Good morning, everyone. And welcome to Portland General Electric Company's Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Results Conference Call. Today is Thursday, February 16, 2023. This call is being recorded. And as such, all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period [Operator Instructions]. For opening remarks, I would turn the conference call over to Portland General Electric's Senior Director of Finance, Investor Relations and Risk Management, Jardon Jaramillo. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Towanda. Good morning, everyone. I'm happy you can join us today. Before we begin this morning, I would like to remind you that we've prepared a presentation to supplement our discussion, which we will be referencing throughout the call. The slides are available on our Web site at investors.portlandgeneral.com. Referring to slide two, some of our remarks this morning will constitute forward-looking statements. We caution you that such statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially from our expectations. For a description of some of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, please refer to our earnings press release and our most recent periodic reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, which are available on our Web site. Leading our discussion today are Maria Pope, President and CEO; and Jim Ajello, Senior Vice President of Finance, CFO, Treasurer and CCO. Following their prepared remarks, we will open the line for your questions. Now, it’s my pleasure to turn the call over to Maria.

Great, thank you, Jardon. Good morning. Thank you all for joining us today. Beginning with Slide 4, I'll start by discussing our 2022 full year and fourth quarter results, as well as touch on a few key drivers. Overall, we delivered solid results for the year despite significant challenges. We reported GAAP net income of $233 million or $2.60 per share for the full year of 2022. After adjusting for the first quarter $0.14 impact of the 2020 wildfire and COVID earnings [Indiscernible] write off, non-GAAP net income was $245 million or $2.74 per diluted share. This compares with $244 million or $2.72 per share in 2021. For the fourth quarter, GAAP net income was $50 million or $0.56 per share. This compares with $66 million or $0.73 per share in the fourth quarter of 2021, as we were specifically impacted by severe late December storms and extraordinary natural gas and energy market volatility. In December, natural gas prices at regional hubs peaked at over $55 per MMBtu and average Mid-C power prices rose to $265 per megawatt hour, over 5 times what we experienced in 2021. The risks and impacts of market volatility are squarely in our focus. We've made improvements to procurement, modeling and have entered into additional hedges. We're also more actively using natural gas storage at the North Mist facility to mitigate market volatility. Over the last year, our hedging program was effective and is also being approved upon. While 2022 prices at the Mid-C increased by nearly 60%, the price for our customers paid for power only increased by 14%. As hedges roll off, further energy market related price increases include 7.7% in 2023, a forecast of 4.5% in 2024. Load growth continues at a rapid pace, increasing 2% over last year. High tech and…

Thank you, Maria, and good morning, everyone. Our 2022 results reflect both the upside of our service territory but also the challenges we face, as our region undertakes the energy transformation journey. Strong load growth continued but we also faced difficult power market volatility and severe weather that impacted our performance. First, some contacts for operating conditions. We witnessed continued demand growth as well as changing load patterns as habits have shifted from the height of the pandemic in 2021 to more normalized usage in 2022. Overall, 2022 loads increased 2% weather adjusted compared to 2021. On a non-weather adjusted basis, total load increased 3.4% year over year, driven by cold periods in the spring and winter and a historically warm summer. In 2022, Portland saw the hottest July and August temperatures on record, and extreme winter temperatures in December caused a new winter peak for the first time since 1998. Residential usage increased 1.4% on a non-weather adjusted basis but decreased 1.4% weather adjusted. As COVID-19 related uses trends moderated for the elevated 2021 levels, residential customer counts increased 1.2% during the year. Commercial usage increased 0.1% non-weather adjusted but decreased 0.5% weather adjusted as commercial growth has slowed slightly in the aftermath of the pandemic compared to the high growth levels in the segment in 2021. The industrial class continued on its rapid growth trajectory with industrial loads increasing 10.9% on a weather adjusted basis or 10.6% whether adjusted as high tech sectors, steady expansion in our region continued. Similar to much of the country, we have seen some signals of moderation in our regional economy. We remain confident in the fundamentals of our service territory. A healthy pipeline of construction and interconnections gives us line of sight to load expectations in 2023 and beyond. As such, we…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Julien Dumoulin-Smith with Bank of America.

