Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Avista Corporation's Q3 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during that session, you will need to press star one one on your phone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ms. Stacey Wenz, Investor Relations Manager. Ms. Wenz, please go ahead. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Avista's third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Our earnings and our third quarter 10-Q were released pre-market this morning. Both are available on our website. Joining me this morning, I have Avista Corp. President and CEO Dennis Vermillion, Executive Vice President, Treasurer, and CFO Mark Thies, Senior Vice President, External Affairs and Chief Customer Officer Kevin Christie, and Vice President, Controller, and Principal Accounting Officer Ryan Krasselt. Today, we will make certain statements that are forward-looking. These involve assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, which are subject to change. For reference to the various factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in today's call, please refer to our 10-K for 2021 and 10-Q for the third quarter of 2022. Both are available on our website. I'll begin by recapping the financial results presented in today's press release. Our consolidated loss for the third quarter of 2022 was $0.08 per diluted share compared to earnings of $0.20 for the third quarter of 2021. For the year-to-date, consolidated earnings were $1.06 per diluted share for 2022 compared to $1.38 last year. Now, I'll turn the call over to Dennis. Well, thanks, Stacey, and good morning, everyone. After an unusually warm and sunny October, it definitely feels like our typical fall weather has now settled into our region. We're getting some pretty good precip, but it looks like our first big mountain snow of the season, so that's a good thing. With the summer season behind us, we're happy with how our system handled this year's peak summer months. The significant investments we continue to make in our system to harden our grid and bolster the reliability and resiliency of our substations and distribution system allow us to better serve our customers. We're also making good progress in achieving our clean energy goals. We're evaluating opportunities in our recent RFP, and we're implementing our Washington Clean Energy Implementation Plan that was approved in June. Turning to rate cases, we continue to work our way through the regulatory process for our Washington general rate cases following the multiparty settlement we reached earlier this year. We expect a decision by the commission in December of 2022. In Idaho, we expect to file both gas and electric rate cases in the first quarter of 2023. We also plan to file a general rate case in Oregon during the first half of 2023. In Alaska, our interim and refundable rate base rate increase of 4.5% was approved by the commission and was effective in December of 2022. Now for earnings. As we previously communicated, our strategy is to achieve our 2023 guidance, including adequate rate relief and cost management, and we've made significant progress on both fronts. Our Washington General Rate Case settlement demonstrates progress toward attaining the needed rate relief we're striving to achieve, and we have identified opportunities to manage our costs for 2023. Despite these great efforts, the goalposts have simply been moved on us. As a result, we are lowering our 2023 consolidated earnings guidance by $0.15 to a range of $2.27-$2.47 per diluted share. The combined upward cost pressures from inflation and rising interest rates, which accelerated in the third quarter, proved too much for our cost management efforts to offset in 2023. In particular, we expect increases in borrowing costs, pension expense, and depreciation. Higher borrowing costs and operating expense also impacted 2022, and therefore, we are lowering our 2022 guidance by $0.05 per diluted share to a range of $1.88-$2.08. At this time, I'll turn this presentation over to Mark to get into some of the details. Mark? Thanks, Dennis. Good morning, everyone. While our news on our earnings is down, I do have a positive Blackhawks comment. I know you're all waiting for that. We're a point out of first place nine games into the season. Still very early, but a lot better than I thought it'd be. Compared to the third quarter of 2021, our utility earnings, you know, decreased primarily due to, you know, rising interest rates, higher depreciation. We have had some higher capital and increased operating expenses. You know, these increases were partially offset by benefits from increases from rate cases that we completed in both Idaho and Washington. We also had, you know, retail customer growth of about 1.5%, which helps our utility margin, as well. The Energy Recovery Mechanism in Washington was a $4.5 million dollar expense in pre-tax expense in the third quarter