assumes IPL's new 2020 electric base rates will go into effect in the first quarter of next year. The 2020 guidance range assumes a 1.5% growth in electric sales when compared to temperature-normalized sales for 2019 . We are forecasting most of this sales growth from commercial and industrial customers. The details of our capital expenditure plan are shown on Slide 4. For your convenience, we provided a walk from the previous capital plan to our current capital plan on Slide 5. You will see on…

Thank you, Mr. Durian. At this time, the company will open the call to questions from members of the investment community. Alliant Energy's management will take as many questions as they can within the one-hour timeframe for this morning's call. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Julien Dumoulin-Smith with Bank of America.

Hi, good afternoon. This is Alex Morgan dialing in for Julien. Thanks so much for taking my question. Good morning. I was hoping you might be able to give us a little bit more commentary around your dividend growth rate versus your EPS growth rate, and more or less kind of discuss your different trajectories there.

Yes. As John indicated in his prepared remarks, we generally have grown dividends in line with our earnings growth, in that 5% to 7%, which you've seen that consistently over the last couple of years, including our projections for 2020, so no real differences between that. We currently have our dividend payout ratio on the bottom half of our 60% to 70% targeted range, but we're generally comfortable with that, as we're going through more of a heavy CapEx cycle right now.

Okay, thank you so much. My second and final question is just, if you have any more information about the equity issuance that we should be seeing in 2020? Whether that be potentially a block issuance, how we should be thinking about the ATM going forward and then beyond 2020, what we should more or less be thinking about when it comes to equity for the company?

Yes, as we announced last night and this morning, we're planning on issuing up to $250 million of new common equity for 2020. To answer your question, beyond 2020 right now, we do not expect any material equity issuances. We do have a direct plan where individual sharers are allowed to reinvest their dividends, which generates roughly about $25 million a year in proceeds. We expect that to continue on beyond 2020, but that's the only equity we see in the foreseeable future. Regarding the remaining $225 million for 2020, we have had success in the past issuing equity under ATM programs, when we've had smaller needs for equity. Last year, as many of you are aware, we did issue an equity forward for a larger equity issuance of $375 million. This amount, at $225 million really gives us a lot of flexibility to use either one of those types of programs in the future. I had also indicated that the timing of this will largely be dependent on our financing needs and the market conditions, so also a lot of flexibility there. We have not yet determined what method to use, but see, like I said, a lot of flexibility in our opportunities going forward.

Okay, thank you so much. That's all from me. Have a great day.

Our next question comes from Shar [ph] with Guggenheim Partners.

Hey guys, how is it going? It's actually James for Shar. I just wanted to ask on the new Wisconsin solar, could you remind us what the recovery route for that would look like? Is it a rider, is it the base rate cases?

Yes, this is John. We would see that as being, as Robert noted in his remarks, we would be looking to file the first regulatory filing for that in the first part of 2020. That would be a CPCN, so that would be through the normal regulatory process and rate review event.

Okay, got it, yes. Just on the quarter, one of your peers saw some weaker industrial load. It looks like you guys were kind of flat, maybe the customer count was down a little. Are you seeing anything of concern? I know you've had C&I growth in your go-forward, but just any weakness you saw this quarter?

James, we've seen somewhat lower temperature-normalized sales relative to last year. I think through the first nine months of the year, our temperature-normalized electric sales were about 0.7% lower than last year. This has largely been in our Iowa jurisdiction with our larger industrial customers, due to various operating and business issues with those individual customers, including experienced some pressure as a result of the agricultural economy challenges, because of the ongoing trade issues. But we are very fortunate, we've got a very diversified mix of industrial customers, more agricultural-based in Iowa, and more manufacturing-based in Wisconsin, so nothing significant. I would note too that the lower sales that we have seen are from our industrial customers, so they have generally lower margins, so it's not been enough to have any material impact on our variance drivers for earnings. The economies in the two states as a measure of unemployment are remaining strong, they are well below the national average, and we have seen some growth in our customer accounts. I think we've added about 5,000 electric customers relative to this time last year. So, all in all, no concerns from us, but we're definitely watching some of the ongoing trade issues as it impacts our agricultural-based economies in the two states.

Got it. Thanks, guys.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question will come from Andrew Weisel with Scotiabank.

Good morning, everyone. Congrats on the IPL settlement. I've got a couple of questions, I know it still has to be approved, but my first question is, I know you had a lot of intervenors on board, maybe 15 or so. Of the parties that didn't participate, what were some of the sticking points? Do you see those as potentially turning into a big deal?

Yes, Andrew. I'll maybe start out. We had many of the intervenors that did sign on, so we are very pleased with that. There are a number of parties that intervene just to be part of the process, so I would probably characterize it as, those that had most of the interest in the rate case were signed-on parties to our ultimate settlement. But again, there are some parties that are part of the rate proceeding, which is typical in any rate proceeding. I'll ask Robert if there's anything else you want to add on to that.

No, I'd say the ones that did not sign on were just there to more learn about the process and for information purposes, not necessarily to influence the process.

Yes. Thanks for the question.

Okay, so from what you can tell then, there are no debated points, anything around rate design, perhaps? Or, are they more fine-tuning issues, in your mind?

Yes, just to be clear, as part of the settlement process, we really aligned around the revenue requirements. The rate design issues still are pending, and we had to go through a hearing process with the Electric Rate Review to discuss those issues. Those were not part of the settlement process, and will be decided by the Iowa Utilities Board when they make their final decision by the end of this year.

Got it. Okay, that makes sense. And then similarly, I believe there's a lot of talk about the rider for renewables and you've got, as you mentioned, 1,000 MW in Iowa by the end of next year. Can you may be talk about your latest thinking about whether you might want to file again in 2021 or 2022? All assuming that the rider is in the final IUB decision, that is.

We really see the renewable energy rider as a win from a perspective with that, so we think the chances of us having to file again next year are very remote at this point, assuming it gets approved by the Iowa Utilities Board. With that rider, and the fact that most of the rate-based additions we see in 2020 are with the wind projects we're putting into service in Iowa, we don't expect a need in 2020 to file another rate case.

Okay, great. One last one on the CapEx walk. You showed the buckets there, I appreciated the reconciling, basically, the old forecast versus the new one. It looks like a good amount of spending was pushed from 2019 to 2020. Was there anything specific you can point to as far as an overall trend, or is that just a bunch of individual things that happened to all be moving in the same direction?

I think it's more of the latter, Andrew. What we saw is in 2019, we have had some extreme weather conditions in our service territory. We had a very extreme cold spell in the first quarter of 2019. We've also had, I would say, wetter-than-normal conditions, and that created a few challenges for us when it comes to some of the wind farms that we're trying to put into service in 2020. Nothing significant. We're very confident that we're still going to get these wind projects in on time and at or below budget, but they have pushed out some of those wind projects, maybe a few months, and so you see a little bit of that spilling over into 2020. But no concerns from my perspective

All right, thank you. That's very helpful.

Ms. Gille, there are no further questions at this time.

With no more questions, this concludes our call. A replay will be available through November 14, 2019 at 888-203-1112 for US and Canada, or 719-457-0820 for international. Callers should reference conference ID 4175543 and PIN 9578. In addition, an archive of the conference call and a script of the prepared remarks made on the call will be available on the investors section of our company's website later today. We thank you for your continued support of Alliance Energy, and feel free to contact me with any follow-up questions.

Well, thank you. And that does concludes today's conference. We do thank you for your participation. Have a wonderful day.