The Southern Company (SO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending December 31, 2022

February 16, 2023 1:00 p.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Scott, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Southern Company Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session.

I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Scott Gammill, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer. Please go ahead, sir.

Scott Gammill - VP, IR & Treasurer

Thank you, Scott. Good afternoon, and welcome to Southern Company's year-end 2022 Earnings Call. Joining me today are Tom Fanning, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Southern Company; and Dan Tucker, Chief Financial Officer. In addition, Georgia Power's CEO, Chris Womack, who will be succeeding Tom as President and CEO in the coming months is also joining us.

Let me remind you, we'll be making forward-looking statements today in addition to providing historical information. Various important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements, including those discussed in our Form 10-K, Form 10-Qs and subsequent filings. In addition, we will present non-GAAP financial information on this call. Reconciliations to the applicable GAAP measure are included in the financial information we released this morning as well as the slides for this conference call, which are both available on our Investor Relations website at investor.southerncompany.com.

At this time, I'll turn the call over to Tom Fanning.

Tom Fanning - Chairman, President & CEO

Thank you, Scott. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. Southern Company had another exceptional year in 2022. As you can see from the materials that we released this morning, we reported strong adjusted earnings per share consistent with the very top of our guidance range. These results were due in no small part to the culmination of the hard work of thousands of people throughout our company to put in day in and day out to provide customers with clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy.

Our operations team, generation fleet and power delivery system worked exceedingly well in 2022 which included meeting an all-time peak load of over 41,000 megawatts in June and navigating well in extreme winter cold event over the Christmas weekend that pushed electric demand to a system peak load of nearly 38,000 megawatts, a December record. Our success with these events is a testament to the value of our vertically integrated state regulated business model delivers to our customers and the communities we are privileged to serve.