Earnings Labs

NRG Energy, Inc. (NRG)

Q4 2013 Earnings Call· Fri, Feb 28, 2014

$149.86

-3.22%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-1.69%

1 Week

-1.27%

1 Month

+8.98%

vs S&P

+7.93%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Q4 2013 NRG Energy Inc. Earnings conference call. My name is Grant and I’ll be your operator for today. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. We will conduct a question and answer session toward the end of this conference. If you wish to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to withdraw your question, press star followed by two. If at any time during the call you require assistance, please press star then zero and an operator will be happy to assist you. As a reminder, this call is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Chad Plotkin, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Chad Plotkin

President

Thank you Grant and good morning everyone. I’d like to welcome you to NRG’s full year and fourth quarter earnings call. This morning’s call is being broadcast live, over the phone and via webcast which can be located on our website at www.nrgenergy.com. You can access the call, associated presentation material, as well as a replay of the call on the Investor Relations section of our website. Because this call, including the presentation and Q&A session will be limited to one hour, we ask that you limit yourself to only one question with just one follow-up. In addition, as this is an earnings call for NRG Energy, any statements made on this call that may pertain to NRG Yield will be provided from NRG’s perspective. Before we begin, I urge everyone to review the Safe Harbor statement provided in today’s presentation which explains the risks and uncertainties associated with future events in the forward-looking statements made in today’s press release and presentation materials. We caution you to consider the important risk factors contained in our press release and other filings with the SEC that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements in the press release and this conference call. In addition, please note that the date of this conference call is Friday, February 28, 2014 and any forward-looking statements that we make today are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of this date. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of future events except as required by law. During this morning’s call, we’ll refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures of the company’s operating and financial results. For complete information regarding our non-GAAP financial information, the most directly comparable GAAP measures and a quantitative reconciliation of those figures, please refer to today’s press release and this presentation. With that, I’ll turn the call over to David Crane, NRG’s President and Chief Executive Officer.

David Crane

Management

Thank you Chad, and good morning everyone. As always, joining me today and also presenting are Kirk Andrews, our Chief Financial Officer, as well as Mauricio Gutierrez, our Chief Operating Officer. Additionally and available for questions, we’re joined by our Head of Commercial Operations, Chris Moser; Elizabeth Killinger, who is Head of Texas Retail for us, and Jim Steffes, who is Head of Northeast Retail. While as we sit here in sub-Arctic Princeton, New Jersey waiting for another 12 to 18 inches of snow on Sunday, it’s an exciting time for us in the power business, which doesn’t happen that often, so let’s get right into talking our results. So if you’re following with the presentation, beginning on Slide 3, I actually want to start with an apology to you, our shareholders. You may recall back in August during our second quarter earnings call, based largely on the relentlessly moderate summer weather across all of our core markets, we shifted downward our original 2013 financial guidance as we felt at the time that we did not have enough levers within management control to compensate for the weak summer and the time remaining in the year. That was a bitter pill for us to swallow because never before had we had to reduce guidance outside of the original range, so you may recall at the time I also vowed to you that NRG management would do everything within our control to try and get us back to our original guidance range. Today, I’m very pleased to report that with a very timely assist from early winter weather, we actually succeeded in getting back within our original range with $2.636 billion of adjusted EBITDA and an above-target outcome for free cash flow before growth of $1.282 billion. This performance was the result…

Mauricio Gutierrez

Chief Operating Officer

Thank you and good morning everyone. As David mentioned, we were able to recover from otherwise weak market conditions for most of 2013 to deliver another year of results within our original guidance. This was largely driven by excellent execution in the fourth quarter which has continued into the important winter months of 2014. Before I go into the results for the year, I want to take a moment to thank the men and women at NRG who in the bitter cold and snow that plagued the northeast did an exemplary job of keeping the grid stable and the lights on during the extreme cold weather conditions. Their dedication and professionalism makes us all proud to be part of this company. On Slide 8, let me spend a few moments reviewing the goals I provided you last year for the operations group, where I’m proud to say we delivered across the board. First and foremost, we delivered on our promise to employees and shareholders with best-in-class safety and operational performance across what is now the largest competitive generation portfolio in the country. We successfully integrated GenOn’s 20 gigawatt generation portfolio into our operations, driving benefits from the additional (indiscernible) outside of Texas. Our relentless focus on cost and (indiscernible) synergies also paid off. We identified close to $120 million in operational synergies from the GenOn portfolio and leveraged that effort to achieve almost the same amount under our FORNRG program. On the construction and development front, we finished an unusually busy year with the commissioning of the Ivanpah project in December. This brings the total number of new plants commissioned in 2013 to nine, an unprecedented number with a total generating capacity of 2400 megawatts. The program was on time and on budget, and I want to congratulate our (indiscernible)…

