Earnings Labs

Eversource Energy (ES)

Q3 2007 Earnings Call· Mon, Nov 5, 2007

$68.55

-0.06%

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Transcript

Chuck Shivery

Management

Thank you and good morning and thank you all of you for coming this morning. This is a really pretty nice morning for us. I guess probably the more important thing that we did not put on your tables is that the New York Patriots won last night, coming from behind and that makes me very, very happy. We started the day off, I think, pretty well. I want to talk just a little bit about some of the things that have happened so far and then I'm going to do something a little different this morning. I want to spend a little bit of time looking out, and actually looking out beyond what is in the current five year numbers and begin to talk about some of the trends that all of you are very familiar with, but that are hitting not only the industry, but are hitting in a particular way and what those challenges might mean for opportunities for NU. David and Lee will then spend the rest of the time going through all of the financial and all the operational things and we think it's a pretty comprehensive package. I also would like to thank those of you that filled out an online survey that we did just a few months ago. We appreciate your input, and in fact, some of you will see that some of the new information in the news release and some of the information in this presentation is a direct result of the input that you guys provided us. So I thank you for that. Along that line, as we move through the year, to the extent there is information that we can provide that we now do not; or information that we do provide that we could provide it in…

Lee Olivier

Management

Thanks, Chuck and good morning. It's good to be here with you all this morning. Chuck talked a lot about the NU direction and the NU strategy. Of course, pivotal to that is our ability to execute around that strategy. What I would like to do with you this morning is update you on where we are in terms of our execution of our strategy. I would like to talk a little bit about our forward capital investment plan, where that money is going. I want to give you a status of our major infrastructure projects, in particular transmission, and give you examples of how these projects are improving reliability and at the same time in many cases, actually reducing cost as well. First of all, our system reliability this year has been very, very strong, particularly at CL&P. If you remember last year, we had a number of outages in our underground systems. We've managed to avoid these this year. CL&P is on path to having probably its best year in reliability over the course of the last ten years as a result of the work we've done there. We've also just recently successfully completed our North American Electric Reliability Corporation audit of our transmission operations. We were one of the first transmission businesses in the country to have that audit. That's really crucial, because that really helps to define what the risk profile is, particularly now that NERC can implement civil penalties of up to $1 million a day. We went through that audit, with no violations, no substantial findings. In fact, NERC said that we were really the standard setters inside of the industry. In fact, we have brought in a very strong team of folks to run the compliance part of the business. They're all folks…

Dave McHale

Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Lee. Let's see if I can just spend a few moments and translate this into some facts and figures. First of all, in terms of 2007 we already mentioned it, we are revising guidance. In fact, we are increasing guidance for the year following yet another good quarter for us. We have traditionally rolled out our next year's guidance at EEI. Again, we'll do that for you and you'll see the figures shortly. The backdrop of our longer term plan is a new $6 billion capital program which also introduces 2012, we keep that five-year horizon in front of you. That of course is the very foundation of our rate-based growth; that, along with ROE improvement gets this 10% to 14% return or growth rate equation continuing to work for us. I think it's worth saying and I'll spend a little bit of time and give you some specificity around capital, very financeable from our perspective and we as a management team remain very, very focused on the overall total shareholder return equation. First in terms of the quarter, we won't go through this extensively, but I think if you look at the overall business, we earned $0.32 for the quarter, $50.2 million, up substantially over last year, up about 34%. If you look at the individual segments, each of those, particularly the distribution business, is up substantially. There's a little asterisk on this page. We have included here for comparative purposes the elimination of the one-time, $74 million tax benefit that CL&P received in the third quarter of last year, so year over year the distribution or the collection of distribution companies earnings up 100%. If we look at what's happening with transmission, up 10% for the quarter, which is a little lower than our run rate…

Jeff Kotkin

Management

Thank you very much. We'll take some questions and then we will stay around here afterward. We also have a visitation from 2:30 to 4:30 today. Not only will we stay around afterward, but folks from Quanta also will also stay around in case you have any questions. With that, does anybody have any questions? All right, well thank you very much for joining us today. We greatly appreciate it. As I said, we will stay around here and if you have any questions, please either search us out up here or over in Europe 6 between 2:30 and 4:30. Thank you very much for joining us.