IDACORP, Inc. (IDA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. My name is Brian Russo, and I will be the moderator for today's IDACORP presentation. As a reminder, for the participants, if you would like to ask a question, please use the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen and joining us is IDACORP CFO, Brian Buckham and Amy Shaw, Director of Investor Relations, Compliance and Risk. And with that, Brian, you could start your presentation.

Thanks, Brian. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. Glad to have you. Just want to mention today is Amy's third day on the job in IR. She's -- as I mentioned on our earnings call, she is very enthusiastic, and she's hit the ground running. So we're just going to go through a few slides, give you an update on the company, some background for those of you who may not be as familiar with it, and then hopefully open it up for some Q&A towards the end. So the -- I was a securities lawyer in a prior life, and then -- and I can't help but refer to this one because of that. So just a reminder that we're going to make some forward-looking statements, and they're all subject to the caveats that are on this slide. We just hit a little bit of background on the company. I know a lot of you are familiar with IDACORP and Idaho Power, but let me just refresh or introduce some of you to this. So Idaho Power Company is IDACORP's primary subsidiary, more than 95% of the company's revenues are from Idaho Power. And then IDACORP is a utility holding company. It's the New York Stock Exchange listed entity. Interestingly enough, we're going to be back in New York in February for what would be Idaho Power's 80th year of listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Now it's IDACORP's effective 80th year listed on the stock exchange. So been there for a while. So Idaho Power is a vertically integrated electric utility, it's electric only, owns a lot of the generation that it uses and then the transmission and distribution system and really large service area. You can see on the map here, it's Idaho and Oregon. It covers about 72% of Idaho's residents. It's the population center, about that middle section of Idaho has almost no one in it, the largest population sectors that southern portion of Idaho. And then what you can see on that map is that the Snake River runs through the bottom of Idaho there. And that's where Idaho Power gets its origins. It's a hydro-based utility, used to be 100% clean. It was 100% hydro-powered back at its origins as we can talk about later, we're headed back to that 100% clean environment that we started from a long time ago, back in 1916. So that's just a little bit of background on the company. Talk about Idaho, in particular, there's just a little something about Idaho. We've had really rapid growth in the past few years, and it's both residents moving to Idaho and businesses. And by businesses, I mean ones that have been here before and are expanding and new businesses that are coming in. That chart that you see on the slide shows our customer growth rate, it ticked back up in July, actually, as I mentioned on the last earnings conference call, about 2.1% growth over the last 12 months, a little bit uptick in July there. And then you can see below that Moody's GDP growth forecast for our service area, pretty robust numbers at a time when you hear about some recessionary pressures in part of the U.S., just not really seeing it here in Idaho. I want to touch a little bit on why that is, and there's a little bit of an economic snapshot there for you. But growth in Idaho has been across a lot of different sectors. So we have tech. So you see Micron and Meta on there, massive drivers of C&I, commercial and industrial growth in Idaho. But you've got food processing, manufacturing, renewable gas, data centers, Meta on there again, residential, we have resorts on there. So the 2 largest loads coming on that you'll see a Micron and Meta on there, that's Micron's expansion that we can get into later because it is a big driver. And then Meta, that's a new customer. Micron has been here for a long time, Meta is a new customer for us. We're actually also seeing some other areas like mining. So our origins were serving a town called Silver City, which was a silver mining town back in the early 1900. We actually have quite a bit of mining load that's come on and scheduled to come on. So even back to traditional industries like mining and ag, we've seen some pretty significant growth in Idaho, even in those areas. I think you've seen our guidance, but I want to talk about that. What is the growth that we've seen in Idaho driving? In 2012, we were just talking with Brian about the Langley Gulch plant came online and when it did, we were in a long position on power, and we had customer growth, but it took a while for the customer growth to take the length out of our system. We also had ready access to energy markets through transmission systems. Two things changed. The growth eventually caught up with it and the transmission markets in the Western U.S. changed. You've probably seen our transmission wheeling revenues. They were a beneficiary of some of those transmission market changes. The downside was the access energy wasn't there like it used to be. So when that happened, we needed to add generation and transmission to our system pretty rapidly. That's on top of the base load of CapEx investment that we were already making just to provide reliable service. So we used to have a consistent about $330 million a year of CapEx. This chart shows you what happened to that due to growth in our service area. As the chart shows, it's much more investment than we've had in the past. And that's all about serving growth reliably. And so what I'll also mention is these charts are from February of '23. So we usually up been about once a year. And I mentioned on the most recent earnings call that 2024 number is probably lower than where we're headed for 2024. And I'll say, '26 and '27, we are a very conservative company. We typically don't put things in until we have a pretty high level of assurance how they're going to turn out. '26 and '27 actually has some pretty significant upside to it because we have RFPs outstanding and some other projects, that include transmission. We just haven't decided yet how those are going to turn out. And so we haven't included them, but I will say that those 2 years, in particular, have some additional upside to them from an investment perspective. So what does all of that investment do? It drives this, our rate-base forecast. And again, with the conservative estimates that we have in our CapEx forecast, there may be some conservatism in our rate-base growth forecast as well, an 11.1% CAGR based on the graph on the prior slide. So again, this is growth-driven CapEx. We've got a lot of accumulated rate-base through 2022, that's not in rates now. And Amy will talk a little bit about what we're planning to do about that. But if you look at our cycle going forward expected in that rate-base additions and these are net of deferred taxes, the number rose pretty significantly. And you have some additions in there, like the Boardman to Hemingway transmission line, Hells Canyon relicensing, some coal-to-gas conversion. There's a lot of big projects that are in there. I think that number is probably best-in-class or close to it. But again, the types of projects that are fueling it are reliability-driven infrastructure projects. In order to serve all the growth, and just to give you a little sample of what they are, there's one of our projects. That's a battery storage project. That picture was taken a little while ago. That facility is now probably by today fully online would be my guess. That's one of our battery storage projects. This is one out in Southern Idaho. We've also been busy with RFPs and they're listed on the slide, probably too many to go through, but we're getting both owned and contracted resources from those. And the owned ones that we know of are in that CapEx slide that you saw previously. So what I will say is you see this sort of rapid development. The engineers originally, they are scrambling with the RFP, scrambling get this stuff built to address the growth that's coming. Another way to address it is transmission. And so since there is not decent access to energy markets, we're building it. What I will say is it takes a very, very long time. So the Boardman to Hemingway transmission line is a significant project for us. We've been working on it for at least 15 years now, and we now have the permit, and we actually expect to start construction this year. We also purchased Bonneville Power Administration share of the project, which takes ours from 21% to 45% ownership. And we got our certificates of public convenience and necessity from the PUCs. So basically ready to get construction started full speed ahead on that with actual shovels in the ground soon. We have another project, Gateway West. If you look at our 2021 IRP, you won't see Gateway West, I think based on where we are from a growth perspective, if you look at our 2023 IRP, scheduled to be issued in September. Gateway West comes into the window and it comes into the window with a vengeance. So we are now actively working on that project and getting plans in place to develop our segments specific or has developed some of their segments, but ours in Idaho, we're putting in place now. And that project stretches into Wyoming and gets Wyoming wind. A little bit more on Micron. I mentioned that one. So some of that projected growth that I mentioned is C&I customers, Micron is a big one of those. They're making a $15 billion investment in Idaho, they have their origins in Idaho and a lot of their R&D facilities are here funded by, at least in large part by the CHIPS Act, so they're scrambling to get domestic chips made and they happen to have a great facility here already. So the driver of load is the 24/7 365 fab shop that's mentioned there, the 600,000 square feet. There's well over 1 million other square feet involved in this of other space, but that's the high load operation. That's also going to drive in migration for filling jobs. We have very low unemployment in Idaho. So those 17,000 new jobs that are projected or some of those are going to have to come from outside. Anecdotally, you can see the dirt being moved at their site. They've started construction on that. And we're working on our substation. We don't give out information on megawatts because it's competitively sensitive to our customer. But I can tell you that the substation that we're constructing is 22 acres. So it gives you an order of magnitude of what size of facility they're installing out there. You can actually see the impact of commercial and industrial growth as well as our residential forecast in our IRP load forecast. So for the 2023 IRP, you see that 5.5% load growth number for the next 5 years, annually for the next 5 years. So robust, we actually did in that 5.5%. We decreased our residential sales forecast just because of comments about recessionary pressures nationally. So that number was updated based on that view. Again, we take a pretty conservative view of load growth. But this is what's driven the new resources and the need to accelerate transmission and other investments in our system in order to reliably serve customers. It also drove us to something we haven't done in 12 years, which is a general rate case. So I'm going to hand it over to Amy to walk through some of the attributes of the general rate case that we filed.