compared to $3.8 million in the prior year of an expense. Year-to-date, we've recognized $7.3 million of expense compared to $7.1 million last year. We do expect to continue to be in the 90% customer, 10% company sharing band for 2022. With respect to capital, we continue, as Dennis mentioned earlier in his remarks, to invest the necessary capital in our utility infrastructure, and we expect our capital expenditures to be about $475 million in each 2022 and 2023 at Avista Utilities. We expect AEL&P's capital to be $10 million in 2022 and $13 million in 2023, and we expect to invest about $18 million in our other businesses in 2022 and $15 million in 2023. With respect to liquidity, as of September 30th, we have $102 million in available liquidity under our committed lines of credit. In the fourth quarter, we expect to enter short-term credit facility for up to $50 million to provide additional liquidity going into next year. During 2022, we expect to issue $135 million of common stock, including the $93 million we've already issued in the first three quarters. In 2023, we expect to issue up to $140 million in long-term debt and $120 million of common stock to fund our planned expenditures. Getting to guidance, you know, as Dennis mentioned, we are lowering our 2022 guidance by $0.05 to a range of $1.88-$2.08, and we're lowering our 2023 guidance by $0.15 to a range of $2.27-$2.47. These increases are all related to Avista Utilities. As Dennis mentioned, while our regulatory and cost management efforts have been successful, you know, we don't believe they're gonna be sufficient to overcome the, you know, as he said, the goalpost move, the increase, the continued increase in inflation and those costs going up. Interest rates continue to rise, driven by the Federal Reserve aggressively raising interest rates, you know, 5 x this year, and we anticipate another, you know, tomorrow, I believe, another, increase continuing that. We expect those borrowing costs to continue to increase next year. We forecast based on forward curves, and that's included in our guidance. A portion of our operating expense is also related to the pension expense, and our pension asset values have decreased significantly as a result of poor market performance, causing increases to our pension expense to outpace the potential decrease due to a rising discount rate from interest rates. Finally, we've increased our capital expenditures primarily due to inflation in certain new projects that we believe are in the best interest of our customers, which results in an increase in depreciation expense. We do expect these costs to be recoverable through future rate cases. As Dennis mentioned earlier, we have settled in Washington a two-year plan, so that, assuming the commission approves it, which is the commission still has to approve it. If the commission approves it, Washington rates will be set for 20, you know, December of 2022 through December of 2024, but we do plan to file in Idaho and Oregon in the first quarter and first half of next year, respectively. We expect Avista Utilities to contribute in the range of $1.66-$1.82 per diluted share in 2022, and the midpoint does not include any benefit from the ERM. Our expectation, as I mentioned earlier, is the ERM would be in the 90/10 sharing band and is expected to reduce our earnings by $0.09 per diluted share. Primarily due to the impact of the ERM, we do expect to be at the bottom of the range for Avista Utilities. Looking to 2023, we expect Avista Utilities to contribute $2.15-$2.31 per diluted share, and our guidance assumes appropriate rate relief in all of our jurisdictions, including the approval of the 2022 Washington general rate cases. For 2023, we anticipate, just to give you a sense of where we are on our earned ROE, we anticipate unrecovered structural costs to reduce the return by approximately 60 basis points. That's what we'll call structural lag, my term. Then we have timing lag of about 90 basis points. We anticipated originally trying to get back to earning our allowed return, but with the increase in interest, pension, and depreciation, we're not gonna get there for 2023. We expect that to be about 90 basis points, so that gets our total return on equity to be 7.9%. We expect AEL&P to contribute in the range of $0.08-$0.10 in 2022 and 2023, and our outlook for AEL&P assumes, among other variables, as always, normal precipitation and hydroelectric generation. We expect the other businesses to contribute $0.14-$0.16 per diluted share in 2022, and in 2023, we expect those businesses to contribute in a range of $0.04-$0.06 per diluted share. Our guidance generally includes only normal operating conditions and doesn't include any unusual or non-recurring items until the effects are known. That's the end of the discussion on guidance, so I'll turn it back to Stacey, and we can get to questions. Thank you, Mark. We are happy to take your questions. