Entergy Corporation (NYSE:ETR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Kimberly Fontan: Sure. As Rod said, the decision that came out in December had a number of components and on the sale-leaseback side, it had a component around recovery of the cost of the portion that’s owned by a third party and how that sale-leaseback was. So when the play that back through, the net rate base that was charged over time had been depreciated when you apply the effects of the sale-leaseback changes that the FERC order judge determined or the FERC determined that depreciation is a turnaround of that effect on that rate base that was depreciated over that time. So it’s kind of — you have to take that piece as well as I think you’ll see another sort of net liability there and all those are adjusted out. It’s related to that — those items are all related to how you unwind the sale-leaseback component that came out of that order.

Paul Zimbardo: Okay, great. Thank you for that. Appreciate it.

Drew Marsh: Thanks, Paul.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of David Arcaro from Morgan Stanley. Your question, please.

David Arcaro: Hi. Thanks so much for taking my question.

Drew Marsh: Absolutely. Good morning.

David Arcaro: I was curious about the Louisiana Commission at least some of the commissioners seem to be focused on reliability and even outside of major storms. So wondering if there’s a path to address that aspect of things, kind of areas that seem to maybe fall out of the specific 10-year resiliency plan, just maybe normal day-to-day outside major storm reliability?

Rod West: Yeah, reliability is actually a part and parcel of our resilience conversation. They are very much connected. And coming out of the back end of 2022 where our customers were experiencing financial hardship because of rising commodity prices, high usage and the like, the regulators were looking for relief and any disruption to our customers was viewed as a challenge for the regulators. But it didn’t stop our stakeholder engagement strategy around reinforcing the need for continued investment, customer-centric investments and reliability. And it will continue to be part of our resilience filing and it’s part of the case that we’ve made and the case will continue to make to the Louisiana Commission. They are aligned with us on those customer-centric investments, and we expect to see improvements in reliability across the board.

So they’ve been interested. It’s been aligned with our engagement with them thus far. We expect to continue to have their support, especially around our efforts to accelerate the investments.

Drew Marsh: And I’ll add to Rod’s comments that we had or we have a resilience and reliability program that we’ve been operating for the last years that has shown improvements in our stats. And when I was mentioning continuous improvement moving over into the capital space in my remarks, one of the areas where we are focusing that is in this energy delivery space because we have a reliability program. We are upgrading our resilience program. We also have customer efforts going on, integrating those three things and making it much more optimized. It’s a space where we think we can achieve all the outcomes that we’re looking for and do it more efficiently. So that is a place where all these things are starting to come together and not — and are actually separate efforts going on internally in the business.

David Arcaro: Got it. Thanks. That’s helpful. And you alluded to it in the prepared remarks, obviously, the last securitization process was a challenging one and I was just wondering if you could elaborate? Is there a way to lower the risk around storm cost securitization processes going forward in Louisiana? Just what kind of initiatives can you pursue specifically to kind of align parties more smoothly going forward?