Leo Denault
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer at Entergy
Thank you, Bill, and good morning, everyone. Today, we are reporting strong results for another successful year. Our adjusted earnings per share is $6.02, which is in the top half of our guidance range. This is the sixth year in a row that our results have come in above our guidance midpoint. Underlying our steady predictable results is Entergy's dedicated, robust and resilient organization working day in and day out to create sustainable value for all our stakeholders. Because of the solid foundation that we have built and our proven track record, we are confident that we will continue to achieve success into the future by delivering meaningful outcomes. As such, we are initiating 2022 guidance and affirming our longer-term outlooks in line with our discussions at EEI. This continued success is important to all our stakeholders, including our customers. Being able to navigate through headwinds is possible only through financial discipline that allows us to continue to raise the capital needed to serve our customers.
Without financial health, we could not have raised the over $4 billion needed to fund the restoration from recent storms, including Ida and Laura, 2 of the worst storms ever to hit Louisiana, Newark. And we have managed through the revenues lost as a result of these storms and COVID-19. Without financial health, we could not consider accelerating resilience investment to better withstand future storms nor could we make the investments in clean energy that our customers, large and small, are seeking.
In 2021, like 2020, we were presented with headwinds caused by the pandemic and weather events. And as in 2020, we proved we could navigate those headwinds and continue to deliver strategically, operationally and financially. Strategically, we stood up our customer organization and appointed our first ever Chief Customer Officer, David Ellis. David is building a team to work with our customers find ways to meet their reliability, affordability and decarbonization goals. They are actively working on unique and significant opportunities to help our customers reduce their carbon emissions. We created a new sustainable planning, development and operations group, led by Pete Norgeot. In order to drive greater strategic direction and collaboration in addressing stakeholders' sustainability expectations, we aligned key internal teams to work collectively to implement strategies that will decarbonize our portfolio and respond to our customers' sustainability needs, all while maintaining affordability and reliability for customers.
Guided by this holistic planning framework, we updated our long-term supply plan to significantly increase renewable capacity. We now expect 11 gigawatts of renewable capacity by the end of 2030, more than double the estimate in our previous plan. As part of this plan, we issued renewable RFPs over the last year totaling nearly 2,000 megawatts. We completed the tax equity partnership for Searcy Solar in Arkansas. We designed this unique structure to help facilitate the economics of utility ownership while better aligning the interest of project owner and tax equity partner. This is an important step to make utility renewable ownership and economic option for our customers. We proposed the Orange County Advanced Power Station in Texas. If approved, this will be our first hydrogen-capable plan and will provide efficient power with the flexibility to utilize clean hydrogen.
We sold Indian Point and received approval from the NRC to sell Palisades, which is our last remaining EWC nuclear plant. We expect the sale to be completed around midyear. We made great progress in our diversity, inclusion and belonging initiatives, including creating the diversity and workforce strategies organization. This team, led by Taiwan Brown is expanding our workforce development efforts and developing new standards for hiring. We concluded 2021 with gains in both female and diverse representation towards our goal of reflecting the rich diversity of the communities in which we serve. Consistent with our progress, we received many awards and recognition for multiple aspects of our business, including environmental leadership and responsibility, storm response, social responsibility, corporate citizenship, economic development and workplace excellence.
Operationally, we improved distribution reliability in 2021. For transmission, years of hard work and strategic capital investment led to system improvements as that team achieved its best reliability performance in more than 20 years. We wrapped up our AMI initiative with more than 3 million meters online. These advanced meters allow our customers to better understand and control energy usage to achieve their affordability goals. Advanced meters also represent a foundational component of other customer and grid technology investments that will further improve service and reliability. Through continued focus on improved operations, Grand Gulf achieved its highest ever generation output in 2021.
In response to the historic damage caused by Hurricane Ida, we deployed the largest restoration workforce in our history. The storm presented unique challenges, and we came up with innovative solutions to restore power and help our customers and communities recover on a timely basis. We deployed portable generators for key businesses and community services. We also procured materials and supplies from nontraditional sources. For example, we used pipe from the [indecipherable] Keystone pipeline to strengthen the foundation of new distribution structures in areas with soft soil conditions.
Financially, our adjusted earnings results were in the top half of our guidance range. We maintained solid liquidity throughout the year. Between driving business risk improvements and progress on our ATM program, we reduced our remaining equity needs through 2024 to $700 million, roughly 1/4 of what we communicated at our Analyst Day in 2020. We made significant progress on storm cost and balance sheet recovery. We expect to receive more than $3 billion of securitization proceeds in the coming months, which includes a $1 billion down payment toward Ida costs. We filed an uncontested settlement in Louisiana, and that case is on the agenda for today's LPSC meeting. Entire Entergy team proved once again to be highly resilient under challenging circumstances, and I cannot thank them enough.
