Edison International (NYSE:EIX) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Edison International (NYSE:EIX) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript July 27, 2023

Edison International misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.94 EPS, expectations were $0.97.

Operator: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Edison International Second Quarter 2023 Financial Teleconference. My name is Fran, and I will be your operator today. [Operator Instructions] Today’s call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Sam Ramraj, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Ramraj, you may begin your conference.

Sam Ramraj: Thank Fran, and welcome everyone. Our speakers today are President and Chief Executive officer, Pedro Pizarro; and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Maria Rigatti. Also on the call are other members of the management team. Materials supporting today’s call are available at www.edisoninvestor.com. These include Form 10-K, prepared remarks from Pedro and Maria, and the teleconference presentation. Tomorrow we will distribute our regular business update presentation. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements about the outlook for Edison International and its subsidiaries. Actual results could differ materially from current expectations. Important factors that could cause different results are set forth in our SEC filings.

Please read these carefully. The presentation includes certain outlook assumptions, as well as reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the nearest GAAP measure. During the question-and-answer session, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. I will now turn the call over to Pedro.

Pedro Pizarro: Well, thanks a lot, Sam, and good afternoon, everyone. I would like to begin with three financial comments. First, driven by EIX’s impressive performance through June. We are confident in our 2023 core EPS guidance of $4.55 and $4.85. Second, we remain fully confident in and deeply committed to delivering our long-term EPS growth target of 5% to 7% from 2021 to 2025. This target incorporates all known business headwinds, but does not factor in potential tailwinds which could present significant upside. Third, based on the strength of SCE’s 2025 GRC application, and other investment opportunities, we are providing EPS growth guidance of 5% to 7% or 2025, 2028, which provides the path towards $7 in earnings per share potential for 2028.

Underpinning this is the rate-based growth driven by the essential investments to advance California’s clean energy transition. Importantly, these actions will maintain SCE’s cost leadership and the lowest system average rates for customers among California’s investor-owned utilities for the foreseeable future. We are very proud of this commitment and I will show more about it later. On the operational front, my two key messages today are: but, first SCE is strategically positioned to make substantial investments in the reliability, resiliency and readiness of the grid as outlined in its 2025 GRC application; and second SCE is well prepared for the wildfire season due to its successful grid hardening actions. I will also emphasize that core to everything that we do is sustainability as Edison International remains at the forefront that the clean energy transition.

Please turn to Page 3. On May 12 SCE filed its 2025 GRC application. The overarching objectives are to ensure the grid is reliable resilient and ready. Reliable, so that it can meet customers’ needs today and in the future. Resilient to protect public safety and the integrity of the grid and ready, ready to support the widespread electrification and decarbonization needed to meet California’s ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals. These GHG-reduction goals are not just “stretch targets” — they are deeply embedded in the fabric of California’s most important legislative and policy frameworks. Mindful of the longer-term costs of inaction when confronting the global climate crisis, SCE’s GRC reflects that urgent need for the state to rapidly electrify vast swaths of the economy, which is facing the fastest electricity demand growth in decades.

To meet these objectives, SCE requested a 2025 base revenue requirement of $10.3 billion; that’s an increase of $1.9 billion or about 12% over total 2024 rates. This also represents a system average rate increase of 9% and an average residential customer bill increase of 10%. The 2025 through 2028 period will be critical to achieving California’s 2030 and 2045 climate goals. SCE will continue to make substantial investments in wildfire mitigation to address the remaining wildfire risk on the system. There is also a need to ramp up infrastructure replacement work, returning to historical levels of proactive replacement to safeguard reliability. Two key themes are always top-of-mind in any of SCE’s applications and in how the company runs.

