Avista Corporation 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Thank you for joining us. Joining me today is Avista Corp President and CEO, Heather Rosentrater, who will speak briefly in a few moments on current events. Senior Vice President, CFO, Treasurer, and Regulatory Affairs Officer, Kevin Christie, is also here and will be available for questions. As I'm sure you can appreciate, we are going to focus this earnings call on the fires that occurred in Spokane over the weekend. Please refer to our earnings press release and second quarter 10-Q for information that was filed pre-market this morning relating to our financial results for the quarter. You can find this information online.

Heather, please go ahead. Thank you, Stacy.

As you may have seen in our press release yesterday and the related Form 8-K filed this morning, multiple wildfires are burning near Spokane, Washington. Fueled by dry and windy conditions, these fires spread rapidly and have devastated our community. Thousands of people, including many of our employees, have been displaced and many are still facing great uncertainty. Our hearts are with everyone who has had to evacuate their homes, everyone who has suffered loss, and all who continue working on the front lines. Our facilities were not involved in starting any of these fires in the Spokane area. We have restored service to customers whose outages were solely related to the public safety power shutoff. However, we still have electric and natural gas outages in parts of our service territory because of damaged infrastructure, evacuation restrictions, and ongoing safety concerns associated with the fires.

At this time, about 7,300 of our 429,000 electric customers are out of power, and about 5,300 of our 386,000 natural gas customers are without service. To reiterate, in areas that were part of the public safety power shutoff event, any remaining outages are no longer tied to that event. They are related to active wildfire conditions and the damage those fires caused. As a result of the fires, we have identified significant impacts to our transmission and distribution infrastructure serving parts of West Spokane. Multiple transmission lines in the area sustained damage from wildfire activity, and the transmission system was operating with reduced capacity due to the damage. I am happy to share that our crews repaired and energized a key transmission line earlier this morning that significantly reduces the risk of new customer outages due to system capacity constraints.

However, we are still assessing the full extent of the damage as emergency responders provide access to impacted neighborhoods and fire conditions allow. The situation is still very dynamic, and the fires in the Spokane area have yet to be contained. We have shared as much as we currently know, right now our primary focus is on assessing damage to our facilities, planning for restoration, and supporting our customers and employees who have been impacted by this tragic event. We will work to provide additional information as it becomes available. Our first priority throughout these events is the safety of our customers, employees, contractors, and the communities we serve. We remain focused on assisting impacted communities, coordinating with emergency responders and community partners, and restoring electric and natural gas service as quickly and safely as conditions allow.

At this time, we will take questions.

I can talk about the extent of the damage. We have had repairs, like I said, to one of the critical lines, then a couple other lines that were damaged we've been able to repair, but we still have a couple lines that are out. We do have access to the areas now, our crews are starting that repair on the transmission system. That shouldn't take as long as the repair likely to the distribution system. That damage is still being assessed, and we'll know more in the upcoming days the extent of that damage and how long it will take.

I'll build on that, Whitney. Of course, many of these assets are long-lived assets, from a regulatory lag perspective, there shouldn't be significant impact there. As we look forward and once the assessment is complete, we can make some determination of whether we file a petition with the UTC. If that ends up making sense, we'll let you know.