Dominion Energy, Inc. (D) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to the Dominion Energy's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to David McFarland, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer.

Good morning, and thank you for joining Dominion Energy's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Earnings materials, including today's prepared remarks, contain forward-looking statements and estimates that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our SEC filings, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q for a discussion of factors that may cause results to differ from management's estimates and expectations. This morning, we will discuss some measures of our company's performance that differ from those recognized by GAAP. Reconciliation of our non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, which we can calculate are contained in the earnings release kit. I encourage you to visit our Investor Relations website to review webcast slides as well as the earnings release kit. Joining today's call are Bob Blue, Chair, President and Chief Executive Officer; Steven Ridge, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and other members of senior management. I will now turn the call over to Stephen.

Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. Since the conclusion of the business review almost 2.5 years ago, we've remained steadfastly focused on 3 top priorities: first, consistent achievement of our financial commitments; second, continued achievement of major construction milestones for the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project; and third, constructive achievement of regulatory outcomes that demonstrate our ability to work cooperatively with regulators and stakeholders to benefit both customers and shareholders. As we'll discuss today, we continue to demonstrate success against these priorities, extending our track record of high-quality and consistent execution. I'll cover financial results and demand trends in my remarks, then Bob will provide updates on the NextEra Energy combination, CVAL, regulatory results and other business items. Turning first to second quarter results, as shown on Slide 3. Second quarter operating earnings were $0.79 per share, which includes $0.03 of RNG 45Z credits. A summary of earnings drivers relative to the prior year period is included in Schedule 4 of the earnings release kit. Second quarter GAAP results were $0.37 per share. A summary of all adjustments between operating and GAAP results is included in Schedule 2 of the earnings release kit. Similar to last year, we've had a strong first half, which positions us well to deliver strong full year results. Additionally, we are reaffirming all financial guidance provided on our fourth quarter earnings call, including operating earnings, credit, dividend and long-term growth guidance. Turning to financing on Slide 4. We've now completed our common equity program for 2026, consistent with our ATM guidance on the fourth quarter call. Full year 2025 and Q2 LTM FFO to debt metrics are both above 15%, demonstrating our continuing commitment to our previously communicated credit-related targets. Turning briefly to sales. We're continuing to see strong sales in our service areas, driven by continued economic growth and data center expansion. Notably, 9 of the Dom zones top 10 all-time peak days have occurred this year, including the 8 highest summer peak days, which have all occurred in the last 2 months. We want to take a moment to acknowledge the outstanding work of our colleagues who have maintained exemplary system reliability in the face of record-setting demand and difficult weather conditions. Their commitment and dedication on behalf of our customers and communities is worthy of special recognition even if most of them would tell you they were simply doing their job. Turning to data centers on Slide 5. We now have over 53 gigawatts of data center capacity in various stages of contracting, including approximately 12 gigawatts of capacity contracted under electric service agreements. To put that in context, we've added over 5 gigawatts of contracts or roughly 11% since the end of last year. Since our last update, we continue to see robust and durable demand from our differentiated, high-quality, low-risk data center customers. Importantly, these customers consistently tell us that many of their highest value workloads need to be built and need to stay in Virginia because of the unique network density, connectivity and ecosystem advantages that have made Virginia the world's leading data center market. And we're bringing those customers onto our system in the right way, protecting existing customers from cost shifts while mitigating stranded cost risk by utilizing a large load framework that ensures these customers pay their fair share of the investments required to support their growth. In closing, we've had a strong first half of the year, and I am highly confident in our ability to deliver on our financial commitments, including our 2026 operating EPS and credit targets. Our financial plan strikes the right balance of appropriately conservative, but not unreasonably so. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Bob.

