Sound check. Great. Awesome. Good morning, everyone. Thank you guys for joining us. This is Jackie Richert. I want to welcome you guys here to CenterPoint's 2021 Analyst Day. I'm going to start off this morning with the housekeeping items. The slides that are available today are going to be on the IR section of the website. Hopefully, you all have been able to download them at this point. Our presentations this morning are expected to run through 10:40 A.M., followed by a 10-minute break, and then we'll do a Q&A session at the end. If you would, please hold all questions until then. Our webcast portion is going to conclude after the Q&A, and for those of you in person, we're going to proceed to the exhibits outside of the generation facility, as well as the Picarro leak detection vehicle. From there, we'll move to an in-depth breakout session across the walkway and conclude around 2:00 P.M. Our management presentations today are going to contain projections and other forward-looking information and statements based on management's belief, assumptions, and information currently available to management. Other than referencing historical facts, all of the information we are sharing today is forward-looking. Those forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially based on various factors, including those noted in our SEC filings. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any of the forward-looking statements, except as required. We will also discuss non-GAAP utility EPS, referred to as utility EPS, non-GAAP earnings guidance, utility EPS growth targets and rates, as well as non-GAAP utility net income and long-term funds from operations. These non-GAAP measures could be materially different from GAAP measures as reported. 2020 will be the base year for our growth-related comparisons today, whether utility EPS, rate base, or dividends. That we will discuss in our 10-year plan, while the 10-year horizon for discussion is 2021 through 2030. For information on forward-looking statements, non-GAAP measures, and reconciliations and guidance, please refer to our presentation materials under the Investors section of our website. We may use our website to announce material information. This presentation is being webcast in listen-only mode. Information on how to access the replay will be available on the website. Now we'll turn towards the company profile. As many of you already know, CenterPoint Energy and its predecessor companies have been in business for more than 140 years. Currently, CenterPoint is a publicly traded investment-grade utility company with around $16 billion market cap and over $18 billion in rate base. We serve over 7 million metered customers across our electric and natural gas footprint, which operate in eight premium jurisdictions. Throughout the presentation this morning, our executive team will provide a more in-depth discussion of how we're positioning this footprint for the future. With that, I'll turn the floor over to our CEO, Dave Lesar. Thank you, Jackie. Oh, okay. I'm not used to that at an Analyst Day. Anyway, first of all, I want to welcome everyone that is on the webcast and of course, everyone that has joined us here in person today. We are very much looking forward to today and sharing our story with you. We're going to have a lot of ground to cover today, and you're going to hear from a lot of members in our management team. I know I'm biased, but I think that this is one of the best management teams that exists in the industry today, and today you're going to get a chance to see them in action. What we're going to cover today, I'll make some opening comments, obviously give the usual headlines that I do, and basically unveil our new 10-year plan for all of our shareholders. We'll then have Jason come up here, and Jason is going to highlight our new industry-leading net zero carbon goal that we'll have. He'll talk about how it fits into our capital spend going forward, our operational plans going forward. We'll have Kenny and Scott come up, and they'll go through the sort of who, what, why, where, and when of the capital spend. Gregg Knight will then come up and really discuss how our capital spend is going to impact and benefit not only our communities, but our customers. Jason Ryan, our Head of Regulatory Affairs, will discuss how the great relationships we have with our regulators, how that fits in and helps our customers and also our shareholders. I'll come back up at the end. After Jason, we'll stitch it all together in terms of showing you how the plan works, and then we'll open it up for questions at that point in time. Up front, I want to be perfectly clear on one item. We believe that this 10-year plan can be fully executed with the liquidity that we'll have on hand after we close the transactions of ET and the LDCs. It is not dependent on, nor does it require the sale of any other pieces of our business. However, as we've said, given the high prices that we got for the gas LDCs, we will be open to additional sales if we can see a way to continually and efficiently recycle capital through our business if new opportunities arise for us. Let's go ahead and get going. I first want to start by summarizing the CenterPoint value proposition as it exists out there today. At CenterPoint today, you're getting 8% utility EPS growth in 2021. You're getting 6%-8% EPS growth through 2025. You have a $16 billion five-year capital spending plan with a 10% rate base CAGR. We have a commitment to exiting the midstream and transitioning to a more pure-play utility, a focus on improving our balance sheet and efficiently recycling capital through our LDC gas sales, funding our $300 million in equity needs through a five-year ATM, a focus on, I'll say a laser focus for you, Anthony, on O&M cost control, and continuing to service our organically growing markets that we have. We'll have a lot more to say about our organic growth a little bit later. That's the value proposition for CenterPoint coming into the meeting today. All in all, a really great place to be as a utility, but it's an even better place for us to start our new 10-year journey that we're going to unveil for you today. We currently have top-decile earnings growth, all ahead of our peers that trade at a premium. We're not yet valued as a premium utility in the eyes of the market. That is the next challenge that this management team is going to take on, because going forward, our headlines are about to get a lot better. We believe that this 10-year plan is achievable. Our management team is committed to delivering it to our shareholders. Now, you can focus on the details of this plan as we unveil it, let me tell you what the headlines are going to be today. The main takeaway is we believe we'll be doubling the earnings capacity, the dividend, and the rate base of the company in less than 10 years. Here we go with the headlines. Headline one, earnings growth. During the next 10 years, we will achieve 8% utility EPS growth in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. After that, we'll have at least 6% - 8% annual utility EPS growth through 2030. Consistent with the past, our team is absolutely intent on delivering the mid to upper range of this 6%-8% for the next six years of the plan after we hit the 8% mark. That will more than double our EPS, the dividend, and our rate base of the company in less than 10 years. This should be top-decile earnings growth for the industry. Headline number two, increasing our capital spend. We're going to drive this EPS growth by first announcing today that we are increasing our current five-year capital plan to $18+ billion from $16 billion. We're also announcing today a new $40+ billion 10-year capital plan. We've also identified $1 billion in reserve capital that we will spend sometime along this 10-year path when we can do so efficiently for both our shareholders and our customers. As you'll be hearing from Scott and Kenny a little bit later, we have runway for capital spending well beyond this 10-year horizon. Bottom line, there is no capital spending cliff at CenterPoint as we go forward. This rate base growth will allow us to continue to improve the safety and resiliency of our system. You heard last night from the mayor how important that is for Houston. Headline number three, no equity needs in our 10-year plan. We are announcing today the elimination of our previously communicated $300 million of equity provided by our ATM plan. We're announcing today that we'll not need any equity during this 10-year plan. None. This is possible because we can efficiently recycle the proceeds from the sale of the gas LDCs in ET, take the increased cash flow we're going to get from our business, plus an allowable amount of regulated debt, and that will be what we need to execute this plan. Jason will walk through a little bit later how it all comes together and show you how it works. Headline four, we expect to eliminate our midstream exposure by the end of next year. We fully expect the merger to close sometime in the fourth quarter. To accelerate our exit timing from our midstream, we're announcing today the contingent forward sale of 50 million shares, 50 million units of ET. This, when coupled with the planned sale of our preferred units in ET after we close the transaction, will mean that we have monetized and eliminated well over 40% of our midstream exposure by the end of this year, and we should be completely out of midstream by the end of next year. Headline number five, a net zero carbon goal by 2035. Today, we're going to be introducing an industry-leading net zero direct emissions carbon goal by 2035 that will establish a number of industry firsts. This plan is going to be clear, it's going to be transparent, and it's going to apply across all of our jurisdictions. No exclusions to it, unlike some other utilities. This net zero goal will be almost 15 years ahead of where the peer average of utilities that own generation today. It's a really, really great plan. Headline number six, maintaining a strong balance sheet. This plan supports an FFO to debt ratio of 14%-15% starting in 2022, provides us more financial cushion, and should reduce our parent company debt to around 20% by the end of 2022. Headline seven, we're going to keep rates affordable for our customers by maintaining cost discipline and continuing to optimize our growth. We will be maintaining our O&M reductions at 1%-2% a year. We will be, as I said, optimizing our organic growth opportunities. This is a new one. EV infrastructure opportunities in Houston alone are projected to add an incremental 1% - 2% annual organic growth on top of the already 2% organic growth we have in Houston. That is going to give us a lot of headroom to keep our customers' rates affordable. Those are the headlines. Now more importantly, so you don't have to do the math, as we describe this plan more fully and you hear from the rest of the team, here's what we believe we will look like in 10 years using the headlines that I just described in only the midpoint of the utility EPS growth that we talked about. Remember what I said, we're intent on making sure that we earn the mid to upper range of that 6% - 8%. As you can see, it's a doubling of our utility EPS, our dividends, and our rate base in less than 10 years. In summary, to me, this is a very compelling utility story, and it's all about sustainability, sustainable rates for our customers, sustainable earnings growth for our shareholders, and a sustainable positive impact on the environment for our communities, all leading to more than doubling the size of the company through organic growth over 10 years. Let's switch gears for a minute and look at what the market tells us a peer premium utility looks like today. They look like this on the slide. You can see that even today, we stack up pretty well versus the premium companies that we show here. At 8%, we have the top growth in utility EPS. At a 9% 10-year CAGR, we will likely have the best rate base growth in the industry. At 8%, we'll have the highest dividend growth. With no need for equity, we'll be among the top peers. With our new net zero carbon goal, we're going to lead the list. With 2% organic growth, we'll have the highest customer growth rate. Our balance sheet metrics will be in line with our peers. What we hear from folks today is that we don't have the track record of consistently hitting our targets. Now, I can tell you, as a CEO, I don't like to hear words like that, but I accept it, because in the past, it's a true statement. With this new team, I hope you're seeing that our earnings track record is changing right before your eyes. As you incorporate the financial impact of this 10-year plan, as we do in this slide, I think our comparisons to our peer utilities we show here will become even more favorable over time. I'd say that in terms of current performance, we already have the look of a premium utility. I understand that as a CEO, I can't wave a magic wand and declare that my shares should trade at a premium. We understand and accept that we have to earn our way to a premium utility. Our team and I believe that we can do that. I hope, in conclusion, at the end of the day, that you come away seeing that not only do we have the building blocks to become a premium utility, but we're building that premium utility right in front of you. I think, and our management team thinks, we are going to be really hard to bet against. At some point, I think we're going to get re-rated, and I hope those of you that are on the call and in the room are shareholders with us at that point in time. Let me summarize what our new value proposition for CenterPoint is based on this 10-year plan. CenterPoint, delivering industry-leading utility EPS and dividend growth for the next 10 years and beyond. Investing in an exceptional $40+ billion capital program with $1 billion held in reserve to apply when we can do it most efficiently. Efficiently funding our growth with no equity issuance for the next 10 years. A full exit of midstream. Industry-leading net zero goal 15 years ahead of our peers. A healthy balance sheet. An ability to keep rates affordable. In essence, a pure-play regulated utility with a consistent track record of delivery. That is our new value proposition and is your ultimate takeaway from today. Today we're starting a new and exciting journey at CenterPoint. Let me begin to describe that journey and how we're going to take advantage of the unique opportunities that we have as an organization. I'll finally let my colleagues get up and continue the story. First, of course, it really helps to be in growing markets, and we certainly have that. I've heard some people say that you don't have to have above-average growth to be a premium utility. That's probably right, because there's examples of that out there. I can tell you, I have been in business for 43 years, and one thing I learned early on is growth always matters, and it doesn't matter what industry you're in. We've got that growth. We are in really good growing markets. I'll describe those here in a few minutes. Growth, of course, provides a company a continuous tailwind. It helps create economic opportunities for our communities