Those are operational excellence and affordability for customers. We recognize that the investments in the grid are borne by customers, so we continuously look for ways to gain efficiencies and save customers money. SCE has been building its capabilities in artificial intelligence and advancing the integration of technology into its operations. In 2018, SCE began to apply technology to some of its highest priority challenges including wildfire risk mitigation and data quality. SCE has implemented several computer vision algorithms as part of the T&D aerial inspection process to scan images and detect defects like broken cross arms and other failure risks that could lead to outages or ignitions. The utility is now leveraging its images, other data, and these algorithms to develop other predictive models that can identify and refine asset data to more efficiently operate the grid, enhance fire spread modeling, and better prioritize grid hardening efforts.

Building on this and further leveraging tools such as artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and mobile solutions, SCE is ramping up its efforts around the customer experience, integrated grid planning and execution, and driving efficiencies in its support functions. Examples include predicting customer issues before they call and proactively addressing them or diverting them to the lowest cost, most effective channel; leveraging speech and image recognition in inspections to automatically fill out surveys and focus the inspections; and using generative AI to create first drafts of everything from communications to data request responses. I’m really proud that SCE is an early mover in implementing new technology that furthers its operational excellence and affordability goals.

Turning to page 4, let me give you a brief update on the 2017 and 2018 Wildfire and Mudslide Events. SCE is putting finishing touches on the TKM cost recovery application and expects to file in August. I reiterate that SCE will seek full CPUC cost recovery, excluding amounts already recovered or foregone under the agreement with the Safety and Enforcement Division. SCE will show its strong, compelling case that it operated its system prudently and that it is in the public interest to authorize full cost recovery. Looking at this year’s wildfire season, SCE’s confidence in mitigating wildfires associated with its equipment continues to grow. Over the past couple of years, SCE has deployed covered conductor at a rate of approximately 100 miles per month and has now replaced nearly 5,000 circuit miles of bare wire with covered conductor since the inception of this program around four and a half years ago.

In addition to this CPUC-endorsed grid hardening measure, SCE completes 360-degree inspections of its transmission and distribution structures that represent up to 99% of risk each year prior to peak fire season and performs repairs and replacements. SCE continues its robust vegetation management programs, inspecting 1.6 million trees across the service area annually and typically mitigating approximately 850,000. More than half of those trees are in high fire risk areas. In 2023, SCE plans to inspect over 130,000 trees that pose a threat of falling into SCE’s electrical equipment in the highest-risk locations. Now let me give you some proof points of how well this is all working to reduce ignitions and their impacts. On fully covered segments, there have not been any ignitions due to failure of covered conductor.

In 2021 and 2022, there were 98% fewer structures destroyed and 92% fewer acres burned than in 2017 and 2018. These and numerous other statistics are shown on page 5. As it has since 2021, SCE uses a rigorous, insurance-industry modeling approach to estimate the probability of losses from catastrophic wildfires relative to the thresholds defined by AB 1054. Incorporating SCE’s latest mitigation data into the industry-leading North America Wildfire HD Model, Moody’s RMS now estimates SCE has reduced the probability of losses from catastrophic wildfires by 85%, compared to pre-2018 levels, as highlighted on page 6. Importantly, the contribution from public safety power shutoffs continues to decline and is now only 10%. SCE has been expeditiously hardening its grid since 2018, with 76% of distribution lines in HFRA expected to be hardened by year-end, which you can see on page 7.

SCE anticipates ramping down its flagship mitigation measure of covered conductor, beginning in 2025, and largely completing its targeted undergrounding work by the end of 2028. Meanwhile, the State of California continues to allocate substantial funding to forest resiliency and to fire suppression, including CAL FIRE crews and aerial resources. We were pleased that the approved state budget maintained $2.7 billion, that was 98% of the original proposal over four years for critical investments restoring forest and wildland health to continue reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires in the face of extreme climate conditions. To put the state’s commitment in context, the total 2023 to’24 CAL FIRE budget of $4.1 billion is double what was originally enacted in the 2017 to ‘18 budget and CAL FIRE’s staffing has increased by 74% since then.

