Welcome everyone to our 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. I am Jeff Keebler, Chairman, President, and CEO of MGE Energy and Madison Gas and Electric Company. I am joined by Jared Bushek, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Treasurer, and Cari Anne Renlund, Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary. If you would like to participate in today's question and answer session following the business meeting, please familiarize yourself with the meeting code of conduct and procedures which appear on your screen and in the web portal. Thank you for your cooperation. This virtual meeting format gives all shareholders equal opportunity to participate in our meeting and to ask questions regardless of where they are. We appreciate this opportunity to connect with and to hear from our shareholders. Today's meeting is being recorded and will be available online at the website virtualshareholdermeeting.com soon after the meeting has concluded. Our remarks today include forward-looking statements and estimates of future performance that may differ from actual results. Because of uncertainties and risks that we encounter in our day-to-day business, please keep that in mind while listening today. Factors that may affect those statements are discussed in our reports filed with the SEC. Shareholders who have not voted by proxy and wish to vote may do so online. Ms. Renlund, as Secretary, please report on the notice sent to shareholders. On April 2, 2026, notice of this meeting was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and mailing to common stock shareholders of record as of March 23, 2026 occurred shortly thereafter. March 23, 2026 is the record date fixed by the directors of this company for shareholders entitled to vote at this meeting. At the close of business on March 23, 2026, there were 36,752,339 shares of common stock issued, outstanding, and entitled to be voted at this meeting. A majority of the total number of shares outstanding and entitled to vote are represented at this meeting in person and by proxy. This constitutes a quorum for the transaction of business today. Thank you, Ms. Renlund. I am satisfied that due notice of this meeting has been given and that a quorum has been met. I declare that this meeting is lawfully convened and ready to proceed with business. We'll begin today's agenda with an introduction of our Officers and our Board of Directors, followed by remarks on our financial performance from Mr. Bushek. I will share a company update. Immediately after the meeting, I will take questions from shareholders. If we do not answer all of the questions today, we will follow up after the meeting with the contact information provided in the web portal when you entered today's meeting. You are welcome to submit questions now or at any time throughout the business meeting. Please use the text box available through the web portal to share your question. First, I'd like to welcome our officers joining us online for this virtual meeting. I thank all of our officers for their management of MGE. To our Board of Directors, who also are joining us online for today's meeting. I'd like to introduce Pat Ackerman, retired Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, and Treasurer at A.O. Smith. Marcia Anderson, retired Clerk of Court of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. Jim Berbee, former Chairman and CEO of Berbee Information Networks Corporation. Londa Dewey, Chief Executive Officer of QTI Management Services. Dan Kelly, retired Chief Underwriting Officer and former CFO at American Family Insurance. Jim Possin, Certified Public Accountant and former partner at Grant Thornton LLP. Angie Rieger, retired Executive Vice President, Chief Transformation Officer at Lands' End. Gary Wolter, former Chairman of MGE Energy and Madison Gas and Electric Company. Noble Wray, former Chief of the City of Madison Police Department. Thank you to all of our directors and officers for your service and for your leadership of MGE and MGE Energy. Today, we have three matters that require your vote. All of them are described in the proxy statement that you received for this meeting. You are asked to vote for Class I directors for three-year terms expiring in 2029. The nominated directors are James Berbee, Londa Dewey, and Angela Rieger. You are asked to vote on the ratification of PricewaterhouseCoopers as our independent registered public accounting firm for 2026. You are asked to vote on a non-binding advisory vote on executive compensation. All of these matters were described in the proxy statement that you received. We will proceed with the meeting while votes are cast. If you have not yet voted or if you would like to change your vote, please vote using the Vote button on your screen. Attorney Andrea Reed of the Sidley Austin law firm is serving as Parliamentarian for today's meeting. Richard Kretz of CT Hagberg LLC is serving as our Inspector of Elections. I will now turn the meeting over to Mr. Bushek, who will describe our financial performance. Thank you, Jeff. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being with us today. It is my privilege to share with you the highlights of MGE Energy's performance in 2025, a year that demonstrated strategic investment, continued financial strength, and meaningful progress toward our long-term sustainability and customer-focused goals. I'd like to briefly touch on our recent equity offering, which we completed on May 6. The company raised approximately $250 million of equity capital to support our ongoing capital investment program and to maintain a strong balance sheet. This financing reflects our disciplined approach to funding growth, aligning capital needs with our regulated investment opportunities while preserving credit quality and financial flexibility for the long term. In 2025, MGE Energy delivered solid financial growth, reflecting both operational excellence and responsible investment across our electric and gas businesses. In 2025, two major clean energy projects helped drive strong earnings for the company: the Darien Solar project, which added 25 MW of owned solar capacity, and the Paris Battery Energy Storage System, which added 11 MW of battery storage to enhance system reliability. These projects advance our goals of providing safe, reliable, affordable, and sustainable electricity, while also supporting long-term earnings growth through regulated investments. MGE also continues to invest in the safety, modernization, and integrity of our gas and electric distribution systems, ensuring reliable service while supporting our customers' energy needs into the future. Taking a look at earnings growth. 2025 earnings per share were $3.72 compared to $3.33 for the prior year. MGE earnings growth remains steady. Over the last five years, our compound annual growth rate in earnings is about 7.4%, underscoring our ability to generate consistent earnings while continuing to advance our sustainability goals and upgrade our infrastructure. Our recent past and projected capital investment is significant. Strong credit ratings continue to enable the company to expand our generation portfolio responsibly. With approximately $1.5 billion in investment in renewables and battery storage expected from 2015 through 2030. In the last five years, MGE Energy has grown its asset base from approximately $2.3 billion to about $3 billion, driven largely by asset purchases and system improvements included in rate base under Wisconsin's regulatory framework. Including our most recent rate case, which set customer rates through 2027, MGE will have seen a nearly 7% increase in rate base since year-end 2020. As you heard from Jeff, last year marked 50 years of consecutive dividend increases by MGE Energy, which is something only a select number of companies have achieved. MGE Energy has paid dividends for more than 110 years. No other Wisconsin utility or utility holding company matches our history of dividend increases. Our Board of Directors increased the annualized dividend rate in 2025 by 5.6% to $1.90 per share. In the last five years, shareholders have seen a compound annual growth rate in dividends of 5%. This disciplined approach to retain a greater share of earnings enables the company to invest for long-term value creation for system reliability, upgrades to infrastructure, and growth opportunities that support steady earnings over time. Consistent with our record as a dividend achiever, we remain focused on a strong financial foundation and responsible, sustained dividend growth for the long term. Our board is committed to balancing capital investment with customer affordability, sustainability, and our ongoing commitment to shareholders. Managing impacts to rates during our ongoing clean energy transition is a top priority. An MGE residential electric customer bill as a percentage of wallet share at 1.46% is below the Wisconsin utility peer average of 1.59%. MGE's affordability as a percentage of customer wallet has improved 20% since 2014. Our investments to serve our customers effectively are structured within our regulatory framework to manage rate impacts while supporting long-term growth. As we move forward, the company will continue to advance our investments in clean energy, strengthen reliability through upgrades to our distribution systems, and maintain disciplined financial stewardship to deliver value to our shareholders, customers, and communities. Thank you for your continued confidence in MGE Energy. We look forward to building on this momentum in 2026 and beyond. Thank you, Jared, for the financial update. Thank you to Jared and his team for their work on the company's recent equity offering, which we completed earlier this month. This financing supports the investments we are making to deliver safe, reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy for our customers and positions the company to continue executing on our long-term strategy. In his remarks, Jared also mentioned the priority we place on managing cost to customers. We know the cost of energy our customers use is highly important to them, to managing their households and businesses. Affordable energy is critical to helping our communities grow and thrive. You've heard me talk every year about how we engage our customers directly as your community energy company. Engagement is one of our core values. We engage customers to help them manage their utility bills, to support their clean energy goals, to meet their reliability needs. Affordability, reliability, sustainability. Advancing these priorities is a balance, a balance we have executed on really well. Wisconsin consistently ranks as one of the top 10 most affordable states from an electric bill or customer spend perspective. As Jared mentioned, our customers spend less on electricity than the Wisconsin average. We have consistently ranked in the top three utilities in the nation for electric reliability, and we are well on our way to achieving our Energy 2050 sustainability goals. That's how we've done and where we stand today. Now I'd like to focus on how we are delivering future-forward energy, consistent with our mission to serve as your community energy company for decades to come. Future-forward energy is safe, reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy powered by a more dynamic, more resilient, and adaptable grid. For our discussion today, I'd like to cover a few key topics, one of which is the issue of energy affordability, and another is our planned investment in natural gas. Natural gas generation helps to ensure safety and reliability for our communities, and it helps to enable our path towards deep decarbonization of our energy supply mix. The other area of focus is the impact or potential impact of large prospective technology-focused customers, such as data centers growing in our service territory. Let's talk first about the critical issue of affordability. We've all heard various media reports about electric rates spiking. In reality, electric rates vary widely across regions. Rates vary even across states within the same region. Wisconsin has, for many decades, ranked among the least expensive states for electric bills. Federal data from 2024 show Wisconsin in the top 10 states for having the lowest average monthly residential electric bill, and that has not changed substantially in the last 20+ years. Increases in the average monthly residential electric bill in Wisconsin have remained relatively close to overall cost-of-living increases throughout that time period. Nationally, a recent analysis shows household electricity cost accounting for 1.25% of total household spending last year, reaching near all-time lows. While any increase in cost is an increase for our customers, and we're sensitive to those impacts, we have been able to manage our costs. Our customers have seen modest increases in their rates throughout the last 10 years, increases below the rate of inflation. The average annual impact on both our electric and gas rates has been below 2% from 2018 through 2025. We know our obligation expands beyond safety and reliability. Maintaining energy affordability and working with our customers to manage their bills helps keep both our communities and our company strong. I'd like now to discuss the company's planned investment in natural gas generation. In March of this year, MGE filed an application with state regulators to acquire a 33% ownership interest in the RockGen Energy Center, an existing natural gas-fired power plant in Cambridge, Wisconsin. This is an investment in existing infrastructure. This means no new carbon emissions. This planned purchase allows the company to enhance system reliability cost-effectively without adding new carbon emissions and without any development risk that comes with new construction. The roughly 25-year-old plant offers MGE customers an affordable and reliable energy source as we continue to grow significantly our use of intermittent renewables and battery storage. The facility is already interconnected, operational, and proven, providing some certainty in meeting future energy and capacity needs. Importantly, the RockGen plant will provide dispatchable capacity, which means from a system planning perspective, the plant can ramp up and down rapidly. It will offer critical support during peak demand periods, extreme weather events such as this past winter's extreme cold, and when wind, solar, or battery storage resources are insufficient. This operational flexibility is especially important as the grid evolves. MGE uses renewables first. Even with our ongoing growth in battery storage, the intermittency of renewable generation still requires firm capacity, such as gas, to ensure reliable service to our customers. Flexible natural gas generation plays a necessary supporting role during this transition, while other technologies such as battery energy storage and others continue to mature. Renewables first, reliability always. The company continues to pursue our goal of net-zero carbon electricity, and RockGen supports our decarbonization strategy. It will help us to continue scaling renewables responsibly, balancing reliability, affordability, and sustainability in our service to customers. As you've heard many times throughout the last several years, our path to net-zero carbon electricity involves three key strategies: expanding sustainable generation, advancing energy efficiency with customers, and electrifying transportation and other end uses. A future-forward grid is smart and sustainable, resilient and adaptable. Our strategic investments like RockGen and others support the evolution of a future-forward grid. If the purchase is approved by state regulators, we expect to close on our ownership share next year. The company has a projected capital investment of nearly $2 billion within the next five years, a significant portion of that investment in clean energy. The company's capital plan supports the development of nearly 400 MW of capacity in renewables and battery energy storage. We've talked a lot in recent years about the industry undergoing a major transformation in many respects, from how we generate energy to how we manage our distribution system and enable a smarter, more dynamic grid, to how we interact with customers who want more control around their energy use and who are using energy differently, for example, to charge their vehicles. Our industry is evolving with technology and facilitating the evolution of technology. As we look ahead, one of the dynamics helping to shape the future of our industry and that of other industries is the development of new large-scale electricity users such as data centers. Data center developers and major technology companies that require highly reliable, resilient, and scalable electric service continue to show interest and drive potential investment across Wisconsin. Including in MGE's electric service territory. Our approach to serving potential data center customers remains disciplined and thoughtful and consistent with who we are as your community energy company. First and foremost, our obligation is to serve all customers with safe, reliable, and affordable energy. Data centers do not change that approach. They are simply another large customer we evaluate with the same discipline to ensure protection for existing customers. MGE is prepared to serve new large customers, such as data centers, while ensuring incremental costs are paid for by the new customer without impacting all other customers. That is our obligation to those we serve and is foundational to equitable service under our regulatory compact in Wisconsin. Sustainability also is a key consideration. The company's ongoing transition towards a cleaner and more diverse generation portfolio, including renewable energy, battery storage, and flexible resources such as natural gas, offers us an opportunity to engage with customers seeking solutions that support both their operational needs and their environmental goals while remaining consistent with our own long-term sustainability commitments. Equally important is the issue of cost recovery. Our deliberate and thoughtful approach within our public and transparent regulatory process serves to ensure fairness for all customers. We began this meeting discussing a balance of reliability, affordability, and sustainability and our mission to deliver future-forward energy within that context. Our careful, balanced, and responsible approach is future-forward, embracing innovation and growth while maintaining what makes our company successful and our communities healthy and vibrant. Our fundamental commitment to our obligation to serve and to our values of safety, reliability, sustainability, equity, and engagement. Those are foundational to how we serve as your community energy company. Thank you for your investment in MGE Energy and your participation in our future. We will now bring our meeting to a close. Once the voting information is finalized and certified, the information on all voting matters will be included in a filing that we make in the coming days with the SEC. Thank you for participating in our virtual meeting. The meeting is adjourned. Now let's take your questions. Please adhere to the meeting code of conduct and procedures shared earlier for submitting questions. Vice President, People and Community Engagement, Melissa Garner, will read your questions aloud. Melissa? Thank you, Jeff. We received a question about our recent equity offering. The specific question expresses concern about dilution of share value and reduction of dividends for shareholders. Can you provide your thoughts on these concerns? Sure. The short answer is we don't expect to see changes in our dividend strategy as a result of our equity issuance. This issuance is consistent with the philosophy of conservative financial management, which is a philosophy we have had for decades. We have a strong track record of delivering earnings growth, dividend growth, and affordable rates. This issuance will fuel a combination of these themes as we move forward, as it supports our growing capital plan. While there is a dilutive component to earnings per share or EPS whenever you issue additional equity, the transaction when combined with the capital investment it supports, is expected to be accretive for shareholders. Thank you. Our next question is from a shareholder wondering about the maintenance requirements and maintenance costs of our wind turbines. Can you share information about our approach to maintenance on the turbines? Sure. Wind turbines are industrial machines, if you will. They use generators and gearboxes along with other major components, and those components are designed for operating lives generally aligned with the turbine's expected useful life, often 20 or 30 years for turbines that we use. Like any large industrial equipment, components may require maintenance or occasional replacement over time, and we perform that work as necessary to make sure that the turbines remain in good working order and can provide energy and capacity for our customers. These costs are incorporated into our O&M assumptions, operating and maintenance assumptions, when projects are evaluated and financed, and the overall economics of wind projects are based on the total life cycle cost and energy production over decades. They are incorporated into our planning process as we decide to invest in that capital investment. Thank you. That's all the questions for this morning. Thank you, Melissa, and thank you everyone for your questions. Shareholders are always welcome to share their questions and comments. Contact investor relations and stay up to date on news and information from MGE Energy by visiting our website, mgeenergy.com. This concludes our presentation. Thank you for joining us today. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
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