and for our customers. Growth also allows for a better alignment between those communities and our customers. We clearly have both in our territories. Let me give you some facts about our biggest territory, Houston. You heard some of this last night, those of you that listened to the Mayor. Fourth biggest city in the U.S. The only one in the top four that's growing. As you heard the Mayor say last night, he believes within the next five years, we'll catch Chicago and be the third biggest city in the U.S. Number two location for Fortune 500 companies. Ranked number one in diversity. We are not just an oil and gas town. The Texas Medical Center, the world's largest, just on its own, is the eighth biggest business district in the U.S. And Houston's long track record of 2% organic growth is projected to continue. To put that number in context, given the size, that is the equivalent of dropping an Ann Arbor, Michigan, into the city of Houston every year after year after year. That is the kind of growth we have here. Despite COVID, housing starts are at a 15-year high in Houston. Here is a fun fact that Kenny brought to my attention. The electric vehicle infrastructure needed in the city of Houston in the next 10 years is the equivalent of 125,000 new houses being built. That is three years of housing on top of our already record build. Lots of growth opportunities just here in Houston. If you go to the San Antonio to Austin corridor, it's projected to grow 50% by 2030. Guess what? We have the gas LDC business there. If you go outside of Texas, the population of Minnesota outgrew the U.S. rate in the last decade. Outside of Minnesota, Indiana is the fastest-growing state in the Midwest. The GDP growth rate for Indiana and Minnesota was faster than that in the U.S. over the last decade. We have constructive regulatory regimes wherever we go. Now, I said earlier we would spend $40+ billion in the next 10 years. This is how that spend will play out over time. It will be biased toward electric, but a significant amount will go into our gas businesses. The slight drop-off you see in 2025 reflects us finishing up the build-out of our Indiana IRP plans and the sequencing of other capital spend ahead of already scheduled rate cases. Capital spend will pick up an average $4.4 billion per year for the next five years. As you'll hear, we have years of capital spend in both gas and electric, well beyond this 10-year horizon, all funded with the proceeds from our already announced strategic transactions, enhanced business cash flows, and regulatory debt issuance. No external equity. My colleagues, as I said earlier, will discuss the why and the where and the how of our capital spend. Today, as I look back and look at our business from 50,000 ft, what I see is a company that has the economic tailwinds and the long investment horizon to spend plenty of capital to provide safe, resilient, clean, and affordable energy for our customers. A very, very powerful place to start a new 10-year journey. It's time to get some of my team up here. Let me conclude with this thought. We have the organic growth, we have the management team, we have the employee base, and we have the investment headroom to be a premium utility. At the end of the day, I'd like you to think of us as the sustainable utility. As I said earlier, sustainable rates for our customers, sustainable earnings growth for our shareholders, and a sustainable positive impact on the environment for our communities. I believe, and the management team believes, that at CenterPoint, the best is yet to come. Enjoy the day, and let me turn the floor over to Jason. Thank you, Dave, and good morning, everyone. I am thrilled that we can share our incredible plan with you this morning. I want to take the opportunity to thank you all for traveling here to participate in Houston with us, as well as those that are participating on the webcast. We sincerely appreciate the time you're spending with us today. I'm excited to begin by sharing how we're going to integrate environmental leadership into our 10-year strategic plan. You will hear, not just from me, but the rest of the management team, that our focus on environmental leadership is the foundation for our industry-leading growth. While we may be late in terms of announcing a net zero carbon reduction goal, we have been working rapidly to reduce our carbon footprint. That work has served as the foundation for today's announcement. That by 2035, we plan to be net zero for direct Scope 1 emissions across our entire service territory. We plan to be net zero for all indirect or Scope 2 emissions at that same time. As Dave said, this puts us in the position to be the very first utility with generation to adopt a goal to achieve a net zero standard by 2035 and is nearly 15 years ahead of the average net zero goal of our peers. We plan to reduce end use or Scope 3 emissions by 20%-30% by 2035 as well. This also places us in the position of being the very first utility to adopt a meaningful Scope 3 reduction goal by 2035. The best part, these plans, they're all backed by clear and transparent steps, and the work is already well underway. Let's spend a minute talking about these clear and transparent steps that we're going to pursue to reduce our carbon footprint. We emitted about 5.2 million metric tons of carbon in 2020. We're currently on track to cut that amount by more than half by 2025. That more than 50% reduction in emissions is largely driven by the retirements of two of our three coal facilities in Indiana that we plan to replace with renewable generation and a gas peaking facility. That gas peaker will help address the intermittency that sometimes occurs with renewable generation, so we can provide not only cleaner, but reliable electricity for our customers in Southern Indiana. We're not stopping there. We're taking actions across both our gas and electric sides of our business to further reduce our carbon footprint. For example, you're going to hear from Scott in a few minutes about how our pipe modernization programs are driving our capital investment in our gas business. Those same plans will help us reduce our methane emissions by about 1/3 by 2035. Those investments, coupled with the fact that we are only one of a handful of gas LDCs currently utilizing the state-of-the-art Picarro leak detection technology, puts our gas business on a path to be an industry leader with respect to reduced methane emissions. We've also committed to and have begun to implement our fleet electrification plan. We expect to convert about 100% of our light-duty vehicles and about 10% of our heavy-duty fleet to electric by 2030. Beyond these actions, we plan to only have one remaining coal plant in Indiana after 2025. The retirement of that facility will be addressed in our upcoming integrated resource planning filing, where we'll work with our regulators and other stakeholders in Indiana to find a plan that will not only lower the cost for our customers, but also provide cleaner, more reliable electricity for our customers. In the interim, we're also committed to improving the environmental footprint of our coal plants during this transition period. One example is through recycling of the fly ash material to minimize waste impacts. Approximately 90% of the fly ash material generated from our coal facilities is utilized as feedstock at a local cement plant. We've recently announced an effort to recycle the historic ponded ash that's currently being stored at those facilities in Southern Indiana. This overall path to decarbonizing our assets should remove about 4.5 million metric tons of annual emissions by 2035 and squarely aligns our focus on environmental leadership with our capital investment plan for the benefit of our customers and our shareholders. The actions I just discussed should result in about an 85%-90% reduction in our current emissions by 2035. Our plan only requires about 10%-15% of overall Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions to be addressed through offsets. We list a scenario here on this slide on how we can achieve the balance of that reduction. We'll first look to optimize offset opportunities through forestry, land use, and properties we own, and then we're also exploring the potential to monetize renewable energy credits, as well as expanding our energy efficiency and conservation programs to address the remainder. As we establish what it really means to be an industry-leading utility today, we've also accelerated our Scope 3 emissions goal of a 20%-30% reduction across our system to 2035. This will reduce our customers' end use emissions by another 4 -6 million metric tons of carbon annually. What's really important about this goal is it's backed by technology that currently exists, and the work is already well underway. For example, this commitment leverages our green hydrogen pilot in Minnesota, as well as our successful energy efficiency programs in Indiana, Ohio, and Minnesota to achieve these targeted reductions. You're going to hear a lot more about our carbon reduction efforts from Kenny Mercado and Scott Doyle and how our customers are asking for and supporting the need for cleaner energy from Gregg Knight. Our commitment to environmental leadership is more than just a net zero carbon plan. Our accountability and alignment are demonstrated throughout the organization. We have an ESG council, which is a cross-functional group of business leaders. This council identifies, evaluates, and recommends strategic opportunities to promote ESG objectives, all in the context of our 10-year plan. We have a named officer over environmental and corporate sustainability, we will continue to have board oversight through our governance committee, which will be designated as the Governance, Environmental and Sustainability Committee in the near future. Our executive compensation program already considers our safety and diversity and inclusion objectives. Starting in 2022, this will be enhanced to include environmental measures. This will show our alignment is more than just words. From a governance perspective, our board continues to be refreshed by a mix of new and diverse perspectives. Two-thirds of our board has been appointed over the last five years, and 55% of our directors are diverse. We now have a strong independent board leadership structure with the recent introduction of our independent chairman. These actions should continue to demonstrate our responsiveness to shareholder feedback and expectations. As we move forward this morning, I'll leave you with this. We are committed to more transparency around, and more regular reporting of, our progress on these net zero goals. To that end, we're announcing the launch of a new ESG website, which is designed to provide regular updates on our progress in all areas of ESG. We realize this is an evolving space, and we are continuing to advance our ESG strategies. We aren't done. We know there's more to do. As I mentioned, we will integrate our emission reduction goals into our executive compensation program next year. We're also aligning our ESG metrics with the UN Sustainable Development Goals as we develop a path for green or sustainable financing. Lastly, with the foundation of our carbon reduction goals, we will regularly report on our progress. Let me close by saying I'm incredibly proud of the progress we've made to reduce our carbon footprint, and I am thrilled we can share with you our industry-leading net zero carbon goals today. I hope you see what we do. This is a plan backed by clear and transparent steps, the work is already well underway. I hope you see through the rest of the presentations today, our environmental leadership is influencing everything from our capital allocation, to how we're working with our regulators, to how we're engaging and adapting to our customers' evolving needs. This effort is not a standalone goal. It is truly woven throughout our long-term strategy, which we're excited to share with you today. Let me turn it over to Kenny Mercado, so he can share how our capital investment is providing cleaner, more resilient service for our electric customers. Thank you, Jason. Good morning to you all. You heard from Dave and you heard from Jason that this is a great time for CenterPoint Energy, and it's also a really good time for our electric utility. It's wonderful to talk to you again and to see some of you in person versus our meeting that we had back in December. I feel even more optimistic about our business and the opportunities of our long-term plans for this electric business than I did back in December. I know you're familiar with our service territories. You see them on the slides. Combined, when you combine our two electric utilities, we have 2.7 million electric customers in Indiana and Greater Houston area. This includes 5,000 mi of transmission lines and 62,000 mi of distribution lines. A fun fact, just on Tuesday of this week, our Houston area had 19,000 MW of peak load, which was 28% of the statewide ERCOT load. We're a big deal in Texas. As you heard from Dave and Jason, we want to emphasize today what we believe makes CNP, CenterPoint Energy, a premium utility, which is sustainable growth of our electric business and how we have line of sight into our long-term capital investments. Let's dive a little deeper into our 10-year and $23 billion plan. 10-year, $23 billion plan. There are three major themes as you see on this slide, broken up in the pie chart. The first theme, and you've heard it from Dave, and you're going to hear it from us often. You heard it from our mayor last night. The first theme is growth. Being a premier utility means we are investing in growth. 