Edison International remains at the forefront of the clean energy transition and we continue to execute on our strategy and net-zero commitment. As climate change continues to challenge our world in unprecedented ways, I am confident in the strength of our team to lead the transition affordably and effectively. We’re paving the way for a future powered by 100% carbon-free electricity and adapting our system to climate change, and supporting customers in reaching net-zero emissions. While the road ahead is long, our 2022 progress demonstrates our sense of urgency and our ongoing commitment to sustainability. I would encourage you to read our 2022 Sustainability Report for details about our accomplishments, goals, and long-term ESG commitments.

Let me highlight just a few commitments and these are covered on pages 8 and 9: In 2022, SCE delivered 45% carbon-free power to customers, installed electric vehicle charging infrastructure to enable customers to add more than 500 medium- and heavy-duty electric vehicles, and installed or contracted for more than 1,800 megawatts of energy storage. By year-end, SCE’s energy storage portfolio totaled more than 5,000 megawatts, one of the largest in the nation. Our team continues to forge coalitions nationally and internationally to address climate change and we are proud to lead the way on these initiatives and partnerships and to support our stakeholders. Our future powered by clean electricity is upon us. So we stand fully ready to make this future a reality and we are going to do that reliably, affordably, and sustainably.

With that, let me turn it over to Maria.

Maria Rigatti : Thanks, Peter and good afternoon, everyone. In my comments today, I will discuss second quarter results, our 2023 EPS guidance, and provide some additional insight into our long-term core EPS growth expectations. Starting with the second quarter of 2023, EIX reported core EPS of $1.01. As you can see from the year-over-year quarterly variance analysis shown on page 10, SCE’s second quarter earnings saw a $0.13 increase. Among the major items, GRC attrition year revenue escalation added $0.19 year-over-year. Additionally, higher FERC and other revenue added $0.04 and there was a $0.10 increase related to balancing account interest income. Partially offsetting this growth was an increase in interest expense of $0.16, driven by higher interest rates associated with funding wildfire claims payments.

At EIX Parent and Other, there was a negative variance of $0.06 primarily due to higher holding company interest expense. Overall, we are pleased with our performance through the first half of the year and are confident in delivering on our full-year core EPS guidance of $4.55 to $4.85, laid out on page 11, which we are reaffirming today. I will now discuss SCE’s capital expenditure forecast, shown on page 12. Following SCE’s 2025 GRC filing in May, we introduced our 2023 through 2028 capital plan of $38 to $43 billion, underpinned by spending covered by SCE’s 2021 and 2025 general rate cases. During the 2025 GRC cycle, which extends through 2028, we project annual capital deployment to be in the $8 billion range, which is double the level from only six years ago.

Over 85% of SCE’s investments are in its distribution grid. These are essential to meeting reliability, resiliency, and readiness objectives that support the widespread electrification and decarbonization needed to meet California’s greenhouse gas reduction goals. You may ask, how do you plan to finance this significant step-up in CapEx? The vast majority will be financed with cash from operations and debt. Between 2025 and 2028, we expect our equity needs will be fulfilled using internal programs, which typically bring in about$100 million of equity annually, totaling about $400 million over the period. We expect this financing plan to keep us within the 15% to 17% FFO-to-debt range through 2028. As a reminder, this financing plan does not incorporate potential cost recovery in the legacy wildfire proceedings.

I want to highlight that SCE’s capital expenditure forecast does not include substantial additional capital deployment opportunities. There is at least $2 billion of potential investment that SCE will request in standalone applications over the next couple of years. As you may recall, filing standalone applications in California is typical when major projects are still in early stages at the time GRC testimony is developed. Let me give you some historical perspective. You can see on page 13 that SCE has obtained approvals of standalone applications for approximately $3 billion of capital spending over the past two rate case cycles. Discrete applications have contributed meaningful growth in the past, and we expect that to continue in the future.

