Black Hills Corporation (NYSE:BKH) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call February 8, 2023 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Jerome Nichols - Director, IR

Linn Evans - President and CEO

Rich Kinzley - SVP and CFO

Kimberly Nooney - VP and Treasurer

Conference Call Participants

Julien Dumoulin-Smith - Bank of America

Chris Ellinghaus - Siebert Williams Shank and Company

Andrew Weisel - Scotiabank

Brandon Lee - Mizuho

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2022 Black Hills Corporation's 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, Jerome Nichols, Director of Investor Relations.

Jerome Nichols

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Black Hills Corporation's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. You can find our earnings release and materials for our call this morning at our website at www.blackhillscorp.com under the Investor Relations heading.

Leading our quarterly earnings discussion today are Linn Evans, President and Chief Executive Officer; Rich Kinzley, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Kimberly Nooney, Vice President and Treasurer.

During our earnings discussion today, some of the comments we make may contain forward-looking statements as defined by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and there are a number of uncertainties inherent in such comments. Although we believe that our expectations and beliefs are based on reasonable assumptions, actual results may differ materially. We direct you to our earnings release, Slide 2 of the investor presentation on our website and our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a list of some of the factors that could cause future results to differ materially from our expectations.

I will now turn the call over to Linn Evans.

Linn Evans

Thank you, Jerome. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us.

As we announced last quarter, Rich will be retiring mid-year, so he gets one final opportunity this morning to provide the year-end financial review. Kimberly, as our incoming CFO, will provide the financial outlook for 2023 and beyond.

I'll start on Slide 4, with some key takeaways. While we successfully offset the impacts of the rapid macroeconomic shift through most of 2022, the increase carrying costs driven by natural gas prices and current interest rates are weighing on our expectations for 2023 and into 2024. I'll dive into those details shortly, but before I do that, I want to recognize our team's strong execution on what was within our control in 2022.