We also know that the key to continuing to achieve outcomes into the future is to ensure we are working for all of our stakeholders, customers, employees, communities and owners. We are committed to achieving meaningful outcomes for each. This holistic approach will drive a vibrant, sustainable business for years to come. Our 3-year $12 billion capital plan will continue to benefit customers with improved reliability, resilience, customer experience and economic development. Our plan will also support our commitment to reduce carbon emissions. These customer-centric investments, combined with our growth forecast and regulatory mechanisms support 5% to 7% growth in adjusted EPS and a strong credit profile. Roughly 1/3 of the capital will go toward generation.
In addition to maintaining our highly efficient gas fleet, this capital will continue to modernize and ensure the longevity of our emission-free nuclear fleet. In the planning period, we will increase our renewable portfolio to more than 2 gigawatts. That's a 300% growth in renewables. And that trend will not only continue but accelerate beyond 2024 with plans for 11 gigawatts in service by the end of 2030. With this plan, we expect to achieve our 50% carbon intensity reduction goal several years earlier than our 2030 target. Additionally, our generation capital plan includes the initial portions of the investment in the Orange County Advanced Power Station with planned hydrogen capability, which is expected to come online in 2026. As we've discussed, our region has tremendous advantages in both hydrogen and carbon capture.
Our distribution and utility support capital plan totals $5.8 billion. The plan is designed to deliver improved reliability, resilience and customer experience through projects focused on asset renewals and enhancements in grids development. We will also ensure the grid is ready for new customer connections. Our transmission plan is $2.3 billion and will drive reliability and resilience, while also supporting renewables expansion. Projects will focus on asset renewal and enhancements, congestion relief and new customer interconnections.
We have clear line of sight to the base plan, but our intention is to do even better. Our future investment profile will increasingly be driven by meeting evolving customer needs. The 2 most significant areas of focus for our customers in the coming years are resilience and decarbonization. We have invested significantly in resilience for years, but with the potential for increasing frequency and intensity of weather events, it's time to review the speed with which we will make those investments. We've preliminarily identified between $5 billion and $15 billion of resilience investments that could be accelerated, which will help mitigate future storm damage and costs.
Over the coming months, we'll map out what makes sense for our customers with a goal to share this information with our regulators. Initially through technical conferences this spring, and subsequently through filings targeted for late summer so that we can, with their support, proceed to accelerate our resilience investment. Our customers have aggressive decarbonization objectives. We are doing our part today with one of the cleanest large-scale generating fleets in the country. And as I have previously mentioned, the continued operation of our large nuclear fleet and the addition of significant renewable capacity will allow us to further support their decarbonization goals to reduce Scope 2 emissions. We are working to provide our customers with the products they need, such as green tariffs so that they can meet their environmental objectives.
By meeting their clean energy needs, we can further accelerate our renewable deployment. But a reduction in Scope 2 emissions will not be enough for many of our customers. Some are also looking for ways to reduce their Scope 1 emissions. Electrification is an efficient way to lower those emissions. Given the size of our industrial base as well as their emissions levels, helping our customers reduce their carbon footprint presents an exceptional opportunity for Entergy. This is true for new and expansion customers like U. S. Steel and Sempra, who recently announced facility additions with electrified processes that will drive significant new sales. These 2 customers alone could add 850 megawatts of new load, which represents nearly 2,000 megawatts of renewable capacity if the new sales are supplied with 100% green energy. It is also true for existing customers who need to decarbonize their processes to meet their objectives.
As we talked about at EEI, and we believe the addressable market could be as much as 30 terawatt hours of additional clean energy by 2030. Understanding the importance of renewables and attracting new jobs, Entergy Mississippi developed a strategy called EDGE, economic development with green energy to give Mississippi an edge in recruiting industry to the state. Entergy Mississippi is making its largest-ever commitment to renewable resources with plans to replace aging national gas plants with 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy over the next 5 years. The plan has drawn praise and support from the governor and the state's public service commissioners.
We continue to work with our customers to determine the size and pace of their needs. We will ensure that our resource plans and financial forecasts reflect the latest customer insights, and we'll keep you updated along the way. This is an exciting opportunity for us and one that is unique to Entergy. 2021 was another successful year for Entergy that benefited from the resilience we built into our business. We delivered on our commitments, including steady predictable growth. We have a solid plan with significant certainty over the next 3 years. Beyond our base plan, other significant opportunities in renewable generation, clean electrification and resilience acceleration will serve at a minimum to extend our runway of growth. This growth will deliver many benefits for all of Entergy's stakeholders, which will ensure the sustainability of our business for decades to come.
Before I turn it over to Drew, I'm excited to announce that we will host our Analyst Day on June 16 in New York City. We will continue the conversation on the significant opportunities that we see ahead, and we will give you a view of our 5-year outlook. So stay tuned for more details.
I'll now turn the call over to Drew, who will review our financial results and our outlook.
