Gale E. Klappa
Executive Chairman at WEC Energy Group
Oh, my goodness. Well, wonders never cease. Peter, thank you so much for dropping by, and congratulations from all of us to the world champion, Milwaukee Bucks. And I'm not sure I can top all of that, but no pun intended, let's give it a shot. So good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today as we review our results for the second quarter of 2021. First, I'd like to introduce the members of our management team here with me today. We have Kevin Fletcher, our President and CEO; Scott Lauber, our Chief Operating Officer; Xia Liu, our Chief Financial Officer; and Beth Straka, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. As you saw from our news release this morning, we reported second quarter 2021 earnings of $0.87 a share. Xia will provide you with more details in just a few minutes. But given our strong performance through the first half of this year, we're raising our annual guidance. The new range is $4.02 a share to $4.05 a share, and our expectation is that we will reach the top end of that range. As always, this assumes normal weather for the remainder of the year. Now as we look across our business lines, I'm pleased to report that every segment is performing at a high level. Our companies continue to deliver superior reliability and customer satisfaction. A solid economic recovery in Wisconsin with commercial and industrial expansion gives us confidence in our projected sales growth. Our balance sheet is strong. We have no need to issue new equity to fund our ESG progress plan, and our plan is well on track for both our regulated and our infrastructure segments.
As you may know, we expect our ESG progress plan to drive average annual growth in our asset base of 7%. At the same time, it's bolstering our sustainability as we invest in renewable energy and state-of-the-art technology. A good example of our progress is the announcement we made just a week ago about a $400 million investment in the Sapphire Sky Wind Energy Center. Scott will provide you with more detail on this development in just a moment, but I will tell you that the offtake agreement is with one of the largest high-tech companies in the world, and we expect the project to meet or exceed all of our financial metrics. We've also made great progress on our plan to build 1,800 megawatts of regulated solar, wind and battery storage. These carbon-free assets will play a significant role in improving our environmental footprint. Recall that, back in May, we set near-term goals that are among the most ambitious in the industry: reducing carbon emissions by 60% from our electric generation fleet by 2025 and achieving an 80% reduction by the end of 2030, both from a 2005 baseline. So ahead that we now expect only 8% of our regulated electricity supply to come from coal by the end of 2030. We believe we can accomplish these targets with the retirement of older, less efficient units; operating refinements; and the use of existing technology as we execute our ESG progress plan. Of course, our long-term goal remains net-zero carbon emissions from our generating fleet by 2050. And our ongoing effort to upgrade our gas delivery networks and introduce renewable natural gas into our system will help us achieve another aggressive goal: net-zero methane emissions by 2030. You can learn more about these goals and much more in our corporate responsibility report, which we published just last week.
And now let's switch gears a bit and take a quick look at our regional economy. We're still seeing the positive effects of a strong recovery. Wisconsin's unemployment rate, in fact, stands today at 3.9%. Folks, that's two full percentage points better than the national average. As I mentioned, business continues to grow with new projects across the region. For example, Milwaukee Tool is expanding the operations again here in Milwaukee. If you're not familiar with Milwaukee Tool, company has been a leader in the development of battery-powered, cordless tools. It now has become the world's number one producer of tools for professionals in the construction trades, utility sector, as well as for auto mechanics. And now Milwaukee Tool is redeveloping a vacant downtown office tower to provide space for one,200 new employees over the next five years. In addition, a number of other economic development projects are in the pipeline, and we'll be covering those with you in future calls. On that note, I'll turn our call over to Scott for more detail on our sales results for the quarter, as well as an update on our infrastructure segment. Scott, all yours. Oh, my goodness. Well, wonders never cease. Peter, thank you so much for dropping by, and congratulations from all of us to the world champion, Milwaukee Bucks. And I'm not sure I can top all of that, but no pun intended, let's give it a shot. So good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today as we review our results for the second quarter of 2021. First, I'd like to introduce the members of our management team here with me today. We have Kevin Fletcher, our President and CEO; Scott Lauber, our Chief Operating Officer; Xia Liu, our Chief Financial Officer; and Beth Straka, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations.