47% of our capital investments is in growth, system growth, and system improvements, and it's supported by that 2%, historically, over 20 years, 2% continuous growth. In the last 12 months, 2.5% growth in our service area, just during the COVID timeframe. We're very excited about the future in the area of growth. The second category, and really the second theme that's going to be bigger and bigger in the future, is $8 billion, or 35% of our capital investment, and it's around system reliability, system resiliency, and system safety. We're going to modernize, we're going to harden, we're going to upgrade, and we're going to build a stronger infrastructure for tomorrow as we have been working so hard in our past. This is all about preserving and preparing for extreme weather conditions in the future. The third area, roughly 14% of our pie, of our capital investments, is $3+ billion, is in renewables. Yes, we are working hard on clean energy investments in the state of Indiana. We're working very hard on clean energy investments with our third parties in the state of Texas, right here in the Houston area. You heard Jason talk about integrating our net zero transition by 2035. This is where it happens. We're preparing for the accelerated EV adoptions you heard Dave talk about earlier. Listen, $23 billion of capital for the next 10 years. It's driving a decade of growth, and then there's more to come after 2030. Let's look at those three areas in a little bit more detail. The first, of course, is growth. After two decades, we still see continued growth in population and economic development. Some of you, I know many of you traveled here today. There are cranes in Downtown Houston, right? This has been common for many years. If you go just south of here, you see the eighth-largest business district. Eighth-largest business district in the country is the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical center. They've got cranes all around that area. They're constantly building new medical research institutions. If you go just west of where we are today, you're in the Galleria business and entertainment district. We're building high-rise condominiums. We're building a lot of new businesses. Again, solid growth in that area, all near Downtown. If you drive 30 mi from here, any direction, you're going to have master-planned homes under construction all across our service area, typically in the count of around 30,000 - 35,000 homes per year. One recent customer that's very headline-oriented is Amazon. They've added 4,000 new jobs recently with two new distribution centers, just another example. In addition to all this, we're seeing continued growth in many sectors, including manufacturing, storage, logistics, the port, aerospace, petrochemical, oil and gas, and many other parts of our business that are all growing. By 2030, it's highly possible that Houston, Texas, and some of you heard this last night from the Mayor, will be the third-largest city in our country. Let's now convert that load, that incremental load, into investments. Which is nearly 2x in our substation infrastructure business and 2x in our distribution infrastructure business when you compare past history of our investments. You can see on the slide that we're estimating about 230 MW of annual increased throughput in our service area. This equates to more capacity. We must build more capacity inside of our infrastructure of our systems. 400 mi of new transmission lines will be built over this 10-year timeframe. 600 mi of upgrades of our existing lines that need to be bigger and more robust and more reliable will be built during this timeframe. If I turn you over to our substation area, where we're moving that bulk power into the load centers, we're going to be adding 32 different substations balanced across our service area. These are significant investments in our infrastructure business. We're going to upgrade 90 of those substations. 90 upgrades because the capacity is limited and it needs to be a bigger capacity for the future. I'm going to take you down to our distribution area, 4,500 new underground residential lines. This is revenue. This is where the master-planned communities are built, and now we're serving them with underground residential distribution. 4,500 new miles of underground to serve our homes. 2,000+ mi of feeders, literally the overhead construction that leaves the substation and takes that power right to the home, right to the small commercial, right to all of our businesses. 2,000 mi over this timeframe. Plus another 400 mi of upgrades to our distribution capacity. While I don't have peer utility benchmarks to compare this data with other utilities, this is a 10-year look that's first in our time, I do think that we can all agree that this is a premium utility growth investment against our peers. Let's turn to our slide to the theme of resiliency. And I know everybody in this room is talking a lot about resiliency. 50 mi, you're sitting here today, you're 50 mi from the Gulf of Mexico. One week ago, last Monday, we had a hurricane, Category 1. Didn't make a lot of big news compared to what happened in New Orleans, but it was a real hurricane. It takes real people to get the work done. Hurricane Nicholas, 90+ mi an hour gust winds. We lost 470,000 customers at a peak, and within one day, 24 hours, 70% of our customers were back in service. Within three days, 95% of our customers were back in service. By five days, we had completed the exercise. Why did we do that so well? It's because we have skilled employees, we have skilled leadership, we have operational know-how knowledge, we have a can-do attitude, we lean on our mutual assistance friends, and we make things happen. Every single employee of the company takes this serious, and we're proud of what we did right here recently with Hurricane Nicholas. In addition to these Category 4 storms that we've seen in New Orleans and the Category 4 storm we've seen here, we can't forget about Winter Storm Uri that just hit this past February. It created a big amount of havoc all around the state of Texas, including Houston. It underscores the importance of electricity and what it does to play in the lives of our customers. For us, resiliency matters, and it matters now. We are talking about resiliency now. You'll hear Gregg talk a little bit more about this in his presentation. Our resiliency includes major investments within our transmission system on the bulk side, our substations that bring that power to the loads, and our distribution. It all is included in both Houston and Indiana footprint. On the transmission side, we only have 280 mi remaining, you saw this chart earlier of our total miles, to harden and modernize. That's a good story. We've got about four to five years remaining, and we're going to upgrade our oldest 69 kV system that was built many years ago to our standard 138 kV system. Once that's completed, this will result in our entire transmission grid designed and operated to meet extreme winter conditions and extreme wind conditions. We're also hardening and modernizing 120 substations, including raising certain substations that are near our creeks, our bayous, and our rivers. Some of you might remember Hurricane Harvey just a few years ago. It created a new watermark. We're elevating our substations that are higher risk and making sure they will not be impacted by the next big flood event. We also have 550 mi of major underground. This is Downtown Houston. This is major underground. We're hardening that underground infrastructure and modernizing that infrastructure over these 10 years. It's an exciting opportunity to provide even better service to our most important large commercial customers. The next big opportunity comes from our distribution infrastructure. For those of you who are asking the question, where can you spend these dollars and how are you going to spend these dollars? We have recently raised our standards to design and build all future projects to meet extreme winter and wind conditions. This is very important to us. In this plan, we have over 1,000 mi of distribution modernization and hardening, and we have additional incremental opportunities above that 1,000 mi to place overhead facilities in select place areas into underground, what we just call undergrounding. We're looking at all those opportunities. In this current plan, we have not added any incremental dollars for undergrounding. We also continue to execute on our proactive programs, replacement programs. Aged infrastructure, we replace all of our cable, all of our poles that are aged, all of our transformers, big transformers, and our breakers. We replace those before they fail to improve the reliability of our system. The second area here in this slide is the blue area. It's really about technology. Our second area is around replacing 2.6 million smart meters with advanced technology, state-of-the-art-enabled meters of the future. It's going to be part of our 10-year plan. You may know that we have been a leader in smart grid technology for the past 20 years. We're very excited about the opportunity to expand this technology. Why? Because the market is demanding it. Our customers are demanding it. This investment will establish improved operational efficiencies. This has got more bells and whistles than we have today. It will provide faster emergency response, similar to what we discovered during Winter Storm Uri. This will give us even faster capabilities in an emergency situation. It will absolutely enhance the reliability of our system and provide better customer satisfaction for Gregg's area. In addition to our smart meters, we're going to plan to expand our intelligent grid. It has worked so well, we're now expanding the use of our intelligent switching and our intelligent technology to enable us to have even more benefit and provide more service to our critical load customers on critical circuits. This becomes very important post Winter Storm Uri because it will provide absolute emergency response during major weather events. For your awareness, our intelligent grid is a leadership technology that we have been using for over 10 years, and it provides real-time operational benefits to our systems and to our customers. The third area, and probably the most exciting part of this resiliency story, is the new tools that have been enabled by recent legislation in Texas. This equates to possibly $1 billion of additional capital opportunities that's built into our plan. During the recent Storm Nicholas, we utilized four 5 MW generators to support emergency backup needs, including the Lake Jackson Civic Center. Some of you, I pointed out to about a handful of you earlier, the gen set is sitting out there. It takes almost half the block. Did you see it? It's very impressive. Not only did we acquire it, procure it, we delivered it, and we turned it on during this last storm. We're really excited about the opportunity to participate in this space. In addition, we are studying a 500 MW emergency microgrid backup generation system that will enable more optimized load-shedding capabilities. Post Winter Storm Uri, this is a real interesting new opportunity. It's in our engineering studies right now. We're going to work with the Public Utility Commission to present this and try to propose it as a future solution post-winter storms and provide more load-shedding capability. We're also evaluating new tools, including 25 MW of battery storage opportunities. Finally, we are planning to accelerate three transmission projects that fit the economic test within Texas market as the bill has enabled us to invest sooner than what was previously permitted based on the older reliability test. Our commission in Texas is all about accelerating transmission investments to improve the reliability of the grid. This becomes a real benefit to the market and to the reliability of the system. We're excited to take advantage of this opportunity. The third theme is renewable generation. In light of the accelerated net zero by 2035 goal, you heard Jason talk about this earlier, we have a real path to success and clear and transparent steps. I talked to you all about this back in December, we start with direct renewable investments in our state of Indiana. Our plan includes the retirement of most of our coal by the end of 2023. We will energize over 1.1 GW of renewables by the end of 2024, utilizing our BTA and our PPA agreements. We anticipate long-term cost reduction benefits to our customers of $320 million in net present value over the next 20 years versus the status quo option. These investments will absolutely benefit our customers and our businesses serving the state of Indiana. Secondly, if you bring it back to Houston, Texas, there's a significant demand for third-party utility-scale renewable power as we speak. We've already been working on a couple projects this year. This is an exciting opportunity for us in Houston. This is new third-party renewable projects, mainly solar, in our service territory, and we are the transmission provider that they need to get that power into our grid. We are seeing currently 12 utility-scale solar projects totaling 3,800 MW, this is big generation, to be energized by 2022. We also project up to 25 storage projects and many, many more in the future. All of this is resulting in capacity needs on our side of the fence. More wires, larger wires, substation transmission to integrate that technology. We're estimating about $750 million in this 10-year plan to serve this new business opportunity. Thirdly, we have long-term investments supporting EV expansion. We talked about that in Dave's discussion earlier. You all may not know this, Houston is one of the largest commuter cities in the country. We're anticipating about 30% of new vehicles will be purchased in the EV market by 2030, and that seems like a reasonable number. It could be more than that. That's 400,000 vehicles in the Houston area. We're working today on the planning of our infrastructure to ensure that we can support greater incremental load, as you heard from Dave, over the next 10 years. As you review this slide, you will see 2 million tons of CO2 emissions that could be avoided annually. Really good news for our customers, for our businesses, and for our climate and for our environment. We also see the potential of $80 of margin on a per vehicle, per year basis for the company. As Dave said earlier, this assumption is about three years of growth over that 10-year timeframe, so it's a really positive story for the company. Gregg will talk more in detail during his presentation about other opportunities with METRO and the City and other areas. Let's switch gears for a moment and talk about our disciplined approach to operational excellence. We are proud to be a top quartile O&M per customer utility for many years versus our peers in the industry. That's not enough. We're really embarking on a continuous improvement culture across our entire operations in electric and in Scott's area on the gas side. We are combining our continuous improvement experts with employees in operations across two critical maintenance areas, substation and major underground. Major underground maintains all of our big customer areas. Substation is the heart and soul of our grid. These two groups are fundamental to the most important maintenance activities for our key assets, and they are focused on improving the scope of work, the type of work, the type of skills, and addressing critical part replacements. They are working hard as we speak. They are working hard to eliminate waste, to reduce repetitive work, to reduce truck rolls, to become more efficient without compromising safety, reliability, and system integrity. Already, they've estimated about $1.5 million of savings that we will start to collect in 2022. In closing, thank you for your time today. It's a pleasure to present our 10-year, $23 billion plan to you. I'm really proud of our success. This year alone, we will make a $2 billion investment in the utility. I'm proud of our 3,500 hardworking employees within this business, and I want to thank you all for your trust in spending $23 billion over the next 10 years. Beyond 2030, we have many more years of similar investments and opportunities ahead, I look forward to your questions a little bit later. For now, I'm going to hand the mic over to my colleague, Scott Doyle, who leads our natural gas operations. Thank you. Well, good morning and welcome to Houston. Thank you for your continued interest in CenterPoint Energy. It's good to see many of you in person. It's good for us all to be back together as well. Welcome to those of you joining us through the telecast. Kenny and I have worked together quite a bit over the last 10 years