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Xcel Energy is a U.S. electricity and natural gas utility, with operations in Western and Midwestern states. They include portions of Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin. Xcel serves approximately 3.7 million electric customers and 2.1 million natural gas customers. It was formerly known as Northern States Power company.

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Xcel Energy (XEL): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Xcel Energy

xcel energy

Hello and welcome to Xcel Energy twenty twenty four Year End Earnings Conference Call.

My name is Melissa and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this conference is being recorded and for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of

presentation. This can be done by pressing star followed by one on your keypad to register your question at any time. Questions will only be taken from institutional investors. Reporters can contact media relations with inquiries and individual investors and others can reach out to investor relations. I'll now turn the call over to Rupesh Agarwal, Vice President, Investor Relations.

Good morning, and welcome to Xcel Energy's twenty twenty four fourth quarter earnings call. Joining me today are Bob Frenzel, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer and Brian Van Abel, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. In addition, we have other members of the management team in the room to answer your questions if needed. This morning, we will review our 2024 full year results and highlights, provide updated 2025 assumptions and share recent business and regulatory updates. Slides that accompany today's call are available on our website.

Some comments during today's call may contain forward looking information. Significant factors that could cause results to differ from those anticipated are described in our earnings release and SEC filings. Today, we will discuss certain metrics that are non GAAP measures. Information on the comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations are included in our earnings release. As a reminder, we recorded a charge of $0.06 per share in 2024 related to the disallowance of replacement power costs associated with an extended outage at our Sherco plant in 2011.

Given the outage occurred thirteen years ago and non recurring nature of this item, this charge has been excluded from full year ongoing earnings. As a result, our GAAP earnings for 2024 were $3.44 per share, while our ongoing earnings, which exclude this non recurring charge, were $3.5 per share. All further discussion in our earnings call will focus on our annual ongoing earnings. For more information on this, please see the disclosure in our earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Bob.

Thank you, Rupesh, and good morning, everybody. At Xtell Energy, we know that economic growth and prosperity of our communities and country depends on our ability to deliver energy to our customers when and where they need it, while keeping their bills as low as possible. And in 2024, we delivered on another year of solid operational and financial progress to that end. Across our eight states, we invested more than $7,500,000,000 to build and maintain infrastructure that supports our customers' energy needs in areas like advanced technology for a smarter, more reliable grid, long haul and regional transmission to support customer growth and system reliability needs, and carbon free generation to continue our pursuit of a cleaner energy future. We navigated considerable headwinds during the year and posted ongoing earnings of $3.5 per share, delivering within our guidance range for the twentieth consecutive year, one of the best track records in our industry.

Our long term performance is attributable to our committed team at Xcel Energy who show up every day on behalf of our customers with safety, affordability and reliability as their top priorities. I recognize that this is the first time we've been below the midpoint of our target range in over fifteen years. We made decisions in 2024 to make investments to improve resiliency and protect our customers throughout the year. And we coupled with December weather that was considerably warmer than normal and little time to adjust, the result was earnings at the low end. But because of the operational improvements and investments we made in 2024, we remain confident in our ability to deliver on our '25 guidance range of $3.75 to $3.85 per share, the midpoint of which reflects 7% growth from the midpoint of our 2024 range.

And over the next decade, we expect to invest significantly in our infrastructure to deliver reliable, resilient and cleaner energy for our customers as well as serve significant forecasted customer growth. Our five year base capital plan delivers rate base growth in excess of 9% and should deliver long term EPS growth in the upper half of our 6% to 8% guidance range. At Xcel Energy, our long term strategic model and value proposition is to make smart capital investments for the benefit of our customers, which improve reliability, resiliency and sustainability provide excellent customer service and to keep bills as low as possible for our customers. In 2024, we reached several important milestones towards these goals. In November, Phase one of our Sherco solar project started commercial operation.

