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

David Hutchens: Yeah. Ben, we can hear you.

Ben Pham: Okay. Great. I was wondering on your electric versus gas mix, how do you think that mix changes or will it change over the next five years? And then, do you have an internal target of where you want to be in what the CapEx program is to this current CapEx program is complete?

David Hutchens: Yeah. No, we don’t have like an ongoing mix other than what you can see clearly in our five year capital plan and the level of investments that we see there. In fact, FortisBC is still a very growing utility. And I think for all the right reasons, there’s not just the natural gas service territory that they have there, but some of the LNG investments they’re making to help produce greenhouse gases and other people’s neighborhood. So that’s a great asset for us to have and still has very strong growth. We don’t have any designs of changing on purposely changing that mix on a going forward basis.

Ben Pham: Okay. Great. And then can you share for 2022 on the realized returns, was there any utilities that’s earning below the allowed ?

David Hutchens: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t have that at my fingertips. And — but yeah, I don’t need — that handy. Obviously, when you look at regulatory lag cycles, just I’ll just philosophically, what you would see like in Arizona is that you probably wouldn’t be quite earning your return right as you’re getting into the volume rate case because after a few years of lag, you’d see a dip. But I actually don’t have those numbers in my fingertips.

Ben Pham: Okay. And maybe lastly on your — you have — your maturity schedule on the debt and you break up between non-reg and regulated, that’s quite useful. Do you expect to recover the interest rate change in the — sorry, in the regulated maturing debt in the rates?

Linda Apsey: Yes, Ben. It will be a part of our proceedings or oil utilities. Some of our utilities have mechanisms that track it, but it’s will be part of the rate case, and we’ve not had any issue in front of the regular recovery these types of costs. So we’re not anticipating any problems going forward.

Ben Pham: Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

David Hutchens: Thanks, Ben.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Richard Sunderland from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Richard Sunderland: Hi. Good morning and thank you for the time today. I wanted to circle back to MISO in this future 2A. Can you speak a little bit to what this refreshed scenario considers versus the old future to and how that’s translating to the early stages of the Tranche 2 process versus, I guess, what you were witnessing at this point in time for Tranche 1?

David Hutchens: Yeah. I don’t mind the exact tweaks between what they did to Future 2 to make it Future 2A. So they — just to be clear though, I mean, the first tranche, Tranche 1 was based off of future 1, which was the kind of lowest level of electrification and probably lowest level of resource transit and renewable integration. So Future 2, which was in the middle, obviously, Future 3 was the one that was the fastest on both of those. And if you remember, historically, and this is data that was — is now a couple of years old, they put kind of price tags on those different futures of $30 billion for Future 1 and up to $80 billion for Future 2. Future 2 in the middle, I never had a number on exactly what that future investment portfolio would look like. But I don’t know, if it’s quite halfway there or not, but I don’t know if it’s the exact adjustments that were made. Maybe Linda has a little bit additional color on what 2A includes that you she could share?