in a lot of different roles in our company. Both of us, as you can tell today, are very excited about the utility-focused nature of our business and strategy going forward. I plan to spend the next few minutes highlighting the investments that will continue the transformation of our natural gas utility into a more modern and resilient network that meets our customer and community expectations for safety and environmental performance. We start with a pipeline distribution system that is the largest in the U.S., serving a diverse footprint across the mid-continent. This foundation provides a significant platform for sustainable capital investment well beyond the 10-year capital plan we are introducing today. I will outline the details shortly, but our $16 billion plan will serve a growing customer base while updating systems that serve our existing customers. As many of you know, we view the premium valuation we received for our natural gas utilities in Arkansas and Oklahoma earlier this year as confidence in the long-term view of this sector. Once the sale of these businesses are complete, we will continue to be a top five gas utility in terms of customer count and top two or three in terms of miles of main. Turning to environmental performance, with the net zero commitment we announced today, we now have industry-leading commitments for carbon reduction targets. All of this is taking place in some of the more constructive gas regulatory utility jurisdictions in the nation. By constructive, we mean stable, predictive, and supportive. A quick note about Winter Storm Uri earlier this year, which was horrible for our customers and our communities. We are fortunate to have regulators and legislators helping us develop solutions to ease the incremental gas cost burden for our customers. We are also pursuing claims against our suppliers where necessary, and we are exploring other funding opportunities at the state and federal level to offset the remaining costs. Finally, we are working with our regulators to develop highly constructive solutions for recovery that minimize the impact to our customers. This process is expected to have 80% of our gas expenses recovered in the first half of 2022. Moving forward, our natural gas utility continues to perform in the top quartile with our peers in expense management, all while we are also growing our customer base greater than 1% per year, which leads to our relentless focus on safe practices. As many of you will have the chance later today, we are several years into the deployment of advanced leak detection, utilizing it as our daily leak detection methodology. We've also developed advanced analytical tools to help inform our risk-based pipeline replacement programs. We've adopted leading leak repair practices that are in line with proposed rules under consideration at the national level. All of this leads to the natural gas utility supporting our 8% near-term utility EPS growth at CenterPoint Energy. Turning to our first-ever 10-year capital plan, I want to point out it's not shrinking after the sale of Arkansas and Oklahoma. Rather, it's increasing. The majority of our $16 billion plan is focused on modernizing and replacing legacy steel and vintage plastic systems, consistent with our risk-based plans. It also includes extending new infrastructure to serve the growing populations in all of our jurisdictions. Those include Houston, Minneapolis, suburban Indianapolis, and Central Texas. Included in our plan is the beginning of updating our metering technology infrastructure with enhanced safety and efficient service delivery features. In short, this system will allow us to move the natural gas utility towards similar benefits that smart meters delivered to the electric utility a decade ago. Finally, ensuring a natural gas supply for our customers in a dynamic environment will include some investments on our side of the city gate. We will work to address the peaks, but also work to invest in spurring the inclusion of renewable fuels in our network. As we dig a little deeper in our system modernization plans, it begins with an elimination of known cast iron in 2024 and uncoated steel in 2025. The categories of pipe being replaced represent the outputs of our data-driven, risk-based integrity management plans. Our goal is to mitigate risk in our system through aggressive replacement programs. As a reminder, this is not new territory for us, as we completed similar programs in the past over the years, having removed cast iron in our legacy CenterPoint jurisdictions in 2018, just prior to the Vectren merger. Eliminating cast iron and bare steel allows us to focus on other categories, such as earlier vintage plastic and other types of steel pipe. This all adds up to over 900 mi of pipe replacement each year. Looking beyond our 10-year plan, we currently have a plan to replace well over 13,000 mi of pipe in the next 15 years, representing less than 2% of our total system mileage in any given year. Stated another way, at less than 2%, our modernization plan is achievable and not burdensome on our customers, which is a significant improvement for both our customers, the environment, and the overall expense of maintaining the system. Finally, we will achieve significant methane emissions reductions from our efforts with an approximate 33% reduction by 2035, all in support of our new ESG commitment. As all of you have observed over the past few years, there is much debate about the future of natural gas, but our experience in the areas we serve is that our communities and our customers continue to choose natural gas, and the regulatory landscape continues to be supportive. We serve some of the most dynamic and growing economies, even in a post-pandemic environment. Minneapolis, suburban Indianapolis, Houston, Central Texas between Austin and San Antonio anchor our greater than 1% annual customer growth. I mentioned our greater than 900 mi of pipeline replacements, but I also want to point out we are expanding our system by more than 800 mi per year as we extend to new communities. We expect our advanced metering technology, which those of you in attendance will see shortly, will be deployed over the coming decade with key features such as an automatic shutoff during certain conditions. We see this as an investment in our customer safety that hasn't been available until now. Let's take a quick pause to briefly discuss about natural gas costs. We've all seen them rise in the past few weeks, but the indexes continue to be well below levels seen in past decades. We're working to mitigate the impacts to our customers, but our starting point for our customers is a current average residential bill between $40 and $70 per month, depending on your location, which is roughly 1% or less of median household wage income. As in the past, we'll work closely with our regulators to explore ways to dampen the effects and keep rates affordable. Ultimately, the value proposition of natural gas is tough to overcome when used as a heating source, whether for home heating, water heating, or industrial processes. While electrification has some merits in certain sectors of the economy, no other fuel source packs a more efficient and affordable delivery of energy and helps meet the ultimate carbon reduction goals of our nation when delivered directly to where the energy is needed. We believe natural gas has an enduring future when compared to alternatives, especially in climates like Minnesota, where electric alternatives for heating homes just don't exist at - 25 degrees. Speaking of our commitments to a cleaner future, we led the effort to establish a Natural Gas Innovation Act in Minnesota, which paves the way for smarter investments in the next generation of fuels that will be transported on our infrastructure. Think of this act as the development of an integrated resource plan for our natural gas utilities. The Minnesota Commission will have to establish some rules, and our first plan will be submitted later next year. As I've mentioned in the past, Minnesota is a great environment to explore a reasonable approach to energy transition. The regulatory, legislative, and advocacy communities are committed to working with industry to explore the full energy value stream in order to unlock potential for improving the environmental impacts of our energy choices. Our modernized pipeline network will be ready to serve the evolving expectations. CenterPoint is also committed to our own investments in support of this journey as well. Our hydrogen production pilot in downtown Minneapolis is set to be operational by year-end. We'll generate hydrogen from water and renewable electricity, and we'll inject it into our natural gas stream for delivery to homes and businesses. We have other opportunities for investment in other states and are targeting injection rates well within the industry-accepted standard of 5%-10% without the need for significant investment in customer appliance upgrades at this time. Our commitment also includes electrifying our light fleet during the 10-year time horizon. Kenny, yes, we're going to have electric vehicles, I promise. It also includes exploring renewable natural gas in many of our service territories. While not new to our system, interest and investment in these alternatives has grown, and we stand ready with enabling tariffs that support infrastructure development to connect to these sources. All of this is in support of meeting our carbon reduction commitments by 2035. Finally, two thoughts on our continuous improvement efforts and our O&M discipline. As Kenny mentioned in his slides, we're building our continuous improvement muscles across the enterprise. In our natural gas business, we are focused on finding additional efficiencies, which includes eliminating certain tasks. In the future, deployment of our updated metering infrastructure will have some simple benefits once fully deployed. It includes enhanced response to leak calls through an automatic shutoff. It also includes elimination of sending a truck for a customer-initiated disconnect. It'll include reduction of emissions associated with sending a truck to shut off natural gas for other reasons. Recently, we were also successful in standardizing processes across our full natural gas footprint. Maintaining a population of 4.7 million meters requires a lot of physical effort, moving the meters around, maintaining them, and inspecting them, and ensuring that they're up to code and up to standard. One example of continuous improvement is our meter testing and inspection practices that yielded a tangible reduction in moving those meters around, eliminating truck rolls, and enhancing overall processing time. These efforts not only support our O&M efforts, but they also promote safety. As I mentioned earlier, we continue to be in the top quartile for O&M performance when compared with our natural gas peers. I'm confident in the capital we are investing, the growth we are experiencing, and the technology tools that we've developed, that we can deliver on this plan. As you can tell, I'm confident in the future of this business and the important energy needs that we deliver. The 4,000+ colleagues who make up our natural gas business throughout our service territories are committed to building and operating a safe, reliable, and affordable system for our customers. It's now my privilege to turn the mic over to Gregg Knight, who leads our customer technology and customer solutions business. It's been good to have Gregg back over the last year as he's helped us re-engage with our communities and cities, just like you saw, those of you that were here last night and got to meet the mayor. Gregg? Thank you, Scott. Well, good morning to those of you who are in the auditorium with us today. Welcome to Houston. For those of you via the webcast, thank you for joining us. Well, you heard Dave and Jason talk about our exciting future for growth, and we're all really excited about what it's going to do for us. It's going to enable us to unlock an investment thesis that's going to deliver some amazing things for the customers and the communities that we serve across all of our territories. Our customers have evolving needs as they continue to become more environmentally focused and also as they feel the impact of extreme weather events that have become really all too frequent across the nation. My comments today are really just intended to demonstrate how our strategy will support our customers and our communities in realizing an energy future that is resilient, clean, affordable, and equitable. Since our last meeting, I really believe that CenterPoint has become a premium utility. What is a premium utility? Well, at its core, it earns trust by meeting and exceeding the needs and expectations of the customers and the communities that it serves. It's a partner that customers can count on to always be there and to support future economic growth. Some of you heard last night directly from the mayor of the City of Houston about our very productive relationship improvement, which has enabled work that we're now jointly pursuing to enhance the resiliency across the greater Houston community. Today, I'm going to further talk about a new era of a much stronger relationship that we have forged with the City that's really important to our future. First, CenterPoint has invested in community incubators to support innovative solutions in science, technology, and the economy as well. CenterPoint Energy co-founded a new energy technology incubator through Greentown Labs to support economic development and also secure Houston's position as the global leader for energy innovation. We're also a founding partner of Evolve Houston, which is a nonprofit whose mission is to educate customers on how to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions through the adoption of vehicle electrification. Now, workforce development investments help Houston's workforce respond to the energy needs of the future, including the creation of a skill empowerment center for EV fleet management and batteries benefiting the Houston business community. Second, working together with the City of Houston, we're collaborating to build the first-ever Resiliency Master Energy Plan. ResiliencyNOW, as the plan is called, will help us strategically identify where infrastructure assets can be optimized and coordinated with the city for benefit to all who reside in our communities. We know that inclement weather uncertainty across the U.S., that resiliency must be our fundamental objective. Third, we're activating our digital maturity and our IT practice, which we expect will enhance the customer experience and improve our operating costs while also supporting workforce automation. An agile IT ecosystem will help further streamline our processes and enhance speed to market while supporting our drive towards affordability for customers and also for our communities as well. Customers really expect us to lead on sustainability, and in fact, they're actually demanding it. Excuse me. In nearly every conversation that I'm having with customers, they're really looking to CenterPoint for support to achieve their own sustainability objectives. They're actually