Welcome to IDACORP’s First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded, and our webcast is live. A replay will be available later today and for the next 12 months on the IDACORP website. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Justin Forsberg, Director of Investor Relations and Treasury.

Thanks, Regina, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you tuning in for our call. This morning, we issued and posted to IDACORP’s website our first quarter 2023 earnings release and the associated Form 10-Q. The slides that accompany today’s call are also available on IDACORP’s website. We’ll refer to those slides by number throughout the call today. As detailed on Slide 2, our discussion today includes forward-looking statements including earnings guidance, spending forecasts, and regulatory plans, which reflect our current views on what the future holds, but are subject to several risks and uncertainties including uncertainties surrounding the impacts of future economic conditions. This cautionary note is also included in more detail for your review in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from statements made today, and we caution against placing undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. As shown on Slide 3, on today’s call, we have Lisa Grow, IDACORP’s President and Chief Executive Officer; and Brian Buckham, IDACORP’s Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. In addition to Lisa and Brian, we have other members of our management team available for a Q&A session following our prepared remarks. Slide 4 shows our quarterly financial results. IDACORP’s first quarter 2023 earnings per diluted share were $1.11 compared with $0.91 during last year’s first quarter. Today, we also affirm our full-year 2023 IDACORP earnings guidance estimate in the range of $4.95 to $5.15 per diluted share, which includes our current expectation that Idaho Power will utilize approximately $15 million of additional tax credits that are available to support earnings as a 9.4% return-on-equity level in the Idaho jurisdiction under its Idaho regulatory settlement stipulation. These estimates assume normal weather conditions and a return to more normal power supply expenses. I’ll now turn the call over to Lisa.

Thank you, Justin, and thanks to everyone for joining us on the call today. I’m going to start with some discussion on customer growth, which remains strong across the Idaho Power’s service area. As noted on Slide 5, we’ve seen 2.2% total customer growth since the first quarter of last year with our residential customer growth rate slightly higher at 2.4%. We now proudly serve more than 620,000 customers. A notable portion of our future load growth is from large load additions on the commercial and industrial side. We have several big projects set to come on line this spring and summer, including the True West Beef processing plant, a Chobani facility, and The Stow Company’s manufacturing facility. Micron has also broken ground on the first phase of its planned Boise expansion project, which will add 6.5 million square feet of new building space over the next several years. I’ll also mention our Clean Energy Your Way program. You’ll recall we made several filings with the Idaho Commission to establish new offerings to help both residential and business customers reach their clean energy goals. While we’re still waiting for approval of the Clean Energy Your Way program, the retail agreement for Micron has been approved, as well as the other power purchase agreements to serve both Micron and Meta. The economy within Idaho Power’s service area has continued to outperform national trends, and sources we look at suggest that the trend will continue. Moody’s most recent GDP calculations for our service area forecast strong growth of 4.7% in 2023 and 4.4% in 2024. Employment across our service area has increased 2% since first quarter 2022, and our region continues to be a great place to live and work, powered by the reliable, affordable, clean energy Idaho Power provides. Partly as…

Hey, thanks, Lisa, and hi, everyone. I’m going to start on Slide 9. It’s our summary of the first quarter’s results. Now, compared to the first quarter of last year, customer growth of 2.2% added $2.7 million to operating income. And despite higher mortgage rates and just general economic uncertainty, our residential customer growth rate remains strong at 2.4%, and we have recently seen an uptick in residential building permit activity after a few months of relatively low applications. Moody’s GDP outlook for our service area continues to point to strong customer growth, as Lisa noted, and we’re planning for more rapid load growth going forward in our upcoming IRP. And recall that a sizable portion of our expectations for growth are from significant commercial and industrial customers. Back to the table of results. Cold temperatures during much of the first quarter resulted in a slight increase in usage for residential customers, while industrial per-customer usage was down slightly. I’d note that the first quarter of last year was also below normal in terms of temperatures, so that drove somewhat comparable usage quarter-over-quarter. We’ve seen a slow start to the irrigation season due to a longer winter-like condition than normal with snow still on fields until relatively recently. But we did see some drying in April and nearly 90-degree days starting last weekend, so it looks to us like farmers are able to plant and begin using irrigation pumps. These weather conditions, combined with the cost of slight net usage per customer, increased operating income, which was offset by $1.2 million decrease in Idaho Power’s fixed-cost adjustment mechanism revenues from residential and small commercial customers. Further down, you’ll see an $8.5 million increase in operating income from the change in net-per-megawatt-hour revenue. The Idaho order for the Jim Bridger plant,…

