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

Hello, my name is Brian Russo, and I will be the moderator for the IDACORP presentation. Joining us is IDACORP's CFO, Brian Buckham; and Amy Shaw, VP of Finance, Compliance and Risk. [Operator Instructions] And with that, Brian and Amy, you can begin.

Thanks, Brian, and thanks, everybody, for joining us today. I'm going to start with the legal stuff, of course. This is from the former lawyer that's in me. This presentation does include some forward-looking statements. They reflect our current expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. There are some details about that on the slide. Actual results could differ from statements we make today based on these factors and some that are in our SEC filings. So we encourage you to review those. Those of you who have followed the company haven't seen this slide before because we just added it, in fact, for our outreach in real time. So I can summarize some of the themes of our company in really 4 general buckets that this slide sort of speaks to. Hopefully, this resonates during our presentation today. One thing is growth. And so growth comes in several forms for our company. It was our 16th consecutive year of earnings growth last year for IDACORP, which I think is unprecedented in the industry. We've had really sustained high customer and load growth. We see that going forward. We've got really high CapEx compared to what we've done in the past, and that begets our expected high rate base growth rate that we have in the slide that we'll talk about today. All of that with some upside. We take a really conservative approach to what we say about growth, which is pretty much the same conservative approach, we take in everything, we do for the people who have been following us for a long time, you know what I'm talking about on that. The second theme is reliability. This infrastructure that we're building all of this CapEx is really intended to be for growth. We've got a lot of growth in our service area. And we can't -- not do the CapEx that we're spending right now based on that growth. It's an obligation for us, not a choice that we're making. So we were long on power a decade ago. We absolutely aren't now. We're very short. And so we have to maintain our current system and then build for the future. The third one, I'd say, is affordability. While we're building a lot, affordability is really understandably important to our regulators, but it's also important to us and customer satisfaction matters including in the regulatory arena. So we're going to be in front of our regulators a lot and bringing CapEx into rate base and rates. So the fortunate thing we have is we start with low rates, and then we have a growing customer number to upsize the denominator in the regulatory equation for rates and then long-life assets to spread out the amortization. We also have a growth base for growth mentality in Idaho. So residential rates can remain affordable. And for people in this room, we pay about $100 or $105 a month on average for our residential rates, not bad for a month. We wanted to remain affordable despite all this industrial build-out that we're seeing. And so we're hoping to have rate cases of less than double digits going forward on a percentage basis. So maintaining the affordability of our service. And then we also have a culture of cost control that we'll talk about, that really helps with affordability. And the fourth theme about IDACORP, I want to talk about is executability and risk reduction. So we have a lot going on. So execution on that is really key for us, so is mitigation as an element of risk. So a few attributes and actions that we do are really targeted at that. So we have a constructive regulatory environment, which absolutely helps. Recent general rate case that we did in Idaho reset, de-risked its regulatory environment, we didn't have any capital disallowances in that rate case. And that was important to us from a result perspective. The balance sheet is strong. We don't have any really sizable maturities coming up until 2037. So a really strong balance sheet in that regard. Our 2024 equity, we already issued on a forward basis last year, we'll take it down at some point during this year. So the equity is already been issued. And then permits are in hand for our transmission projects. So those took years, one of them took over 15 years to get a permit. So just to give you an indication of how hard it is to build some of these infrastructure projects. So those projects have been in large part, de-risked as well. So with that, I'm actually going to hand it over to Amy to talk about a little bit more about IDACORP in general.