looking to us to help them understand how we're growing and maintaining our own business, and also how we can contribute to their climate goals of the communities and the customers that we serve in our various markets. You heard Scott talk about how we support our customers by reducing emissions in our gas jurisdictions, and also leveraging new technologies like RNG and green hydrogen, and how we're working across our ecosystem to achieve that objective. Kenny also discussed our plan to transition from coal generation to more renewables, and how we're also supporting electrification of transportation right here in Houston, both of which provides opportunities to support our customers' aspirations. We've also maintained very strong energy efficiency and conservation improvement programs through our gas and our electric businesses. In fact, we have an award-winning natural gas conservation improvement program that supports our customers and their sustainability goals. In 2020, our customer conservation improvement programs helped customers save over $20 million annually. I'm sorry, almost $20 million annually. The related emissions reduction is the equivalent to removing 20,000 fossil fuel vehicles from the roads, supporting the local community's climate action plans. Let's dive a little bit deeper into the components of our Resiliency Now Plan, which is our EV future. METRO has served the City of Houston and the surrounding areas for more than four decades and recognizes their role in Houston's energy transition. Through working with our incubation partners, METRO has announced a commitment of 100% emission-free vehicle procurement by the year 2030, which is no small undertaking for the fourth largest city in the U.S. Now, we simply can't meet this critical City of Houston climate action plan without each other. Together, we're working on a 10-year infrastructure plan, as Kenny discussed, that will provide targeted investments to drive resiliency and account for all of the additional load that will come from adding over 1,200 buses to our electric system. This is a true collaboration in electrifying hundreds of buses in less than 10 years, and the infrastructure needed to support this. Now, this is a little bit personal for us, as a third of employees working in our downtown area, including our own, depend on Metro daily, and we're really proud to be an enabler of cleaner transportation. Outside of Houston, customer sustainability expectations, well, they're really not much different. The demands are the same. We're also responding to their needs as well, especially when it comes to saving both energy and money as well. We delivered a historic $2 million rebate check to the University of Minnesota, which was part of the largest natural gas efficiency project ever undertaken in the state of Minnesota, and also as a part of our own Gas Conservation Improvement Program. As a result of this, the university saves about $5.4 million annually on their gas bill, and that equates to removing 8,900 fossil fuel vehicles from the roads of Minnesota. We're also working with the university to develop a multi-year program that will install high-efficiency equipment to help obtain carbon neutrality by the year 2050. In Indiana, more than a dozen corporations have publicly created sustainability and renewable energy goals to support our efforts as well. Specifically, Berry Global has joined the Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers Principles group, which consists of 50 global companies that publicly set environmental goals. In a letter supporting our 2020 IRP filing in Indiana, Berry Global said, "The increase in renewable energy and the decrease in carbon intensity of CenterPoint's portfolio will provide tremendous assistance in achieving our own goals." We're excited about the future, as you can see, the role that we're going to play in helping our customers achieve their aspirations. Well, because we share them. Our leadership team and employees are committed to achieving cost-effective, and enabled by digitalization, workforce automation, and new ways of working safely. By focusing on affordability and infrastructure optimization, we truly believe that we and Houston and other communities will sustain economic vitality in our service territories and support our regions for all of its stakeholders. At CenterPoint Energy, we're really proud to be a part of the solution. We work to meet and exceed our customers' expectations for safe and reliable service that exceeds present and future technologies and maximizes those benefits. Now, all of you know that in order to achieve our goals, it's not only customers that we have to work with, but also regulators. At this point, I'm going to invite Jason Ryan up to talk about how we're working in that space. Thank you, Gregg, and good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to talk to you about our views from a regulatory and government affairs perspective this morning. As you've already heard, we have the privilege to serve growing communities, and as we, as the new management team, execute on the 10-year plan that we unveiled today, we know that it's our responsibility to keep our service affordable for our customers. We also know that this new management team needs to work proactively with our regulators and with our legislators to improve service for our customers and value for our shareholders. I'm going to take everything we've talked about today so far and cover it in three areas, bringing it all together. First, we believe we are in a unique position to maintain affordable service for our customers, even with the backdrop of inflationary concerns. Second, I want to highlight the constructive mechanisms in our jurisdictions that lead to timely recovery of our capital investments for the benefit of both our customers and our shareholders. Finally, I'll highlight some changes we've made to work effectively with our regulators and legislatures, the results of which initially can be seen in legislation that was recently passed in every single state that we serve in the last year, benefiting all of our stakeholders. Let's dive right in on affordability. I'll start with the electric business. You've heard a lot about our customer growth today. Dave put it in perspective of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Think about that for a minute. I'll pick some different cities that you might be familiar with. Think about it as 100,000- 125,000 people. It's the equivalent of adding a new customer base the size of Pasadena, California, Berkeley, California, Hartford, Connecticut, if you want to pick the other coast. It's significant, it's happening here in Houston every single year. That's before we even consider the benefit from additional load growth from electric vehicles that you heard management talk about today. This gives us an ever-expanding base to spread our fixed costs across. As important is the benefit our customers have already received, and that will continue to receive, in the form of historical charges that roll off their bill. First, as you can see in the middle, we've decreased our rates for customers over the last five years as transition bonds and smart meter charges and others have rolled off their bill. Starting at that lower point gives us rate headroom today. We anticipate even more charges rolling off the bill during the next few years related to other storm and transition securitization bonds. This too provides significant rate headroom for the capital investment that you've heard about today. You've also heard about our focus on reducing O&M by 1% - 2% every year. All of this together puts us in a unique position to keep our service affordable for our customers while we continue to deliver on industry-leading growth for our shareholders in the future. We're in just as strong a position on natural gas. We recognize that there's been a lot of concern recently about the spot price of gas trading at over $5. We're focused on this, I think it's important to put this in context around this cost. First, the commodity portion of our bill has historically represented about half of the overall cost to our customers on a weighted average basis. Second, we hedge about 50% of our winter usage, so we'll average a lower price of gas than what you're seeing in the market for the 2021-2022 heating season. Third, forward gas costs are projected to be lower in the coming months, returning to a normalized mid $3 by about mid next year. Overall, we are focused on taking steps to keep the gas cost half of our bill affordable for our customers. We do not see this as a fundamental reset to our overall cost of service for Scott Doyle's business. Now stepping back to the overall bill, our gas bills have remained relatively flat in Texas and relatively flat in Minnesota, with one small exception that you see on the chart, over the last dozen years. These bills represent a cost that is 1% or lower of the customer's share of wallet. Given the growth in our gas jurisdictions, coupled with our expected O&M reductions, we are confident that we can continue to deliver industry-leading growth in our gas businesses as well while maintaining affordability of the service for our customers. Now I want to shift gears to highlight the constructive nature of the jurisdictions we serve. You see on the left-hand side of the slide that about 80% of our capital spend is anticipated to be eligible for recovery through capital mechanisms. That number goes to 85% when you include the spend on projects that require prior commission approval through a CPCN proceeding. This means that we will get the vast majority of the capital that we're spending in the 10-year plan into rates within about a year of when those projects are serving our customers. This supports the timely recovery for shareholders by reducing regulatory lag. It also reduces rate volatility for our customers by incrementally increasing rates over time between rate cases. On the other side of the slide, I won't cover it in detail, but we have other mechanisms in place to reduce volatility for our customers as well. Given Hurricane Nicholas was last week, for example, in Texas, we have the ability to defer prudently incurred storm costs as a regulatory asset, and we have the ability to securitize them if they exceed $100 million. These are all important tools to reduce volatility for both our customers and our shareholders. Moving on, I want to discuss the changes that we've made to improve our regulatory and legislative relationships. Our team works closely with our regulators and with our legislators to achieve constructive solutions for our customers, our shareholders, and our communities. We do that today through a dedicated team of professionals that are on the ground where our regulators and our legislators work in our state capitals. We've strengthened those teams over the last year. For example, in Austin, we've enhanced our leadership team over the last year in our regulatory space. Our teams all over our state capitals have strong connections back here in Houston so we can be responsive to the needs of our business as well. While we are a geographically dispersed leadership team in our state capitals, we are all coordinated, having reduced silos in the past few years. Let me turn to the slide content, and you can see that proof of our improved relationships, both on the regulatory side and the legislative side, over the last year has resulted in constructive legislation that you've heard about today. You heard from Kenny about the nearly $1 billion of incremental CapEx associated from Texas legislation. What's incredibly important about the spend is that much of it leads to an overall bill for our customers. For example, the new category of economic transmission lines will only be approved under economic justification that leads to an overall reduction to the total cost to serve our customers. We think that's significant. These new tools in our toolbox also have a social benefit. For example, the emergency generation will benefit our entire community, relieving the burden for those customers who are unable to afford their own personal generators to power through a storm like Winter Storm Uri. Scott mentioned our planned investments under the Minnesota Natural Gas Innovation Act, which is one of the most constructive gas legislations out there that address how to affordably develop and deploy renewable resources in the gas space. Finally, our affordable natural gas service will continue to be a choice for all of our customers as the legislatures in all remaining seven states pass legislation to ban municipal gas bans. The progress on the legislative front really demonstrates the depth of our relationships. They are win-win solutions. We look forward to continuing to build on them. We now have more tools to provide cleaner, more resilient service for our customers while continuing to support industry-leading growth for our shareholders. I'm proud of the progress that we've made under the new management team and look forward to continuing to work on constructive solutions while maintaining affordable service for the customers we have the privilege to serve. Let me now turn it back over to Jason Wells to give you more details on our financial plan. Thank you, Jason. Now you've heard about our industry-leading net zero carbon reduction goals, how we plan to spend the $40+ billion in capital investment to improve service for our customers, why our customers are asking for and supporting these investments, and in how we're in an incredibly unique position to deliver industry-leading growth for our shareholders while keeping our service affordable for our customers. I now want to spend some time on discussing why we believe we have a sustainable financial growth profile. Our value proposition is quite simple. We offer stable, industry-leading earnings growth with a conservative financial risk profile. We are laser-focused at delivering 8% year-over-year utility EPS growth through 2024 and 6%-8% long-term annual utility EPS growth through 2030, with a focus on delivering at or above the midpoint of that range. We will grow dividends in line with our utility EPS growth targets over this timeframe. As Dave has mentioned, we are also committed to efficiently funding our $40+ billion, 10-year capital investment plan and resulting earnings growth for the benefit of our customers and our shareholders. We've made a number of hard but necessary capital allocation and business optimization decisions that put us in an incredibly unique position to fund this growth without any external equity issuances needed in the 10-year plan, and while continuing to prioritize a strong balance sheet. That is one with parent debt expected to be 20% of consolidated debt levels by the end of 2022 and maintaining FFO to debt of 14%-15% throughout the plan. I want to shift gears, and I want to spend a few moments talking about the pending merger between Enable and Energy Transfer. As Dave said, we fully expect this transaction to close in the 4th quarter of this year. As we've discussed in the past, we are absolutely committed to efficiently exiting our exposure from the midstream sector. To that end, I