We are now ready to begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from the line of Chris Ellinghaus with Siebert Williams Shank. Please go ahead.

Hey, everybody. How are you?

Great. Thanks, Chris.

Hi, Chris.

The 2.2% sort of 20-year forecast that’s in the preliminary IRP forecast, it seems a little on the low side. Is that reflecting some change in customer growth expectations? Or are you not reflecting much for electrification trends? Or you’re not expecting some data center trends to continue? What can you give us some color in terms of where you come up with that 2.2%?

Sure, Chris. I’ll start, and I’m sure Adam has some to add from the analysis that we’re currently working on with the IRP. We are certainly looking at all of that, but right now we still see really strong growth, but there are just some trends. We saw sort of a cooling off of housing permits in the last quarter, although those are starting to pick up. So, I think, in general, there’s not any one big thing that we’re seeing that has us alarmed. It’s rather sort of a continuation of some of the growth that continues, but not any gigantic loads that are showing up that are not already addressed. Would you, Adam?

Yeah, Chris, I think you’ll notice the 5-year number is quite a bit higher. And that does include Micron, Meta, some of these large loads that we’ve seen coming into our service territory. We just feel more comfortable about those. It’s closer in time. Beyond that, electrification is certainly a part of the projection, but we tend to project kind of normal conditions on that front. Obviously, that could ebb and flow over time, but really it’s that first kind of 5 years that we have a pretty strong look at and at least a better feel for than 15 after that.

So, would you say that maybe that 2.2% might be on the conservative side at this point?

I would say so. That’s generally how we tend to look at things.

Sure. Back to the growth in the first quarter, customer growth has slowed a little bit in recent periods. Can you attribute that to any kind of economic factors, or is that really just the rise in interest rates on mortgages?

I would say it appears to be much more interest rate related. We still are getting lots of inquiries on commercial activity, businesses that want to site or expand, and those sort of go up and down. Like I said, in the last quarter, we saw cooling a little across the board, but it’s really kind of come back in this first quarter of this year. But with the latest increase in interest rates from the Fed, we’ll have to wait and see how that all plays out.

Chris, I would just add, as we look across different sectors, there’s not one that particularly stands out as either being a massive growth or a massive decline, pretty consistent. And we saw some higher sales areas or things like lodging, dairy, and food packaging, and some special contracts, and some that were lower or things like construction and refining, and those do tend to have some cyclical applications, and I think we’ve seen some of that. And this is out of – I just saw the results from last month. And, again, we kind of track every load that’s above 1 megawatt that’s inquiring about our service territory. And for the last 3 months, including the last month, they’ve been solid. They’ve been as solid as the years before. Who knows if they’ll come to fruition or not, but at least inquiries and interest are certainly coming our way.

Okay. That sounds good. Little clarity on the BPA interest acquisition on B2H. I don’t remember the number exactly, but in the 10-Q, you noted something about a number, $30-million-something. Is that the acquisition cost?

It is. Adam, do you want to take that one?

Yeah. I mean, it’s broken up to – it’s kind of all-encompassing deal. And I think, as you know, BPA will be taking service from us over a 20-year period, but the total cost I think is around $41 million.

Okay. Great. Brian, you sort of talked about financing going forward. Given where the balance sheet is now and your capital forecast, does that suggest that 2024 might be kind of in the neighborhood of where you might be getting some equity?

