Dominion Energy (D) Q3 2026 earnings call transcript

Good morning, and thank you for joining Dominion Energy's 3rd Quarter, 2026 earnings call. Earnings materials, including today's prepared remarks, contain forward-looking statements and estimates that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our SEC filings, including our most recent annual report on Form 10K and our quarterly reports on Form 10Q for a discussion of factors that may cause results to differ from management estimates and expectations.

This morning, we will discuss some measures of our company's performance that differ from those recognized by GAF. Reconciliation of our non-GAF measures to the most directly comparable GAF financial measures, which we can calculate, are contained in the earnings release kit. I encourage you to visit our Investor Relations website to review webcast slides, as well as the earnings release kit. Joining today's call are Bob Blue, Chair, President and Chief Executive Officer, Stephen Ridge, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and other members of Senior Management.

I will now turn the call over to Stephen.

Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. We continue to be focused on three top priorities. First, consistent achievement of our financial commitments. Second, continued achievement of major construction milestones for the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project. And third, constructive achievement of regulatory outcomes that demonstrate our ability to work cooperatively with regulators and stakeholders to benefit both customers and shareholders.

As we'll discuss today, we continue to demonstrate success against these priorities, extending our track record of high quality and consistent execution. I'll cover financial results in my remarks. Bob will provide updates on the next-air energy combination, CVOW, and other business items in his remarks.

Turning first to third-quarter results, as shown on slide three, third-quarter operating earnings were $1.28 per share, including five cents from RNG 45Z credits, and five cents from better than normal weather. Third-quarter gap results were $1.30 per share. A summary of earnings drivers relative to the prior year period is included in schedule four of the earnings release kit, and a summary of all adjustments between operating and gap results is included in schedule two of the earnings release kit.

Turning out a guidance, year to date operating EPS has benefited from better than budgeted sales, better than normal weather, and higher than expected 45Z credit income, combined with strong overall financial and operational execution. Inclusive of conservatism for balance of year weather, as well as potential opportunities to de-risk future financial performance, we now expect fully results to be in the top half of our original guidance range.

We've provided year over year drivers for the fourth quarter in the appendix of today's materials for your reference. Additionally, we are reaffirming all other existing financial guidance provided on our fourth quarter earnings call, including credit, dividend, and long-term growth guidance.

Turning to financing on slide four, we made significant progress on our financing plan during the quarter, successfully executing several plan transactions while continuing to manage the balance sheet consistent with our robust credit guidance. In September, the Virginia State Corporation Commission approved our fuel securitization financing petition, representing a balance of approximately $900 million, helping mitigate near-term fuel-related impacts on customer bills.

Turning briefly to sales, we're continuing to see strong sales in our service areas with LTM weather-normal electric sales growth of 3.4% across DEV and DESC. In addition, all 10 of the Dom Zones summer peak demand days have occurred in 2026. And in August, DESC said a new all-time electric peak.

Turning to slide five, since our last update, we continue to see robust and durable demand from our differentiated, high-quality, low-risk data center customers across multiple localities in Virginia. And we're bringing these customers onto our system in the right way, protecting existing customers from cost shifts while mitigating stranded cost risk by utilizing a large load framework approved by the Virginia State Corporation Commission in our most recent Biannual Review that ensures these customers continue to pay their fair share of the investments required to support their growth.

We now have over 54 gigawatts of data center capacity in various stages of contracting, including over 12 gigawatts of capacity contracted under electric service agreements. To put that in context, we've added over six gigawatts of contracts or 13% since the end of last year. In conclusion, I am highly confident in our ability to deliver on our financial plan.

We've built our plan to be appropriately, but also not unreasonably conservative to weather unforeseen challenges that may occur. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Bob.

Thank you, Stephen. I'll begin with safety on slide six. Through September, our employee OSHA injury recordable rate was . 41, which remains well below industry average. Safety is our first core value, and we're always focused on driving workplace injuries to zero. Turning next to our announced combination with next-air energy, as we detailed in May, this transaction represents a truly transformational opportunity to bring together two world-class utilities with 238 years of collective industry experience to even better serve millions of regulated customers across four states.

Looking ahead, we believe we can accomplish far more on behalf of our customers together than we can apart. In mid-September, next-air and dominion announced an enhanced Virginia benefits package that puts customers first, and positions the Commonwealth as a global energy leader. That proposal doubled the duration of residential bill credits, expanded energy bill assistance by $100 million, included a $100 million workforce development fund, committed to creating at least a thousand new jobs in the Commonwealth, building a new shareholder-funded co-headquarter's tower in Richmond, and supporting Virginia companies through a $1 billion annual five-year Virginia supplier program.

