Evergy, Inc. (EVRG) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending June 30, 2023

August 4, 2023 9:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q2 2023 Evergy, Inc. Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Pete Flynn, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Peter Flynn

Thank you, , and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Evergy's Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Our webcast slides and supplemental financial information are available on our Investor Relations website at investors.evergy.com. Today's discussion will include forward-looking information. Slide 2, in the disclosures in our SEC filings contain a list of some of the factors that could cause future results to differ materially from our expectations. They also include additional information on our non-GAAP financial measures.

Joining us on today's call are David Campbell, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Kirk Andrews, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. David will cover our second quarter highlights, our integrated resource plan and regulatory and legislative priorities. Kirk will cover in more detail the second quarter results, retail sales trends and our financial outlook for the year. Other members of management are with us and will be available during the question-and-answer portion of the call.

I will now turn the call over to David.

David Campbell

Thanks, Pete, and good morning, everyone. I will begin on Slide 5, and I'm pleased to report that Evergy had a solid second quarter as we delivered adjusted earnings of $0.81 per share compared to $0.84 per share a year ago. The decrease was driven by less favorable weather as well as higher depreciation and amortization interest expense partially offset by growth in weather normalized sales, transmission margin and lower O&M expenses. Kirk will discuss these earnings drivers in more detail in his remarks. Our reliability metrics were strong for the year, through June as average duration and frequency, otherwise known as SAIDI and SAIFI, were favorable to relative to our target.

I'd like to call out the work of our distribution and transmission teams for the improvements in system resiliency that we're seeing. Weather has been less cooperative to start the third quarter and on July 14, our service territory experienced a severe storm. The storm produced 80 to 100-mile per hour winds resulting in our most impactful storm in recent history. As the storm's peak, nearly 200,000 Evergy customers were without power, as high winds down countless turbulence and damaged or destroyed nearly 500 power poles. We estimate total O&M costs of $6.5 million for the storm recovery efforts.