Yeah. Chris, at this point, I think that’s a reasonable assumption. We did with the debt issuance that we had in March and the tranche that we got from the December offering. We did move the needle on our debt-to-equity structure closer to the target. We’re sitting more at the 51% equity line now. Now, we have additions earnings during the year, dividends paid out, and we’ll have additional factors that will influence where we are on that. We would say that we’re going to be working on the equity program design this year, and equity is going to start coming into the window. But as we get close to that 50-50, it’s certainly going to be a factor for us. We also have planned debt issuance later in the year. That will impact where the equity debt ratio goes, so we’ll be watching that. We also watch things like credit ratings. That’s important to us as well. So, that’ll factor into what we do in terms of timing and also market conditions as we look at the capital markets, and I want to make the right decisions there, understanding that the impact on current shareholders will be part of our analysis well.

Okay. On Slide 7, the $600 million, I don’t see any other resources on that page other than the batteries. So, is that $600 million just attributed to those 3 owned storage projects?

I think the $600 million that’s included on that slide includes the batteries that we have now, plus new RFP resources that are coming into the window that you see further down on the slide.

Okay. So that’s inclusive of extra.

Correct.

Okay. Thanks for the details. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Chris.

Thanks, Chris.

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Russo with Sidoti. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good afternoon.

Hi, Brian.

Hey, just a follow-up on Boardman-to-Hemingway. It’s nice to see that finally breaking ground. But just curious, what would be – what’s the full commercial operation date targeted for? And then what’s kind of the total CapEx and then kind of the profile that we should think about over the next several years?

This is Adam. I can talk about the in-service date. We are still shooting for summer of 2026. In terms of the CapEx range, it’s $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion for the project. We would be now a 45% ownership of that project. In terms of how it’s laid out over time, it’s a 2.5-year construction window, maybe 3 years, depending on the situation, probably more like 2.5 years. So, those costs would be spread out throughout that timeframe.

Yeah, Brian, I’ll just add that if you look at it from a rate base perspective, we’re planning to be somewhere around that $500 million mark when you factor in capital costs, deferred taxes, that type of thing. The other thing I want to mention is on the acquisition of the share from Bonneville Power Administration, we pay for those costs over time. So, the $31 million number that was referenced or the $41 million number all-in is something that we don’t pay until further down the line. So, you won’t see that coming out of cash flow this year.

Okay. Great. And then just on the transmission margins, $5.1 million of margin this quarter, I think that’s up 30% year-over-year. And I’m just curious will we be seeing another tariff increase in October of 2023. And then just trying to get a sense of what kind of normalized full-year transmission margins are supposed to be because we really haven’t had a normal year in several years now.

Yeah, that way. Amen to that. But that’s a formulaic rate. So, it’s determined every October. So, Adam, do you want to give a little color on the direction?

Yeah, we won’t know until October what that rate is. I think the one thing I can say is, in 2020, volumes increased. I think it was 8% over 2019. In 2021, it was 18% over 2020. And in 2022, a 12% increase over the prior year. So, you’re right, we have seen volumes go the right direction. Obviously, our OATT rate has increased, too. What that OATT rate will be and what the volumes will be in the future. It’s hard for us to predict, but you can see the general trend.

Okay. And then is there any movement on the Hells Canyon relicensing?

Well, we’re still optimistic that we would have a license in the next year or two. Certainly, the supplemental EIS and biologic opinions, I think we’re on track for that. So, at this point in time, I think that we’re optimistic. But certainly, we’ve been optimistic for 20 years. So we’re thinking we’re coming to the end of that, though. We’re pretty excited to get that one in place and get that one behind us.

Yeah. And FERC, they provided a proposed schedule that had a final EIS in December 2023 and a FERC license kind of in the 2024 later range. So, right now, we’re just kind of hanging tight and waiting to hear from them on that.

Okay. And then lastly, just on customer growth, as mentioned earlier, I think it moderated. It was 2.2%. The trailing 12 months, I think, as of December, is 2.4%. With the understanding of the macro environment, are you seeing much impact from the Micron expansion yet and kind of the multiplier effect that that would likely have going forward? And is that captured in your IRP and in Moody’s GDP forecast?