I just wanted to come back to the extension here and the reaffirmation of 5% to 7%, kudos there. I just want to clarify this and really press a little bit. Obviously, ‘22, you're ruling forward on the actuals as the baseline here, but clearly ‘22 was towards the lower end of the overall range here. Again, I just want to hear if you say for instance came in towards the midpoint of ‘22 and that would've been the baseline here to reset the actuals, would you still feel comfortable with the outlook in 5% to 7%? I know that's a little bit of a what if type question, so hopefully it's fair. But with that said, I just want to make sure we're crystal clear about any potential signaling of moving to ‘22 actual given where you came against the actual range with respect to the cascading implications on the 5% to 7%?

I don't consider this a rebasing. I would say that the context here is when we released new earnings guidance in the third quarter, we didn't have actual ‘22 numbers, right? And so, I think it's quite fair for people to take the midpoint of the range and start to extrapolate from there. But I hope we were always clear on basing it off the ‘22 actual results. And as you're implying, we had a rough end of the year given weather and volatility. So -- but the bottom line is I would still be comfortable in achieving the 5% to 7% range, even if earnings were a little bit higher, adjusted earnings were a little bit higher in 2022. The opportunity that we have to grow the business is still significant. We feel that we'll be very comfortable inside 5% to 7% range. And so while it's a hypothetical question and we're not using the hypothetical to base the forward look, I'm still pretty comfortable and pretty confident in the 5% to 7% range, even if you did.

So Julien, underlining the 5% to 7% long term is really our fundamental service territory growth that we're seeing in terms customer usage of 2%. And we're very fortunate to have a strong technology sector in our area. But we also have -- to serve that we see growing need for renewable energy, both wind, solar, battery storage, longer term, even [battery] storage. But in addition, the growth that we're seeing is putting pressure on our distribution infrastructure and we're also seeing replacement of aging assets and developing out a a bidirectional smart virtual power plant. And then we're also seeing increasing needs for transmission. So all of those projects combined with a strong load growth makes us confident in the 5% to 7% long term.

And actually, just since we're talking about the 2% low growth here, I mean, just can you elaborate a little bit? Is it shaped differently considering some of the headlines we've seen here in early ‘23 and specifically what that does for the tech sector, et cetera, or is that reading too much into the outlook here?

No, that's a really good question, it’s something that we've looked a lot at ourselves. Near term, we feel very confident in the growth rate, because much of the capacity is already built out by the semiconductor as well as digital customers. So it's really filling out capital investment that they have already spent as they're continuing to contract with their customers. We have not seen a turn down in the semiconductor area. I would note that most of the semiconductor work that we do here for our customers relates to R&D and other cutting edge developments. So if you think of having Lam Research in our service territory as well as much of the R&D areas for Intel and others, it's not quite the same commodity semiconductor manufacturing that you see in other states, we're very fortunate. And as we look at the investments from the CHIP Act and the support of the State of Oregon is giving to this sector we're fairly bullsish.

And then just the cadence of developments, I mean, obviously, you guys are quite constructive here on the setup on some of the renewable developments here. But in terms of the procurements themselves and data points from a near term perspective to kind of give you affirmation on -- your specific ability to own some of these opportunities, maybe that was in Jim's comments. Can you review that in brief here, just where we stand and what should be the expectation here on those data points here in the next few months?

So we're working towards the capacity or battery sets right now. We have been working towards that for a number of months now. I would say that given this challenging macroenvironment that we're in, it is taking a little longer. But we're literally, I'll call it, a number of months away by the end of the first half of the year. So still have a lot of confidence there. That will still be a very substantial capital investment. Stay tuned for that. But as we get closer to announcing that, we'll also provide updates on how we're going to finance that as well. But I think that that's an opportunity that will be there. There may even be some generation opportunity in this first set. But even if it's not there, it'll roll into the next RFP, which will begin very soon after the mid year point as well. So as we discussed in the past, we're going to be in almost constant procurement cycle for the next four or five years as we get towards the end of the decade to achieve the decarb goals. So we've added a couple of slides here for you. Slides 10 and 11, in particular, which show you the opportunity set that's there, these are numbers that are embedded in our working group and our clean energy plan that we're about to see. And we've also provided illustrative rate based growth, and I made the point in the commentary that the 85% CAGR does not include financing. So it's not a surrogate for [earnings model], but it just goes to show you the large capital investment needed here in addition to Clearwater that we have in front of us. So we're really optimistic. And this is really at a 25% ownership rate. So I think a lot of folks, including yourself, were asking for a bit of an illustration on how we looked at that. And I think this could be conservative.