To wrap up my comments on the upside opportunities, CAISO’s recently approved transmission plan identified 17 projects that upgrade SCE’s existing facilities. As the incumbent transmission owner, these projects represent at least $2.3 billion of FERC transmission investment for SCE. The CAISO plan also identified $3 billion of competitive projects in southern California that SCE will be able to compete for. Turning to page 14, SCE’s GRC request supports approximately 6% to 8% rate base growth, starting from a 2023 base of $41.9 billion, which itself is nearly 20% higher than only two years ago. Rate base growth through 2028 is driven by the crucial grid infrastructure needed to facilitate California’s leading role in transitioning to a carbon-free economy.

Page 15 shows our progress in successfully executing the parent company’s 2023 financing plan. SCE and the parent issued debt during the quarter and both transactions were well within our average projected refinancing rates by 2025, further bolstering our confidence in achieving our 2025 EPS guidance. Page 16 provides an update on the CPUC cost of capital mechanism. Given that the Moody’s BAA utility bond index is trading well above the deadband with only two months remaining in the annual measurement period, it is likely the mechanism will trigger. We believe an upward ROE adjustment is justified given the current interest rate environment has increased the utility cost of capital in line with the overall financial market. Once triggered, SCE will file an advice letter to implement the adjustment to the 2024 ROE, and update the costs of debt and preferred equity.

The CPUC equity ratio will remain at 52% on an adjusted basis, consistent with the proposed decision issued yesterday afternoon to extend SCE’s capital structure waiver for two years or until final decisions have been made on cost recovery for the 2017 and 2018 events. I’ve previously discussed our operational excellence program and noted that we would share updates along the way. SCE’s employee-driven ideas have identified O&M savings for customers that are already reflected in the GRC request. We work tirelessly to continue fleshing out these ideas and finding additional benefits for customers, irrespective of the GRC cycle. I’m pleased to share some tangible examples of our successful efforts to find efficiencies, which you can see on page 17.

Starting on the left side, in May, the CPUC approved SCE’s expanded wildfire self-insurance program, which saves customers approximately $160 million per year and has the potential for greater long-term savings. In the category of work planning, we’ve successfully implemented our wildfire mitigation plan year in and year out and have continually found ways to improve. To give you an example, SCE programmatically inspects about 216,000 structures in high fire risk areas every year from the ground and the air, which in the past was performed by distinct teams. We have transformed the program by combining ground and aerial inspections into a single, 360- degree inspection process. This reduces driving time in the field, benefits safety for field personnel, and improves overall quality and customer experience.

Through this effort, we expect to generate nearly $55 million in cumulative O&M savings. In the category of procurement, we are successfully finding ways to buy better. We recently re-evaluated the prescription benefit provider in our healthcare plans and switched vendors, achieving about $50 million of cumulative O&M savings, while maintaining the level of benefits and service for our employees. These are just representative examples that clearly demonstrate the value our team can uncover and implement in a short period of time. We are excited about such opportunities to provide savings to customers, and we will continue to share additional examples with you in the future. Turning to our financial commitments, we remain confident in our 5% to 7% EPS growth rate guidance from 2021 through 2025.

I reiterate our management team’s steadfast focus on delivering this growth. Additionally, for the 2025 to 2028 period, we expect to continue core EPS growth of 5% to 7%, which provides a pathway toward $7 earnings per share potential for 2028, shown on page 18. For you to further understand this pathway, we have also provided some key sensitivities on page 25 of the appendix. We see this long-term EPS growth as highly achievable for three primary reasons: First, the core driver for this earnings trajectory is SCE’s strong rate base growth. Second, the headwinds we have navigated over the past couple of years will have mostly stabilized by 2025, allowing for a simplified growth story through 2028. These past headwinds included the cost of financing wildfire claims payments, driven by both the increase in legacy wildfire reserves and higher interest rate environment, the reduction in CPUC ROE, and issuance of preferred equity at the parent to strengthen the balance sheet.