want to provide a little bit more clarity around the timing of our exit. We have already locked into a contingent forward sale for 50 million Energy Transfer common units. This was an incredibly efficient way to begin to lock in a portion of the appreciation we have seen in Energy Transfer unit value since the merger was announced, and to begin our timely exit. In addition, as we've intimated previously, we plan to sell the Energy Transfer preferred units that we'll be exchanging into as part of the merger before the end of this year. These two steps provide the foundation for our intention to monetize well over 40% of our entire Energy Transfer stake before the end of 2021. Most importantly, these two steps put us on track to execute on our plan to fully exit our exposure to midstream before the end of 2022. As we look forward, post our exit from midstream, we will be among the premium pure-play regulated utilities with over 95% of our earnings coming from regulated utility assets. Now let's focus on our core utility business. I'll start with a look at our 10-year capital investment plan, which is the foundation for our industry-leading growth plan. As you've heard from Kenny and Scott, the very tangible examples of how these investments are going to improve our service, that is making our system safer, more resilient, to providing cleaner energy, and to lowering our cost structure for customers. As you've heard from Dave, we've already identified $1 billion in reserve capital that we'll look to fold into this plan when we can efficiently fund it and efficiently execute it for our customers. Overall, there are three key points I want to reinforce. First, this spend doesn't rely on any big bets. This is routine spend and consistent with what our customers are asking for. Second, this profile is reflective of a longer-term focus of having a bias towards the electric side of the business. Third, we're able to earn a timely return on this capital investment, with over 80% of the spend included in rates within one year of being placed into service. Now, as Dave and I both have mentioned, we will fund the next 10 years of our capital investment plan through efficiently recycling capital, internally generated cash flow, and incurring debt consistent with our capital structure targets, which means no external equity is needed for this plan. Let me start by highlighting how we plan to fund the incremental CapEx in the first five years of the plan. Building off the plan that we outlined last December, the slide here highlights our ability to increase that five-year CapEx plan by roughly $2 billion, while also eliminating the previously communicated ATM equity plan of $300 million. About half of that CapEx increase will be funded with operating company debt consistent with our regulatory capital structure targets. We'll fund the balance with the $300 million in incremental proceeds we expect to receive from the sale of our Arkansas and Oklahoma gas LDCs, as well as a new source of incremental cash flow of about $550 million. This is really driven by two things. First, this relates to about $350 million from electing a new method for deducting repairs from a tax perspective, and an expected $250 million from the securitization of our remaining coal rate base as part of our coal transition. Finally, it also includes about $450 million from the expected incremental proceeds from the appreciation we have seen in Energy Transfer unit value since the merger was announced. Now, to be clear, our plan is not sensitive to the valuation of Energy Transfer units. The current value of Energy Transfer is sufficient to provide the level of funding I'm discussing today. We are equally committed to exploring additional asset sales to efficiently recycle capital to the extent necessary. Let's turn to the back half of the 10-year plan. The level of growth in the first five years of our plan puts us in a great position to fund all of the capital investment of the back half of the plan with operating cash flow, debt consistent with our capital structure, and incremental debt capacity that will be created at the parent level. To be clear, this is maintaining a similar set of credit metrics. That is 20% parent debt to total debt, FFO to debt of 14%-15%, but it's utilizing the additional debt capacity that will be created through the overall growth in the company over the course of this plan. I also want to reiterate the last five years do not require any additional asset sales for growth. We retain that full flexibility to recycle capital should other growth opportunities arise. Our increased capital investment plan leads into our 10-year rate base outlook. As you can see, we project about 11% near-term rate base growth CAGR, which normalizes into an approximately 9% CAGR over the full 10-year plan. Our 2030 projected rate base is north of $37 billion, which would more than double the size of the earnings power of the company over the next 10 years. Finally, our projected rate base split of about 60% electric and 40% gas put us in a position that is consistent with several other premium peer utilities today. Turning to this next slide, we are reaffirming the previously stated $1.25 - $1.27 2021 utility EPS guidance. We're initiating 2022 utility EPS guidance of $1.35 - $1.37. We anticipate $0.07 - $0.08 of net customer growth and rate relief year-over-year. Our organic growth, as you've heard today, is a key component of our industry-leading utility EPS growth. There are also several one-time items that will contribute $0.03 - $0.04. These include the previously recorded tax benefits in the second quarter that will be more than offset by expenses incurred related to the recent governance changes that we announced, as well as certain one-time items that will be recorded in the balance of the year. Additionally, we expect $0.02-$0.03 of benefit from achievable O&M reductions from our continuous improvement programs across the business that you've heard about throughout these presentations. Finally, we're reflecting about a $0.02 reduction in earnings from the closing of our Arkansas and Oklahoma gas LDCs. The key highlight here is we plan to grow utility earnings per share at 8% each year through 2024, and then grow at 6%-8% each year through 2030, with a focus on delivering at or above the midpoint of that range during that time period. As you can see on this slide, we intend to grow our dividends in line with our utility EPS growth over the 10-year plan. Our annual 8% growth rate through 2024 is tops among the premium peer utility set, and our dividend growth, when layered on top of our utility EPS growth, provides a compelling total return proposition for our shareholders. As you can see on this final slide, we have committed to a meaningful increase in our five-year plan that we announced last December. To put this in context, if the market was to apply our current utility earnings multiple of about 20x our 2025 earnings, it would translate to a stock price of more than $35 per share. That's well over a 30% increase from today's levels. It would be well over a 40% increase if the market was to apply the average peer premium multiple. As Dave said, the best is yet to come here at CenterPoint. In closing, I want to reiterate how tangible our plan is, that we have industry-leading earnings growth underpinned by a sound financial position with no big bets. I'm excited to be part of the team here at CenterPoint. On behalf of all of us on the management team, we thank you for joining us here in Houston, and we look forward to answering your questions and spending incremental time with you throughout the day. With that, let me turn it over to Dave for his closing comments. Okay, we've said a lot this morning, believe it or not, I'm going to be very quick with my closing comments. As I said when I signed off last time, we're going to be the sustainable utility, sustainable rates for our customers, sustainable growth in earnings for our shareholders, and a sustainable positive impact on our environment. I said it, Jason said it, everyone said it. At CenterPoint, the best is yet to come. I think we're going to go, what, Jack? We're going to take a 10-minute break. We'll set up, and then we'll go to Q&A. Thank you, everyone. [Break] We just need that first hand in the air. There we go. Hey, guys. Couple of questions. First, Dave, on the $3 billion of capital on the clean generation side, remind us what you assume and plan as far as utility-owned versus PPA, especially in Indiana, around the 1.1 GW. I guess another way to ask, is the $3 billion figure your total generation needs or is there an amount above this you assume will come from PPAs? No, it's going to be a combination. I'll let Kenny answer the question. Yeah, we've got about $1.4 billion-$1.5 billion over the next four years. 50% is at PPA, 50% of that is BTA. It's about a 50/50 split. That's what our Commission requested. Totally, through the 10 years, it's probably around $2.3 billion of total. There's some other things in there that are above and beyond the renewable investments. Okay. Got it. Thank you for that. On the $4 billion of CapEx, no equity through the 10-year plans, obviously, it's going to come from ET utilizing cash flows, some incremental leverage, right? Dave, what would drive you to look at further LDC sales if you have sort of no equity needs and your CapEx plans are kind of well stated? Is it kind of the decarbonization driver as you're thinking about net neutral? Is it to capitalize on sort of the transaction multiples we've seen? Could it be timed with the $1 billion of reserve capital that you kind of mentioned can come into plan? How do we think about that? The answer is yes to all of what you said. No, I think having the optionality of the additional $1 billion, it's just a wonderful luxury to have. I think if you look at the combination of opportunities we have, a lot going on in Washington right now. Let's see what comes out of that. Could be fantastic opportunities for a utility like CenterPoint. Those of you that were here last night and listened to the Mayor, he is all about resiliency right now. So there's certainly additional capital that we could move into this 10-year horizon to basically meet the resiliency needs that the City of Houston is demanding. One of you asked a really great question to him last night about affordability, and you heard his answer. It's you just got to do it. It's suddenly you got to suck it up and get it into the bills. The opportunities beyond 10 years, potentially accelerating some of those in. We're in a position, it's just a great luxury to have. We know we have a set of assets in the LDCs. We have communication all the time with potential buyers. We know the value of those assets. It is sitting out there as basically the liquidity to take on new opportunities as they come by. As I said, $40 billion is a lot to absorb. My view is let's get on with that. Let's get on down the road. We know we got another billion that we can fold in when we want. There is even more opportunity in that 10-year period and beyond. We have the liquidity ability with the LDCs to meet that, most importantly, without having to issue any more equity. The shareholders that we have today, I want to have them benefit from this opportunity set we have and not have to dilute them down to meet this great future we have. Okay, great. Why don't we go to Jeremy? Hi. Jeremy Tonet at JP Morgan. Just maybe picking up on the $1 billion a little bit more there. Is there anything preventing that from going into the plan today, I guess? It sounds like it's really baked. Is it just there's a lot going on and want that to settle before moving on? Just trying to marry the LDC, seems like the valuations are quite robust there. The opportunity to recycle capital is great. Didn't know if there's any kind of gating items for that $1 billion to kind of time more asset rotation there. Does your portfolio mix shift play into your thought process in divesting LDCs? Yeah, I'll answer it just maybe at one level, let Jason go down and be a little more granular. At the end of the day, I've been in business a long time, and efficient capital allocation and spending capital efficiently is really important to me. $40 billion is a big capital increase for a company like ours. The hesitancy to put it in the plan is not that we don't know what it is. We do. Are we going to have the engineering resources? Are we going to have the project management resources? All of those kinds of things to make sure that we can do these projects in an efficient way on the timeline that I want them to be done. To some extent, the burden is on the two gentlemen to my right to demonstrate that they have essentially the organizational infrastructure to execute this. I'm absolutely confident we do. As I said earlier, it's a great luxury to hold back, and then as Jason said, when we can efficiently fund it, which we can with our liquidity, and we can make sure that it's going to support a customer and get it into the regulatory environment. We'll start layering it in. There's really no gating issue other than my inherent, let's do things efficiently approach to life. That's very helpful. Thanks. One more if I could, just on gas prices, that was a lot of helpful color that you provided there, but still, if you look at the 2022 strip, kind of higher than where it was in 2019 and before in recent history. Just wondering, it seems like there's some fear in the marketplace with regards to higher gas prices, bill pressure. Could this adversely impact regulatory outcomes in your jurisdictions? Any thoughts you can provide on that, in moving forward here, or what mechanisms can be done to alleviate customer bills? Yeah. Yeah. We feel very confident in the capital investment plan that we outlined. We understand that the commodity cost is creeping up, something we focused on. As Jason Ryan highlighted, we went into the 2021-2022 winter season with about 50% hedged. We're seeing gas costs come back down, starting from a really good spot with bills less than 1%. I think what's important is what Scott highlighted. These are necessary and critical safety-related investments. This is an incredibly efficient and affordable form of energy for our customers that I think was reinforced with the Winter Storm Uri, and how the gas systems stood up, and provided much needed heating relief. While this temporary tick up in commodity prices is something that we're focusing on, we feel confident in the long-term delivery of our plan. Yeah, let me take a risk here and probably say, maybe no one in this room has more knowledge about the natural gas business than I do, since I spent 20+ years in that business. I am a couple of years removed from it, but I do continue to watch it because it is important into our business. If you look at the other markers that are out there, I think it's a lot easier to build a bear case for gas prices than a bull case. I'll just give you a sort of what I used to watch when I was at Halliburton, rig count. Gas rig count's up 40% this year. The regular rig count's up 50%. Somebody doesn't rent a rig to have it sit around. That says those rigs are going to work, and that well