Thanks. So obviously, there's a lot of details included on the slide related to the rate case. But Brian touched on this. It's really an infrastructure-focused rate case. And there's 3 kind of key points, I think, I want to talk through or highlight for you. The first is, it was really important to us that we went in with a single-digit ask for our customers. So you can see Idaho jurisdiction revenues of $111 million and an 8.6% overall average customer rate increase. We're requesting an ROE of 10.4% with a 51-49 equity ratio. And finally, we asked for an enhancement to our earnings support mechanism. For those of you that aren't familiar with Idaho Power, this might be new to you because it's something that's unique Idaho Power and it's really worth highlighting. We'll talk about the existing mechanism, a little bit more in a couple of slides. But just to touch on what our ask was and that enhancement, so we wanted to be thoughtful and balanced to ask the customers. So it was really a creative way around being able to accelerate the use of the battery-related investment tax credits that Brian mentioned, the battery projects that are in progress now. So if approved, our existing mechanism would be enhanced to provide up to $46 million of accelerated use of those tax credits annually, up from our $25 million per year now to a total of $90 million overall that we could use. And we can talk about that a bit more in a minute. So again, something that we're really proud of -- or well, first, let me touch on the dividend, I apologize. So our dividend has increased since 2011. We continue to expect management wants to recommend a future increase of around 5% and target that payout ratio of 60% to 70%. This was highlighted in one of Brian's earlier talking points, but we've been able to stay out of going intricate because we have a culture of cost management and that's really showcased by our O&M and such a small growth in O&M over our history. We're also really proud of our consecutive years of earnings' growth. You can see here that we've consistently had a steady EPS growth. And Brian mentioned this early on, but just to highlight it again too, Idaho Power is the biggest contributor to IDACORP's earnings. Idaho Power has an authorized rate of return of 10% in Idaho and 9.9% in Oregon. And again, touching on that earnings support mechanism. So this has sort of a twofold. It helps our owners because if we earn less than 9.4% in a given year, this mechanism offers a support to those earnings. And on the flip side, it also benefits customers. If we earn over 10%, then it shares that excess or that additional with customers. And we've shared about $130 million with customers since 2009. Finally, Brian touched on this. We're kind of going back to our roots. We used to be 100% clean, back before 100% clean was all the rage. But we're moving back towards that. So we have a clean energy goal to be 100% clean by 2045. We have short-term, midterm and long-term goals along that path. And our IRP, Brian mentioned this as well, that should be coming out in September 2023. IRP, we'll highlight some of the steps that we're taking along the way. When we look at our portfolio, I think it's important to note that in years where hydro isn't as strong, which for us was 2022 and even 2021, we'd see more a little bit of a different mix in years for hydro strong. And so far, 2023 is shaping up to be a good year or a better year for hydro. We tend to see fewer market purchases and less use of natural gas and coal because we have that benefit of that low-cost clean resource in our hydro system. We also have some materials available in our appendix, but we're happy to open it up for questions.