Taking these into consideration, you can see that the midpoint of our 2025 guidance provides a stable platform for a strong long-term growth trajectory. Third, this growth is achievable even without incorporating a few key items. We can achieve this growth at SCE’s current authorized ROEs and rate base forecast, without factoring in the additional capital potential I mentioned earlier or upside to the cost of capital by 2028. Additionally, we have not incorporated potential cost recovery in the legacy wildfire proceedings, which clearly presents substantial upside value to our long-term earnings power and credit profile. Based on these factors, I want to underscore we see 5% to 7% growth as highly achievable. We firmly believe we can achieve our targeted growth, both for 2025 and 2028, based on SCE’s significant investment to ensure the grid is reliable, resilient, and ready for California’s economy-wide clean energy transition.

That concludes my remarks. Back over to you, Sam.

Sam Ramraj: Fran, please open the call for questions. As a reminder, we request you to limit yourself to one question and one follow-up, so everyone in line has the opportunity to ask questions.

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Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Ryan Levine with Citi. Sir, your line is open.

Ryan Levine : Thank you. In terms of your longer term growth outlook, what do you see as the biggest risk to achieving the longer-term 5% to 7% LF through 2028? And from a financing standpoint, you highlighted a couple billion dollars worth of upsides. To the extent that that were to materialize how would you look to fund that?

Maria Rigatti : Yeah, so Ryan. Hi, nice to hear from you. In terms of your first question, what I really want to focus on is, you’d ask about risk to the 5% to 7% growth. We think that it’s highly achievable. We also think that as we move forward into ‘25 through ’28 period that the story and the profile is much simplified. We’ve worked through a bunch of headwinds that we were dealing with in the ‘21 through ’25 period and we’ve managed through those and we are reaffirming our 5% to 7% percent growth rate. And as we move into the next period, you’ll see a lot of those things because they stabilized really allow us to focus on the key factors of our business, which frankly are rate base growth. And so when you ask about, if we get, we realized these other potential CapEx opportunities, some of which we will be filing for in the next year or so, what the equity program would need to look like, I think it really – we’ll have to take a look at that as when the dollars actually start to hit, because we’re always targeting that 15% to 17% FFO to debt range.

The financing plan, we put in front of you during the comments earlier today is absolutely supportive of that 15% to 17% FFO to debt and as the other capital comes in, depending on where we are in that range, it will drive whether or not we need more equity. So I think we’ll see when those dollars come in the door.

Pedro Pizarro : You know, Ryan this is Pedro, let me just underscore the first question. The need for this infrastructure build is so clear and strong. Thinking of that the team at SCE has done a nice job encapsulating that in the general rate case application, we will have other pieces as Maria discussed or the need will also be very strong. So to me, it kind of enter because it needs to be for infrastructure of that’s really needed for reliability and resiliency and readiness. And that’s the big opportunity here and that’s why we’re so confident.

Ryan Levine : Great. In fact, I guess, one follow-up. In terms of the O&M cost outlook, you highlighted some changing vendors, more broadly, how are you seeing inflation pressures across your supply chain and then any color you could share around your outlook on the O&M cost base?

Maria Rigatti : Sure, maybe we’ll have Steve Powell kind of address what we’re seeing with some of the vendors. He’s the CEO of the utilities. Steve?

Steven Powell : Yeah, so, we’ve got a lot of the vendors that we work with on multi-year agreements. So we are regularly going back to remarket as we get towards the end of those agreements. Certainly, over the last couple of years we’ve seen escalations in labor rates as well as on the material side. I think the global supply chain crunch has extended time frames for paying everything from customer meters to transformers to switchgear, which is also driving cost up. And so, those are all – those are all things that our team is constantly getting ahead of the building inventories. It’s also things that we are baking into our general rate case and we have inflation adjustment mechanisms in the rate case to take that into account. And so these are things that we’ve got the mechanisms to manage through our rate case. And we’re constantly looking at different ways to work with our vendors to drive the cost of the services down.