Kirk Andrews

Chief Financial Officer

Thank you Mauricio and good morning everyone. Beginning with the financial summary on Slide 16, our 2013 financial results now place us proudly back in line with our original 2013 guidance. Specifically, adjusted EBITDA totaled $2.636 billion, exceeding the upper end of our most recent guidance range by $36 million, driven marginally by colder than expected weather during the last two months of the year, positively impacting both wholesale which ended 2013 with nearly $1.8 billion in adjusted EBITDA, and our retail businesses which delivered $614 million. Finally, NRG Yield finished 2013 with $244 million of adjusted EBITDA. The favorable weather late in the year combined with operational improvements and lower capital expenditures drove free cash flow before growth to $1.282 billion in 2013, exceeding the upper end of our guidance range by $107 million and providing further liquidity improvements and a strong base for 2014 capital available for allocation. NRG’s 2013 capital allocation plan again struck a successful balance among balance sheet management, value-enhancing investments, and return of shareholder capital. We continue our consistent focus on prudent balance sheet management by paying down over $900 million of debt, which included $575 million to redeem the 2014 GenOn senior notes and $200 million to repurchase NRG senior notes of various maturities. We reinvested in the growth of our company with over $800 million in acquisition and growth investments, enhancing our generation portfolio, further increasing our renewables platform, and expanding our retail businesses and customer offerings. Finally during the year, we returned $170 million through a combination of common stock dividends and share repurchases. Now turning briefly to 2014 guidance on Slide 17, while exceptional operational performance combined with effective risk management helped to give NRG a strong start to this year, we are reaffirming our guidance ranges for both 2014…

David Crane

Management

Thank you Kirk. As Mauricio did, the sort of overall goals and objectives for the company, which we always do on this call, appear on Slide 22. You can see our priorities for the 12 months ahead and this will allow you to follow along and hold us accountable for our progress. As you see from the list, we don’t lack either ambition or in things to do, but I think one of the things I’m proudest of is that we’ve proven in the past that we can succeed at this company on multiple fronts simultaneously. So with that, Grant, I think we will open the phone lines for some questions.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Jon Cohen from ISI. Please go ahead. Jon Cohen – ISI: Thanks, good morning guys. A couple questions – Mauricio, last year, you guys left yourself pretty open to the Texas summer and the weather really didn’t show up, which caused the spark spreads to collapse early in the season, and you can see that on your Page 12, the delta between the ’13 and ’14 spark spreads. So just given that the outcomes are pretty primary and the experience you had last year, has that impacted your thinking about how you’re going to hedge the Texas summer going into ’14?

Mauricio Gutierrez

Chief Operating Officer

Hey Jon, good morning. As you can see on our hedge table, for 2014 around our (indiscernible) portfolio, we’re pretty hedged. Where we have maintained the length has been around our gas portfolio and that, as you can appreciate for competitive reasons, we don’t disclose particularly as we go into the summer. But what I will tell you is we are evaluating the open position that we have relative to last year. From a fundamental standpoint, it was tighter last year. We’re seeing some plants coming online this year, and we’re taking that into consideration. Now keep in mind that we also have some positive developments. One is the increasing price (audio interference) to 7000 and then the second one is the implementation of ORDC, which would improve potential scarcity pricing. So you know, we’re balancing both the fundamental view that we have and some of the market changes, so of course it always influences our view but I would say—you know, that’s what I would give you in terms of color on how we’re approaching (indiscernible). Jon Cohen – ISI: Okay, thanks. I think I missed about 50% of what you said. I don’t know if it was just me or everybody, but I’m sure it was good so I’ll go back and read the transcript. Then another question for Kirk – there’s been a lot of chatter among the fixed income community recently about certain coverage thresholds being breached at one of the GenOn subs and speculation as to how that’s going to impact the rest of the GenOn structure. Appreciating that there’s still a lot of uncertainties and that your first maturity is sometime away, can you talk generally about what the issue is and whether you’re concerned about it, and maybe a few of the options that you have available to deal with it?