Happy to. So as an overview, IDACORP is the holding company and the NYSE listed company. We've actually been listed for 80 years. We celebrated that earlier this year. Idaho Power is our primary subsidiary. When we say primary, we mean about 95% of IDACORP comes from Idaho Power. For those of you that have been following us, you know we're a core electric utility. That's part of our strategy, and we're very proud of that. Currently, we're growing conservative core utility when you look at Idaho Power, and we talk just a little bit deeper, we're a vertically integrated utility. So we own the transition, the distribution, the generation resources that serve our customers, and we have over 630,000 customers. We have a really strong hydro base, 17 dams, and we're very proud of that hydro history. And that hydro history is a key base to our Clean Energy portfolio. Typically or historically, we spend about half of our energy mix comes from hydro. The last few years in the lower water situation, it's been lower than that, but still very strong. You can see over half of our energy comes from renewables and that's something we're proud of. And when we look forward, already clean, but we plan to be cleaner in the future. We have a goal of 100% clean energy by 2045, that's something that isn't driven by any sort of an outside push, something that the company is interested in and also our IRP really showcases and highlighted that we'll be exiting coal by 2030. We have efforts underway to convert several of our coal units to gas to kind of help move us through the energy transition. Another thing that we want to highlight is our dividend. Our dividend has been growing. We focus on a 60% to 70% payout ratio, we announced that a years ago that something that we've been committed to. We've steadily grown the dividend, as you can see, by 177% since 2011. Something else that's worth highlighting is our ability as a company to manage our O&M. It's just part of our culture. We have a low CAGR over the past 10 or so years. One thing that we're highlighting, you see what might be a notable jump in 2024 but actually, we expect that O&M might be flat or near flat again this year. That $40 million is offset by revenue collection from our rate case. So although it looks like a notable jump, it isn't really when you kind of dig into it a bit more. There's been a lot of talk about growth in Idaho. We've seen it both in residential and commercial and industrial. Part of that is the favorable business climate in Idaho. The other is just the quality of life in Idaho. It brings people to the state, it makes it -- the state makes it pretty easy to do business, and so we benefit from that and so do our customers. You can see Moody's growth projections for the service area in '24 and '25. So we expect to continue to see that growth that we've been responding to over the past few years. When you look at it, obviously, data centers are a hot topic across the industry, but we really have a variety of companies and industries that are focused on Idaho. If we really haven't seen the development isolated to any particular industry, it's across the board. And we've seen big expansions from long-time customers like Micron and as well as new customers like Meta that brought the data center to our area. Talking a little bit about Micron. They have a notable expansion. They have a $15 billion project, where they're expanding their already large facility. That project is well underway. It includes a new cleanroom. As you can note on the slide, 600,000 square feet. It also is bringing jobs, 2,000 direct jobs and around 17,000 total jobs as part of the expansion. We've been working with Micron for a long time. They've been here about 4 years, and we're excited that we get to continue to work with them. All of the growth we're touching on is really highlighted in our IRP. We issued our 2023 IRP late last year, noting an expected 5.5% growth in the near term. And once again, as Brian touched on earlier, we're not a company that counts their chickens before they hatch. So we have a really robust pipeline of others that are interested in Idaho and these numbers and any of our forecasts don't include those potential loads or that potential growth. We don't count things until there's something significant just happened that really determines that a firm load or a for sure customer that's coming in to our service area. We only have known size committed loads. So with all of that potential higher ticker activity, there's more upside beyond what we're showcasing here. And that will -- I'll turn it over to Brian, who'll talk a little bit more about how we're responding to all that growth.

Yes. So I think what you can see is what is all that growth drive that Amy's talking about it drives this. So if you look back -- you go to the 2018 to 2022, for example, our spending on CapEx was about $330 million a year. And that really started uptick recently. I mean I mentioned we were long on power. We're not anymore very short on power. So that's driven a lot of the building that you see on this slide. So we're still doing all of the standard care and maintenance of the system and the stuff we have to do to maintain reliability. And those are some of the lower bars that you see on that and then some of the other stuff are the additional incremental CapEx that we have to spend in order to really upgrade system. And some of those lower bars include a portion of that too, as we see customer growth expansion. We are having to build out standard transmission infrastructure, not just 500kV. So really diverse mix of projects here, our CapEx doesn't have any one project. It makes up a really substantial component of it. It's just -- you can see from the size of the bar, it's a lot of different projects that are in here, And it's across the whole vertically integrated sector, it's transmission, distribution and generation. So robust forecast for CapEx. And as a result of that, you end up with another thing that's robust, which is the rate base growth forecast, the level of spending we're