As you saw from our news release this morning, we reported second quarter 2021 earnings of $0.87 a share. Xia will provide you with more details in just a few minutes. But given our strong performance through the first half of this year, we're raising our annual guidance. The new range is $4.02 a share to $4.05 a share, and our expectation is that we will reach the top end of that range. As always, this assumes normal weather for the remainder of the year. Now as we look across our business lines, I'm pleased to report that every segment is performing at a high level. Our companies continue to deliver superior reliability and customer satisfaction. A solid economic recovery in Wisconsin with commercial and industrial expansion gives us confidence in our projected sales growth. Our balance sheet is strong. We have no need to issue new equity to fund our ESG progress plan, and our plan is well on track for both our regulated and our infrastructure segments. As you may know, we expect our ESG progress plan to drive average annual growth in our asset base of 7%. At the same time, it's bolstering our sustainability as we invest in renewable energy and state-of-the-art technology. A good example of our progress is the announcement we made just a week ago about a $400 million investment in the Sapphire Sky Wind Energy Center. Scott will provide you with more detail on this development in just a moment, but I will tell you that the offtake agreement is with one of the largest high-tech companies in the world, and we expect the project to meet or exceed all of our financial metrics. We've also made great progress on our plan to build 1,800 megawatts of regulated solar, wind and battery storage. These carbon-free assets will play a significant role in improving our environmental footprint. Recall that, back in May, we set near-term goals that are among the most ambitious in the industry: reducing carbon emissions by 60% from our electric generation fleet by 2025 and achieving an 80% reduction by the end of 2030, both from a 2005 baseline. So ahead that we now expect only 8% of our regulated electricity supply to come from coal by the end of 2030.
We believe we can accomplish these targets with the retirement of older, less efficient units; operating refinements; and the use of existing technology as we execute our ESG progress plan. Of course, our long-term goal remains net-zero carbon emissions from our generating fleet by 2050. And our ongoing effort to upgrade our gas delivery networks and introduce renewable natural gas into our system will help us achieve another aggressive goal: net-zero methane emissions by 2030. You can learn more about these goals and much more in our corporate responsibility report, which we published just last week. And now let's switch gears a bit and take a quick look at our regional economy. We're still seeing the positive effects of a strong recovery. Wisconsin's unemployment rate, in fact, stands today at 3.9%. Folks, that's two full percentage points better than the national average. As I mentioned, business continues to grow with new projects across the region. For example, Milwaukee Tool is expanding the operations again here in Milwaukee. If you're not familiar with Milwaukee Tool, company has been a leader in the development of battery-powered, cordless tools. It now has become the world's number one producer of tools for professionals in the construction trades, utility sector, as well as for auto mechanics. And now Milwaukee Tool is redeveloping a vacant downtown office tower to provide space for one,200 new employees over the next five years. In addition, a number of other economic development projects are in the pipeline, and we'll be covering those with you in future calls.
On that note, I'll turn our call over to Scott for more detail on our sales results for the quarter, as well as an update on our infrastructure segment. Scott, all yours. Oh, my goodness. Well, wonders never cease. Peter, thank you so much for dropping by, and congratulations from all of us to the world champion, Milwaukee Bucks. And I'm not sure I can top all of that, but no pun intended, let's give it a shot. So good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today as we review our results for the second quarter of 2021. First, I'd like to introduce the members of our management team here with me today. We have Kevin Fletcher, our President and CEO; Scott Lauber, our Chief Operating Officer; Xia Liu, our Chief Financial Officer; and Beth Straka, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. As you saw from our news release this morning, we reported second quarter 2021 earnings of $0.87 a share. Xia will provide you with more details in just a few minutes. But given our strong performance through the first half of this year, we're raising our annual guidance. The new range is $4.02 a share to $4.05 a share, and our expectation is that we will reach the top end of that range. As always, this assumes normal weather for the remainder of the year. Now as we look across our business lines, I'm pleased to report that every segment is performing at a high level. Our companies continue to deliver superior reliability and customer satisfaction. A solid economic recovery in Wisconsin with commercial and industrial expansion gives us confidence in our projected sales growth. Our balance sheet is strong.
We have no need to issue new equity to fund our ESG progress plan, and our plan is well on track for both our regulated and our infrastructure segments. As you may know, we expect our ESG progress plan to drive average annual growth in our asset base of 7%. At the same time, it's bolstering our sustainability as we invest in renewable energy and state-of-the-art technology. A good example of our progress is the announcement we made just a week ago about a $400 million investment in the Sapphire Sky Wind Energy Center. Scott will provide you with more detail on this development in just a moment, but I will tell you that the offtake agreement is with one of the largest high-tech companies in the world, and we expect the project to meet or exceed all of our financial metrics. We've also made great progress on our plan to build 1,800 megawatts of regulated solar, wind and battery storage. These carbon-free assets will play a significant role in improving our environmental footprint. Recall that, back in May, we set near-term goals that are among the most ambitious in the industry: reducing carbon emissions by 60% from our electric generation fleet by 2025 and achieving an 80% reduction by the end of 2030, both from a 2005 baseline. So ahead that we now expect only 8% of our regulated electricity supply to come from coal by the end of 2030. We believe we can accomplish these targets with the retirement of older, less efficient units; operating refinements; and the use of existing technology as we execute our ESG progress plan. Of course, our long-term goal remains net-zero carbon emissions from our generating fleet by 2050. And our ongoing effort to upgrade our gas delivery networks and introduce renewable natural gas into our system will help us achieve another aggressive goal: net-zero methane emissions by 2030.