Our next question comes from the line of Sophie Karp with KeyBank.

I wanted to ask you about the Slide 11 here in particular, which you just referenced. I think, it's very helpful in terms of showing me what if upside scenario. And so you guys outlined potential for 8.5% CAGR for the rate base here with certain assumptions, but stopped short of translating that into potential EPS CAGR upside. And I'm just curious how you think about potential like puts and takes here in this upside scenario and financing equity needs and how regulatory lag under various scenarios, how would that translate into the EPS CAGR, and when would we have some more clarity on that?

I think we're going to be providing incremental clarity as we win actual projects, right? And so since we have two more procurement cycles plus the wrap up of the current one, I don't want to be presumptuous about that and present an earnings model based on this growth rate. But you can assume a couple of things, I believe, which is fair. This is at a 25%, I'll call it, handicapping of the total opportunity, taking into account a generation that's owned by others, DER and other needs that are taken care of. It'll assume accretive projects. It'll assume that we financed at a 50/50 debt equity structure. And you could assume too that as we enter 2023, the balance sheet repair will be almost done. We'll be a long way into adding to the equity ratio. So it's a bit of a clean start for growth in terms of the balance sheet. We've asked for a 50/50 ratio in this new rate case. So I'm not providing an earnings model against this. But if I were to look at this from that 8.5% illustration that we have, that's why we call it illustration, not guidance. You'd have to assume 50% equity and 50% debt, but this at least gives you the numbers upon which to do that modeling.

And it's fair to say that you would go about issuing equity in a similar fashion as you were sort of gone about it so far? Can I [Multiple Speakers] resolutions?

Yes, maybe not. I think, given the nature of these projects, which are mostly build on transfer, I think that'll continue. That means that we won't want to overequitize the projects on day one, because they haven't been built yet. So what we'll do more than likely is use forward equity and private place bonds with also delayed draws. So both features, both markets have delayed draw opportunities. So we can actually fund progress payments with equity and debt as we go. That'll be the best and most efficient structure to fund the projects. So we have no negative arbitrage if you get my drift. So I certainly like the at the market program as a technique as we go into this latter part of the year. So that's what I'm thinking right now.

My other question is more, I guess, philosophical question. So pretty significant power price -- energy prices volatility and power in the gas that you guys sustained, as you highlighted. As you look at the buildout plans in the region, particularly for electric generation, right? Would you say that the way the generation stack is poised to evolve here is likely to reduce or increase this volatility in the future?

I think what we're going to see is a significant increase in distributed energy resources, rooftop solar in particular, but also more locational based battery storage, which will not necessarily help the seasonal changes, particularly those that could be caused by multi-year drought, but will certainly reduce the fluctuations on a 24 hour basis, as we have solar periods versus wind periods versus hydro periods. And I think you'll see overall less volatility but we could see more longer term seasonal issues, particularly with multi-year drought periods or multi-year high precipitation and high wind periods. So as we look going forward, you're asking the million dollar question that, that we're all trying to figure out. And what we take is sort of what I'd say is an all above set of solutions. We're looking at every alternative because as we move forward, particularly with the growth we have, we're going to need the diversity of all of those resources and the ability to respond and maintain reliability at the lowest cost for customers. The most expensive way to handle a transition would be to create a great shock for customers, and we need to be prudent here, particularly as we're seeing higher and higher reliability issues. I'd also say we're working much more closely across the entire west in terms of integrated markets, in terms of partnerships between high tech companies, large and small to regional and global hydro players and we're -- it's again, an all above set of solutions.

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Mortimer with the Mizuho Group.

So we've seen high natural gas prices kind of across Pacific Northwest, even as we've seen decreases in other areas from other hubs in the country. Is there any ability you have to diversify from your hub?

Yes, there is. And actually one of the things that's really interesting is what happened this last December was sort of a -- whatever things spike as they did is the confluence of multiple events. Clearly, you had very hot weather turning very cold quickly without the period that many of the storage facilities across the west were able to re refill. You also had pretty dry December. So you had many hydro participants who had actually sold forward energy and needed to fulfill those contracts, putting unusual pressure on the market. And then you had, as Jim mentioned, super cold weather and usage that spiked. So I think as we look to going forward, how we create stronger hedging strategies, more diversity in resources, additional partnerships, again, for more diversity, is all part of our strategy as we move forward and will have an incremental benefit. The other is, as we looked at last year, we had forecast very strong industrial demand, driven by semiconductor industry, cloud computing and other digital capabilities. But it exceeded even our expectations. And so as we go into 2023, we've really reracked the way we think about our customer load and different customer segments. And so that will give us -- that's much more aligned to our hedging strategy throughout the entire year that is already in place. So yes, we're doing more and we already have done much of that.