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your phone. Please stand by as we compile the Q&A roster. One moment please for our first question. Our first question will come from Julien Dumoulin-Smith of Bank of America. Your line is open. Hey, good morning team. Thanks for the time. Hope you guys are well. Good morning, Julien. Julien. Hey, thank you. I want to come back to the 2023 guidance. You guys spent a good chunk of time here, but can we break down some of the pieces you alluded to here? You know, obviously, you talk about cost management efforts. You guys have been talking about that for a bit here. Can you talk about the ability to kind of recapture some of that in some of these subsequent cases, as well as some of the discrete breakout of the other items that you flagged here on the 2023 guidance, just to quantify the three or four specific points that you called out? Well, I mean, it really is rising interest rates. We do borrow money under our, you know, it's largely our short-term credit facility. We will issue some bonds later in 2023 on a long-term basis. We have $140 million of debt we expect to issue on a long-term basis, but really, the short-term interest rates have increased significantly. As I mentioned, you know, we have just to give a sense, we have a $400 million credit facility, and we have $100 million at September of available liquidity. If that liquidity goes consistent, you assume we have, you know, $300 million borrowed and interest rates have moved substantially, you know, over the course of where we were to now in 2023 where we expect to be. We're just looking at forward curves there on interest rates. We borrow very short term, week to two weeks under that credit facility. That has caused it to go up. Our pension expense, as I mentioned, you know, our asset values went down significantly. You know, we see the market values, right? What's happened in the stock market, we have a certain portion equity. We do have some fixed income as well on that, but interest rates rising there hurts the returns on the fixed income portion of the portfolio. We're down in our assets over 20% in our pension, and that's too much to overcome relative to the increase in the discount rate. I'm not trying to get into Julien into pension accounting because I don't want to, and nobody wants to hear it. That's overall our pension expense is expected to be higher for 2023 based on that, you know, based on what we see today, and that's what we have to go on for our guidance. The increase, you know, we mentioned earlier, we had, you know, on an earlier call, we had some increase in inflation in our CapEx, and our CapEx is higher than what we have filed for in Washington. We will expect to file in, you know, in Idaho and Oregon early in 2023, first quarter for Idaho and first half for Oregon. There's an opportunity there to pick up some amounts, you know, in those future rate cases, all subject to that process. You know, in Washington, our case is before the commission right now. We've reached a multiparty settlement. One party did not settle, Public Counsel. That's still going through that process. We, you know, we expect that we will be able to get approval on the Washington case, but that still has to be determined by the commission. That's not up to us. Those are the three primary drivers. Our other cost management efforts really offset the other impacts of inflation. We've seen inflation in wages. We've seen inflation in, you know, goods and services in, you know, different contractors that we use to do a lot of our work. We were able to offset that with our cost management. I'm not going to go into specific details there, but the effort we did offset all that. It was just the faster rise, and I guess I'd attribute it to, you know, higher inflation for longer that the Fed has had to then move and the market reaction to that. Those, you know, those are really the drivers we were not able to offset in our expectations. We do believe that will all be recoverable in future rate cases, assuming we can demonstrate that we did this prudently, and I believe we absolutely can. Got it. Actually, can we try to quantify a little bit more on the pension impact reflected here in 2023, as well as, if you don't mind going back to the cost management equation. Like how do you think about maybe 2024 at this point in reflecting some of these pieces? Maybe also, if you don't mind, on interest expense, thoughts on the refinancing, terming that out, et cetera, such that, again, how you think about that on a more structural basis into 2024. Again, I know that you keep trying on cost management. I've heard this effort for a while. How do you think about, you know, kind of giving another college try, if you will, into the 2024 time period? We're always doing that, I mean, that'll be consistent and we will expect to continue those efforts. I don't have anything specific to report for 2024, you know, we've done that. 2023 wasn't an unusual. We had a little bit higher effort in 2023 because we knew we had a little bit higher hurdle. You know, we always are trying to manage our cost to run it efficiently. We need to demonstrate that, you know, as we, you know, go in for rate cases. We have to demonstrate how are you trying to manage your costs. We do that consistently. 