Thank you, Stephen. I'll begin with safety on Slide 6. Our employee OSHA injury recordable rate for the first half of the year was 0.36, which remains well below industry average. Safety is our first core value, and we must continue to focus relentlessly on improving our safety performance. Turning next to our announced combination with NextEra Energy. As we detailed in May, this transaction represents a truly transformational opportunity to bring together 2 world-class utilities with 238 years of collective industry experience to even better serve millions of regulated customers across 4 states. Looking ahead, we believe we can accomplish far more together than we can apart. Under the proposed terms of the merger, Dominion Energy customers would receive $2.25 billion in shareholder-funded bill credits, representing meaningful customer value. Over the longer term, customers and communities would benefit from a stronger company with the scale and capabilities to buy, build, finance and operate critical energy infrastructure more efficiently, helping support reliability, affordability and economic growth. Earlier this month, we filed our joint proxy statement on Form S-4 as well as our state and federal regulatory applications with the Virginia State Corporation Commission, the North Carolina Utilities Commission and the Public Service Commission of South Carolina as well as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Virginia State Corporation Commission has now issued a procedural schedule, including evidentiary hearings beginning on November 17. In South Carolina, the proposed scheduling order would set a hearing date of December 8, with the final order by January 29, 2027. The South Carolina Senate, House and Office of Regulatory Staff have indicated they do not object to the company's proposed schedule. We expect the commission to rule on the proposed time line next week. The time lines for each of the proceedings are shown on Slide 7. I could not be more excited about the combination of these 2 companies. We'll continue to share updates as we progress through shareholder and regulatory processes. Turning next to offshore wind. As illustrated on Slide 8, CVOW continues to achieve significant derisking milestones as evidenced by its 81% completion status. Let me highlight a few factors that give me great confidence in the successful completion of this project. First, supply chain. We're making excellent progress toward completing all remaining equipment, a key project milestone. 100% of nacelles, 99% of towers and 85% of blades have now been fabricated. Towers will be completed in the coming days, followed by final blades in October. Second, installation. As of today, we've successfully installed 31 turbines with the installation of the 32nd currently in progress, averaging approximately 2 days of operations per installation from jackup to jack down in line with our prior assumptions. It's worth noting that the 31 turbines installed to date have a capacity of more than 450 megawatts, rivaling the magnitude of some of our fossil units. We expect the third and final offshore substation to be energized by year-end, which is especially meaningful because it will signify that approximately half of project investment adjusted for network upgrade costs has achieved in-service status. That's a meaningful milestone toward project derisking. And third, proof of concept. We've now successfully completed every major fabrication, construction, commissioning and operation evolution multiple times. This is noteworthy because we've clearly and affirmatively answered the question, will this work? Every type of component is in service and functioning as expected. Turbines, inter-array cables, substations, export cables and onshore transmission and distribution infrastructure are all working together to provide much needed power to our customers. In fact, in recent weeks, as we've set new demand peaks, we've done everything possible at the request of system operators to deliver the maximum possible amount of power from CVOW. In my mind, it's critical to note that CVOW is significantly different from a traditional power plant, and we're not waiting for a final switch to be flipped to confirm proof of concept or to qualify investment for regulatory recovery. Rather, CVOW is effectively 176 individual power plants, each entering service upon completion. This allows the project to clearly demonstrate technical feasibility and deliver energy to the grid well before the final turbine begins to spin. That's why for CVOW, it's important to note the project's derisking is heavily front-end loaded. -- and in our view, mostly behind us. Turning to Slide 9. Let me update you on expected timing of installation of the project's final turbine, which we're adjusting by 6 months to reflect 3 updated assumptions. First, given previously reported delays with Cardus and BOM suspension order, weather and vessel maintenance contingency had been significantly reduced. Today, we're adding incremental weather and vessel maintenance schedule contingency to the plan, which assumes somewhat better than normal weather consistent with our overall weather experience thus far as well as the continued optimization of our installation iterations. Second, we're adjusting the schedule to account for additional time required for our loadouts at PMT based on observed performance times to date relative to our prior assumption. Finally, based on continued data gathering, we're adjusting the schedule to account for what we expect will be