You can learn more about these goals and much more in our corporate responsibility report, which we published just last week. And now let's switch gears a bit and take a quick look at our regional economy. We're still seeing the positive effects of a strong recovery. Wisconsin's unemployment rate, in fact, stands today at 3.9%. Folks, that's two full percentage points better than the national average. As I mentioned, business continues to grow with new projects across the region. For example, Milwaukee Tool is expanding the operations again here in Milwaukee. If you're not familiar with Milwaukee Tool, company has been a leader in the development of battery-powered, cordless tools. It now has become the world's number one producer of tools for professionals in the construction trades, utility sector, as well as for auto mechanics. And now Milwaukee Tool is redeveloping a vacant downtown office tower to provide space for one,200 new employees over the next five years. In addition, a number of other economic development projects are in the pipeline, and we'll be covering those with you in future calls. On that note, I'll turn our call over to Scott for more detail on our sales results for the quarter, as well as an update on our infrastructure segment. Scott, all yours. Oh, my goodness. Well, wonders never cease. Peter, thank you so much for dropping by, and congratulations from all of us to the world champion, Milwaukee Bucks. And I'm not sure I can top all of that, but no pun intended, let's give it a shot.
So good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today as we review our results for the second quarter of 2021. First, I'd like to introduce the members of our management team here with me today. We have Kevin Fletcher, our President and CEO; Scott Lauber, our Chief Operating Officer; Xia Liu, our Chief Financial Officer; and Beth Straka, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. As you saw from our news release this morning, we reported second quarter 2021 earnings of $0.87 a share. Xia will provide you with more details in just a few minutes. But given our strong performance through the first half of this year, we're raising our annual guidance. The new range is $4.02 a share to $4.05 a share, and our expectation is that we will reach the top end of that range. As always, this assumes normal weather for the remainder of the year. Now as we look across our business lines, I'm pleased to report that every segment is performing at a high level. Our companies continue to deliver superior reliability and customer satisfaction. A solid economic recovery in Wisconsin with commercial and industrial expansion gives us confidence in our projected sales growth. Our balance sheet is strong. We have no need to issue new equity to fund our ESG progress plan, and our plan is well on track for both our regulated and our infrastructure segments. As you may know, we expect our ESG progress plan to drive average annual growth in our asset base of 7%. At the same time, it's bolstering our sustainability as we invest in renewable energy and state-of-the-art technology.
A good example of our progress is the announcement we made just a week ago about a $400 million investment in the Sapphire Sky Wind Energy Center. Scott will provide you with more detail on this development in just a moment, but I will tell you that the offtake agreement is with one of the largest high-tech companies in the world, and we expect the project to meet or exceed all of our financial metrics. We've also made great progress on our plan to build 1,800 megawatts of regulated solar, wind and battery storage. These carbon-free assets will play a significant role in improving our environmental footprint. Recall that, back in May, we set near-term goals that are among the most ambitious in the industry: reducing carbon emissions by 60% from our electric generation fleet by 2025 and achieving an 80% reduction by the end of 2030, both from a 2005 baseline. So ahead that we now expect only 8% of our regulated electricity supply to come from coal by the end of 2030. We believe we can accomplish these targets with the retirement of older, less efficient units; operating refinements; and the use of existing technology as we execute our ESG progress plan. Of course, our long-term goal remains net-zero carbon emissions from our generating fleet by 2050. And our ongoing effort to upgrade our gas delivery networks and introduce renewable natural gas into our system will help us achieve another aggressive goal: net-zero methane emissions by 2030. You can learn more about these goals and much more in our corporate responsibility report, which we published just last week. And now let's switch gears a bit and take a quick look at our regional economy.
We're still seeing the positive effects of a strong recovery. Wisconsin's unemployment rate, in fact, stands today at 3.9%. Folks, that's two full percentage points better than the national average. As I mentioned, business continues to grow with new projects across the region. For example, Milwaukee Tool is expanding the operations again here in Milwaukee. If you're not familiar with Milwaukee Tool, company has been a leader in the development of battery-powered, cordless tools. It now has become the world's number one producer of tools for professionals in the construction trades, utility sector, as well as for auto mechanics. And now Milwaukee Tool is redeveloping a vacant downtown office tower to provide space for one,200 new employees over the next five years. In addition, a number of other economic development projects are in the pipeline, and we'll be covering those with you in future calls. On that note, I'll turn our call over to Scott for more detail on our sales results for the quarter, as well as an update on our infrastructure segment. Scott, all yours.