Two additional phases will come online in 2025 and 2026. And once complete, Sherco's total capacity of of seven ten megawatts will make it the largest solar facility in the Upper Midwest. And by using existing interconnection from our retired coal unit, we saved customers money and accelerated deployment by several years, providing opportunities to serve new customers, including multiple data center projects on and around the Sure Coast site. We're also near completion of the conversion of our 1,000 megawatt Harrington coal plant to natural gas, which provides essential energy resiliency and reliability to our customers and will benefit the local community there for years to come. In 2024, our wind fleet achieved availability of 97%, marking our best performance in five years in achieving first quartile benchmarks.

High turbine availability ensures our customers benefit from the zero fuel cost resource and provides production tax credits that keep their bills low. In line with our Minnesota resource plan, the NRC approved a twenty year license renewal for our Monticello nuclear facility. This allows customers to continue to benefit from a critical, low cost, carbon free energy resource through 02/1950.

to energy resiliency and growth is expanding our electrical grid to ensure that customers have access to the generation resources needed to meet their daily requirements.

to say that for the past fifteen years, Xcel Energy has been the leading provider of new transmission line miles in the country. In July, we began construction on the final segment of our Colorado Power Pathway project, which started construction in 2023. The Power Pathway is a six seventy five mile double circuit three forty five kV transmission loop that will enable Xcel Energy to connect more than 5,000 megawatts of essential energy resources in Eastern Colorado. And in the fourth quarter, the MISO board approved Tranche two point one of its long term transmission portfolio and the SPP board approved its 2024 ITP portfolio. These two portfolios will enhance transmission systems in our regions and inter regionally ensuring that we can meet customer growth and resiliency needs.

Our portions of these transmission projects could result in $3,000,000,000 to $4,000,000,000 of capital investment in excess of our base plan. We've also made considerable progress to protect our customers, communities and system from the increasing threats of extreme weather that we continue to see across the country. During 2024, we filed an updated wildfire mitigation plan in Colorado, a new system resiliency plan in Texas and issued wildfire mitigation plans for each of our other states. We've also accelerated a number of risk reduction efforts including operational mitigation such as enabling public safety power shutoffs and wildfire safety operations across our entire system and making investments to better sectionalize and automate these capabilities. Physical mitigations that include the repair or replacement of priority one and two distribution poles across our system in over 600 miles of vegetation management in Colorado amongst other milestones.

We've developed foundational tools completing comprehensive wildfire risk mapping of our system and deployment of advanced risk modeling tools like TeclaSilva. And we've increased situational awareness, where in Colorado we completed installation of 42 AI equipped cameras and completed the installation of 25 utility pole mounted weather stations with many more planned across our system in 2025 and beyond. Equally importantly, our customer bills have remained amongst the lowest in the country. This is attributable to our thoughtful investments, access to some of the lowest cost renewal resources in the country and focus on continuous improvement through our lean operating principles. Since 2020, our continuous improvement programs have generated nearly $500,000,000 of sustainable savings for customers, while improving operations and reducing enterprise risk.

Since 2017, our Steel for Fuel program has saved customers nearly $5,000,000,000 in avoided fuel costs and production tax credit benefits. Our average residential electric and natural gas bills 2812% below the national average with historical growth rates well below the rate of inflation. In addition, we've reduced our residential electric customer share wallet by 13% since 2014. And with our low energy prices, customers have the further potential to reduce their energy expenditures by over 40% as they adopt electric vehicles. At the same time, we reduced carbon emissions on our electric system by 57% relative to 02/2005 levels and remain on track to meet our goal of 80% carbon reduction by 02/1930, proving that our geographic advantage for renewable resources ensures that customers don't have to sacrifice costs or reliability to achieve sustainability.

Looking forward, we are focused in 2025, working to capture the unprecedented opportunities for growth we laid out in our base capital investment plan to deliver on our incremental capital opportunities, to advance our clean energy leadership and to raise the bar on delivering a compelling experience for our customers in order to make energy work better for them and the communities we serve. Finally, I'd like to express my thanks to Paul Johnson. Earlier this year, Paul announced his retirement from Xcel Energy after forty one years of service. Over his career, his commitment, his integrity and his acumen have been critical to the success of our controller, our treasury and our investor relation programs. He has mentored countless programs inside the company and across the investment community.