longer duration jacking operations for certain remaining turbine locations. Relative to the other approximately 80% of turbine locations, we expect based on subsea geotechnical analysis, this subgroup to require additional time for jacking operations. Moving now to capital investment. As shown on Slide 10, we're updating the project cost estimate by a little less than $250 million. Our most recent budget was $11.4 billion, inclusive of $123 million of unused contingency. As highlighted on our last call, we've added $228 million for additional tariff costs associated with revisions to the prior steel and aluminum guidance, and we've subtracted $502 million to account for the reallocation of certain PJMassigned network upgrade costs. We've also added about $234 million of miscellaneous costs that primarily reflect additional cable protection to account for faster underwater currents, fuel costs, mitigation costs for the more difficult jacking locations and final onshore construction costs. The total of all these adjustments is a net reduction to project costs of around $40 million, so essentially a wash. From there, we've added about $288 million to account for the incremental 2 quarters to complete the final turbine installation. You'll note that this averages out to about $144 million per additional quarter, which is below the low end of our prior rule of thumb guidance of $150 million to $200 million per quarter. As a result, we're increasing our project cost estimate by approximately 2% to $11.65 billion, which continues to include $123 million of unused contingency. Turning to Slide 11. The project's cost sharing and risk sharing continue to work as intended to protect customers and shareholders with minimal changes to LCOE or customer bill impacts. We anticipate that approximately 1/3 of the most recent cost increase will be shared with our financing partner. CVA remains 1 of the most affordable sources of energy for our customers. Our analysis indicates that the project is expected to generate fuel savings of approximately $5 billion for customers during the project's first 10 years of operation. On regulatory, we received a final order in our 2025 rider filing proceeding on July 29, approving 100% of our revenue request. As I mentioned last quarter, and all of the above approach to energy supply, including CVA is critical to ensuring continued reliability amidst real-time growing demand in our service areas as evidenced by new demand peaks that Stephen mentioned earlier. Building new energy generation is a core competency of ours as demonstrated in recent years with our successful development of thousands of megawatts of renewable generation as well as combined cycle plants at Greenville, Brunswick and Warren County. We continue to advance the development of new generation capacity consistent with our update last quarter. We recently filed the air permits for two new natural gas fired combined cycle plants, Kennady station in South Carolina and at Mount Storm in West Virginia, representing nearly 5 gigawatts of new capacity. In addition to producing much needed energy for our customers, these projects will be an economic benefit for the states in which they operate. generating thousands of new jobs, billions of dollars of economic investment and meaningful local tax revenue. Now I'll turn to other business updates as shown on Slide 12. In South Carolina, the comprehensive settlement agreement and DESC's electric rate case were unanimously approved by the Public Service Commission of South Carolina in June with rates becoming effective at the beginning of July. We appreciate the engagement of all parties. We now achieved successful settlements in each of our last 4 South Carolina base rate cases across our electric and gas businesses. Finally, on Millstone. We've heard recently from the regulators in Connecticut, and we expect a solicitation decision from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection regarding the facilities bid in the 0 carbon energy request for proposals in the near term. Consistent with the process laid out previously, we anticipate negotiations with local state utilities will begin thereafter, and contracts will then be submitted to the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority for approval. The time line for reaches up to 180 days. The facility's existing PPA has delivered tremendous value to customers. Lower costs and significantly dampen volatility. Despite being priced at the time in 2019 above prevailing price outlooks, the contract is expected to save customers over $300 million this year including $190 million year-to-date in addition to the $200 million in savings to customers last year. Based on current forward curves, the contract is expected to save customers in Connecticut over $900 million over the 10-year life. We remain focused on achieving a constructive outcome for the facility which has delivered tremendous value and produce bill reductions for customers in Connecticut through its existing contract. We will continue to provide updates as things develop. With that, let me summarize our remarks on Slide 13 by reiterating our focus on our three top priorities: consistently achieving our financial commitments, continued achievement of major construction milestones for the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project and achieving constructive regulatory outcomes, that demonstrate our ability to work cooperatively with regulators and stakeholders to deliver results that benefit both customers and shareholders.

