Gerardo Norcia
President, Chief Executive Officer & Director at DTE Energy
Well, thanks, Barb, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. I hope everyone is having a healthy and safe year so far. This morning, I'll start by giving you a recap of our 2021 business performance, provide highlights on how we are well positioned for 2022 and give an overview on the robust opportunities in our long-term plan. Dave Ruud will close by providing a financial update and wrap things up before we take your questions. I'll begin on slide four. 2021 was another great year for operational and financial results, continuing our incredible track record of creating shareholder value. We did all of this with a keen focus on our employees, customers and communities, continue to drive an organization to improve the health and well-being of our team, cultivating deeper employee engagement, which results in service excellence. I always say that employee engagement is the secret sauce that drives our success and for the 16th consecutive year DTE was named one of the Best and Brightest Companies to Work For in metropolitan Detroit. Now I'll switch over and discuss our customer focus. As you know, heavy storms impacted our service territory in 2021. To further harden our system in preparation for similar extreme weather events in the future, we are investing an additional $90 million in our tree trimming program through 2023, and these investments will not impact our customer bills. Additionally, we have been making significant investments to further improve our reliability to ensure we are delivering for our customers now and into the future. Our strong focus on service excellence positioned us to achieve high customer satisfaction rankings.
Our gas company is ranked number one by J.D. Power for both residential and business customer satisfaction. Moving on to our communities. We are continuing our commitment to provide cleaner, more reliable energy through our decarbonization and voluntary renewable programs, which I'll discuss in more detail in a few minutes. Additionally, we were recognized as the 2021 Corporation of the year by the National Minority Supplier Development Council. We also had tremendous success on the economic development front. We were actively involved in General Motors' decision to invest over $4 billion in EV technology in our service territory. On the investor front, we finished 2021 strong and are well positioned to deliver future growth. I am also very proud of how the team successfully completed the spin of DTM. This separation positioned DTE as a predominantly pure-play utility and unlock significant value for our investors. In addition, 2021 was the 13th consecutive year, we exceeded our operating EPS original guidance midpoint. Now let's turn to slide five. Our 2021 operating EPS of $5.99 per share provides 17% growth from our original 2020 guidance. We are narrowing our 2022 operating EPS guidance range. Our increased midpoint of $5.90 per share provides 7% growth over the 2021 original guidance midpoint. We are reaffirming our 5% to 7% long-term operating EPS growth rate through 2026 from 2022 original guidance. We also increased our dividend by 7%, which is in line with the top end of our operating EPS growth target. With the highly successful spin of DTM, over 90% of our growth will come from our utility businesses. At DTE Electric, we are investing heavily in the modernization of the grid and cleaner generation. At DTE Gas, we continue our main renewal work as well as infrastructure improvements.
And the balance of our portfolio, about 10% is made of mainly earnings from our DTE Vantage business. Earnings from this segment are primarily from cleaner energy focused projects. So on to slide six. At DTE Electric, we announced our plan to accelerate decarbonization by ceasing coal use at the Belle River Power Plant by 2028, two years earlier than previously planned. Our Blue Water Energy Center is in the late stages of completion. We introduced test gas at the facility last year and two turbines have been synchronized to the grid. This state-of-the-art natural gas plant is 96% complete and is on track to be in service this summer. These steps move us closer to our goal of net zero carbon emissions. In 2021, we continued to see great success with our voluntary renewables program. We reached over 1,000 megawatts of commitments from large business customers and over 48,000 residential customers. We have an additional 1,300 megawatts in advanced stages of discussion with future customers. As we highlighted last year, we are filing our integrated resource plan in October of this year. We continue to evaluate the opportunity to exit coal use at the Monroe Plant earlier than 2040. We started hosting meetings in January for the public to participate in shaping our clean energy plan. Getting our stakeholders' input early in the process ensures that what matters most to them is taken into consideration, as we work to achieve the right balance of energy sources that will provide cleaner, affordable and reliable power for decades to come. We announced during our third quarter call, that we increased our five year capital program by $1 billion. This increase in our electric five year plan is driven by distribution infrastructure investments, preparing our grid for electrification and hardening initiatives, and we increased our investment in clean energy. Overall, this five year $15 billion investment supports our plan to improve reliability and strengthen our system while focusing on customer affordability.