And then just in terms of guidance, both in 2023 and then kind of over the long term with the 5% to 7%. Basically what gets you either to the high or low end both in the near and long term, and then is there any bias with how things stand at the moment within that range?

I would say that there's no particular bias at this moment. We are leveraged to the RFP opportunities that we have. Really those are where we're going to reach the upper limits of that guidance range. But I would say increasingly even since last October when we first talked about increasing this guidance range that we are more confident now that we could be comfortably inside that range with what's in front of us. I'll leave it more qualitative at the moment and just tell you that I think that our confidence level has actually increased in the last five or six months.

And I also would add that we are really well poised to bring to Oregon and to our customers significant federal funding, whether it’d be for reliability and resiliency and let's say BRIC grants from FEMA, whether it’d be in infrastructure grants and partnerships with transportation organizations across the State of Oregon and the IIJA, whether it’d be in terms of clean energy through the IRA, we are focused in being successful in these areas. We've already started with a number of applications and are really working hard to make a difference, as we go through a significant transition to reduce the [otherwise] customer price impact of a clean energy transition.

And I think, I would add two things to Maria's commentary. Number one is that, of course, given that the treasury rules on the Inflation Reduction Act are not yet promulgated, we think there's upside. We're just not sure how to calculate that yet and where the market is going to monetize the credits, that's point number one. And point number one, I'm really pleased about how we've attacked the federal programs that are available. And our concept papers and our grant applications are so far put against $945 million in total project opportunity. And we haven't had one concept paper rejected. And the way it works is you submit a concept paper and if your concept paper is accepted you're invited to make a bid. We've had no rejections on the concept papers. Concept paper rejects are at 50% right now, so all of our applications and concept papers so far are moving forward. So I think that's a good sign.

And then, just finally, we've seen headwinds obviously across the industry, whether it’d be natural gas, interest rates, inflations, et cetera. I was just hoping you could provide any sort of color on your assumptions on when some of these headwinds may abate going forward, just given the reaffirmation of the 5% to 7% today?

Well, your guess is as good as ours. We are expecting to see continued inflation through 2023, hoping that it will moderate. But clearly, particularly when it comes to electrical equipment, in particular transformers and other capital investment, we are continuing to see steep demand, robust prices and working very hard to improve our processes, our systems and our efficient deployment of all of that equipment to mitigate the impact of all of those external factors on our customer base.

I just can't guess, right, it's too hard. But we can just do what we've been doing, right? We've grown deliveries 10%, customer count 5%, kept our head count flat. And we've grown the rate base pretty significantly, right? So we're getting scale in the business. So that's the continued focus that we have against a difficult macro environment.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Travis Miller with Morningstar.

Just on the 20 -- following up on that 2023 or rather 2021, the RFP projects to come. When you break out that 375 and then the remaining, are there technology differences that you're looking at in that 375 and then that remaining up to 200?

Yes, Travis, there are, right? So in addition to the wind and possibly more wind, solar, of course, there is an opportunity for substantial battery sets in there. We're working on some right now and that's what we hope to announce by the end of the first half. There is one upstorage project in the acknowledgement list that's there. And when we turn the crank on the next RFP and in the middle of this year, call it -- I'll call it, July 1 for pointers, we'll see additional technologies. We're technology agnostic, right? It's all about pricing for the consumers, managing the load and the grid and integrating them efficiently. So we expect to see more diversity as we go.

All those would be, I guess, for lack of a better term, traditional renewable energy. And we're not load management or anything like that though, right?

I think there's a lot of DER going on, but not necessarily as part of this procurement process. I also think that we will see additional players come in, so the dynamics could evolve, competitive dynamics could evolve here, as this decade unfolds. So stay tuned for that and we'll keep you updated.

And then one longer term, the range you provided out through 2030 at 2.2 to 3.1. What are the underlying assumptions as item, I'm thinking you probably have that same type load growth? But are there retirements in that assumption, are there other load shaping assumption within that number, and what's embedded in that number or that range?