Kirk Andrews

Chief Financial Officer

Sure, Jon. Well first of all, as you’ll read later as we file our 10-K, there are a number of distribution tests within the GenOn (indiscernible), most notably there are three. There’s one at GenOn which is exactly what you’re used to seeing in our unsecured notes, which is the distribution test at 5.75 times corporate debt to corporate EBITDA, and then both GenOn and REMA have fixed charge coverage ratios. GenOn’s ratio is a trailing ratio. We were kind of right on top of that, slightly over it as of the end of the year. GENMA and REMA are slightly below their fixed charge coverage ratio test, and importantly those tests are both backward looking on a 12-month basis and forward looking. So currently, the cash that I went through on the liquidity slide is subjected to those various tests, but given that we reserve a certain amount of cash for liquidity needs within the complex and there is an ample amount of cash within that, we’re comfortable in the current environment; and while certainly one could prognosticate about what the future impact might hold in terms of where the commodity price environment is, et cetera, from my perspective you look no further than the unusual events especially that occurred in the northeast, where a lot of those plants are located, and how some of the upside can change the fortunes especially from a cash and liquidity standpoint. So currently we’re quite comfortable with the liquidity levels across the complex, and there are various means at our disposal to manage around that, most notably as I indicated in my remarks, we’ve got that inter-company credit facility between NRG and GenOn to help support the liquidity needs moving forward. But as I said, there is ample liquidity currently there today. Jon Cohen – ISI: Okay, great. Thanks a lot, guys.

David Crane

Management

Thanks Jon. Is there another question? Well, I don’t know if people on the phone are having communications issues, but we’re not hearing anything here. Jon Cohen – ISI: I can just keep asking questions if you want.

David Crane

Management

Yeah! Well Jon, that sort of depends on whether they’re easy questions, but why don’t you go ahead. Jon Cohen – ISI: Why is NRG such a good company?

David Crane

Management

Because it’s followed by such great sell-side analysts! Okay, go ahead, Jon. Jon Cohen – ISI: No, I mean I guess one other question is just as you talk about your distributed generation strategy, do you see the potential for maybe some distributed generation assets being dropped into NYLD? Could that be a financing vehicle going forward for—so maybe some longer term retail PTAs?

David Crane

Management

You know, it’s interesting, and I guess I should answer that question—well, I guess I can answer that question from NRG’s perspective. We would hope and we believe that the management of NRG Yield has discussed with the NRG Yield board of directors, their independent directors, the idea that ultimately down the road – and this is a few years down the road – that whether it’s C&I level customers or even ultimately residential customers, that they’re going to have to be looking at leases or offtake agreements that aren’t just with sort of the traditional utilities but these sort of credit bundles, if you will. So we do think that that ultimately—you know, from NRG’s perspective we would hope that NRG Yield would be able to wrap their mind around the offtake credit is going to become a little bit more varied than just utility offtakes. But I think from NRG Yield’s perspective, that’s at least two to three years away before they’re going to have to confront that, because I think it would take two to three years for us at NRG to be able to sort of bundle appropriate packages to deliver to them for consideration. Thank you, Jon, for that entertainment moment, because I think that we can go back to the queue. Grant?

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Stephen Byrd from Morgan Stanley. Please proceed. Stephen Byrd – Morgan Stanley: Good morning.

David Crane

Management

Stephen, everything we possibly could do to block you out did not work, so now it’s your chance to ask a question. Stephen Byrd – Morgan Stanley: Yeah, you delayed as long as you could, but we still have about 15 minutes. So yeah, I wanted to just get your sense of as you look at acquisition opportunities, both for renewable assets, contracted fossil assets, can you just give a little color on the extent to which you do see opportunities? Clearly the NYLD currency must be helpful, but I’m just curious, as you seeing willing sellers, are you seeing a fairly large amount of opportunities, or are there issues in terms of whether there’s—you know, the delayed transaction? Just some color on sort of the M&A market, if you could.