2024 won't be any different, with respect to that effort. With respect to the, you know, putting down the pieces, you know, we kind of laid out what our borrowings were. If that was an average borrowing, you can look at rates and determine what that is. The pension dollars, I'm not going to get into specifics because those can move around. Coming into 2024, if interest rates come down a little bit, that could help 2024, right? If market performs better going into the end of 2023 or we get into 2024 and the market performs better, that our pension can have a lower expense, that's a future opportunity as well. None of those things are known at this time. All we can give you is what we expect at this time, which is where we're at. If you look at it, I won't say a third, but that's probably as close of an estimate, without getting into great detail of depreciation, pension, and interest. Got it. A third of the delta in guidance reduction here. The delta, $0.15. Yep, exactly. Thank you for qualifying that. To be clear, on the 2024 rate activity though, how do you think about going back here to true that up? Just, sorry, I tried to ask that a little, perhaps in code earlier just to clarify that, and I'll pass it. Well, with respect to 2024, you know, we expect to file in 2023 in Oregon and in Idaho. That's about 40% of our business. Washington represents about 60% of our Avista Utilities business. In Washington, we're not going to be able to refile until you know in 2024, effectively for 2025. I mean, it might possibly get into December. Rates can't change before December in our expectations. It'll be Oregon and Idaho that will be able to you know look to recover. Again, we got to go through the process in Oregon and Idaho to demonstrate that these are approvals, and then we will continue to have our cost management. We'll continue to look at where the market goes. Excellent. Thanks for your patience, guys. Speak to you soon. Thanks, Julien. Thank you. One moment please for our next question. Our next question shall come from Shar Pourreza of Guggenheim Partners. Your line is open. Hi, guys. It's Jamieson Ward on for Shar. How are you? Hi, Jamieson. Good. Good. Wanted to clarify, are you still projecting long-term growth of 4%-6% off of 2023, or how should we think about that aspect, the later years aspect in the forecast period? Yeah, I think that's consistent. Again, that's our, you know, looking at our rate base growth and as we would go in a normalized period. We are, as we, you know, are going to be under-earning and have some continued timing lag. We would like to see that we could chip away at that, but that's gonna take a period of over 2024 and 2025 to have that opportunity, as I just mentioned earlier, really because of the, you know, again, regulatory process in Idaho and Oregon, able to possibly chip away at 2024 and then Washington for 2025. We would expect that to be a normalized growth based on current expectations of where our rate base growth is. We would look to, you know, add to that, some incremental growth to offset this reduction we have, and this timing lag that we have identified today. Gotcha. Would a fair way to put it be, sort of think of rebasing as four to six, still off of 2023, off of this lower 2023, but maybe more of a bias to the top end of that rather than the midpoint as you look for incremental opportunities to normalize, as you're saying, and to catch back up. Is that fair? Or, I think I would look at, you know, we have an incremental opportunity. The base that makes sense, right, go off the, you know, the 4%-6% off of the revised 2023. Okay. I would say that makes sense. The incremental opportunity is we're going to have to see. I would say, yes, there is an opportunity for, again, 40% of the business in Oregon and Idaho, if you're gonna look at that versus the, you know, Washington. So 60% of that, we don't believe. You know, we're gonna continue to do cost management. We're gonna continue to look at running our business efficiently. We'll have continued impacts of market forces as we go forward, but we can possibly pick up to 40% of that in 2024, and then the remainder in 2025 is our opportunity, and we'll have to work through those processes with our commissions. Got it. In terms of incremental opportunity, we've had $0.04-$0.06 as the other business's initial guidance for the past couple of years. Obviously that segment has exceeded expectations repeatedly. Understood that investment gains have driven that, but what's sort of the potential that we could see an upside surprise, similar to what we've seen in the last couple