I consider Paul more than just a cherished colleague, he's become a personal friend. I know you will all miss him as will I. I want to extend my sincere appreciation to Paul, his wife, Renee, their two sons and two dogs, and wish him nothing but the best in his retirement. With that, I'll turn it over to Brian.

Thanks, Bob. And I think everyone in this room certainly echoes your comments about Paul. So let's turn to starting with our financial results. Xcel Energy had ongoing earnings of $3.5 per share for full year 2024 compared to ongoing earnings of $3.35 per share in 2023. The most significant earnings drivers for the year include the following: outcomes from rate cases and riders increased earnings by $0.87 per share and higher other income, which increased earnings by $0.16 per share due to interest income on cash balances and the gain on debt repurchase that we proactively use to offset increased spend on our wildfire risk reduction measures.

Offsetting these positive drivers higher depreciation and amortization decreased earnings by $0.4 per share, reflecting our capital investment programs higher interest charges net of AFUDC debt decreased earnings by $0.24 per share driven by increased debt levels upon capital investments and higher interest rates. Higher O and M decreased earnings by $0.13 per share and other smaller items combined decreased earnings by $0.11 per share. Turning to sales. Fourth quarter and full year weather adjusted electric sales increased by 31%, respectively, driven by increased C and I load in SPS and residential sales in Piesco. For 2025, we continue to expect full year weather adjusted electric sales to increase 3%.

Shifting to expenses. O and M expenses increased $96,000,000 in 2024, reflecting actions we took to reduce future operational risk by increasing investment in wildfire mitigation. In addition, we experienced increased costs from generation maintenance, damage prevention and storm response. We also made progress on a light rate case calendar. In our Minnesota electric rate case, interim rates of $192,000,000 were approved effective January 2025.

And in North Dakota, we filed an electric rate case and the Commission approved our settlement in our natural gas rate case. Moving to 2025, we are looking to several milestones as we make progress on adding 15,000 to 29,000 megawatts of generation to replace retiring capacity and serve load growth. In the first quarter, we anticipate a decision from the Minnesota Commission on our RFP and IRP settlement. The RFP includes seven twenty megawatts of company owned firm dispatchable resources. The IRP includes an additional 4,200 megawatts of generation needs.

By summer twenty twenty five, we expect to file recommendations for up to 3,500 megawatts of this need across three RFPs. In the second quarter in SPS, we anticipate filing recommendations for 5,000 to 10,000 megawatts of generation from our RFP that is in flight. And finally, in the third quarter in Colorado, we anticipate a commission decision on our resource plan for the 5,000 to 14,000 megawatt resource need with RFPs to follow in late twenty twenty five or early twenty twenty six. We're excited to execute on this significant opportunity and look forward to working with our stakeholders to drive economic growth for our communities and continue our clean energy leadership. Moving to our five year sales forecast of data centers.

We have already signed contracts for approximately half of our new data center capacity included in our five year sales forecast. These projects are under construction and will begin energization late this year. Additionally, we expect to have executed contracts for the remaining amount that is included in our five year sales forecast by this fall. We are in active discussions with several counterparties and look forward to bringing on these large customers that will drive economic development and benefit to all of our customers. Given our large backlog of additional opportunities, we are confident in our long term sales forecast.

Additionally, we continue to see significant growth in other parts of the business, particularly in the oil and gas region and SPS. As a reminder, our data center growth represents only half of our 5% long term sales growth that we are projecting. To help fund our $45,000,000,000 5 year capital plan, we issued nearly $1,400,000,000 in forward equity in 2024. This issuance significantly reduces financing risk, helps maintain a strong balance sheet and credit metrics and funds accretive growth for our customers and investors. We also continue to make strong progress in the Smokehouse Creek wildfire claims process.

We have resolved 113 of the 199 submitted claims, which we continue to view as constructive. We have committed $73,000,000 in settlement agreements, of which $35,000,000 had been paid. There is no change to our estimated liability of $215,000,000 as we described in our disclosure. With that, I'll wrap up with a quick summary. Xcel Energy posted ongoing 2024 earnings of $3.5 per share, navigating significant headwinds and meeting guidance for the twentieth consecutive year, one of the best track records in the industry.