David Crane

Management

Well the M&A market—the question was specifically the M&A market for contracted assets, is that right? Stephen Byrd – Morgan Stanley: That’s right.

David Crane

Management

Yeah. So what I would tell you, Stephen, is that I think it is sort of a—it’s a target rich environment, and right now while there are a lot of other people that are, as you know, talking about yield vehicles, there aren’t that many others out there that actually exist, and the ones that are, are much smaller and sort of single asset or single type of asset, so we like to think not at the same quality as NRG Yield. So there are a lot of targets. What I would tell you is that the two challenges that have to be overcome is, number one, the success of NRG Yield and what it means about NRG Yield’s cost of capital. The math can easily be done by the seller, and so my bigger concern rather than having a bunch of targets is making sure that the seller doesn’t think that all the benefit of NRG Yield’s cost of capital goes to them, because for it to work, we have to have some clearance on our cost of capital. So I think it’s raised price expectations amongst sellers of contracted assets. The second thing, and this is an interesting area, it’s just more complicated, is that particularly when you talk about renewable contracted assets, there are a lot of thinly capitalized companies that have a portfolio of operating assets but they also have a development portfolio, and what’s interesting to me and interesting to them, but complicated, is the idea of working out an arrangement going forward where they can feed their contracted assets into NRG Yield but also have some sort of understanding with respect to their development assets when they get them finished. That could very much be a win-win, but it’s complicated. Stephen Byrd – Morgan Stanley: That’s great color. David, I wanted to talk kind of about the future of distributed generation. You’ve written some interesting things and I think recently gave a discussion of this. One of the elements I wanted to talk about was the Stirling engine coupled with batteries. If you could just give us a sense for how that business plan is developing, what we should be looking for, how you see that potentially rolling out over time.

David Crane

Management

Well I mean, I’m always very concerned about the precise nature of the question, Stephen. I mean, the Stirling engine, it has a few batteries in it but the beauty of the Stirling engine, which for other people on the call, we hope it to be our entrance into the distributed generation in terms of reliable distributed or non-intermittent distributed generation, is that while it does have a few batteries in it to sort of clean up the power from a voltage perspective, for us it’s a substitute for massive banks of batteries. The basic theory of it is that if you have a machine that ties to the natural gas system in the United States, you can link it up with solar on a distributed basis and you don’t need to have a basement full of batteries. So what we’re trying to get to on Stirling, we’re in the field demonstration phase, Stephen. We expect to have 20 machines out in real-life applications by the end of the first half of this year, and that will lead to a decision to go to large-scale manufacturing in the second half of the year, and hopefully available for—you know, fully commercially available certainly by the second half of 2015. So I think you’ll be hearing a lot more about that over the next six to 12 months. Stephen Byrd – Morgan Stanley: Great, thanks so much. I’ll let others have some time.

David Crane

Management

Did that answer your question? Stephen Byrd – Morgan Stanley: That answers it. Thank you very much.

David Crane

Management

Okay.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Paul Zimbardo from UBS. Please proceed. Paul Zimbardo – UBS: Hi, good morning. I had a question about your expansion plans in California – I think you’ve called them significant repowering opportunities, what you’re seeing out there, and also your contracting efforts in New York.

David Crane

Management

Well, in general terms I think our main goal in California is in the wake of the San Onofre closure to move forward with our project at Carlsbad, which I think it’s well on track; it’s just that things go—it takes a while in California. I’m actually—in addition to people I’ve previously said, John Chillemi, who runs California for us is here. John, do you have anything to add to that?

John Chillemi

Analyst · Paul Zimbardo from UBS

I do. There is also an RFO ongoing right now with Southern California Edison, and two of our sites that have great repowering opportunities are participating in that. One is the El Segundo energy center second phase, which is 435 megawatts proposed, and the other is what we call the Mandalay repower in Oxnard, where there’s a station there that we’re looking to replace with 300 megawatts. So we are participating in the current SE RFO, and we’re also pursuing the Carlsbad energy center.