of years in, say, 2023 that might, if not close the gap, but, make up some of the $0.15 difference, that you projected? Again, we don't. You know, we look at the forecast, Jamieson, on with respect to where we see those market valuations. They can go up and down. We actually saw some, you know, third quarter wasn't a significant pop. It was pretty flat. You know, we don't forecast significant market upsides in those. We just kind of forecast a normalized return that we see based on our investments there. Is there a possibility it could go up? Yes. Is there a possibility it could go down? Yes. I mean, there are valuations that can move there. Got it. We try to, I think I would say, we try to forecast conservatively in that area. But, you know, it can go both ways. Market valuations can go down as well, as we've seen. Yeah. in the stock market. Certainly. The last two questions I have, well, one on that note of asset valuations declining. Now, in our pension survey back in the summer, you'd mentioned that you have regulatory mechanisms that allow you to record regulatory asset for the portion of the pension and other post-retirement benefit funding deficiency that you'd have relative to what you're recovering in rates. How does that play in here? And is that something that can help to offset, or it seems like it isn't if pension headwinds are gonna be weighing on 2023. How should we think about the regulatory mechanisms and regulatory recovery that you have related to pension? Yeah. I mean, that's assets versus liability for an unfunded component of it, but we're largely funded in our pension. Gotcha. I don't think that there's an issue there. It's not with respect to the expense. You know, we get recovery of the ERISA expense based on an annual calculation there. You know, that ability to change that, we don't have a tracker for that mechanism at all at this point. It's a GAAP expense. This is more like you've exceeded like the corridor and you know it pushes out into a 2023 impact or it could or it looks like it might. Is that more of the way to think about this? Well, as we look at it, we can forecast what the market's gonna do, what our pension's gonna earn, and what the discount rate is, and we can run an actuarial calculation on that that says, "Here's what pension expense would be," forecasted based on what we know today. You know, those numbers change and we value it at the end of the year for the next year. But where we see it today is going to be a higher expense. Yep, understood. That makes sense. Just to clarify as well on the ERM, obviously the midpoint of guidance does not include an impact from the ERM. We understand the $0.09 weighting this year. Just so we can understand when thinking about next year, do you have any sort of early indication, given the components that go into the ERM, of essentially, is it just a reset to zero at January 1, or is there any sort of early indication of whether things are looking more positive or negative relative to coming in flat or at zero, I should say, not flat? We're really waiting for. We've got a filed rate case in Washington, which is where the ERM is. You know, we have a PCA in Idaho, but that's more of a 90/10, so that's not as impactful as the ERM from an earnings perspective. In Washington, when we filed our case, we reset to, you know, December or January of that year. I don't remember the exact dates that we reset, but we reset our power supply cost in that case, but have not reset for any current amount. Until we get that case through the Washington Commission, you know, I'm not comfortable saying where we expect to be. We will come out in February because we'll assume that in December we will have an order from the commission. When we give our guidance, you know, when we refresh our guidance for 2023, in our fourth quarter call, next year, you know, we will have a view of where that ERM is based on the market conditions at that time. Understood. Thank you very much. Appreciate you answering the questions. Thank you, Jamieson. Thank you. One moment please for our next question. Our next question will come from Sophie Karp of KeyBanc. Your line is open. Hi. Good morning. Thanks for the time. Hi, Sophie. Hi, Sophie. A couple of questions. I'm looking closely at the numbers here in your 10-Q, right? It seems to me that your interest expense has gone up by about $3 million, so it would have been like $0.04 delta year-over-year in your EPS. Just wanted to confirm that this is the totality of it because you've written it up as a major driver. It seems like O&M was a way bigger driver. Is there another interest expense somewhere, like, buried in the line somewhere? Again for 2022, but also in interest expense, you know, as we look at it, I'm looking more to 2023 than 2022. Okay. As we look at that. You know, 2022's, we just moved guidance in 2022 by $0.05, which included interest and operating expenses. But it really didn't move significantly in 2022. 