Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the NorthWestern Energy Third Quarter 2025 Financial Results Webinar. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Travis Meyer, Director of Corporate Development and Investor Relations Officer. You may begin.

Thank you, Perella, and good afternoon, and thank you again for joining NorthWestern Energy Group's financial results webcast for the quarter ended September 30, 2025. Joining us on the call today are Brian Bird, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Crystal Lail, Chief Financial Officer. They will walk you through our financial results and provide an overall update on the progress this quarter. NorthWestern's results have been released, and our release is available on our website at northwesternenergy.com. We also released our 10-Q premarket this morning. Please note that the company's press release, this presentation, comments by presenters and responses to your questions may contain forward-looking statements. As such, I'll direct you to the disclosures contained within our SEC filings and safe harbor provisions included on the second slide of this presentation. Also note that this presentation includes non-GAAP financial measures and information regarding the pending merger transaction. Please see the non-GAAP disclosures, definitions, reconciliations and merger-related disclosures included in the appendix of the presentation. Webcast is being recorded. The archived replay will be available today shortly after the event and remain active for 1 year. Please visit the financial results section of our website to access the replay. With those formalities behind us, I'll hand the presentation over to Brian Bird for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Travis. On our recent highlights, we reported GAAP diluted EPS of $0.62 per share, non-GAAP diluted EPS of $0.79 per share for the quarter. We are affirming our 2025 earnings guidance range of $3.53 to $3.65. We -- during the quarter, we integrated our Energy West acquisition of the natural gas assets. We've also integrated the customers and employees, and we've really tucked that business in seamlessly. Very, very excited about that opportunity. I'll tell you what, something we've been a bit more excited about is the announcement of our agreement with Black Hills Corporation for an all-stock merger of equals. Even though we did that announcement in mid-August, we have already filed our joint applications for the transaction approval with the regulatory commissions in Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. In addition, during the quarter, we filed a tariff waiver request with the MPSC for recovery of our operating costs associated with the Avista Colstrip interest. And recently, we submitted a 131-megawatt natural gas generation project in the Southwest Power Pool expedited resource adequacy study. And that project if we move forward, we'll be approximately a $300 million project, which is currently not included in our 5-year CapEx plan. And lastly, dividend declared during the quarter, 66% -- $0.66 per share payable December 31, 2025, to shareholders of record of December 15, 2025. Moving forward to the Northwestern value proposition with a dividend yield between 4% to 5%, add that to a base capital plan providing a 4% to 6% EPS growth, gives us a total return of 8% to 11% total return. And if you think about that CapEx plan, the vast majority of that is in a T&D investment throughout our total system on both the gas and electric side of our business, obviously, necessary to serve our customers. If you consider the incremental opportunities we have, certainly with data centers and large load customers, FERC regional transmission and any incremental generating capacity, some of which I just spoke to, you could see the dividend yield plus that greater than 6% EPS growth, giving a total return even greater than 11%. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Crystal to talk about the third quarter financial review.

Thank you, Brian, and good afternoon, everyone. We are coming to you from beautiful Butte America today following a Board meeting here. And based off those highlights, it feels like we might have had a little bit of a busy quarter. I will cover and update you on our third quarter results and outlook for closing out the year and then turn it back to Brian for some really exciting strategic updates and where we're at otherwise with the business. We are pleased to deliver a solid quarter in line with our expectations here for the third quarter of '25 and are on track to deliver on our earnings guidance and financial targets for the year. For the quarter, earnings were $0.62 on a GAAP basis compared to $0.76 in the prior period. On an adjusted basis, we delivered $0.79 as compared with $0.65. In the upcoming slides, I'll dig in a bit on the details of those drivers, but I would note and highlight what you just caught, which is comparability year-over-year. There's a couple of items I would just highlight that are impacting that. That includes the merger-related costs that are included in third quarter of '25 and also remind you that in the third quarter of 2024, we had a tax benefit. Moving to Slide 9. From a year-to-date perspective, that leaves us at $2.22 from a GAAP basis compared to $2.34 last year. Again, on an adjusted basis, that's $2.41 in 2025 year-to-date compared to $2.27 in 2024. Slide 10 shows you the third quarter drivers of EPS compared to that same period in 2024. I would note that despite mild weather, margin improvement drove $0.52, which was offset in some regards by higher operating costs, again, including those $0.12 of merger-related costs I referred to,…

Thanks, Crystal. On 18, we talk about our merger with Black Hills update in August 18 seems like a long time ago, but it was about 2 months ago. And in that short period of time, we, with our Black Hills friends have worked collectively to make 3 filings with each of the 3 states that we needed to make filings in. We filed with the MPSC and the North Dakota Public Service Commission, the South Dakota PUC. Those filings are made, and we continue to work on other filings necessary for the transaction. Continue to work on the S-4 and joint proxy statement and expect to release that in Q1 of 2026. In terms of shareholder meetings, sometimes in Q2 or Q3, our respective companies would have hold shareholder meetings on a vote on the transaction. And then developing transition integration implementation plans, what I'd say there is we collectively are talking to independent integration consultants, hope to make a decision relatively soon there. And just really in early planning stages. things will really get going here, I'd argue in the December, January timetable as we continue planning moving forward. And lastly, receiving approvals and closing the merger, I'd like to think that can happen sometime in the second half of 2026. Moving on to the next page regarding large load customers. Off to the right, I think all of you are well aware of the 3 LOIs that we currently have with SEBI, Atlas and Quantica. I'll mention the development agreement with SEBI here shortly. But on the left-hand side of the page, just a quick focus on Montana and South Dakota. We do anticipate making a filing with the MPSC to propose a large load tariff in the fourth quarter of 2025, and we'd like to do…

Thank you, Brian. That was a good update. Prella, we'll open the lines for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Aidan Kelly with JPMorgan.

Yes. I just want to hone in on the data center front first. It looks like there was some activity in the request and high-level assessment stages. Could you just clarify if this was a simple pull forward of some of the request stage into the high-level assessment and then maybe one just got added to the request stage? And then just on top of that, what sort of time line you might be able to kind of convert the high-level assessments into incremental LOIs?

They're great questions. I think the data center requests, the queue count there went up 1. But more importantly, we've -- net-net, we've increased the queue count in the high-level assessment by 3. I'll tell you that I can't give you a specific time. One thing I've learned through this process, it takes two to tango in essence to when things move to that next level. But I do think there are at least one of those that could show up in that box here relatively soon, that LOI box, if you will, or directly to a development agreement.

That's helpful to know. And then maybe just pivoting to South Dakota. I am also curious on time line there for getting approval of the gas plant. And then ultimately, how should we think about that kind of flowing into CapEx in the rate base?

I'll take that one. I think both MISO and SPP put out this summer an expedited resource adequacy study window. We submitted based off that study, a facility that would get us to resource adequate and meet the requirements by 2030. We've received feedback -- initial feedback from SPP that our -- what we've submitted meets their initial requirements, and we expect to hear on the transmission piece in early 2026. As such, we will wait to put it into our capital plan until we roll forward that refresh here in probably the fourth quarter call in the February time frame.

[Operator Instructions] And I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn it back to Brian Bird for closing remarks.

Well, thank you so much. I just -- again, I want to reiterate the tremendous support we've had certainly since the announcement, and I think the feedback we've received, and I know our friends at Black Hills have received tremendous support for the merger. I will just tell you that we both collectively seem to be working really well together to make things happen here and continue to move this process along and both endeavor and understand the importance of this merger, and we'll work really, really hard to make sure it happens. And like I said, hopefully, as soon as the second half of 2026. And so with that, again, thank you for your participation today.

Thank you. And this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.