talking about has influence this rate base growth forecast over time. A 10.8% CAGR is our estimate as of February. There's also some other stuff in here, Hells Canyon Relicensing, things like that. What I want to highlight on this slide is while that CapEx translates into this high rate base growth forecast, there's a few things we don't have in that forecast. For example, we have RFPs outstanding for 2026 and 2027, and we have projects that are on the shortlist that are Idaho Power owned projects, partnering projects. We don't have any of that in here. So it wasn't in our CapEx slide that I just showed, it's not in this rate base forecast. So there are upside scenarios to these. And as Amy and I both mentioned, we're kind of conservative utility that doesn't count chickens before they hatch. So we don't include customers in our forecast until they really sign the contract. We don't include CapEx and rate bases. So we're fairly certain it's going to happen, which is why the RFP stuff isn't in there yet. And so we hope to know more about bets on the RFPs later in the year. And when that happens, then we'll update this forecast. You could see on the CapEx slide though, some significant transmission project, the 500kV transmission project. So Boardman to Hemingway and took 15 years to get a permit for that thing. So we now have it and expect to break ground this year. We've been doing some materials procurement for that to keep it moving along. The Gateway West project. So if you look at our IRP in 2021, that project was outside the 20-year window. So we didn't actually need to construct the Gateway West segments that are Idaho Powered. Turns out that's changed dramatically recently such that when we did the 2023 IRP, and I'm going to serve all this low growth, it got accelerated into the near-term window. So we're already working with our partner, PacifiCorp, on Gateway West development. Just try to get that one really moving. We need that to serve all of this customer growth. We have the permit for that one, too. So we've de-risked both of these projects pretty substantially by having permits. I know there's a lot of transmission projects being talked about in the U.S. What I will say is it's really hard to get a permit. It takes a long time. I mentioned the RFPs that are outstanding for '26 and '27. You can see just based on the magnitude of what we're adding here, the deficits that we're working with in terms of resources being short on power. This is the current status of where those sit. You can see we've been doing well competing in the RFPs. You can see the owned resources that we have, that we're contributing to rate base. Solar generally is something that we don't win from an RFP perspective. But a lot of the solar that's listed is actually allocated to specific customers under what we call the Clean Energy Your Way program, which is a program to allow our customers to procure their costs through Idaho Power, some renewable energy resources if they want to have renewable energy at a rate that's faster than what Idaho Power is doing under its own clean energy goal. So that's been a successful program. So '26, '27, again, we'll see how those turn out. We're in the bid evaluation stage, but again, haven't counted those. And I will say, also not shown here, '28 and '29 -- we're already -- and we're looking at some of the other stuff coming down the pipeline, and we're really considering what we have to build in those years too and getting those RFPs started so that we can beat obligations in those years. A big news for us, people who have been following along for all you haven't seen a general rate case for Idaho Power since 2012. So we've finally filed another one in 2023 and settled it in 2023. And we did a lot of stuff in the meantime. It wasn't that we weren't active in the regulatory arena. We were very active. I mean we did tax reform, coal plant acceleration, Hells Canyon investment prudence, Wildfire mitigation deferrals. We have a lot of stuff going on in the regulatory arena. But we didn't need to file a general rate case. So we wanted to shore that up in 2023, and the rates are in effect now from the settlement that you can see the details on the slide. It was largely infrastructure cases, right? We had a lot of rate base that hadn't been included into or a lot of CapEx that wasn't included in our rate base for recovery purposes. So we brought that forward. Our goal was a single-digit percentage increase under the theory that smaller bites at the apple for a better approach with our regulators. So we went in with an 8.6% ask. That factor not having gone in for 12 years for general. Again, there were interim rate changes along the way, but a very reasonable ask. You can see the results of that. Question people have had is, well, how are you able to go into such a low rate request after such a long period of time. And a lot of that is customer growth, right? So our rate change actually was allocated to drop a much larger number of customers. And so that helped a lot. The total rate base increase you see there is about $55 million. The other component of this case that's important, though, is the $168 million of power supply costs that were moved from PCA rates or power cost adjustment mechanism into base rates. So that removes quite a bit of the volatility that we were seeing from power supply costs that would cause upward and downward movement in what our customer rates would be. And in one year, we actually had a pretty significant earnings impact from power cost adjustment, which is not typical for it to be very large just because of a significant amount of volatility. So that was one of the big improvements that the general rate case provided for us was being able to move that into base rates. So if you aggregate the 2 of those, it wasn't just a $55 million increase. It was also increased by that adjustment to the power cost adjustment as well. Customers didn't feel that as much because it was already in rates on a temporary basis under the power cost adjustment. So we're looking at what we would file for 