We’re happy to say that our capital forecast here is on track and importantly on track for what we think are the most critical investments to serve our customers. So, with that, I will turn it back to Brian.
Brian Bird: Thanks, Crystal. Just one page here just to talk about the Wildfire Plan. And when we meet many of you at AGA and beyond, we’ll talk in more detail about the plan after we release it here in early May. I think the main thing to talk about first and foremost before this plan, I think on our last plan we just put in front of the commission not too long ago on our last rate review, really captured everything we’ve been doing from a Wildfire mitigation perspective for decades, actually, in terms of system hardening in the 2010 through kind of 2020 time period, hazard trees and dealing with many other forest-related issues and just putting in place very, very good procedures to deal with that. The one area where we thought we needed more work was in system monitor situational awareness, if you will.
And we have done a tremendous amount within the last year, adding technologies and other process to do a much better job on that. And we continue to think about public communication and outreach and then all be addressed in this upcoming plan. One major difference between this plan that you’ll see here shortly and the plan from a couple of years back is, we are now going to be executing Public Safety Power Shutoff on a going forward basis. And again, we have — our segments have been down to very, very — I would say there is so many segments, the amount of customers potentially impacted by PSPS is going to be significantly different than you might see from some other utilities. We’ll manage that pretty fine detail. One other thing I should point out on this particular page is, we assess each of our segments in terms of risk.
And as we sit here today, only 6% of our distribution and about 7% of our transmission are in the highest risk category for Montana Electric and Gas. So that’s also helpful. But we know that Wildfires can start in many different spots and we’ll continue to really look at our system as a whole and manage that accordingly. We look forward to talking about this more in May after we release the plan. One of the reasons we’re waiting to May to release it, we will be meeting with the Montana Public Service Commission on May 6th, as well as the Montana Governor, to get a preview of the plan we’ll be releasing shortly after this. So we’re very excited about the steps we’ve taken thus far and continued progress on this. And obviously, we like the rest of the industry, trying to mitigate this risk as best we can, not just for our customers, but all of our stakeholders.
And with that, just from a concluding standpoint, again, appreciate the support of the Company and we’re making great strides in ’23 and we continue, as we’ve noted here, thinking about rate reviews. From our perspective, we are just really trying to capture, recover the investment we’re making to serve our customers and I think making sure that those increase customers are seeing are going to be manageable in line with inflation on a going-forward basis. And with that, we’ll turn it over to Mr. Meyer to handle any questions.
A – Travis Meyer: Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Crystal. [Operator Instructions] We’ll take our first call from Jeremy Tonet at JPMorgan. Jeremy, your line should be open.
Jeremy Tonet: Hello. Can you hear me?
Brian Bird: Hey, Jeremy.
Jeremy Tonet: Hi. Good afternoon. Glad to connect here. Just want to start off, I guess, EPA had some new announcements yesterday and wanted to just follow up, I guess, on the thoughts that you provide in the press release there. How do you think this impacts NWE going forward at this point given what’s known?
Brian Bird: Yes. I would say this, I think from our perspective, when you say impacts NWE, I’m primarily concerned about how this impacts our customers to start. From our perspective, we have a capacity shortfall in Montana as we start and adding incremental Colstrip was going to certainly help us drive that, and we believe that still makes great sense. But I think this news obviously was not good. I think the decision puts a significant risk on our ability to reliably serve our customers and I think it ultimately could force us to make short-term decisions that could impact the affordability for our customers instead of long-term, cost-effective solutions to provide more capacity for our customers. And again I think I want to make sure everyone’s aware here.
We like every other company in the utility space, we obviously want to go down the direction to promote cleaner generation resources to serve our customers. But we want to be able to do that in a way with proven technology that’s cost-effective. And unfortunately, these rules and I think, by the way, to be able to do that, be it small modular reactors or what have you, that’s 10 years in the making. From my perspective, those resources are available and certainly cost-effective. But making us make changes here are probably going to result in short-term decisions that, again, are going to impact customers from a reliability standpoint and an affordability standpoint. And trying to have anybody do something within four years around these rules makes absolutely no sense.
So, Jeremy, if you think I feel strongly about this, you’re absolutely right.
Jeremy Tonet: That is — that’s helpful there. Just curious, to the extent you might be able to comment, whether you think there could be, I guess, legal challenges here and how that might unfold if you’re able to comment there.
Brian Bird: Yes. I think from our perspective, we feel very strongly, particularly around the MATS, that there — we expect litigation around that. I believe based upon the first blush of the rules, I think the industry as a whole is going to think about this from a litigation perspective on all the rules, for that matter. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Jeremy Tonet: Got it. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. And then I guess, pivoting back to just Montana itself and I just want to get your thoughts, I guess, for the next rate case, it seems like there is — there’s going to be some changes in the commission. Just wondering, with elections and term outs, what have you, if the next rate case will be under the current composition or changes in composition or any thoughts, I guess, on Montana regulatory strategy at this point, given the moving pieces.