Over the longer term, customers and communities will benefit from a stronger company with the scale and capabilities to buy, build, finance, and operate critical energy infrastructure more efficiently, helping support reliability, affordability, and economic growth. In Virginia, we've received testimony from parties which we will address through rebuttal testimony due November 2nd. Evidentory hearings began on November 17th, and the final order is due by January 11th of next year.

Ultimately, the State Corporation Commission will decide the case based on the record presented to it and on the legal standard, whether adequate service to the public at just and reasonable rates will not be impaired or jeopardized by the proposed transaction. Another way of thinking about this is whether the transaction will do no harm to customers or confident that we have met that standard.

In fact, we've exceeded this standard by proposing significant benefits in terms of customer affordability, jobs in our service area, and development of needed energy resources. In South Carolina, we've received testimony from parties which we will address through rebuttal testimony due November 18th. Hearings began on December 8th with the final order by January 29th, 2027. In North Carolina, hearings began on February 23rd, 2027.

The timelines for each of the proceedings are shown on slide seven. Required federal approvals have all been filed and continue to progress. We continue to expect the transaction to close in the second half of 2027. I could not be more excited about the combination of these two companies. We'll continue to share updates as we progress through the regulatory process.

Turning next to offshore wind on slide eight, SEVAU continues to make significant progress with the project approximately 85% complete and the fabrication of all the cells, towers, and blades now complete. We've installed 44 turbines, representing more than 640 megawatts of generating capacity, with the installation of the 45th turbine happening now. Installation continues to average approximately two days from jack up to jack down, consistent with our assumptions.

July and August turbine installation cadence was in line with expectations. While September and October were below due to a combination of weather and crib dismaintenance activities, which were completed earlier this month. Importantly, these impacts were within the types of risks contemplated when we added scheduled contingency last quarter. While we've utilized a portion of that contingency, our outlook has not changed. We continue to expect project completion by the end of 2027, and energization of the third and final offshore substation by year in 2026.

From a cost perspective, our current budget remains $11.65 billion, including $123 million of unused contingency. We also continue to see strong customer value. The project's LCOE remains well below the statutory threshold, as well as the range contemplated in our original filing. And we estimate SEVAU will generate approximately $5 billion of fuel savings for customers during its first 10 years of operation.

Our overall view of the project remains unchanged. SEVAU installation has been significantly de-risked and continues to make progress against its scheduling cost objectives, while delivering significant long-term customer value.

Now I'll turn to other business updates as shown on slide 10. In mid-October, we filed our Virginia Integrated Resource Plan update, which included several possible generations and build portfolios designed to meet robust customer demand growth. Relative to last year's company Preferred Plan, we've added and accelerated four gigawatts of solar and two gigawatts of battery storage. Importantly, under the company's Preferred Plan, we're meeting our customer needs, protecting system reliability, maintaining affordability with monthly residential electric bills forecasted to increase on average by about 2.3% annually. We continue to see a growing role for energy storage in Virginia.

Our recently filed IRP as an update and represents a snapshot in time. But it already reflects a meaningful increase in storage relative to our prior plan. Importantly, Virginia also enacted significant energy storage legislation this year that establishes substantially higher targets for both short and long-duration storage. We expect storage to play an increasingly important role as use cases continue to broaden, and the technology continues to advance.

We're actively evaluating both short-duration battery storage and emerging long-duration technologies through the lens of reliability, affordability, and customer need. And looking longer term, the proposed combination of next-air energy would bring together significant capabilities and experience in energy storage. We believe that positions that combine company exceptionally well to deploy storage at scale as the technology matures and system needs evolve.

Finally, on Milstone, in September, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection provided an update on this ERO carbon energy request for proposals, indicating that it intends to announce a decision later this year. The facility's existing PPA has delivered tremendous value to customers, lower costs, and significantly reduced volatility. Despite being priced at the time in 2019 above prevailing price outlooks, the contract is expected to save customers over $245 million this year, including $200 million year to date, in addition to the over $200 million in savings to customers last year.

Based on current forward curves, the contract is expected to save customers in Connecticut over $900 million over the 10-year life driven by lower energy pricing. We remain focused on achieving a constructive outcome for the facility, which has delivered tremendous value and produced bill reductions for customers in Connecticut through its existing contract. We will continue to provide updates as things develop.