David Crane

Management

Okay, thanks John. And you mentioned New York – I think it was announced recently about a refueling of Dunkirk in western New York to gas, which I think is very helpful. We have a permitted site in New York City at Astoria which we’d love to go forward. We’re just hoping basically for a long-term contract. So as I’ve said previously, I hope just in terms of intrinsic growth that over the next 12 to 18 months, we certainly can go forward with 1,000 to 2,000 megawatts in total of redevelopments of existing sites off the strength of long-term contracts so that they would be assets that over time would be – I don’t know if this is proper English – drop down-able into NRG Yield. Paul Zimbardo – UBS: Okay, great. A follow-up question – on Slide 6, it’s really great, a lot of information there. On the bottom, if you kind of had to place your bets, if you will, where do you see the biggest growth opportunities for (indiscernible)? I know you touched on energy storage a little bit already.

David Crane

Management

Well, I think if you’re talking about growth opportunities in terms of financial growth in the near term, the type of term that most people on the phone are probably interested in, sort of the two to five-year term, by far I think that the greatest growth effort for us would be actually in the center column where traditional retail and residential solar come together. We are big believers in this view that various analysts, maybe some analysts on the phone, have also come to the conclusion that within the next 12 to 24 months in 24 states, roughly 20 to 24 states, residential solar will be cost competitive, and where we see our advantage is in combining that with actually supply of system power. So I would say in the medium term time frame, that is the highest growth area. Paul Zimbardo – UBS: Okay, great. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thanks for your question. Our next question comes from the line of Angie Storozynski from Macquarie. Please go ahead.

Angie Storozynski - Macquarie

Analyst · Angie Storozynski from Macquarie. Please go ahead

Awesome, thank you. So I wanted to start with the year-to-date results. I know you don’t want to quantify any benefit, but you kept talking mostly about your generation assets. How did the retail perform year-to-date?

David Crane

Management

So Angie, first of all, I should say the first draft of our comments, Chad wanted me to say about how we wouldn’t talk about year-to-date. He almost had a sentence in there saying, Angie won’t listen to our statement that we won’t talk about it. So what I would say, we have Elizabeth and Jim here, but I would say that the cold weather that we have—I mean, there have been bouts of cold weather. It’s been coldish weather in Texas, but nothing of course like what we’ve seen in the northeast. But we’ve had good volume in Texas and so—and that by far is the biggest portion of our retail, so I’d say that they’re sort of on a positive track. With respect to the northeast and the extraordinary weather that we’ve got up here, as we’ve talked about, the various extreme weather events in the summer or the winter, we hedge our retail book against expected weather so when extraordinary weather comes there is a road bump, so I would say that the results in the northeast retail year-to-date were not positive. But the scale of it relative to the positive side on the wholesale, it’s sort of a rounding error. Angie Storozynski – Macquarie: Okay, that’s great. Moving on to the South Central business, there was a pretty significant drop year-over-year in the profitability of this business. The area has just joined MISO. How should we think about it going forward? Is this actually—is the MISO joining, does it actually create potential upside to your earnings power from the plants there, or is it given that there’s going to be more availability of power in the region, that’s actually going to suppress earnings further?

David Crane

Management

It’s a good question, Angie, and that’s why it’s a tough question. I’m going to ask Mauricio to answer it.

Mauricio Gutierrez

Chief Operating Officer

Hey, good morning Angie. So look, year-over-year South Central was affected by lower spark spreads, and I don’t think you can—as we go into MISO, and that integration just happened at the end of the year, we’re still waiting to see how that market will develop and some of the initial pricing has been somewhat positive. But just looking at 2013, you saw in our compression of spark spreads, we didn’t have sustained weather so that affected the profitability of the business. That’s pretty much it. Angie Storozynski – Macquarie: Okay, and my last question is you’re talking about asset drop-downs to NRG Yield, and there’s clearly a big gap in the value, which is implied in the NRG share price from the market value of NRG Yield. How should we think about your ability to bridge this gap? Is it that every time there’s a drop down of assets into NRG Yield, you’re basically going to use the cash to buy back shares of NRG, or—and that’s how you’re actually going to link the valuations of these two stocks?