Before we open for questions, let me just touch a little bit on our rate case strategy as well, just to add some context from what Amy mentioned. So she mentioned the idea of going in with a single-digit rate ask and when we put the case together, we didn't get there. We had a greater -- we had a higher than 10% average rate request. As Amy mentioned, we got that down to 8.61%. We've seen other utilities go in with big asks and come out with results that are just not favorable. And that's not how we wanted to approach it. When we're going in with that sort of just low O&M growth rate, that was 1 piece of mitigation that was already there. And I think one of the primary points we hit in -- we hit on in our case before the PUC is, we were very prudent in managing our expenses. But what we have is an infrastructure app that we need to bring to you in order to continue to provide reliable service. And Amy, you walk through what the aspects were that we did to mitigate the case. The battery storage one was a really big one to remove that revenue requirement and replace it with tax credits, that really benefits our customers by taking $21 million of our ask out but it benefits our shareholders significantly as well, just by giving them the additional support from the mechanism at a time when we're going into a massive CapEx investment where depreciation and interest expense to finance that could be pretty significant. We've seen that this year certainly. The other things we've asked for is we just want to make sure our credit metrics are in a good spot. So we've got a decent-sized pension deferral on our balance sheet that we thought, well, we need to recover a little bit more on that. We want to keep our pension in a good funded status where it is now. And we've got some wildfire mitigation on there, too, where it's been deferred, but we'd like some cash collection just to help on the credit side. The thing I think that's also really important to recognize is Idaho does have a bit of a mentality of growth pace for growth. And so when we went in for our ask, if you think about the fact that we've had a 23% increase in customers, our costs certainly haven't gone up at that rate. So when the costs don't go up, if the denominator gets better, that's a much better case for us. And as we look at some of these investments that we're making going forward, that denominator continues to expand, both in terms of additional residential customer growth, but also commercial and industrial. Some of the investment we're making on behalf of these commercial and industrial customers will be built into their rate. So return on and return of the investment we make to serve those customers. So the rate ask that we've made has that benefit. It also going forward, has the benefit of the fact that a lot of our assets are long life. So you think about what we're putting into rate base transmission line, our Hells Canyon relicensing costs. So when those come in, those are, I want to say, 50 years, hopefully, each in terms of depreciable lives. So that will help keep our rate request going forward, smaller and I also want to add that this is probably not -- or it is certainly not our last case, right? So this is our first one in a long time as far as our general rate case. We've been in front of the regulator regularly, and we've had very constructive outcomes on things like the Bridger case, wildfire mitigation, capitalization of cloud computing. And we've had very, very constructive outcomes in that. So we're in front of our regulator all the time. We're going to be in front of them more frequently with these infrastructure asks going forward. So we've got this case bringing in the $1 billion of rate base that just hadn't been in there before. But we're going to have battery storage assets. We're going to have the Hells Canyon license come out perhaps 2025, maybe 2024. We're going to have Boardman to Hemingway transmission line come in finally, around 2026 is our plan. So that could be another case. And then we have additional resource additions, that's beyond just the base load of standard care and maintenance we have on our facilities that are capitalized. So it's not going to be just this case. It's going to be a series of cases. And those can be general rate cases, we could work with our regulator on some sort of capital track or multiyear rate cases, that's all TBD. But at this point, we're just looking at this case first for really reset and say all of the accumulated investment we need to start recovering on that for the benefit of our shareholders. And that's why we're in on this one. But keep in mind, this is going to be a series of cases and regulatory apps. Again, hopefully, relatively modest in light of just the denominator providing a benefit to the case. I just wanted to add those points, and now we will open it up to Q&A.