2023 was what I was trying to address there, Sophie. It, when I said the interest, pension and depreciation was really a 2023 expectation. Got it. Okay. The increase in O&M versus, I guess, the prior run rate that we're seeing this year, this is basically your expectations that it stays the same going into 2023, or you're contemplating some kind of a acceleration or deceleration in the rate of inflation in the O&M like? Well, again, with respect to our cost management, we expected to try to keep our O&M relatively flat in 2023 compared to 2022. You know, we're gonna see higher costs in our pension, and we are gonna see some, you know, the drivers really for the change in our guidance, you know, go back to, again, pension depreciation interest costs. You know, we did have higher debt in 2022 compared to 2021. We expect to continue that as we go forward into 2023. It's a combination of the rate going up and plus, you know, our increase to fund our capital budget. We're, you know, funding- Right. $175 million capital budget, so that increases as well. Some of that you don't see in there, Sophie, is the effects of our cost management. I mean, we are trying to manage our costs to keep that rate of growth below inflation. Right. Let me ask you this. You mentioned that you hope to recover the so you have a two-year settlement that hopefully will get approved, like, in December in Washington. You mentioned that you hope to recover extra O&M costs, I guess maybe above and beyond what was contemplated in this two-year rate case and future rate cases. How does it work? Do you have, like, some kind of mechanism to track those costs in excess of what's in the settlement? Because it's a black box settlement too, right? Can you help us understand how this would work? Yeah, Sophie, this is Kevin Christie. I'll jump in here and focus primarily on capital. The capital that we're incurring that creates timing lag, we'll pull into the next case. When we build the test period and pro forma into the rate effective date. Any expenditures, operating expense will be treated like it always is. We'll develop a test period, in that test period we'll pull the current O&M, and we'll pro forma any additional O&M we think might be appropriate. We have the ability to take what we expect to have from an expense perspective at that time, and any capital that we're spending now that isn't recovered or what might not be recovered in that case will be pulled into the next case as well. It's the capital. Your comment relates to capital, not on the O&M. Yeah, not on O&M. Okay. O&M, unless it's covered in a tracker, like what we hope to have for insurance expense. That's part of the settlement in the Washington case. Anything related to Wildfire, for example, which is a current tracking mechanism. We have that in the state of Washington as well. Got it. One last one, if I may. Mostly a philosophical question, I guess, with respect to your regulatory strategy here. You know, is there a way to have some kind of limited reopener for this settlement to account for these, you know, incremental costs, which I'm assuming arose after you reached the settlement because of, you know, the timeline of this, it seems to me. Yeah, I think you're right on. That's when we mentioned the goalpost moving on us in that what we had in test period and what we knew of at the time when we reached the settlement, a number of things have occurred negatively since then. With the state of regulation in Washington, we really don't have an opportunity to go back unless it's captured in a tracker that I just mentioned and reopen. With the new legislation in Washington that we are utilizing here, if the case we filed was longer, three or four years, which is an option, we didn't do that here, then there's a reopener if you're under earning below a certain level. That doesn't really apply here, given the timing of this case just being two years. Okay. Got it. Thank you. It also doesn't necessarily make sense for us to withdraw from the settlement and refile because it's an 11-month process. We would effectively lose a year. To do that just to try to come back. We don't think that makes sense either. We think the settlement is a good settlement. As we said earlier, we think the settlement is a good settlement. We think it's a fair settlement reached with all the parties and, you know, will help us get towards earning our allowed return. Like we said, you know, it's just the market has changed since this time, so we don't have that opportunity. All right. In Washington, Idaho and Oregon we'll file. Right. Well, thank you. Appreciate the call. Thanks, Sophie. Thank you. Again, to ask a question, please press star one one on your phone. One moment please for our next question. Our next question will come from Brian Russo of Sidoti & Company. Your line is open. Yeah. Hi, good morning. Hi, Brian. Brian. Just to clarify, with the understanding that you expect the