So, we certainly haven’t seen it yet. We’re in the early stages of the work there, but we’re certainly hopeful that that will come in time as they get their operations up and running. We certainly look at things like that as we’re doing our forecast. And I can’t really speak to whether Moody’s has it or not.

I don’t know. The latest projections I saw, though, from Micron is that they believe as many as 200 companies will follow that project, as you know, it’s massive in its size. So, there’s going to be the growth of Micron and then maybe the ancillary growth. We absolutely look at the growth of Micron and what we think that will be in our projections, the ancillary growth is maybe looked at slightly. But, again, we mentioned before we’re pretty conservative in that regard.

Okay. Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thanks, Brian.

Your next question comes from the line of Paul Zimbardo with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hi, Paul.

Hey, Paul.

Hi, good afternoon. I just want to make sure I heard it correctly. I think you said that there are some small timeline delays on some of the 2023 projects. So, could you just give some context on what’s happening there? And could you remind me, are those the projects where there’s that "soft cost cap" from the commission? Thanks.

Yes. And so, we had experienced some delays in our supply chain related. So, they’re coming on more over time than all showing up at once. And I’ll let Adam give some more detail.

Yeah. Originally, if they were supposed to be delivered in the kind of April-May timeframe, we have seen some delays. That’s not uncommon right now in the industry. We’re looking more in the June-July timeframe for the bulk of the batteries coming into play, and then maybe a side portion of them being later in the summer. But the exciting thing we would like to note is we did start receiving the deliveries in April, and they’ve been pretty steady since then. So, the projects have experienced some delays, but we feel like it’s moving forward at a pretty steady pace at this point.

Yeah, Paul, as I mentioned, was that’s going to impact depreciation for us this year as the in-service date of some of those batteries, as they go in in-stages, depreciation will be delayed on them. And also the payment schedule for those, that’s also adjusted, which will impact AFUDC accruals for us.

Okay. I got it. And then a bigger picture question just as we finally get ready for that big rate case coming up, whatever the outcome there, is it fair to think that 2024 is a good base after which earnings growth should track better with the strong rate base growth? And just overall, how you think about that outlook? Thanks.

I mean, I think that’s certainly our goal. We’ll see how the case turns out. We’re very confident in the case we’re putting forward. Brian, do you have [anything to add?] [ph]

Yeah, I agree. Paul, the way we look at it is that is our first case in a very long time, at least the full general rate case. We’ve been in front of the commission, obviously, for the last decade a lot for different things, but this is the first full general in over a decade. It is certainly not our last. That will be a series of rate cases that we’ll have to file to bring in things like Hells Canyon, additional battery, additional resources, Boardman-to-Hemingway. So, we will be in with additional requests for a lot of this rate base infrastructure that we’re putting in to serve all of this growth. So looking at 2024 as the first case of a series to bring in all the rate base. I think you’ve seen our 11% CAGR on rate base out there, and that really is a springboard for us moving forward, again, driven by so much customer growth that we have to serve reliably. So, we will be in front of the commission with that going forward with a relatively frequent cadence.

Okay. And a quick follow-up, just as we think about that cadence, is there a good whether like basis points or how you think about regulatory lag prospectively?

We don’t have a specific regulatory lag number that we use. I mean, we do have a historic test here in Idaho that will impact that. We do try to put it note in measurables. But over time, with this much capital investments, the depreciation and the interest expense on that will cause quite a bit of lag until we recover it. So, part of it will be on us to execute well in the regulatory arena and make sure that we get in there timely with as much growth as we have in our rate base, but no specific lag number.

Okay. Understood. Thanks a lot, team.

Thank you.

Thanks, Paul.

[Operator Instructions] That concludes the question-and-answer session for today. Ms. Grow, I will turn the conference back to you.

Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon and for your continued interest in IDACORP. I look forward to providing you with a recap of 2022 as well as an overview of our long-term strategies at our annual meeting of shareholders that will be 2 weeks from today. So, hope you all have a great afternoon and thank you very much.

Thanks.

That concludes today’s conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.