Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Portland General Electric Company's first Quarter 2025 Earnings Results Conference Call. Today is Friday, April 25, 2025. 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. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the numbers 11 on your telephone keypad.

If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. If you do intend to ask a question, please avoid the use of speakerphones. For opening remarks, I will turn the conference call over to Portland General Electric's Manager of Investor Relations Nick White. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today. Portland General Electric announced advanced key priorities in the first quarter. Laying the foundation for solid results diligent cost management and strong execution in 2025 and beyond. Beginning with slide four, I'll speak to our financial results and key drivers. For the first quarter, reported GAAP net income of $100 million or $0.91 per diluted share. This compares with first quarter 2024 GAAP net income of $109 million or $1.08 per diluted share.

And non-GAAP net income of $123 million or $1.21 per share. Our first quarter results reflect the continuation of strong load growth from high-tech and data center customers. Who drove 4.6% total load growth and industrial load growth of 16.4%. Compared to the same quarter last year. PGE serves five large semiconductor customers and over 10 significant data center providers. That are spread across dozens of sites. Making up nearly a quarter of our total deliveries.

This growth is driving important capital improvements and upgrades across our transmission and distribution systems. These investments advance critical energy security and resource adequacy goals shared by customers the communities we serve. And also address aging infrastructure needs and enable the economic engine of our service territory. Many of these customers have aggressive clean energy goals that align with our municipal and residential customers.

Who make our clean energy program number one in the country according to NREL. Our strategy drives our work, to build the reliable, affordable, and increasingly clean grid of the future. Including the ongoing 2023 and 2025 RFPs. And the forthcoming 2025 IRP update. Customer prices, are central to our strategy and are playing and we are paying close attention to the evolving federal policy landscape and advocating for the continuation of renewable investment and production tax credits.

Credit transferability, and other provisions under the IRA and IIJA, as well as closely following the ongoing ongoing tariff situation. Our commitment to address system resilience, advance clean energy priorities, and provide safe, reliable, and affordable energy for every customer we serve. It is important today as ever. Turning to wildfire risk. We're actively engaged with key stakeholders, legislators, the governor's office, the OPUC, the Oregon Department of Forestry, first responders, and other utilities.

And customers. As we work towards solutions that address the societal risk of wildfires and other extreme weather. Our mature year-round wildfire mitigation work is advancing as we deploy lessons learned from recent wildfires and sharpen our practices ahead of summer. In 2025, we plan to spend over $120 million on wildfire mitigation, including capital investments and O and M. We're working with elected officials and stakeholders on legislation to address the financial risk from wildfires.

A bill was introduced in February to create a standard of care for utility wildfire mitigation and establishes a safety certificate process to be managed by the OPUC and tied to our wildfire mitigation plan. Creating clear standards for the work utilities do to prevent wildfires and keep communities safe is essential. Our clear standards reduce the likelihood of wildfires being triggered by utility equipment as well as enhanced services liability.

Lowers customer costs, and provides economic stability for Oregon's communities. We're pleased to see continued progress on this important policy. While proposed legislation to create a catastrophic wildfire fund has not moved forward, the ongoing dialogue with stakeholders represents productive progress. Pacific Northwest states are just beginning to grapple with the liability issues related to wildfire risk. And as I said in our last call, these policies may take more than one session to achieve.

The work we're doing to address and manage risk by executing on our wildfire mitigation plan and working to find societal solutions for the risk of wildfire in extreme weather helps with affordability and protects customers. When it comes to affordability, there are several areas that also come together to reduce upward customer bill pressure. Growth. Serving a growing customer base allows us to spread out operating costs and investments over larger volumes of business.

Cost management, Our company-wide work to reduce O and M costs is well underway. We're evaluating every program and reducing costs to help keep customer prices as low as possible. Joe will cover this work in greater detail in his remarks. As discussed on our previous call, we're working towards updating PGE's corporate structure to enable a holding company. This is a common structure in the industry, in fact, most common structure.

And will help enable increased flexibility in how we finance our business. As we look ahead, Portland General Electric team is focused on managing our business with discipline and foresight, diligently controlling costs and risk management, and seeking competitive returns to effectively attract investment. Delivering value to customers, communities and shareholders. With that, I'll turn it over to Jill. Jill?

