Fortis Inc. (NYSE:FTS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jocelyn Perry: Thank you, Linda. This is Jocelyn. Yeah. So with press, yeah, it’s certainly a part of our toolkit today. And so we’re always watching that market. When we laid out the five year capital plan in the fall, right? It was a pretty simple funding plan that we had for that $22.3 billion capital, no discrete equity, just a DRIP. And most of the debt is at the regulated entity at Fortis Inc. press (ph) certainly will be a part of the equation and we’re looking at all sources, right, of funding. But very, very simple and we expect to keep our balance sheet where it is from a capacity perspective. I actually, clearly, it depends on DRIP participation, which remains quite healthy, thus far. It really going to depend on the timing of any additional capital, right?

I mean, if for some chance that we advanced more of the LRTP projects. I’m just using those as an example or the investments in Arizona. It’s possible that we’ll go back to the drawing board. But I actually feel there’s certainly a bit of capacity in our plan today. So it’s not no immediately that if we see some variances from our annual plan right now that we’ll be able to handle it. But if in fact we see a material change, then as I always say, I guess we go right back to the drawing table and everything goes back on the table. But we do have a bit of capacity in our funding plan today. And I think a more green Linda, I do expect more green financings coming out of our subsidiaries. We’re seeing more and more green financings because we’re getting more and more involved in cleaner energy investments.

So I do expect to see that trend to continue as well.

Linda Ezergailis: Thank you. Appreciate the context. And maybe just on the flip side of the equation, recognizing that affordability is at the forefront in many jurisdictions. What are the thoughts on potentially deferring other discretionary capital to the extent that Fortis and its subsidiaries choose to accelerate green initiatives. And what sort of forbearance is there at the rating agencies to continue to kind of defer recovery of those expenses as kind of the customer bill pressures, one of the levers as well to consider.

David Hutchens: So I’ll start that answer, Linda. I think on deferring capital, we don’t see that as necessary on a going forward basis. You have to remember that not all capital immediately either contributes to rate increases or even shows up in rate increase. We always like to prioritize our capital based on doing that capital first that saves our customers money, the old OpEx for OpEx (ph) kind of trade. Even the resource transition that we’re doing down in Arizona as we shut down a coal plant and remove the fuel and O&M and replace it with investments in infrastructure. It’s a good story for customers, investors and the planet. So those are the things that we’re really focused on and we can’t slow down the necessary investments that we need to make in reliability and resiliency.

And in fact, those are ones that we probably need to step up more on a going forward basis to make sure that our systems are ready to handle more severe weather events going forward. So that’s kind of on the capital side. On cost control side, that’s something that we’re always focused on. So we know that every dollar that goes in there, we want to figure how much that — how much of that we can offset with other costs and that’s really things that we can do across the board. So we start with obviously managing our capital, managing our expenses, looking at innovation and efficiencies as best we can. We look at the entirety of the bill, what our customers use, focus on energy efficiency conservation programs, we focus on, in our vertically integrated utilities on how we dispatch that energy to maximize the benefits of being in the market for our customers.