count is going to increase. More production is going to come on to the market. There's this concept of capital discipline, which better capital discipline does exist in the E&P space. At $5 gas, I would say almost every basin in the U.S. is profitable at $5 gas, especially the wet gas basins like the Permian Basin, where you need a lower gas price to break even because you have all the liquids that you produce with it. You look at the gas strip. It's not an absolutely perfect predictor of where things are going, but it's back down to $3, as you get into 2022. If I was back in my oil and gas service days, I'd be looking at those markers and saying gas prices are going to come down and not go up. If I could take a step back and also add to the question about the $1 billion in reserve capital, two themes that I think are important, and I hope that you see them in this management team. We're absolutely committed to delivering on our commitments to stakeholders. Holding back $1 billion of capital puts us in a really unique position that for whatever reason, if we encounter challenges with respect to the supply chain, permitting, it gives us the opportunity to fold capital into our plan and deliver at a minimum on the plan that we've outlined to you. This focus on consistently delivering, if anything, underpromise and overdeliver, is a very key theme. The other theme that I think is really important that I want to reinforce, I think you saw it last night for those of you that attended the reception, is a theme about partnership. We're in the early innings with respect to this Texas legislation. We're in the early innings with respect to resiliency now here in Houston. We want to work with our stakeholders on effective solutions that work for everybody. This gives us an opportunity where we have ideas on where that capital spend can be deployed effectively, but we can partner with our stakeholders and do it in a very constructive manner. I wanted to reinforce that aspect of some of the themes and why we haven't folded that $1 billion into the plan that we outlined today. Great. Why don't we go to Insoo? You got it, I think so. Hey, thank you. Insoo Kim from Goldman Sachs. First question maybe for Scott and/or Dave, but just following up on that gas comment. What's the gas storage capability that you guys have at the LDCs at all? Do you own any? Have there been more conversations just about potentially investing in more gas storage capacity at the utilities just to further hedge or balance out the gas prices? Yeah, sure. I'll start with where we are. We have owned storage here in Houston as well as in our Indiana market, as well. We also have peaking capabilities, LNG peaking, as well as propane air peaking in our Minnesota, Indiana, and even Houston markets as well. As we've looked out at storage potential right now in the market, it's priced at a premium at the moment. We're going to get through the next season and work through some other mitigants that we've got in place. We'll continue to look at that and see if there's opportunity to expand, particularly in a market like this. Got it. The second question for Dave, with the impressive and I guess top decile growth forecast that you're laying out kind of on a 8% point range on an annual basis. Help us with any contingencies or what type of contingencies you've baked into the plan so that, if certain low-growth assumptions don't work out, if gas prices go higher and this squeezes bills and there's some moving parts here and there, that we could still be comfortable that from an execution basis, that consistency that people are looking for, that you'll be able to achieve that. Yeah, I think maybe the first thought is what Jason said. This is an under promise, over deliver approach to things, number one. Number two, we always have cost levers to pull, in terms of managing it. I guess I sit back and say, Jason, I think, put his finger. We're not taking any big risks in this capital spending program. We're not going to build a nuclear plant. We're not going to do this, the kinds of things where your capital could really get away from you. This is bread-and-butter capital stuff that essentially we do every day. My view is that you're going to have bumps in the road. They come along. That's what you pay a management team to do. A management team handles bumps in the road as they come along. I have a list of contingencies I would do, Jason does. I'm not going to tell these guys what it is because I want to pull those contingencies, if we ever get to that point. I'm sure they have their own levers that they can pull in their own business. I think at the end of the day, it's a competence of a management team, your confidence in us, that we'll handle the bumps in the road as they come along. I've been doing it for a long time. I've got a lot of confidence I can get it done. Hi, Steve Fleishman at Wolfe. Just rough idea of the business mix of the company between electric and gas, I guess starting point after the LDC sales and where that goes to by 2025 or by 2030. Yeah. Right after the gas LDC sales close, we'll be just under 60% electric, just over 40% gas. As we outline the capital investment plans, there's a slight bias in the electric business, over the 10-year horizon. By 2030, we should be just slightly over 60% electric and just slightly under 40% gas. Okay. Just a question on the incremental. You got a lot of incremental proceeds from your prior plan, and I know you talked about the incremental rate base, and I guess if you looked at the prior midpoint to the new high end of the range, still feels like some of that's not fully getting into earnings or rate base over the period. Is that somewhat just due to that 20% that doesn't immediately go into rates? How should we think about that? There are a couple of things there, but there's one slight regulatory lag for some of the capital spend that isn't immediately going to rates within one year of being placed into service. Coming back to this theme, we're outlining a plan that we're absolutely confident that we can deliver on. We've put some conservative assumptions around here. We haven't stretched on things like growth, coming back to the last question. As we continue to execute on this plan, we look forward to providing further updates. Thanks. One last question just on Energy Transfer. For the announcement today on the forward sale, are you fixing a price for the stock with that forward sale? We are. Okay. It was fixed on the 21st. We sold that. The only contingency related to the transaction that we announced is the close. To the extent that the close doesn't occur, there's no obviously sale. As we've expressed today, we're confident that transaction will close here in Q4. When it does, we will receive proceeds at a fixed price, which is a slight discount to where ET was trading on the 21st this week. Just on the closing, just any more color on FTC approval and it sounds like you feel good about it. Is it? Yeah. As I said, we don't want to get into disclosing where we are with the FTC and those discussions because really, we're not having those discussions. It's Enable and ET. I think the fact that we say that we fully expect it to close in the fourth quarter should convey our confidence in that happening. Great. Thank you very much. Okay. We'll take the next one over here. Thank you. Durgesh Chopra with Evercore ISI. While I pass this microphone. Maybe Jason, can you give us any color, you sort of give us the utility EPS guidance, but can you give us any color on parent overhead? Maybe the key components of it. Obviously, there's debt, but then any sort of savings or dis-synergies with the Enable separation, just maybe the parts for us to model the parent drag. Let me just put a plug in the materials that we outlined and released today. In the appendix, those include modeling drivers for not only 2021 and 2022. We have gotten some feedback from shareholders in the past, sort of for more visibility. I want to highlight that material's in the deck, but to be responsive to your question, corporate allocations really are driven by a couple of things. It's the parent company debt, it's the preferred dividends, and it's a small amount of salaries. We do see a fundamental shift in that cost structure coming down. A couple of things that are driving that. The Series B preferred dividends have converted to common here this year, so you should see a lower amount of dividends in 2022. We also have a reset on the Series A preferreds beginning at the end of 2023. That will also lead to a pretty significant step down in parent company costs. Part of the $3 billion of recycling capital from those transactions and paying down debt, that debt that we pay down will be at the parent company level. You should see a glide path to a much lower amount of parent company costs over the next several years. Got it. Super helpful. Just as it relates to the repairs tax deduction, obviously you took repairs historically, as I understand it, if that's correct. Do you actually are going to be taking repairs moving forward as well as part of your sort of capital program, and then that's factored into your rate base projections and all that stuff? That's correct. The company elected the tax repair method on the electric side of the business a number of years ago. What I would say is that the industry has continued to evolve. It's thinking the Treasury has issued guidance around the electric sector, we are truing up the amount that we've historically deducted on the electric side. We have not, to date, elected the tax repairs deduction on the gas side. That will be a new deduction going forward. What is largely driving the balance of what will be on an after-tax basis, about $350 million of incremental cash flow in our plan. Durgesh, to your point, it's a timing difference. That timing difference will generate a deferred tax liability. That deferred tax liability will be a deduction from rate base so that customers get that benefit going forward. It's a very efficient way to fund our rate base growth. The rate base projections that we've outlined today include the assumption around that higher deferred tax liability from the tax repairs deduction. Thank you. I'm going to go to Julien. I have questions. All right. Julien Dumoulin-Smith, obviously BofA. Good morning. Thank you guys. If I can come back to the earnings growth question, I'll frame it this way. Many of your premium peers just talk about a sort of a single number or range through a period. You guys, in this instance, have raised your outlooks for four of the five years, arguably. Maybe if I can push you a little bit further, what about that 2025 year? It kind of stands out a little bit, especially considering that you all in your own slides identify no equity needs now, kudos, as well as a 9% rate base trajectory. It all seems to point to a certain level of conservatism. I understand that there's certain dynamics in 2025 specifically. Again, when you think about the ability to go the full 8% for the full five years, what stands out, anything you'd flag, et cetera? Jason? I think it's just reinforcing this concept of under-promising and over-delivering. One of the things that I want to point out, though, is that we're in a pretty great position with respect to rate cases. We only have one major rate case over the next several years, and that's in Minnesota. We'll have several rate cases that will impact 2025. We've made, obviously, certain assumptions around those rate cases. We want to work with stakeholders as we're going into that to find a constructive solution for our customers and our shareholders. That's really driving sort of the, what will be a refreshed view of the long-term earnings 2025 and beyond. I think, and what I hope you've taken away from my comments, Dave's comments, is that we're laser-focused at delivering at or above that midpoint of that range during the back part of that plan. Excellent. Good to hear. If I can, I know there's a few different moving pieces in the capital budget, so I'll just throw it back to you a little bit. You guys raised from, I think, sort of an opportunity of $1.5 billion from, I think, the last call up to $2 billion now. Identify a little bit more in that bucket, what that delta is, but also, you talk about a reserve CapEx budget now of an additional $1 billion, right? You raise it, and then you throw out something sort of incremental. What's in that reserve? How does this ultimately tie back to some of the legislative opportunities created, you all have identified transmission at times? The primary driver for the increase from about the $1.5 billion that we had kind of teased at the second quarter to now the $2 billion that we are raising it really is driven by a continued refinement of our expectations around the impact of the Texas legislation. I do not know, Kenny, if you want to share some thoughts around. Yeah how critical those investments are for our communities and where the money's going. It's what Jason described earlier and what Gregg Knight was referencing in his presentation. We're working with our key cities. It can be the city of Galveston that's hammered pretty hard with a major event. Just recently, the Brazosport Lake Jackson area. Even the bigger Houston, Texas. The underserved communities. We want to do a number of things there that could still be incremental to where we are today, but it begins with how do we further harden those infrastructures? How can we make them even harder than they are today, maybe take them to another degree? Also, let's find the perfect places where you have underprivileged and you have emergency needs where there's critical loads. It could be hospital, could be whatever. We're trying to find those perfect places, sort of those optimal places where we could make some even bigger investments and potentially underground the infrastructure in those areas and make it a win for the city, make it a win for the state, and a win for us. We have not put any of those dollars into these budgets. We go from overhead in modern times to underground. You're looking at some pretty significant investments that would provide long-term sustainable value to those complete communities. This is a process we're working on right now. You heard the mayor talk about it last night. We're actually excited about working from a resiliency angle to really make that difference. I would add that from probably the largest driver from the second quarter call to now on the $2 billion increase was an amount related to the mobile generation, which we're really excited about. This is not generation that's expected to run regularly. If you think back to Winter Storm Uri, our system was designed to shed about 3 GW of load when ERCOT called upon us, that went to 5 GW immediately. Our thinking behind this was that we would expand the mobile gen program to about 500 MW, that gives us the opportunity to address the risk of a 5 GW load shed event, where now we can roll power at least every four hours for those customers, where we were unable to do that because our system was designed for only 3 gigs of load shed. Seeing the real value of mobile gen allowed us and gave us confidence that when we work with