Thank you. As a reminder to ask a question, please Our first question comes from the line of Julien Dumoulin-Smith with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

So it you're you're spot on with regards to the timing. With regards to progress that we're making, one of the things I think that has really been evident is there are a lot of legislators that really were not aware of the extensive wall mitigation plans that we put in place, the extensive increase in vegetation management and work that we've done in system hardening over the past number of years. And so there was a lot of discussion over really what it takes the costs, and the significant increase in costs over the last couple of years for wildfire prevention and mitigation.

One of the things that I think is also interesting is that wildfire presents itself very differently in different parts of state. So we've had a lot of discussions by experts as well as others Where we have really excelled is with regards to a certificate process. And that has been very important in terms of establishing a well known and well understood standard of care. Not unlike what you would see in the medical field or in engineering fields or in many other fields.

And then where we have much more work to do is with regards to a fund and then also limitations of liabilities associated with accessing that type of fund to the customers can get access to funds much faster than they would through other processes. We have a lot more work to do there. And I think you'll see that the continuation of discussions, even after the legislative session should be very productive.

Yeah. I think it's a good question, Julian. It's one that we ask ourselves continually. Quarter excuse me, on the first quarter call in February as well as previous We always thought that the discussion with regards to addressing wildfire in Oregon would take two sessions. And I I'm very appreciative of representatives Marsh and Mannix for the tireless work that they have done with regards to both bills, but in particular with regards to safety certification.

As we move forward, you're right. We're looking at our ability to be able to adequately recover costs and deliver competitive returns and competitive growth for investors. Excellent. Well, look. I'll I'll I'll

So we couldn't be more pleased with the negotiations as they're progressing. Obviously, in the external and global, as well as national environments, there's a lot of noise. But our customer base is growing. Our customer base continues to be focused on clean energy. And we look forward to concluding the negotiations as we go through the balance of the year and bringing on projects in the 2027 time period. I would note that from the last projects we brought on, we're already seeing tremendous advantages of the battery storage In fact, we've seen upwards of just under 10%, a certain periods of time coming from our battery storage. Enabling lower cost energy to be delivered to customers and really taking advantage of the variability across the entire West.

Thanks. Thanks, Julian. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Lonigan with Evercore Evercore ISI. Your line is now open.

Yes. So so first of all, with regards to our industrial base, it's it's primarily, three areas. The first is a quarter of it is really traditional industrial customers. A quarter in our fastest growing area is semiconductors excuse me, is data centers. That's the fastest growing area by far. And then about half is semiconductors. We are watching the global market for semiconductors very closely. And between all three of those sectors, we remain very confident in our growth as we move forward.

In terms of overall inflation, we've actually seen a moderating of inflation in terms of costs that are impacting us. Would imagine that our customers are seeing somewhat of the same thing. Obviously, does not come and take into consideration all discussions with regards to tariffs that are taking place nationally and globally.

I don't know. Joe, do you wanna address that?

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Richard Sunderland with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

You know, it's an excellent question, and it's something that we're spending a lot of time talking about both in the regulatory and in the legislative arenas. In fact, there is legislation to address this as we speak. Overall, the impact is in several areas. The first is just overall infrastructure. And as you can see, we've broken out a separate transmission area in our capitalization table. And it's really these new large customers, particularly data centers, that driving a lot of the need for transmission build out really in the first time and sometimes decades in our service territory.

So there is a benefit overall for system reliability. With regards to distribution, some impact there. Certainly. But most overall, what you really see is a change in the market price of power. As the increasing demand comes from data centers, whether we are serving them or other utilities in the Pacific Northwest. And we need to be doing more direct procurement for those, and we do have some programs that allow for that already.

And we're working directly with customers. I would also say that the data centers bring additional stability to the grid. We have some data centers that are bringing battery stores. We have some that have backup many have backup generation. And that is something that we had been working on for years. And accelerated our virtual power plant process.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Nathan Richardson with Barclays. Your line is now open.

Good morning.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Anthony Crodell with Mizuho. Your line is now open.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Greg Oriole with UBS. Your line is now open.

Okay. All right. That's the only question I had. Appreciate it. Great. Thanks. Thanks, Greg.

Thank you. And I'm currently showing no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to Maria Pope for closing remarks.

Thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate your interest in Portland General Electric, and we look forward to connecting with everyone soon. Thank you very much.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.