2024. There's a decent chance with all of this CapEx and all of this plant going into service that we filed again in 2024. What we've been trying to decide, and we've been working with commission staff and possible intervenors in the case of could we just do a limited scope case. Our biggest ask is going to be infrastructure again. So we just do a case that asks for that and our labor costs. We're really good at controlling O&M, but of course, our labor cost goes up every year. So we just do that. And we don't have an answer to that yet. We're still working through with customers on where that goes, but we'll see. It'd be nice to get more real-time collection on our rate base. That's the biggest area that we have where we could use some help from the regulatory process. Something really important that we've been reminding people about as we're going through this big CapEx cycle is just spending that amount of CapEx. When things go into service, you start to have depreciation and AFUDC turns off, and that can create some lag. And also, you have depreciation and financing costs associated with this massive build-out that we have. So I want to remind people that we have this mechanism in Idaho really helpful for us, originated a long time ago from a revenue ruling that we got from the IRS in 90s. Where we have regulatory authority in Idaho to actually accelerate the amortization of investment tax credits that we have on the balance sheet, if necessary in order to achieve a minimum ROE in Idaho. The details of that are on this slide, the current floor for earnings use of the ADITCs is 9.12%. So if we under earn an ROE in Idaho of 9.12%, we're allowed to use these credits that the commission is authorized. About $86 million of credits are authorized as of the end of 2023. I think we'll get another $10 million to $15 million probably into the bucket this year from battery storage resources that were intended to all be paid for in 2023, but we're going to pay for in part in 2024. The flip side of that is, historically, if we've I'll call it over earned our authorized ROE. We've had to share with customers. And we've shared almost $130 million with our customers under this mechanism. And to date, the shareholders have not received the benefit of the earnings prop-up that it provides. So there -- we believe that it's time for our shareholders to get the benefit of that. We do expect to use some of our ADITCs in Idaho this year to get up to that 9.12% ROE. This really helps us out with the regulatory lag that's caused by our big step-up in CapEx and our customer growth. So this mechanism, we're the only utility, we're aware of, that has this mechanism and the ability to prop-up earnings in that way. So really helpful for us as we go through this cycle. Lastly, jurisdiction for us, certainly is Oregon. It's about 5% of our -- of Idaho Power's operations, but we did file a rate case there. I highlight the joke it's 5% of our revenues, but 51% of our efforts on the regulatory side because it's no easier operating in Oregon despite its smaller size. We did make a larger ask in Oregon of 19% increase. That's driven largely by the fact we just didn't have the same amount of customer growth in Oregon that we did in Idaho. So the rate request was a little larger. Working on that case now. We've got just one settlement conversation so far as part of the process. So affordability, I mentioned is one of the things that's really important to us, and we start from a really strong place. You can see the low rates that we already have for both our residential and industrial customers. Again, our average residential bill was $100 before Idaho [indiscernible] rate base now it's $105. So again, a pretty small move in our service area. Also, a strong balance sheet is an element of our approach. Certainly, we want to maintain 50% to 51% equity, keep our balance sheet in a strong position and also keeping it in a place where it makes sense from a regulatory perspective because that's what the regulators will most likely look at as the debt equity ratio for purposes of setting rates. We issued our equity for 2024 already. We issued it in November '23 on a forward basis. So we haven't drawn down on it yet, but the equity that we have -- that we expect to use for this year. We already have price done, basically. One thing I will mention that's important too is from an equity issuance perspective, going forward, that operating -- the cash from operating activities, number you see for 2023 is really low, even below what our expectations were for '23. That was caused by power and fuel market volatility, we actually started the year in a deficit for operating cash flow because of power and fuel cost. That since recovered and moderated, and we have recovery going through our power cost adjustment at this point and the benefit of the rate base. So we expect our 2024 operating cash flow to improve dramatically, which reduces both our debt and equity needs going forward. Our debt maturity profile, you see we don't really have much the sizable before 2037, and even after that, the maturities are relatively sizable. So it's about 2048, when they start to get larger again. So it helps with our strong balance sheet, a lot of debt financing has room for us. We do plan to issue both debt and equity, really, was that goal of staying at the 50-50 ratio, a really good chance we've got up in ATM later this year for future equity issuances, possibly with a forward component just like we did on our last follow-on offering from November. And then the last thing that I really want to touch on, this has been a question a lot of people have had, and it's a really good question. It's one that all investors should be asking. Basically, all utilities regardless of what the Wildfire Risk map looks like across the U.S. no one is immune to it, it turns out. So major topic of vendors in our industry, and I think rightly so. So I wanted to talk about what Idaho Power's risk profile was and what we do about it. We started with California's approach. So California had a contractor