With that, let me summarize our remarks on slide 11 by reiterating our focus on our three top priorities. Consistently achieving our financial commitments, continued achievement of major construction milestones for the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project, and achieving constructive regulatory outcomes to demonstrate our ability to work cooperatively with regulators and stakeholders to deliver results that benefit both customers and shareholders.

We remain committed to delivering reliable, affordable, and increasingly clean power for our customers. With that, we're ready to take your questions.

Morning, Shar. Morning, Bob.

Yeah, Shar, great question. 57 conditions, a chunk of them are conditions that were ones that we had already voluntarily proposed. So I think it's important to keep that in mind. But fundamentally, as you heard from John on next era's call a week or so ago, we're still focused on the statutory standard, which is no harm. That's what the judges are gonna follow. We'll file our rebuttal testimony on Monday.

Look forward to the hearing beginning on the 17th of November. And we remain confident that our position goes beyond the statutory standard will deliver benefits, not just no harm to Virginia customers, to employees and communities. It's gonna keep our company locally led, still regulated by the SEC fully accountable to them.

John said it on their call. The judges of the SEC are gonna follow the law. That's the best that we could possibly ask for. And we look forward to presenting our rebuttal testimony on Monday.

Well, the governor has participated as an intervener in the case, as she is obviously entitled to do, and we welcomed her intervention.

We're participating in the case through the filings that we make in the case. We obviously talk to parties as make sense, but really our focus right now is that testimony that we're filing on Monday, making sure that we're all very focused on the no harm legal standard.

Sure, Steve, it's hard to predict the price. We obviously reflect it quarterly when we update the filing and very transparent about it. What we're seeing is the tightening of supply and demand, sort of unsurprisingly. And remember that a large portion of those REX need to be generated by Virginia resources. And so that obviously acts an additional constraint which pushes prices up. And remember the way that math works is that we credit the revenue from those REX generated sales by CVAL against the LCOE. That's why you see that price come down. But we've seen it kind of go up and down.

It was a little higher. Now it's back down a little lower in terms of the LCOE. I think the most important thing is we continue to believe CVAL will provide significant value to our customers.

Yeah, I give a similar answer, Nick, to the question I gave on Virginia. We're in the process, in the regulatory process there. We continue to work our way through. You all have the procedural timelines in front of you. Next step for us is to file our rebuttal testimony and then go into the hearing. We continue to believe that we've presented a very strong package in South Carolina the same way we did in Virginia.

And we look forward to an opportunity to demonstrate that to the Commission. Obviously, we work with parties in all the states and all the regulatory proceedings that were involved in to try to find a good outcome.

Hey, Nick. We're encouraged and constructively engaged with the parties in that process. A little difficult to say with certainty is to sort of what would be public at the end of the year. We don't certainly don't want to speak for or get ahead of the regulators in this case. But I do think we'll feel like we've got a little bit better sense of where that process is going by the end of the year. And of course, as we have announcements to make, we'll be excited to make that public to folks.

Yeah. Yeah, it works. We were starting to get a little right there.

That's a great question, Anthony. And I wouldn't limit our experience just to C-Vow. It hasn't been that long since we finished some sizable combined cycles here in Virginia.

And our focus is having an experience project construction team that is working with contractors that we have familiarity with. They know the risks to look at. Our board has become quite comfortable asking us questions about the risks that we should be focused on.

Not surprisingly, those line up off and around. What are your potential labor constraints? How's the supply chain look? And having familiarity with all of that is really valuable. So at least in our case, we're comforted by the fact that we have an experience team that has handled big projects, not just on the gen side, by the way, but on the transmission side of the house as well. Because we've done an awful lot of that work over the last few years to put that experience team combined with strong counterparties, where we have confidence in the supply chain.

And then finally, familiarity with the permitting process. I mean, I think we all know that there can be challenges in these projects when permits get off track and so having the relationships necessary in order to work your way through the permitting process is critical as well.

Thanks, Anthony. Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, beyond the Jack up to Jack down time, other factors that we think about that we've identified are weather, maintenance, transit, and loadout time. We've made assumptions regarding weather. We don't have the ability to control that, obviously. And then on the other items, our loadout times continue to improve. Our transit times are defined by where we're going on the project. And I think the team has put together a very good schedule to minimize those transit times so that we are putting turbines up close to each other rather than crisscrossing across the project.

And maintenance is a factor that we put in. And everything gets a little bit better as we move along. So if you think about, Carly, when everything we've done on this project, we get quite a bit faster as we go along, just give you a few statistics on the installation times. So our first 10 turbines took an average of 69 hours each to install.