Kirk Andrews

Chief Financial Officer

Angie, it’s Kirk. First of all, in terms of the value linkage, the only thing I would say is prescriptively in terms of our long term goals is my remarks about the dividend. In terms of the specific proceeds from NRG Yield drop-downs, we look at that as just capital replenishment, and we would deploy that capital towards the opportunities as we see them across the three categories as we typically describe them. I made a couple of remarks about the impact on drop-downs on our credit ratios, which of course we take that into consideration as to what, if any, portion of those proceeds would go towards maintaining those target ratios, and then we approach the remaining capital, which would be the substantial portion of that from any drop-down as we would any capital allocation decision between NRG and NRG Yield. But certainly we’re mindful of the fact that the cash proceeds are easier for the market to grasp in value than is our stake in NRG Yield, but our focus is certainly in driving the success of that moving forward in part to help resonate the fact that NRG Yield as we expected to do, most notably because of some of the opportunities that John Chillemi mentioned. That is really an enabling factor to allow us to drive our success and be more competitive in realizing the benefits of the opportunities that present to us in our markets for redevelopment, which is largely going to be on a contracted basis. Angie Storozynski – Macquarie: Okay, but just going back to the original statement you made about watching your credit metrics, there is so much debt that is moving with these assets, like if these are highly levered solar assets, a lot of them actually, so the drop-downs into the NRG Yield should significantly de-lever your balance sheet, so why would credit metrics worry you at NRG?

Kirk Andrews

Chief Financial Officer

Sure. On a consolidated basis, that’s true; however, in terms of our credit ratios, especially under our indentures there’s a very important corporate debt to corporate EBITDA ratios, the debt which is all non-recourse at those excluded project subsidiaries that make up all of the assets, both in NRG Yield as well as the assets in ROFO pipeline, that doesn’t count towards that particular ratio, i.e. the numerator of that ratio. However, as I indicated in my remarks, the one thing we do benefit from in those excluded project subs in terms of the denominator, that is the corporate EBITDA, is the distributions that we get from those subsidiaries. So when we move an asset into NRG Yield, it does not affect our corporate debt, i.e. the numerator; it does reduce the corporate EBITDA by the amount of those distributions, the denominator. Angie Storozynski – Macquarie: Okay.

David Crane

Management

Thank you, Angie. And Grant, I know we’re approaching if not passed the top of the house, and some of the people on the call will have another earnings call with NRG Yield in half an hour, and I know the management of that company gets really antagonized when we go over. But since we did have that disruption, I’d like to take two more calls and then anyone that we don’t get to, we apologize and please contact Chad and we’ll set up a call or try and answer your questions. So Grant, two more callers and then we’ll be done.

Operator

Operator

Okay, thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Neil Mehta from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Neil Mehta – Goldman Sachs: Good morning. Any thoughts on the demand revisions here from Ercot: And then the preliminary CDR has come out. Any early thoughts on their views of reserve margins?

David Crane

Management

Well, let me just say I’m sure Mauricio will have more to add to this. I think we’ve shown here, didn’t we, that—I mean, Texas was up 3.4% for the quarter, so why someone thinks Texas is going to suddenly stop—go down to 1, I mean, you tell me. We would be planning for more robust growth.

Mauricio Gutierrez

Chief Operating Officer

No, I think—Neil, our view is that we’ve seen over the past three years low growth, weather-normalized close to 2%. We have seen the revised new load forecasting methodology coming out of Ercot, and I think it has it around 1.3%. We disagree with that assessment. I have not seen the new CDR since I’ve been sitting I’ve been sitting here, but what I would tell you is we’re going to look at some of the other assumptions that they have embedded in their 1.3% load forecast and the variables on the CDR, particularly around energy efficiency to make sure that there is no double counting. You know, we’ll go through that in the next couple of hours, but what I will tell you is we continue to see very robust demand not only Ercot as a whole but speaking with Elizabeth and her team at retail. We don’t see the economy as slowing at all.

David Crane

Management

Yeah, I’d actually like Elizabeth to comment on that because a big part—you know, an important sales channel for Reliant is actually people moving in, and as far as I know, I’ve heard of no abatement in terms of pace of people moving into Texas. And if we get 18 inches on Sunday, hell, I’m moving to Texas!