rate case settlement to be finalized next month, and then you've got a rate increase in late 2022 and then again in late 2023. When actually can you file again, assuming that 11-month time clock for a fully litigated rate case? Do you have to wait till December of 2023 when the second year of the rate increase goes into effect? Or can you file any time after you reach the settlement agreement? Well, it's easier to think about it this way. We can file 11 months prior to December 22, 2024. You could file sooner than that, but you're not going to have new rates into effect any sooner than that. It's really up to the company to try to time it right up to that point in time. If we are continuing to have lag to fill the gap there right at that 2024 timeframe, in late December. Okay, got it. Thanks for the clarification. That's all I had. Thank you. Thanks, Brian. Thank you. Again, one moment please, for our next question. Our next question will come from Brandon Lee of Mizuho Securities. Your line is open. Hi. Hi, Brandon. Hey, how are you? So from the midpoint of $1.74 for 2022, if I reduce it by the ERM of $0.09, I get $1.65. So far for the year, you've earned $0.90. Am I thinking about this correctly, that you'd need to earn about $0.75 in the fourth quarter to hit the midpoint of your guidance for Avista Utilities? Sorry. Sorry. No, I mean, that's again Avista Utilities. I look at it more on the consolidated, but you know, at the end of the day, that's right. Second or fourth and first quarters are our largest quarters historically. That is an expectation that we would. You know, I'm trusting your math there. That. Yeah. Without confirming, you know, any models. That sounds appropriate. Okay. For Avista Utilities to earn that in the fourth quarter. Now that we're about a month into the quarter, how is the fourth quarter looking so far? No, I don't have a sense. Again, it's early in the fourth quarter and, you know, as you look at the fourth quarter, we're looking at earnings. The second and third month of the quarter are the colder months of the quarter. I'm not gonna- Okay. Try to guess at how it is looking. Sure. for the quarter. Sure. We do expect to make that, you know, in our quarter. Okay, when we think of the drivers from 2023 to 2024, I mean, you have rates set in Washington. I guess, how do you improve 2024 from here? Is it the Idaho and Oregon rate cases? Are there other drivers? Yeah. That's part of it, as I've mentioned earlier on the call, that is part of it. We do expect to be able to file cases there, and we'll have to go through those processes and demonstrate that we should get recovery. We do expect that. You know, we're gonna continue our cost management efforts. We're gonna have to continue that as we go forward. As well as, you know, there are, you know, can interest rates slow down or you know, reverse some? There are some forecasts out there that show that. We, you know, just continue to manage our business. We have a strong business. We've hit a timing issue here that's gonna take some time to get through. Our business model is still very strong and, you know, we just have to work through these timing issues to get back to earning our allowed return. That'll be through the regulatory process, and we're not gonna be able to get there in Washington, as Kevin just mentioned, until, you know, late 2024 will be the opportunity to increase in Washington, which is 60% of our business. Got it. In 2024, assuming, you know, Idaho and Oregon go well and you get constructive outcomes there, that's about 40% of your business. But you have cost pressures on 100% of the business. Should we be leaning towards the lower end of the 4%-6% range? No, I don't know that I'd say that. I haven't really thought that all the way through. We can, you know, continue to look at that. We've really focused on 2023 and then incrementally as we go forward in 2024. We expect to incrementally improve the 4%-6%. We expect to, you know, be able to achieve that. We included that, you know, even in our Washington case, and we will get some opportunity there as part of our second year in our Washington case. We're always gonna have to continue to manage that 100% O&M, so we will continue to work for that. I don't know that I'd say there's an upside or downside to the range. We'll have to continue to look at those cost increases and continue our cost management efforts to help offset those. I don't know that I'd say directionally I would give guidance on where we are, with respect to any possible increased range for 2024. Okay, great. That's all I had. Thanks for taking my question. Thank you. Thank you. I'm seeing no further questions in the queue. I would now like to turn the conference back to Stacey Wenz for closing remarks. Thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate your interest in the company. See a number of you at EEI in the coming weeks. Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.