No, it's a great question and there are a number of assumptions. And probably as we look forward there's more variability than we've ever seen in our industry. We do not have any retirements included in any of those assumptions of any of our assets. With the exception of we are planning on getting out of our Colstrip investments and not having that energy delivered to our customers here in Oregon. We also have, and this relates a little bit to your earlier question to Jim. We are fairly advanced when it comes to a virtual power plant. So we were incorporating distributed energy resources, some of which we own, but many of which our customers own and will increasingly own in the future. We also have a number of load management programs, which help with some of our hedging and we're also looking at the adoption of rapidly in this area of electric vehicles. As you know, Oregon and our service territory is one of the top five leaders of EV penetration in the country. So there's a number of items that are impacting our load forecast and our asset growth forecast over time.

Our next question comes from the line of Nicholas Campanella with Credit Suisse.

It's Nathan Richardson on for Nick. I just wanted to ask, what's assumed for the PCAM in ‘23, if you haven't covered that already? Is it the baseline or is it still a headwind there?

As we look at our PCAM, we forecast basically at the annual update tariff. So there's no forecast. I do think that as you look at our power costs and you look at the entire region, it's important to note where we are with hydro conditions. 55% of the energy generated across the northwest is hydro based and we're roughly, and you can see it in the 10-K in our disclosures, we're roughly a little bit over 80%, and that's the low, but it's in particular a low in comparison to last year where you saw Mid-C and others at 110%. And so we have forecast those lower hydro levels into our energy prices for this coming year and I think that's an important sort of calibration in terms of the risk balancing of 2023.

So one way to shorthand it is we entered the year flat based on the AUT, which is the baseline, if you want to call it that of the PCAM. So obviously things change. We saw that last year. But we essentially are reset essentially are reset at the beginning of early January 1.

Our next question comes from the line of James Kennedy with Guggenheim Partners.

I apologize if I missed this a little earlier, but the slippage of the 2021 items and the RFP process. What is actually driving that, is it the bids that were rebid, is it the deadline for the RFP itself? I guess just what would drive that schedule for…

You know, it's just normal commercial negotiations in a time of extraordinary supply chain challenges. We've had a number of solar projects recently that have been laid as they have been laid across the country and we want to make certain that as we are negotiating that all of these projects will be delivered as expected. And it's a challenging environment out there, but it's nothing unusual.

Yes. It's a question of a few months, James [indiscernible] of these [indiscernible] projects, I'm not concerned at all. And also batteries are unusual in the sense that they're modular, right? So we're always looking at the grid and what kind of storage and capacity is needed around the grid. And we're able to work with the vendors to size those projects appropriately based on the latest information we have. So as you go further in time, you have more information about the grid and you can actually design around that. But we're talking about very modest differences in timeframe.

And then just one kind of nuance question. I really like Slide 11, but I'm just curious, one of the footnotes, you assumed about 25% ownership of the midpoint. I guess just how did you kind of arrive at that number?

So we stepped back, and we wanted to provide this sort of illustration to help you understand what the opportunity is. Just wanted to be somewhat conservative. But also take into account what we saw happening in the rest of the market, the PPAs, third party agreements, community solar, DER, I mean, you name it. So we tried to have a holistic look at what we would need to do to make the decarb goals possible. And so I think, over time, I would say that we won a higher percentage, and I'll let Maria add onto this, because of her history here in terms of utility scale generation, we've been much more successful on that. But this 25% is more a piece of the pie of the more holistic energy mix that we have.

We've sometimes surprised ourselves with the number of sales builds or ownership opportunities we've had through RFPs. And I think it's because we take very seriously the need to be cost competitive and least cost leased risk. And we work very hard to make sure that our bids are set up where customer price impacts first and foremost as well as the overall functionality with the portfolio. So hopefully, we will be as successful as we have been in the past. But it's highly competitive, which is important in terms of driving costs to their lowest levels, which is a challenge through a significant energy transition and something we need to always stay constantly vigilant on.

I'm showing no further questions in the queue. I’d now like to turn the call back to Maria Pope for closing remarks.

Thank you very much for joining us today. We appreciate your interest in Portland General and we look forward to seeing you all soon. We very much appreciate the robust questions. Thank you.

[Technical Difficulty] today's conference call. Thank you for your participation and you may now disconnect.