Janet C. Loduca - Vice President-Investor Relations
Management
Good morning, everyone. This is Janet Loduca, and thank you for joining us for the Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation's Third Quarter Earnings Call. Before I turn over to Tony Earley, I want to remind you that our discussion today will include forward-looking statements about our outlook for future financial results, which is based on assumptions, forecasts, expectations, and information currently available to management. Some of the important factors that could affect the company's actual financial results are described on the second page of today's slide deck. We also encourage you to review the Form 10-Q that will be filed with the SEC later today and the discussion of risk factors that appears there and in the 2014 Annual Report. With that, I'll hand it over to Tony. Anthony F. Earley Jr. - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Thank you, Janet, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Our key focus areas remain unchanged. California continues to lead the U.S. in driving clean energy policies and PG&E will play a critical role in helping to achieve the state's goals. We also know that safety must be at the core of all of our decisions and our commitment to that is unwavering. We continue to make progress towards resolving outstanding regulatory and legal issues, while strengthening our safety and compliance programs. We believe that executing our strategies in these focus areas will provide the foundation for both operational and financial success. So I'm going to touch on some of the key developments this quarter before I turn it over to Kent, to discuss our financial results. Geisha Williams and Nick Stavropoulos are also with us today and they'll be available to take any questions that you have. In terms of our focus on clean energy, PG&E has a long history of action on climate change and we've been a vocal advocate for policies that will move us forward. In fact, I recently participated in a meeting with President Obama and talked about the actions PG&E is taking to help drive clean energy policy and greenhouse gas reductions. We supported Governor Brown's recent move to increase the renewable energy target to 50% by 2030 and we're confident that we can get there. We've been investing in the electric grid to enable both utility scale renewables and the growing distributed resources such as rooftop solar, electric vehicles and energy storage. During the quarter, we filed our proposal to update the current net metering rates. Our proposal supports the continued growth of rooftop solar, while beginning the transition to a sustainable rate structure that also supports the necessary grid investments. Our 2017 General Rate Case includes detailed proposals for continued grid modernization to ensure that we have the visibility and flexibility we'll need to enable all of the new distributed resources. Our General Rate Case also supports our goal on delivering customer expectations by providing customers with safe, reliable, and affordable service. Using a risk based approach, we proposed safety related investments across the system, including replacing aging infrastructure, taking targeted actions to reduce risk and improving our emergency response, and we balanced the necessary investments with affordability. Average residential bills will increase less than 3% and will remain below the national average. In terms of reliability, the most significant event this quarter were the fires in Northern California. As you know, California is in its fourth year of a severe drought and we've been partnering throughout the year with CAL FIRE and other stakeholders to address a challenging fire season. Our efforts have included things like increased patrols and vegetation management, as well as enhanced emergency response coordination. At one point, the state was simultaneously fighting three major wildfires across 300,000 acres of our service territory. In addition to restoring power to impacted customers, our crews came up with creative ways to meet our community's needs in a very challenging time. So for example, we leveraged the new exportable power technology from our electric trucks, to provide an evacuation shelter with backup electricity when its generator failed. The response from our customers and other stakeholders has been positive and we're really proud of how safely and quickly our crews were able to perform the work. As we've publically reported, CAL FIRE is investigating whether one of our electric clients could potentially been the source of the Butte Fire. That investigation is still underway and could take quite a while to complete, so we don't have any updates on that at this time. On the heels of the state's historic drought, we're now hearing forecasts about an El Niño winter, which could bring significant rainfall and cause mudslides and floods. Our team has been preparing for this possibility through a wide array of actions, including updating our meteorological models and performing drills that simulate potential flood scenarios. Finally, in terms of resolving outstanding regulatory issues, we recently received a report from the Safety and Enforcement Division in the Gas Distribution Record-keeping Investigation. While the report identified a number of potential past violations, which we'll be responding to in the next month, we were pleased to see that it also acknowledged the progress we've made to improve our records. Over the last few years, we've implemented a number of new procedures that have been informed by extensive benchmarking and industry best practices. As we said from the beginning, we know we have more work to do to enhance our distribution records and practices, and we're absolutely committed to getting that right. Geisha and Nick recently had a chance to share some of the actions we've taken to improve our safety culture at the California Public Utilities Commission's first-ever safety en banc. This was an opportunity for all five commissioners, the presidents of California's investor-owned utilities and a number of interveners to talk about what each of the utilities is currently doing around safety, and what changes the Commission might make to better incorporate safety into its proceedings. Nick and Geisha talked about the changes made by our board of directors to focus on safety, the strong link between our executive compensation programs and safety performance, our use of third-party experts and benchmarking and the way we engage our front-line crews around safety. The Commission also had the opportunity to hear from other utilities and to start thinking about how to create common metrics to track and measure