DTE Electric filed a general rate case last month, which was the first filing in almost three years. I'm proud of the work that we have done with the commission to come up with innovative ways to maintain affordability, and we will continue to focus on keeping rates affordable as we invest in the system. And now let's turn to slide seven. At the electric company, we are planning to invest $35 billion over the next 10 years to support reliability, additionally renewable resources and the increased pace of electric vehicle adoption. This provides a large inventory of potential capital investment pull forwards into the five year plans. As we plan for the cessation of coal use, we will need to invest in renewable resources, short and long duration storage, demand response and other dispatchable resources. Over the next 10 years, we also see an increased pace of EV adoption that drives grid investments to support increased sales and a need for additional reliable generation. We believe EV adoption will increase our electric loan by 5% to 10% over the next 10 to 15 years. General Motors recently announced a $7 billion investment that will secure its commitment to accelerate an all-electric future, along with 5,000 high-paying new and retained manufacturing jobs in Michigan. This includes a $4 billion investment to convert GM's Orion Township assembly plant located in DTE service territory. This plant will produce full-sized electric pickup trucks. Our collaboration with GM and the State of Michigan was fundamental in securing this investment. The GM projects are the first to be approved utilizing the new Critical Industry Program and Strategic Site Readiness Program signed into law by Governor Whitmer in December. These programs were created to ensure Michigan could effectively compete for billions of dollars in investment and attract tens of thousands of jobs to ensure continued economic strength in the state.
We are confident there will be more investment in the EV industry in our state. Even in our own operations, we are making strides in this area. We recently announced that we will be replacing up to 25% of our fleet with green fuel technologies by 2030. Now let's turn to slide eight to discuss our gas business. We had significant accomplishments at DTE Gas in 2021. We announced our new Natural Gas Balance Program. This program provides the opportunity for customers to purchase both renewable natural gas and carbon offsets, allowing them to offset up to 100% of the carbon from the natural gas use. We are the first gas utility to introduce this innovative program, and our customers really like it. We are proud of how fast the program is growing with over 5,000 customers already subscribed. Another major accomplishment in 2021 is that we finished the first phase of our major transmission renewal project in Northern Michigan. This project includes the installation of new pipe and facility modification work to provide supply redundancy for a growing market. We are on track to complete this project in 2022. We continue to focus on upgrading our system and replacing aging infrastructure to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction. We plan on completing 200 main renewal miles in 2022. At DTE Gas, we are planning on investing over $3 billion over the next five years to upgrade and replace aging infrastructure and to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Overall, we're looking forward to another strong year from our gas company, and we see natural gas playing an important role for Michigan's energy needs over the long term. Now let's turn to slide nine. At DTE Vantage, we continue to see additional opportunities in RNG and industrial energy services as the REF business sunset at the end of 2021.
Last year, we told you about a new RNG project in South Dakota, which is now under construction and slated to start up in the second quarter of this year. We commenced construction on another Wisconsin RNG project in the third quarter and entered into an agreement for an additional one, which will be our first project in New York. Additionally, DTE Vantage, along with its 50% partner, will build a new RNG facility to take all of the available biogas from Riverview Energy, a Michigan-based landfill and converted into pipeline quality renewable natural gas. The project adds to DTE Vantage's portfolio of RNG projects serving transportation and other end-use markets. The RNG business contributes to our decarbonization efforts as we move to a cleaner energy economy. At DTE Vantage, we are planning to invest between $1 billion to $1.5 billion over the next five years. We are targeting operating earnings of $90 million to $95 million in 2022, growing to $160 million to $170 million in 2026. So longer term, we are maintaining our earnings growth target of about $15 million per year, which we have been able to achieve over the past few years. And we continue to have a great pipeline of projects in both R&D and industrial energy services to achieve future growth. With that, I'll turn it over to Dave to give you a financial update.