We continue to lead the clean energy transition while ensuring safe, clean and reliable service and keeping customer bills as low as possible. We are focused on reducing operating risk in our system from extreme weather, including proactive mitigations across our system, our resiliency plan filing in Texas and updated wildfire mitigation plan in Colorado. Going forward, we are excited to make significant progress on our $10,000,000,000 pipeline of additional investment opportunities. We continue to maintain a strong balance sheet and credit metrics using a balance of debt and equity to fund accretive growth. And finally, we are reaffirming our 2025 guidance of $3.75 to $3.85 per share.

This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we will now take questions.

Thank you very much. Our first question is from Nick Campanella with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. Thanks for all the information today.

your general thoughts. I know there's been a lot of headlines in the new administration, but particularly around renewable permitting and siting. And are any of your projects kind of in scope from either a federal or a private permitting haul perspective? And then maybe you can kind of also just remind us what's embedded in the plan from a transferability perspective? Thank you.

Hey, Nick, it's Bob. Thanks for the question. Look, broadly speaking, when I think about the EOs, they support the energy dominance goals of the administration. We're supportive of a broad and all the above energy strategy. And Brian's comments in the prepared remarks talking about sales growth and need of our customers for our product and our electrons would suggest that we need to move and we need to be able to move very quickly on building our infrastructure and making sure that we can serve our customers.

We know that the administration supports economic development. We know that they support low cost energy. And while many of the EOs are directed at oil and natural gas, in our focus areas is really on the electricity side of the ledger. Look, we support permitting reform broadly at a national and even state and local levels in order to be able to build the infrastructure we need to meet this era of growth. We have about 30% expected load growth over the next five years and making sure that we can deliver on that is important.

So, any we think that any of the executive orders and any of the challenges that may be embedded in there today are things that we can always work through. As a reminder, we don't have any offshore wind. We don't have projects on federal lands. And our permitting needs are actually relatively light for wind and solar and storage assets.

to work through it all. And I'm optimistic that our capital plan for 2025 and beyond are going to remain intact. And we'll be able to work with the administration and all the agencies to make progress here. I don't know, Brian, you want

Yes. Nick, I can just add a little bit of color to that. I know there was an article yesterday, around the Army Corps and our projects, we do not expect that to impact our projects in flight. And as Bob said, the other projects in flight, we feel comfortable with where we stand in the permits that we have in our continuing construction and continuing progress on all our projects in flight.

And obviously, with the RFPs, once whether it's tariffs or regulations or EOs, we can certainly look at how that impacts RFPs. But we feel very good about the need and our overall pipeline in executing on both the stuff in flight and the pipeline. Just quickly, you asked your other questions about PTCs. We have approximately $700,000,000 a year in transferability embedded in our forecast, right? That's a reduction to revenue and then we transfer the credits.

And so that's been pretty consistent over the past year in terms of what we've forecasted.

Hey, I appreciate the answer on that. That's really helpful. And then, the at the end of your prepared, you kind of talked about you do seem to have some line of sight to announce additional customers this year. Just how do you kind of think about the cadence of pulling in those 8.9 gigawatt customer requests? And at which point do you think you would reevaluate that sales CAGR?

Is that more of a EEI later in the year item? Or just how much of that can actually fall into this five year time horizon and impact where you are in the six to Thank you.

Yes. And I think expect us in terms of updating capital plans, five year sales forecast plans, all of that generally is our Q3 earnings release, so we can talk about EI. So expect that all of that to be comprehensive update on a regular cadence. Now what I mentioned in my prepared remarks is we expect to be able to sign contracts that will fulfill the what we have in our base plan for the data centers and we expect to we're actively working in negotiations on several of those and expect to have them all executed by the fall. So pretty excited about that.

And then, yes, as you alluded to, we have a backlog behind that, which we'll turn to working on that as we get through these. And I think that just highlights the kind of pretty significant opportunity we have. By the time we're donning expect to talk about this in greater detail in the fall is we'll have a data center in every one of our operating companies. So we have regional diversity, data center diversity that we deal with different hyperscalers. So we feel really good about the long term sales prospect.