Well, thank you, Brian and Amy. As a reminder, for the participants, if you'd like to ask a question, please use the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. So Brian, maybe I'll just start off. There are several macroeconomic headwinds that are affecting the utility industry. One is the interest rate environment, and you've been active in the capital markets this year and will be in the future to the fund, which is a rather robust capital plan. Maybe one, you can just address that for the participants. And then just a follow-up on your O&M comments, obviously, 1% average annual growth for over a decade is remarkable. What are you seeing in terms of labor availability in your service territory as well as raw material inflation and how -- or what levers do you have in place or that you've used in the past that you can help manage those costs and ultimately increases to the customer?

Sure. On the macroeconomic side, we've enjoyed the benefit long term over the last 10 years of being able to refinance that at a lower rate. And if you look at the WACC that we included in our case, is actually pretty similar to what we did in our last case in 2011. And that's because the overall cost of debt has decreased. No, it's not going to happen now that the benefit that we have is we don't have a lot of near-term maturities. So we don't have to refinance. We just refinanced the last maturity that was of any sort of magnitude. So the debt we are going to be issued, won't be refinancing-related, it will be related to actually funding this growth capital. So it will be more expensive to issue debt going forward, but so long as we're prudent in our debt issuance, these will be captured in these cases going forward. So we want to hope to not have too much lag on interest expense as it increases. And we'll be creative in our financing methodologies too. The other thing I'll mention is we're going to blend that equity to fund growth. We need to keep our equity structure somewhere around 50-50. That's why our regulator -- we believe they expect we filed at 51%, like to stay at 51%. We like to be a little bit over-equitized on that, but it may believe 50-50 is appropriate. We're currently still high on the equity scale. So that gives us debt headroom, and we're going to use it. But over time, we'll start blending some equity, too, and we need to do from a credit metric perspective and just to fund that, keep that ratio in check. On the labor side and the inflation side, so we've absolutely seen labor inflation. And part of that is all of the residential influx to Idaho, housing couldn't keep up with it. Housing prices went through the roof. They've somewhat -- they're somewhat levelized for people who grew up in Idaho like Amy and I, it looks absolutely exorbitant. For people who are coming from out of state, it looks like an absolute bargain, still what you get for the amount of dollars. So people who are still coming in, but we did, through the pandemic, have some issues with affordability of housing and being able to bring in workforce. We had people from Portland, for example, accept a job and then come to Boise to look at housing and say, "I can't afford to move to Boise", and that didn't used to be the case. We've fortunately seen a slowdown and the increases and there is housing becoming available. So it's easier to attract people. The number of applicants we're getting for jobs is ticking back towards normal levels. We saw Micron. They're going to -- they expect 17,000 new jobs in Idaho. That's going to have to come from outside. We don't have enough unemployment for that. So we will get additional customers moving to Idaho to help in that area. And in other industries, I mean, there's just a lot of industry that's developing in Idaho because it's such an easy place to do business. Amazon commented that their distribution center that they opened just west of Boise was the fastest from they ever got done from start to finish because while the permitting and environmental requirements were the same, the government worked with them quickly to get them done and in place. So it's just really easy to do business in this state. And so we have seen labor inflation. You saw our uptick in O&M, last year, and that was largely labor-driven. There are some other drivers like scheduled plant maintenance in there too, but that was hugely driven by labor increases where we had to catch up with the fact that it's become expensive to live here and therefore, more expensive to compensate labor.