Elizabeth Killinger

Analyst · Neil Mehta from Goldman Sachs

And you’d be welcome. No, I would agree with what Mauricio said. The economy is very healthy in Texas. It was the last to go into the recession, the first to rebound, and we have new businesses coming in Houston, to the greater Houston area, and Dallas sees some of the same. From a retail perspective, our engine is strong across all of our retail brands in Texas and momentum is strong, and I’m excited about what we’re going to do this year.

David Crane

Management

Yeah, so we don’t believe it. Did you have another question? Neil Mehta – Goldman Sachs: Yeah, on the PTM auctions here, can you talk about pluses and minuses as you think about it as the auctions are coming up, both for RTO and then also for the eastern footprint?

Mauricio Gutierrez

Chief Operating Officer

Okay, Neil, I’ll pass it on to Chris Moser.

Chris Moser

Analyst · Neil Mehta from Goldman Sachs

Hey Neil, it’s Chris. On the BRA coming up in May, I think one of the big pieces that we’re going to see is the limits on imports – I know they’re about 7,500 megawatts that cleared in the ’16 - ’17. For the ’17 – ’18, that looks like it’s going to be capped at about 6,500. You’ve also got the cap on DR, the limited DR, which has been 90%-some of the DR that tends to get purchased, so that’s going to be capped at around 2%, so call that 2,500 versus the 10,000 or so that cleared last time. So those are two of the big ones. I know they’re still working on DR operability and a couple of other moving pieces, so those are kind of the pluses we see for the BRA. In terms of the incremental that is closing later today, it’s going to be interesting. This is the first time we’ve seen PJM on the buy side – normally, they are reducing load forecasts and have extra megawatts available that they’ve got to spit out into the third incremental. This is the first time that PJM is actually on the buy side and will be procuring some, so that’s a swing of 1,000 or 1,500 megawatts there, and it will be very interesting to see where this one clears. I believe the numbers come out next Friday. Neil Mehta – Goldman Sachs: Got it. Thank you guys.

David Crane

Management

Thank you. So Grant, last question?

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Steven Fleishman from Wolfe Research. Please go ahead. Steve Fleishman – Wolfe Research: Hi, good morning. I might have missed some of this in the in and out of the call, but just curious to your interest in—there’s a lot of distressed people both in conventional generation as well as more recently in retail. It seems like there’s a lot of retail businesses for sale. Could you give us at least some view of your interest in acquiring more of both?

David Crane

Management

Yeah, what I would say about that is that—I mean, both in terms of conventional, wholesale and retail system power, they are both core parts of our businesses, particularly in the geographic areas we’re in. We look at everything, so we look at everything and we get specific on nothing on a call like this. But no – we definitely actively look at everything, and I don’t know if I would say—you sort of said distressed, but I mean, we were a little bit surprised that we didn’t actually get more questions about buybacks, why aren’t you announcing buybacks. But Kirk said it near the very end of his comments, which it is a good time, I think, to be a buyer and so—because it does seem like there’s a lot of potential opportunities out there, and at a particular price we’re interested in a lot of things. I would say on the generation side, the times where we used to say to you, look, we really need a counterweight for our position in Texas and we’ve got this northeast but we need more in PJM, that was the one compelling strategic need we had on the generation side, and let’s face it – that was satisfied by the GenOn transaction. So I think it’s a more opportunistic approach on the wholesale side. On the retail side, clearly we have a fantastic market leading position in Texas. It could always be better. We’re interested in more retail in the northeast, but in the northeast it’s sort of market to market, and some markets are good, some are less good. So we look at everything and we’ll see what happens over the next six months. Steve Fleishman – Wolfe Research: Great. Thank you very much.

David Crane

Management

Okay, thank you Steven, and thank you all for hanging in there with us through whatever troubles there were with the phone and for an hour and 10 minutes, and we’ll try and be more succinct next time. So Grant, I think that’s it.

Operator

Operator

Okay, thank you ladies and gentlemen for your participation in today’s conference. This now concludes your presentation. You may now disconnect. Enjoy the rest of your day.