And as we continue much forward, we'll see if there's opportunities to add more. It's not just the demand there, but ensuring that we have the discussions with our stakeholders and commissions about being able to build those assets. I mean, you heard Bob say we need an all the above energy strategy. We need to build these. So it's really working with our stakeholders to drive economic development and benefit for all of our customers.

Thanks for all the thoughtful answers today. We'll see you soon.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jeremy Tonet with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Paul, we will certainly miss working with you. Best of luck in retirement. Maybe just if we could touch on the wildfires a little bit here, just given national headlines recently, it seems like developments in other states might have impacted XL trading recently. And just wondering what thoughts you could provide here incremental as far as the outlook, the possibility for federal wildfire policy changes, any views from D. C.

Here, just in conversations within Colorado as well, just trying to get some color there.

Hey, good morning, Jeremy. It's Bob. Look, obviously, the California fires were a tragedy for that community. And it does bring both a federal and a state highlight to potential solutions there. And we're going to work at both levels, through EEI largely at the federal level, and then obviously across our states for anything we can do to continue to protect our customers in our communities from that kind of threat and that kind of risk.

I'd say the dialogues are active across the federal government and at the state level. Obviously, at the federal side, there's a lot going on. I think a lot on TCJA, IRA and items like that. So, I think any wildfire movement in the federal level is probably a back half of the year kind of effort and focus. But California certainly put a bright light on the issue and national problems need national solutions.

And I think there's a big role for the federal government here to help setting standards, helping with insurance backstops, getting to functional markets, both on the insurance side and on the capital market side as you alluded to. So I

think there's a big role for the federal government here.

On the state basis, we're having great conversations, Texas, Colorado, the Dakotas, around everything from roles of the companies and roles of the states and how we're going to set standards for forestry, how we're going to set standards for building infrastructure, for operations and making sure that there's a clean line of responsibility for who's doing what to make sure that we can protect our customers and our communities. I don't have anything to talk about that's advancing right now, but we're early in legislative sessions and maybe we'll come back to you in the first quarter call.

Got it. That's helpful there. And just going to D. C. At large, is there anything else I know you talked about a bit with Nick there as far as changes you think going forward, especially

it relates to, I guess, transferability? Is there a need to go through the federal government in any way? Do you see anything changing there?

Hey, Jeremy, you just broke up in the very first part of your question there. What did you say? I caught the last part.

Just about any changes out of D. C. I know you touched on that a bit there.

Yes. Certainly, we're working very closely with our policymakers around D. C. Obviously, one of the things we're bugging on and working is around the IRA and what happens through legislation. And certainly, as we see it now, I think what we're hearing is that they're going to attempt to do one bill, but if that slows down, they'll split it into two.

I think you heard me speak before is we believe the key tenants of the IRA are intact. When I say that, I'm talking about tax credits and transferability. They kind of go hand in hand. And so we feel good about that. I mean, it is there's an incredible amount of jobs in manufacturing and economic benefit being driven by the array, which is primarily going into red states.

So I think there's a recognition of that. So we feel good about where that stands overall and we'll just watch it play out and continue to be plugged in.

Got it. And just the last point there, does transferability go through the federal government or is it bilateral?

So I think the permissibility of transferability is definitely embedded within the IRA. I think the transferability themselves is a bilateral contract with us and any other taxpaying entity. Yes. And I think that persists.

Yes. That's exactly. We negotiate directly with our other companies. We have a number of Fortune 500 companies in our backyard here in Minneapolis that we partner with. The one caveat is co ops or municipalities that use direct pay would go directly with the government, but we don't use direct pay.

Got it. And if I could just finish up on D. C. Real quick here. The new administration, there's more of a focus I think on gas and maybe there was in the past.

And at the same time, resource adequacy has been very much in focus. And just wondering your thoughts on adding incremental gas fired generation to meet higher than expected load growth. Is that evolved in any way based on what's coming out of D. C? Or just higher growth expectations and have conversations with large C and I customers changed on this side as well at all?