stakeholders, we can increase the capital investment plan. As we look at that $1 billion of reserve capital, it really comes down to the Texas legislation. It is still very much early innings. We believe that there is an opportunity for the electric transmission lines that are based on economic justification to provide incremental tools to help with reliability and resiliency while lowering the overall cost for customers. We need to work through permitting stakeholder involvement. That is what we are doing now. Again, coming back to the theme of resiliency now that you heard last night, continuing to work to finalize that plan with the Mayor. The other part of this is, if you look at what happened in New Orleans, 35,000 poles were destroyed. What we see is an incremental opportunity. I gave you a picture of 1,000 mi. We've got 50,000 more miles to go. We have a lot of work, very important work. The way we're attacking it is we want to prioritize the highest needs first, then go down the path. Without question, when you have three major storms in basically one calendar year, we need to up our game. We need to have more and more investment in that space. We're going to continue to find more incremental ways to invest in the distribution grid for a modernization and a technology solution because now you have so many different sources. Your distribution grid is becoming like the transmission grid already is. That's our objective, is really to do more to enable all these new technologies to participate. Excellent. Jason, if I can hold you even more accountable about some of the embedded levers within what you described. Credit, you're still committing to this 14%-15% through that period without the equity, and that's despite the fact that you are likely to receive some additional latitude as you get out of this midstream business. Right? I just want to make sure I'm clear about potential further balance sheet strength relative to what's required. That's correct, Julien, and we're certainly going to advocate as we exit our exposure to midstream for a better business risk profile, particularly from Moody's, and advocate for a lower downgrade threshold that would be more consistent with our dual fuel peers, about 13%. Our intention is not to use that additional balance sheet capacity. Rather, we'd rather have a healthy cushion between where our credit metrics stand and where that downgrade threshold. We'll advocate for it, but we'll retain that flexibility. Right. You'll rebase that 6%-8% as you roll forward. Once you get to 2024, that 6%-8% is off the elevated 8% baseline. There's no rebasing. We are growing year -over -year -over -year on our earnings, and have committed to that starting last year. That's what we're committing to here in this plan. Yeah, just to be clear, no, there is no rebasing. Right. All right, next question. Hi. Good morning. Sophie Karp, KeyBanc. Thank you for the detailed presentation. I wanted to ask you a bit on the O&M part of the equation, where it's really 1% - 2% contribution to the EPS growth as you outlined. We can all appreciate that it might be difficult to promulgate a sustainable cost-cutting and O&M efficiency culture through the levels of organization, all the way down to the people who operate on the front lines. Could you maybe talk a little bit about what you're doing with that respect and how this is going? Sure. Maybe Jason can open a discussion, then Scott and Kenny, who are going to be responsible for getting it done, can add your $0.02 worth. Or your 1%-2% worth. Your 1% - 2% worth, right. I think what's important about our O&M reductions of 1% - 2% annually is that they're driven by not only a focus on continuous improvement, which we'll talk about, but they're also driven by investments that we're making on the capital side to lower our overall cost structure. We highlighted this year that we're finally on one common IT platform after the acquisition of Vectren. We only are going to experience a portion of that benefit for this year. Going forward, we will have that full benefit in future years. We've talked about the benefit from the coal transition, the lower O&M cost associated with retiring our coal facilities. Scott highlighted briefly the deployment of fully smart meters, limiting the amount of time that we have, or allowing us, rather, to remotely disconnect customers, minimizing time with meter reads. There's a number of capital investment opportunities that are lowering our cost structure, in addition to the theme around continuous improvement. I'll let Scott and Kenny maybe give some examples of how that's being adopted in the field. Yeah, to me, there's like a trifecta effect. If you find a capital investment that can improve the reliability, then what you're really saying is you're going to get an operational benefit because there's an operational savings there. You're going to get a reliability benefit, where you're going to have less outage associated with whatever you put in there, and you're going to get a satisfied customer because they are no longer experiencing a bad outage. The more we can find more trifectas where we're going to improve the reliability of our grid, reduce outage time, and make our customers more satisfied, that's the win. I'll give you one good example. Our intelligent grid I mentioned to you earlier. We've been a leader in this space for 10 years now. We basically have put a mini breaker in the middle of a line, that allows us to sectionalize that line. When you have a storm, you've got a lot of crews that are going out on that to repair, it will automatically take set 30%, 40%, 50% of the customers who are clear from the outage event and put them back on. Then allow the crews to go to another 30% of the section and reduce their window time, reduce their travel time. If they can reduce their travel time, we've saved cost. If they can get to the outage quicker, we've improved reliability. If we can improve reliability better, we've made a customer satisfied because, one, 30% of them went back on really quick, and two, the others are going to get there sooner because we've troubleshooted it faster. Our continuous improvement is going to continue to be focused on how do we improve reliability, how do we reduce outage minutes, and how do we cut costs, reduce costs sustainably, and not impact the integrity of the grid, the safety of the grid, and provide better customer satisfaction. This is an opportunity that we will have for years ahead of us. What's really special about the time now is we're creating a culture. We have a safety culture today. Everybody understands they have a very important role in managing safety. We're building a continuous improvement culture that has been utilized, quite frankly, in our Evansville area for Scott for a long time, and they brought that skill set into the Houston and other state areas. That culture is now spreading across the electric operations. I gave you two examples earlier. That is only the beginning. I've got 14 offices right here in the greater Houston area. Each office is kind of slowly building their own culture around how can we make continuous improvement stick, sustain, and become viable in our business plans. Yeah, thanks, Kenny. I'll just add to culture and then build on a couple of examples and maybe spread it even broader across the organization. Part of that culture is at the lowest level in our organization, is giving them the tools to actually solve their own problems. When I participated in one of our training exercises, we've trained well over 200 of our employees in the tools to do process improvement. What I said to them was, "Look, I really don't know what you do on a day in and day out basis, and I hope you're not waiting for me to come give you the answer." Some of it is them taking hold culturally of their own solutions. If we go over to Gregg's area, Gregg will tell you in the IT space, they're further along in that, but where they need to evolve to is the agile delivery method for new technology. They're ready for that and are in that culturally doing that, doing that with several of our new systems and new processes that we're rolling out. In the gas business, I'll use one real simple example, and it's along the lines of industrial engineering processes that gets a lot of our engineers excited. We have a meter shop in our Indianapolis area that was experiencing a larger influx of meters that needed to be processed. As a result, they just relaid out the assembly line, for lack of a better approach. They were able to then double the capacity of that shop. As a result, we now have built additional capacity without adding staff or adding overtime as a result of that. There's lots of what I call post-Vectren merger, lots of micro-integration opportunities that we have out there that we can't even get our hands around the list that's available. You'll see in one of the breakout sessions later today the two people that are leading that effort for us, and they've got a lot of detail about that as well. It's a good place to find out more. Hopefully, when you go to the breakouts, I don't know if we have the pictures, Kate or Darren, but you'll see pictures of the guys in the field motivated, inspired, and really wanting to make a difference. It's phenomenal to watch. Thank you. My other question was when you formulate your projections through the end of the decade, obviously it's a very long-term plan. I'm wondering if when you think about customer bill impact, if you're factoring in the increase in frequency of adverse weather events through that timeframe or are you assuming the kind of constant frequency of these events? You have a securitization mechanism, obviously that helps to mitigate. How do you think about the actual physical impact of climate change on your plan at this point? Do you expect that that will be a headwind with greater frequency of these events and higher costs over time, or do you expect that that will not be the case? Thank you. We've run many sensitivities on this plan, and looking at the results of those sensitivities gives us confidence we can deliver on it. To address your question, I want to offer a perspective that was shared by Sylvester Turner last night that I think for those of you that attended the reception heard, but I think it's really appropriate. The alternative of not making these investments is actually more costly. The plan that we're outlined is focused on helping support resiliency, minimizing the impact of extreme events, providing cleaner energy, minimizing the impact of climate change and what we can do with our footprint. Avoiding those investments will just continue to compound the risk of extreme events. We believe that there will be stakeholder support to make these investments to put us in a position that is more effective than not making them. That's why we have confidence in the plan that we outlined to you today. I mean, Jason, the Entergy cost estimate for their most recent storm is somewhere between $2.2 billion and $2.6 billion. High level estimate. It's a significant penalty, big price. You're still going to pay for that. That's the point, is we're trying to reduce that overhead cost, that potential that's out there. This is our job. I think just one more maybe editorial comment to keep in mind. Everybody wants to focus on headwinds, but we have one of the greatest tailwinds in the utility space, and that's our organic growth that we have here in Houston and in some of our other states. As I said in my prepared remarks, it's a continuous tailwind on your business, so it allows you to make those resiliency investments now. If you get a weather event, but you have a more resilient system, it's not going to impact us as much. I think we look at it as a balance as we look at our 10-year scenarios and what might happen. We know at least once every 10 years in Houston, we're going to have a major hurricane event. We factor that in. The quicker we can get more resilient, the less impact that's going to have. Taking advantage of the organic growth and the infrastructure and the technology we use to essentially put that infrastructure in. You put it in with the latest technology, with the most weather-hardened capability, those sorts of things. Getting out ahead of it with this capital spend and taking advantage of that growth. A couple of us said it, but people don't understand how big and dense our territory in Houston is. The concept of dropping in a Berkeley, California this year and a Pasadena, California next year and a Hartford, Connecticut the year after, I mean, that creates this fantastic tailwind that we have behind us to invest across the entire system. Thank you. First of all, a very great presentation by all of you guys. Very impressed. I don't know if you can just elaborate a little bit about the regulatory calendar in the different jurisdictions, till 2025 in Texas, Minnesota, and Indiana. Jason, a question for you is what kind of ROEs have you assumed in this plan till 2025 in terms of the different jurisdictions, if you can share on that? That's a question tailor-made for Jason and Jason. You want to start first with the outline of the regulatory calendar? Absolutely. Thanks for the question. As Jason Wells described earlier, we are entering into a phase where our general rate case calendar is a little lighter than what we've had in the past. We've got a Minnesota case coming up later this year, then we skip forward to a handful of rate cases in the 2023-2024 time period in many of our major jurisdictions. Those cases in Texas on both gas and electric and with Indiana Electric that you see on our schedule, those are kind of at the bookends of the statutory schedule. We are planning to execute on the rate case schedule that we've laid out there. There's some possibility that you can move things around in a non-material way. What you see on the schedule is what we're planning to execute on. From a return on equity standpoint, I won't speak to the specifics of what we've assumed in our model, but I will reinforce the notion that we've tried to share so far, which is we have outlined a plan that we are absolutely confident we can achieve. Our focus is on under-promising and over-delivering. We have not made any aggressive assumptions around allowed returns. Obviously not going to get more granular than that until we can work through those rate case processes with all relevant stakeholders. I think just one last point. I think it's important to remember in Texas, our electric business is regulated by the PUC. Our gas business is regulated by the Railroad Commission of Texas. With an ROE that the PUC might put on our electric business is not necessarily the ROE that we're going to have in our gas business. Okay. Next question. No more questions? Five minutes. We're good. Okay. Is that it? No more? Okay. Okay. Jackie, you want to wrap it up? Absolutely. Thank you everyone for participating. With that's going to conclude actually the webcast portion of our presentation today. Thank you for all of us that joined us online. For those of you that are here in person, we are going to proceed out these doors, and we've got a few exhibits for you. As you heard from our presenters, we have a mobile.