Our first question comes from Nick Campanella with Barclays.

Good morning. Thank you. Maybe just on the offshore wind time line, just part of this seems to be getting a better sense of your sequencing and installing the turbines, which you're just kind of repeating now. But just how would you kind of frame risk of further slippage? Are there any ongoing activities, I guess, that you're going to get new data on that should be monitored? And just what kind of informs confidence that year-end '27 is the right date now? .

Yes, that's a great question, Nick. And the short answer is I'm confident in the updated time line. But let me take a step back. The strategic value of Caval hasn't changed. It's remains one of the fastest ways to bring a lot of power to our customers. And it also remains one of the most affordable sources of energy for customers. And the financial plan, as we outlined, remains durable and resilient as we finish construction. But there are really sort of two ways to think about progress in derisking -- and are largely the same. Have final completion, you don't have power. But CVA is different. As I mentioned, we already have more than 450 megawatts on the grid. That's comparable to a sizable generating unit. It's also different from a regulatory recovery perspective. This isn't a project where the entire asset waits on one final COD event. We expect approximately half of project investment adjusted for network upgrade costs to be in service by the end of the year. So that's also a very meaningful derisking milestone. And so as we think about the schedule on remaining work, we continue to get better. Our most recent reload of towers and cells and blades at the Portsmouth Marine terminal was our fastest we've had so far. We're continuing to refine our jackup times, our sequencing, our installation, our execution. Once we're jacked up, the installation process continues to get better. That's the same learning curve we've seen elsewhere on the project, whether it was monopiles or transition pieces. Now at the same time, the updated schedule reflects what we have learned based on actual load out timing in Portsmouth. We've added cushion for weather and vessel maintenance contingency, and we now have added some longer jacking durations at certain and more challenging locations. So it's not a theoretical schedule. It's based on experience, which is what we said we would base it on, on prior calls. So the way I would summarize it is this way, the final turbine date has moved but the project has been substantially derisked. CVAL is already producing power. It's already benefiting customers. It's already supporting regulatory recovery. We don't have to wait until the last turbine is installed at the end of 2027 to see the value of this project, we can see it now.

All fair points. Appreciate that. And then maybe just moving to the merger. It's great to see documents got filed at the respective regulators. I know there have been some headlines in Virginia that they like certain folks would like to see a more extended time period for review. But to your point, in the prepares the procedural schedule has been set. So just your expectation that the procedural schedule stays as is and just any data points you would highlight there?

Yes. I mean I would echo what John said on Nexera's call. The conversations that we've had with stakeholders thus far have gone well. As to the specific time line and the discussion that you mentioned, worth noting that at a June meeting of the Energy Commission of Virginia, the SEC staff indicated -- the SEC is used to working with statutory deadlines and they did not directly asked, didn't indicate they needed more time or more resources. We also happen to believe the current time frame is sufficient, particularly when you look at the level of expertise on the Virginia Commission and the Virginia staff, they've done mergers before, they're used to working in these kind of time lines. They handle rate cases of great complexity in -- with statutory time lines all the time. So when we look at it that way, we think that the schedule that has been set forward makes a lot of sense, and we don't think it makes a lot of sense to change the rules in the middle of the game.

Our next question comes from Paul Zimbardo with Jefferies.

The first I was going to ask that there was another report in Virginia just around grid disruption, some of the data centers turning on their backups both or otherwise on the transmission line. Do you see a need to kind of incrementally strengthen the system with a transmission storage or elsewhere, just as here. ever very critical -- the most critical infrastructure in the U.S. in your service trajectory. Any change you see coming out of these events? .

Yes. Paul, it's a great question. At a high level, I'll answer that and then turn it over to Ed Bain, who is our EVP and CEO Utilities. The highlight is that this event is 1 that our planners handled very well. Our system operators handled very well, worked with but we can always learn. And to the sort of broader question that you asked before Ed gets into a little more of the specifics, we've been working very hard to upgrade the transmission system for some time. we feel like we're as good as anyone at operating a transmission system with these kinds of large loads. We have more experience than anyone else. We've been investing heavily as you are aware in the transmission system over the years, including some very specific projects in that part of our territory in the last few years. So we'll keep that up. We'll keep learning from this event. But Ed, is there anything you want to sort of talk about specifically on that?