And I think the last question was around supplies and materials. And I think the environment has changed a little bit. A lot of us have seen that from COVID and whatnot. But our supply chain group has done a really good job of trying to diversify, so they're no longer -- utilities are very relationship-based, and we still are, but they've worked on expanding that. So they don't have just 1 supplier and trying to ensure that we can continue to make sure we provide reliable service to our customers, right? That's a key tenant of every utility. But I think we've seen that turn around as well, just with the work they've done to kind of broaden their base of suppliers and ensure we have access to what we need. But there's definitely been increases there, too.

And I would not want to negotiate against our supply chain team. They're vicious, negotiating concessions and keeping prices down where they can. I think another just anecdote that help from our labor side is, during the pandemic, we saw an uptick of our voluntary turnover rate, and we were aghast at the number, it was 3% and 3% turnover rate at any company is exceptionally low. That was unacceptable for us. It's back down to more typical levels of 1.5% voluntary turnover. So really, really low. So we're able to attract really high-quality candidates, and then we keep them here at the company. We're pretty proud of that.

Okay. Great. We have a question here regarding the Micron project. What's the status? Is it on schedule? And this participant is referencing TSMC, which is timeline semiconductor that face -- was facing delays at maybe one of their other facilities out there?

Yes. So we're full speed ahead on that project. So working on our -- on the substation development getting that in place, we've got all of the transformers ordered, and that's one of the project delays that you see. For a while, transformers were very hard to get. So we put in early orders on those transformers to make sure we get them on time. My best gauge of whether or not they're on schedule is if you drive by there or we flew over it a couple of weeks ago, the dirt has been moved. So you can see all of the development taking place out there. And I don't know what their time line is under the CHIPS Act, if there's a specific time by which they have to have this done, but just from my view of the progress they've made that they look to be full speed ahead, and we certainly are.

Okay. One last question, Brian. If you could just touch on your wildfire mitigation plan, especially what we've seen recently in the West and in Hawaii, and also what differentiates Idaho service territory geographically right, that may or may not make it less susceptible to a heightened level of wildfire seasons that we seem to be seeing almost every year now?

Yes. So that question comes up a lot because we're in the West. But we are distinguishable from a lot of the other utilities that are in the West. I would note is we do have a wildfire mitigation plan publicly available, and it is robust. I mean we've gone through our system and categorized areas by risk. We have operating procedures about de-energizing lines, we have public safety power shut off and in place already, we never had to use one and the reason why we haven't had to use one is your comment about geographic differentiation. So a lot of the lines that we have go over what I would call more stage brush lands rather than highly vegetated. Vegetated, is that a word?

Right.

Highly vegetated land.

Vegetation.

So you look at some of the fires that have happened in California or the ones that have happened in Pacific or in Hawaii. You've got things like really high sand and winds, hurricane winds, trees and branches that are -- because the wind is so violent, it actually blows into the infrastructure and knocks it down. We don't have a lot of areas here where that's the case. And we also -- to the extent we do have those areas have a pretty intense vegetation management program. In fact, we spent so much on vegetation management that we have, the deferral order for the wildfire mitigation plan with about a $40 million, I want to say, at this point, deferral associated with incremental costs for wildfire mitigation. So we've hit that really hard but we just don't have the same type of wind and vegetation here that you see in other areas that have caused those significant wildfires. We do lose some infrastructure every year to brushfire, but we've shored a lot of that up with steel poles or we put vegetation management around the base of our poles, so that the fire doesn't reach them if it burns into our poles. So certainly a geographic distinction, but even beyond that, our wildfire mitigation efforts are just -- are substantial and worth looking at our wildfire mitigation plan, we're pretty proud of it. We put a lot of time into and thoughtfulness. There are certain areas where if the conditions are what we would call risky, we won't even drive in there with our trucks so that the bottom of the truck is still on ignite, drive rush that might be underneath. We just turn off our work in those areas unless it's safety-critical.

Okay. Great. Well, we are out of time. So I want to thank Brian and Amy for their presentation today and all the participants. This concludes today's IDACORP presentation. Have a nice day.

Thanks, Brian.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining.