Lisa A. Grow
Thank you, Amy, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. I'll start with a look at the continued customer growth across our service area, which we've summarized on Slide 5. Idaho Power's customer base has grown 2.5% since last year's second quarter, including 2.7% for residential customers. We saw several significant new customer investments in the technology, food processing, mining and distribution warehousing sectors during the first half of the year. I talked about some of those on our first quarter call. The most notable new one I'll highlight is Micron's June announcement of a second high-volume fabrication plant in Boise, adding to the first fab already under construction. We expect that second fab facility will be about the same size as the first fab. We've included a recent photo of the construction progress of the first fab on Slide 6, so you can see the scale of that project. We've served Micron since its inception, and we're excited for them and the opportunities that this expansion creates for our region. We're already working with the Micron team to determine how we'll serve the expanded project. ValorC3 data centers also announced an expansion at a second location in Boise, and Tesla has energized 6 new large electric vehicle fast charging stations throughout Idaho Power service area. While growth is already robust, we continue to field and thoughtfully process requests from businesses looking to locate and expand within our service area. The pipeline of prospective customers on our list exceeds our all-time peak load of around 3,800 megawatts. While we don't expect all of those customers to materialize in the near term, those prospective customers would be incremental to the load growth rate that we included in our recently filed IRP. And they give us visibility on incremental load growth well into the 2030s. Also, the infrastructure and resources needed to serve those prospective customers is not yet in our CapEx plan. We strongly advocates that growth has to be sustainable and responsible and that service to our existing customers must remain reliable and affordable. So any new agreements with large load customers will include the appropriate time frames needed for build- out and ramp-up as well as appropriate cost allocation just as we've done in recent large load special contracts. Turning to Slide 7. I'll provide some updates on what we're building to meet this historic demand. In June, we broke ground on the Boardman-to-Hemingway transmission line, a key resource we've been working hard for nearly 19 years to make a reality. We also recently brought a company-owned 80-megawatt battery project online, along with the batteries for a 150-megawatt energy storage agreement. For the Gateway West and Swift North transmission lines, which will join Boardman-to-Hemingway as major energy highways across the Western U.S., we're working through the remaining regulatory and permitting processes to get to construction. Recent legislation and executive orders have introduced new hurdles and some uncertainty around the constructability of renewable projects. So we've been working with our counterparty on the Jackalope Wind project in Wyoming to assess the impact of these federal actions. In addition to permitting, there are other conditions that still need to be satisfied to move forward with the project. This project would provide both energy and capacity that we need to serve load growth. So if ultimately, the project doesn't move ahead, we are identifying alternative capacity and energy resources. With a dynamic environment, remaining flexible and planning ahead is key. In other developments related to resources, we recently filed our 2025 IRP. On Slide 8, you can see a key takeaway from this 20-year plan is that our IRP recommends more gas-fired resources, which are needed to provide additional system flexibility and dispatchable capacity. These gas assets would complement our existing diverse resource portfolio. Remember that the IRP is a fixed point in time, and it assumes that current laws like the Clean Air Act Section 111(d) continue into the future. If those rules change, the portfolio could also change. Like I said, things are very dynamic. Also, it's important to remember that we issue RFPs for resources. And what we're looking for as we plan for the future is the least cost, least risk resources that are viable and meet the capacity and energy deficits we see in our future. Often through that RFP process, those resources are ultimately different than what our IRP shows. On Slide 9, you can see the significant load growth the 2025 IRP forecasted between 2025 and the early 2030s. As I mentioned, our 5-year growth rate has increased notably in each of the last 3 IRPs, and Micron second fab wasn't included in this one. So we're quite possibly underestimating load growth in our 2025 IRP. On a related note, turning to Slide 10, we filed our 2029 RFP final shortlist in July for Oregon PUC acknowledgment. As a reminder, the Oregon PUC acknowledged the 2028 RFP final shortlist last quarter, and it has a mix of renewable projects. For resources in both RFPs, some of the listed projects would be owned by Idaho Power and some would have third-party ownership. We continue to make progress on contract negotiations. We'll be working with the bidders to help understand the impact of recent federal legislation, tariffs and executive orders on their projects as we focus on identifying the least cost, least risk resources from those RFPs. I think the most notable is the 167-megawatt Idaho Power-owned gas plant shown as the top project on the shortlist for the 2029 RFP, which would provide us with greater certainty on a high capacity factor relative to the other listed projects. Turning to regulatory matters on Slide 11. Idaho Power filed a general rate case in Idaho at the end of May. The regulatory process for that case is underway, and we expect new rates to go into effect at the beginning of next year. This request is a full general rate case filing similar to our 2023 Idaho rate case, and it requests an overall rate increase of about $199 million for Idaho customers. We're requesting a 51% equity ratio, a 10.4% ROE and additional ADITCs to be added to our regulatory mechanism, along with the depreciation and interest expense tracker. Brian will talk more about the case in his comments, and I will hand it over to him now.