Yes. So, look, we I made a comment in my prepared remarks about sort of the real advantage we have across our eight state footprint and the ability to deliver low cost energy with wind and solar, and that persists. And so, we think that those are very valuable asset classes for our customers. They're very important for our hyperscaler and data center customers who are trying to have their own sustainability goals. And we think that persists.

We've been clear that we're going to continue to focus and achieve our 80% carbon reduction by the end of the decade. But we've been clear since we made that announcement that we need dispatchable resources to support that. So gas has a real role to play in our active resource plans right now, we've got CT builds in the Upper Midwest, in Colorado, and in the Southwest, and in our resource plans that are on the come. We also have incremental gas resources in there. They're all combustion turbines.

So, we think we need peaking resources. And we don't think we need base load gas because of our advantage in wind and solar and our ability to deploy solar and storage. But we will have new gas across our systems. They'll have low capacity factors. We talked about having them clean fuel capable at construction and other items to make sure that we can meet sustainability goals in our states.

But we will have new gas coming and we are converting some of our coal stations to gas as well. So, increasing importance for gas in our footprint, but a maintenance of a real sustainability footprint as well given our geographic advantage.

Thank you. Our next question is from Julien Dumoulin Smith with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, team. Thank you guys very much. And Paul, it's been a real pleasure, I got to say.

a little bit about '24 and '25 real quick. And I know we've talked about some of the bigger picture items here, but coming back to, obviously, as you say, a little bit out of the norm for you guys historically on '24, some items that, as you say, you were trying to deal with through the course of '24. But in addition here, when you look at the 25 drivers, there's a few items that net to, you know, I suppose, up to 40,000,000 negative versus the prior kind of bits and pieces here, if you will. How do you think about where you're positioned on '25 and getting back on track? And what I mean by that is back on track relative to what you guys have consistently delivered, in terms of within your mid within or at or above your midpoint level?

Yes. Hey, Julian, thanks for the question. I can provide a little bit of color on that. I think, on face it adds up to that, but I think you got to look at the property taxes are offset in regulatory mechanisms, so that doesn't have an impact. And I look at some of the other offsets, it's probably less than half of the impact that you quoted.

And so when I think about 2025 we feel very comfortable with where we sit. It's early in the year. You know we always target midpoint of guidance. So I expect that we deliver this year, like you said. Last year was a little bit of an anomaly for us.

But overall, I feel very comfortable with 2025. And there's just some other offsetting stuff in there that gives me that comfort.

Got it. Right. So bottom line, back on track 25 onwards here. I appreciate it.

wordsmith you guys too much, but you guys have made several times your confidence in the sales growth outlook. You made it in the prepared remarks. You said it in the Q and A. At the same time, how do you think about the backdrop here, when I think you guys dropped the sales growth number from the slides itself. I can't discern is that was that purposeful?

Is there some sort of update coming at some point here? Just wanted to kind of ask you to elaborate. Maybe I'm nitpicking too much.

I think you might be reading into that too much, Julie. And I mean, generally, we talk about our five year sales growth on the Q3 call. I mean, you just heard me reiterate it. In 2025, our 3% sales growth is unchanged. We feel good about that.

So there has been no change. I mean, basically sitting here, what we wanted to do is give a little bit more context in the data center growth because that's about half of that 5%. And the fact that we already have three signed contracts in construction, all three of those planned to energize later this year, we expect to deliver the rest of that contracted or the capacity that's in our base sales forecast by this fall. And we're in active negotiations exchanging term sheets right now with multiple counterparties. So that's where you so I think you might be reading into it a little bit.

But our 2025 sales growth is unchanged and our outlook five year outlook is unchanged. And I think I'd just add, I said this in the opening remarks is, plus only half of our load is from data centers in our five year sales forecast. Having this diversity of growth is also a benefit to I mean, we continue to see very strong growth out of the oil and gas sector in the Permian and Texas and New Mexico. So, overall, hopefully that helps with a little bit of additional color with how we feel.

Xcel Energy (XEL) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Company Participants