progress. I can tell you that we thought it was a really positive step forward in the conversation and we look forward to continuing the dialog with all the parties. So, before I turn this over to Kent, I just want to take a moment to thank him for all that he has done for PG&E. As you know after 33 years with the company, Kent has decided to retire next year. Kent has done a tremendous job managing PG&E's financial activities during challenges that were some of the most complex in our industry. He has also been a great source of leadership and inspiration across the company. We're working through the succession process right now, and I'm thankful that Kent has agreed to stay on to ensure a smooth transition. So, thank you, Kent and with that I'll turn it over to you. Kent M. Harvey - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Thank you, Tony. Good morning, everyone. I plan to first cover our results for the quarter and then I'll go through our updated guidance. Let me say upfront that the complexity of our rate case timing issues has made it especially difficult for you to forecast quarterly results. However, we do expect solid results for the full-year and you'll see that when I get to guidance. So, I'll start with our quarterly results, which is on slide five. Earnings from operations were $0.84 in the third quarter and GAAP earnings, including our items impacting comparability, were $0.63. Our pipeline-related expenses in the quarter were $32 million pre-tax, or $19 million after tax shown in the table. This includes our costs to remediate encroachments on our pipeline rights-of-way and to complete the remaining expense work for our Pipeline Safety Enhancement Plan. Our legal and regulatory-related expenses in the quarter were $14 million pre-tax, or $8 million after tax in the table, and here we have our costs for litigation and enforcement activities related to natural gas matters and regulatory communications. Fines and penalties in the quarter were $142 million pre-tax as shown in the table below. This amount represents the disallowed capital work coming out of the final San Bruno penalty decision, which we're accruing as we do the work. Finally, we received insurance recoveries in the quarter of $10 million pre-tax, or $6 million after tax, as shown in the table above. I'm pleased that we've now resolved all San Bruno claims with our insurance carriers, and in total, we recovered $515 million through insurance. Moving to slide six, you'll see our quarter-over-quarter comparison of earnings from operations of $1.73 in Q3 last year and $0.84 in Q3 this year and this is where it gets a little complicated due to all the timing issues. In Q3 last year, we've recorded three quarters worth of revenue increase associated with our 2014 General Rate Case. That's the biggest difference from Q3 of last year, worth $0.47. $0.16 is associated with the lower cost recovery this year due to the timing of the Gas Transmission rate case. As you know, a lot of our transmission work is seasonal and the Q3 amount reflects a higher level of activity in the summer months. When we receive a final decision in the case next year, the revenue increase will be retroactive to January 1, 2015. $0.09 relates to the timing of taxes, which will reverse to zero by year-end. $0.05 relates to regulatory and legal matters. This includes the impact of some favorable regulatory decisions in Q3 of last year, as well as some legal costs incurred in Q3 of this year. Another $0.05 is associated with an increase in shares outstanding and the impact here of share count is magnified by the fact that earnings in Q3 last year were so much higher as a result of booking three quarters worth of revenue increase to the GRC. $0.03 relates to the disposition of SolarCity stock in Q3 last year, and $0.09 relates to a variety of smaller miscellaneous items, many of which are timing. And we've had positive miscellaneous items in previous quarters. These factors are partially offset by a $0.05 increase due to growth in rate base earnings. That's it for our Q3 results. On slide seven, you'll see our 2015 guidance. Previously, we've had a guidance range for earnings from operations of $2.90 to $3.10. Year-to-date, we've been trending towards the upper end of this range. Therefore, today, we're narrowing our range to between $3.00 – $3.10. There are few other changes to this slide. We've reduced our range for pipeline related expenses, and I'll say more about that in a moment. We've also updated our insurance recoveries just to reflect the amount we've recovered in the quarter. Our resulting GAAP guidance is shown at the bottom of the table. On slide eight, we've updated our 2015 CapEx assumptions from $5.5 billion previously to $5.3 billion. There are really two main reasons for this update. First, our response to the recent wildfires displaced some of our planned work in electric operations. And second, we're realizing some efficiencies in gas operations, primarily related to our distribution pipe replacement program. The other assumptions for 2015 on this slide remained consistent with what we've previously provided. Slide nine reflects the updated range for pipeline-related expenses that I mentioned earlier. You can see we've decreased the upper end of that range from a $150 million to $125 million. The lower end remains at $100 million. You'll recall that this item is primarily associated with our rights-of-way work, and we continue to expect that the cost of the overall program will not exceed $500 million. Moving on to slide 10. Our total equity needs for 2015 remain the same at $700 million to $800 million. Through the end of Q3, we've issued roughly $700 million of equity. This includes about $350 million through a block trade done in August, about $75 million through our continuous equity offering program earlier in the year, and then about $275 million through our internal programs. Those are our 401(k) and dividend reinvestment programs. We do not expect to issue any additional equity this year other than through our internal programs. Slide 11 shows our estimated CapEx through 2019 and other than the change to 2015 that I previously covered, the ranges for 2016 through 2019 remain the same. Slide 12 shows our estimates of authorized rate base through 2019 and these are consistent with the CapEx ranges on the previous slide. As a result, we estimate that 6% to 8% annual growth in our authorized rate base over this period. As Tony discussed, California's clean energy policies and our focus on system safety and reliability are driving significant investment in the coming years and support this strong growth profile. I'll stop here so that we can now open the lines for your questions.