CMS Energy Corporation (NYSE:CMS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Garrick Rochow: Well, you remember Q4 call last year. And I was in this spot, and we were saying, hey, we need to improve. We didn’t get the best order out of the commission. And we said a couple of things on that call. One, we needed to improve our testimony in our business cases. And we did that. We took two months. We delayed the case by two months, and that’s exactly what we worked on. We also adjusted our approach for the electric rate case and how we deliver that and interface with the staff on it. That was a learning that we took from our integrated resource plan filing, we extended that to our electric rate case. And then as we got to August, we saw staff position, it was a very constructive staff position because of all the work that had been done in the testimony and business cases, the improvement that had been done.

And that was the foundation. So once you have that constructive foundation, that constructive point where staff is, then it’s really an opportunity to work through settlement. And that’s exactly what we did working with a number of interveners, the Attorney General, the staff, business community, residential community as well as number of environmental interveners to really have a very constructive outcome with this electric rate case. And so as I look forward, we’re going to continue to deploy those methods. We’re going to continue to improve the process going forward so that we can set ourselves up for settlement or if we have to go to the final order that we can get a constructive order.

Michael Sullivan: Great and thanks, that’s really helpful. And then just shifting to the CapEx plan and the clean energy spend. Can you guys just quantify like how much on a megawatt basis of renewables you’re looking at over the plan and what that looks in terms of split between solar storage, wind?

Garrick Rochow: Let me – I’ll take a crack at it here and Rejji will jump in a little bit too. So in our IRP, there’s – obviously, we’re replacing coal. And so, I’ll just kind of walk through the whole piece of it, so you can see every component of it. So we’re going to add about 1.2 gigawatts, that’s the Covert facility. We got this RFP out there for 700 megawatts, 500 is dispatchable, 200 is renewables, which will have a PPA for that will get enough financial compensation mechanism on that portion of it. And then in addition to that, we got about 1.2 gigawatts of renewable build-out in that plan that’s spelled out in our IRP. And again, 8 gigawatts over the longer piece of 1.2 roughly in that 5-year window. That’s a mix of wind and solar.

. And then bottom line, we have also in here, what I call energy efficiency and demand response. Those are also play out in that window as well. And then if you’re doing the math on this, we’re also keeping Kam 3 and 4 around. That’s part of it as well, but that’s just more of a capacity look. And so, we’re in the process of constructing a wind farm right now. That’s part of our renewable portfolio standard. That’s the one Rejji mentioned in his comments. It’s under construction that’s about a couple of hundred megawatts of that plan. And the remainder out there is roughly solar and solar build. I will add this, and Shar asked this question earlier and I didn’t finish it. But we also have in this plan 300 — roughly 300 megawatts of voluntary green pricing.

This is our large customer renewable program. We’ve talked about this over previous calls. It’s about 1,000 megawatts. We have ability to build and we have subscriptions for that. And we’ve got our first, you might say, tranche of subscriptions. And then we’re building the first – over the course of this plan, we’re building the first 300 megawatts. Is that helpful?

Michael Sullivan: Very helpful and also, add thanks a lot.

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