The next 25 took an average of 45 hours. So it's a 35% improvement. And then the most recent 9 averaged 38 hours, which is a 45% improvement to the first 10. So we're improving on the installations of turbines the same way we improved our timing on monopiles the same way we improved our timing on transition pieces. As I mentioned, we continue to get faster on the turns at port. Obviously, we don't do as many of those because we're loading four turbines each time.

But we're getting faster with that as well. I think our plan is good on transit time. And any maintenance we have to do, if we've done it before, it'll be faster the next time we do it as we've found going along.

Carly, I think it's a really fair question. If I can put some numbers around what I think you're asking about, in addition to the great answer Bob just provided. If you think about the last three months, we had about 91 days in that period. 14 were impacted by weather and about 36 by the vessel maintenance we've described, which means we installed about 13 turbines over about 41 available days, which equates to about 3.2 calendar days per turbine, which again is a little higher than the two because that doesn't include transit.

And looking forward, we have about 425 calendar days left through the end of 27 to install the remaining 132 turbines, which by coincidence also 3.2 days per turbine. And I think what's important to note, as Bob just mentioned, is the timing for the jack up and jack down, even though our base assumption is two days, as he just mentioned, our most recent nine have been closer to a day and a half. If you were at a day and a half, you'd be able to do the remaining turbine installation in about 200 days. If you stayed at two days per turbine, you'd be 265.

And we expect about 33 of those loadouts at the port, each take about four days or 130 days in total. So if you put all that together, 427 days, 200 to 265 days for turbine installation, 130 days for port turns, that leaves somewhere between 30 and 95 days for weather maintenance. And if you need more time for some of the more difficult locations for turbine installation. So I think that gives folks a little bit of a sense of sort of how much contingency is in the plan from a timing perspective. And that's what gives us that confidence. In addition to what Bob described, which is as we go through the various iterations of construction, it gets faster every single time.

No, Carly, nothing specific. We obviously reevaluate those drivers quarter by quarter to reflect the latest perspective on the forecast. I would say we gave our guidance to be in the top half. And I think I put in my prepared remarks that that includes some conservatism around November and December weather, as well as potential opportunities to de-risk financial performance. So we're gonna have that lever available to us as we go out to the last two months of the year to make sure we land solidly where our guidance is, the updated guidance, but also take steps necessary to de-risk future years.

Good to hear from you, Paul.

Yeah, Paul, good question. We've got some limited opportunities. We think at Milstone, as we've discussed before, the regulated fleet we've done a lot of operate work over the years. Our focus at the regulated fleet is the investments necessary for subsequent license renewal.

We're extending the lives of those plants for another 20 years. So that's really where the work is going on right now. We always look for opportunities for operates where it makes sense. We can do it safely within the appropriate safety margin.

Absolutely, Paul. So if you look at 2025's IRP relative to the latest IRP, it effectively through 2034 increases the battery on the system by about four times. So for instance, in the 2025 IRP 2034, battery was 850 megawatts in the 2026 update, it's 3.3 gigawatts. And think about the capital cycle around that is about a two-year timeframe where you're spending that capital leading up to the actual COD.

So obviously as we roll forward and pick up 31 in our five-year plan, we'll be picking up one additional year of not just what the existing battery capital opportunity was, but actually this enhanced battery capital opportunity. And we framed that as every gigawatt being sort of a three billion dollars of opportunity. Now, keep in mind, some of the IRP would be under a PPA structure, obviously we don't, wouldn't include that in our rate-based, but the majority of it is under self-filled, consistent with the Virginia Clean Economy Act. So I think as we think about roll forward, there's a very meaningful opportunity for capital enhancement in order to comply with the legislative and policy intent of the state.

Yeah, totally understand why you'd ask that question. But as I mentioned, we're working our way through the regulatory process now, which involves filing a rebuttal testimony on Monday and then hearing just a few weeks away. So we're going to continue to present what we think is a very strong package through that regulatory process, but I can hope you understand why I wouldn't want to be getting into the details of that, you know, on the Friday before we file our rebuttal testimony.

Are you asking Nick about our sort of where our 2027 financing needs might be and how that could be impacted?

So when we did our call in the fourth quarter, we gave a five-year look and we indicated that from at least from an equity perspective, it was very back-end loaded in sort of the last couple of years of our plan. I don't want to get out ahead of our sort of updates to the forecast, but generally speaking, we were seeing 27 and 28 as relatively lighter equity years.

And I haven't seen anything which suggests that would be necessarily different.

Thanks everybody for taking the time to join the call today and enjoy the rest of the day. Thanks.