you can go through -- and create a risk map for California where the high risk areas are. We took that same methodology and that same contractor and said, take your criteria of California and apply to Idaho and see what happens. And so they did, and we didn't have any high-risk [ accounts ], it turns out. So we decided that wasn't good enough. I mean, that's reassuring. But we said, you know what find some anyway. So made the criteria even more conservative. And some of the things that really make a difference are we don't have [indiscernible] or Santa Ana in Idaho, we're mostly high desert. We have a limited number of areas with high vegetation. You can see what a lot of our service area looks like actually from that photo where they're wrapping the poles with mesh wrap. Those factors really lower the degree of risk relative to some of our peers who operate in coastal areas that do have some of those attributes and high vegetation and didn't know that those areas could burn, right? Because historically, they had. So they were caught a little bit off guard. We've always had fires in Idaho, so we've operated with that risk for decades, and we know how to do so. The fires that you see in Idaho, most of those that are in have any size are actually in national forest areas. So wilderness areas largely roadless, usually started by lightning or a camper. So we don't have lines in many of those places certainly. So while some of them make the news, those are in the middle of nowhere. It turns out. So despite really coming in from a much lower risk profile, we did end up finding ways to identify areas that might be higher risk, some areas that have higher vegetation. We do have a formal Wildfire Mitigation Plan. It's reviewed by both regulators, Idaho, Oregon, on our website. We do vegetation management. We've done spark protective fuses, pole-based clearing. You can see the mesh wrap here that we do to protect the poles from burn-in, we do underground in some areas. We have operating practices like in high-risk areas or in wildfire season, we do a 1-shot lockout, which means the line doesn't attempt to reenergize automatically if it locks out, we got to patrol the line before it reenergized so that we don't spark the fire. There are some areas we won't operate in, and we won't drive trucks over dry grass in some areas. Weather stations, AI cameras. We do have a PSPS, public safety power shutoff like California. We've never had to use it. Again, we don't have the same sort of winds and conditions you see in California, but we test it, and we're ready for it. If conditions ever did set up -- actually we have a formally trained fire response team that can go out and prove causation or help prove causation and then help pursue people who burn into our line and suffer damages for people who caused fire to burn into our line. So we also ensure against it. And I think really important items, the negligent base state Oregon effectively is as well. Unless you intentionally start fire. So we start from a lower legal risk profile, and we have a statutory cap on noneconomic damages as well. So sadly, I'd say a lot of the fires actually start by birds and squirrels. So those are negligent in any way, but unfortunate causes of fires. So anyway, despite the lower risk, we definitely pay a lot of attention to wildfire risk and wildfire mitigation. And our state has supported it. The regulatory commission gave us deferral orders on it. So we're in a good position of strength from the Wildfire Risk Mitigation perspective. With that, I just want to say thank you. And I don't know, Brian, if we have time for questions or not, but hopefully, we got through the material in the allotted time.

Yes. Thanks, Brian and Amy. [Operator Instructions] So Brian, we've got a minute left, right? And I just wanted to make sure the participants are really aware of why data centers are attracted to Idaho that then creates a multiplier effect with both your commercial and industrial customers? I mean is it the climate, the manageable wildfire risk or even the Clean Energy, your way tariff that -- and low rates that are attracting data centers and that pipeline -- robust pipeline of interest that you're seeing, maybe just quickly, if you don't mind.

Yes, absolutely. So it's a variety of factors. It's low natural disaster risk. It is a well-educated trained workforce, relatively inexpensive real estate prices, low electricity rates in Idaho. A already clean portfolio. Some are willing to take portfolio as is. Others want 100% clean. And to the extent they do, we do have the Clean Energy Your Way program for them, which allows us to earn our return on their power service, but also gives them 100% renewable energy. So the pipeline for fiber in Idaho has been upgraded as well. So it's now easier to transmit the data to the data centers. We have nice cold winters here, so it helps with cooling of the data centers. So we've got a lot of different things that are really going for us. And we have a sales tax exemption right now for some of the servers that are in data centers on the storage. So we've made it a very -- we were already a hospitable environment for them. We've made it even more. We can't take them all, not even close. We can't take all of them that are coming that have told us their interest in coming years. So we're having discussions with them about when they could come online and how big they could be and how we could ramp them up and where they could be located, how much do they have to pay and those conversations are going really well. We've given the numbers that, from our perspective, seem high, kind of like Boise real estate to us, it seems high. So then it seems really reasonable. So we become a very attractive service territory and it's a matter of which ones we can manage to allow in with the rate of growth we already have.

Okay. Great. Well, we're out of time. So I want to thank you, Brian and Amy for the IDACORP presentation. This concludes today's presentation. Thank you, and have a nice day.

Thanks, Brian. Thanks, everybody, for listening.