Entergy Louisiana, LLC COLLATERAL TR MT Q1 FY2025 earnings call

• Financial results: Adjusted earnings per share of $0.82 reported, on track for 2025 guidance. - Customer growth: New customer announcements include Hyundai Motor Group ($5.8B investment), CF Industries ($4B low-carbon blue ammonia facility), and Woodside ($17.5B LNG facility); data center pipeline remains in 5 to 10 gigawatt range. - Capital projects: Orange County Advanced Power Station ~70% complete, Delta Blues in construction; exploring 500 MW capacity increase in gas facilities; nuclear refueling outages at River Bend and Waterford 3; NRC early site permit for Grand Gulf renewal. - Regulatory/legislative: Entergy Louisiana approved Hurricane Francine capital investment recovery, West Bank transmission project; Texas PUCT approved transmission investments; Arkansas Act 373 supports economic growth; Louisiana gas LDC sale closing in July. - Tariffs: Impact on capital plan manageable (~1% of $37B 4-year plan), working on supply sourcing strategies. - Leadership changes: COO Pete Norgeot retiring, Kimberly Cook-Nelson and John Dinelli taking new roles; passing of Alexis Herman.

Adjusted earnings per share for the first quarter was $0.82. Weather-adjusted retail sales growth was strong at 5.2%, with industrial sales increasing by 9.3% due to customer additions and ramp of new/expansion customers. Revenue contribution details were not explicitly broken down by specific product segments beyond general operations like power generation, transmission, and customer sales.

• Affirmed adjusted EPS guidance for 2025, on track. - Second quarter O&M expected ~$0.05 higher than last year due to power generation spending. - Confident in delivering guidance and outlooks with strong start to the year and solid plan for growing customer base.

• Tariff impacts, though manageable. - Regulatory and legislative uncertainties. - Potential sunset of renewable tax credits, but plans in place to mitigate via safe harboring and tax equity partnership.

Q: Congrats on a great quarter. Just as we're thinking about the Arkansas generation build, do you feel the state is now fully competitive on the data center front in terms of providing turnkey interconnection? Have there been any inbound thus far? Or do you need any further rate design improvement?

A: Shar, this is Drew -- sorry, Constantine, this is Drew. The -- we feel that they are fully competitive at this point. And we are talking to potential customers in the state of Arkansas. We have a lot of interest there. And so we are working down that path right now.

Q: And then maybe in terms of the financing updates, just last quarter, the guidance was for 75% of the equity to be after 2026, and it looks like that might be accelerating slightly. Does that imply an acceleration of credit metric improvement or any other moving pieces you want to highlight?

A: Yes, there hasn't been a substantial change in the timing of the equity needed. We contracted forward into '27. But -- and our credit metrics through '28 continue to build towards and up to 15%. So we see strong flexibility in credit, but I wouldn't assume a whole lot of shift in the equity needs and the timing of the equity in that period.

Q: Just wanted to look at the sales a little bit here. I think that your residential customer count might have been up just under 1% quarter-over-quarter. And your weather normalized sales, if I'm seeing this right, residential went up about 4.5%. Just wondering if you could talk a bit more about drivers there?

A: Jeremy, it's Kimberly. I wouldn't look too much at the specifics on the quarter-over-quarter, you're going to see some volatility in the accounts. But we expect our residential sales to be about 1% for the full year, I mean our sales overall to be about 5.5%. So still strong sales over the year, but you're going to see some volatility in a given quarter on a quarter-over-quarter basis.

Q: I was wondering if you could maybe just give -- maybe an update or a profile of your system as you're looking at some of these large load customers in the pipeline, how quickly can you offer them service to connect in -- time to power has been a focus among that cohort. So curious just what the latest is in terms of how quickly you can accommodate new large load customers?

A: Yes. This is Drew, and then I'll see if Kimberly wants to add anything. But the -- we do have positions in queues in order to provide generation to potential customers. As you all know, those queues are full. But our positions, we believe would allow us to continue to offer up opportunities for customers. At this point, it's near the back end of our period because there's just a lot to do to make room for all this. And as you know, the three that we -- customers that we were talking about today are all in the 2028, moving in -- ramping into 2029 kind of time frame. So that's kind of where we are in terms of potential opportunity. And so it doesn't really matter which kind of customers we're talking about, that's where that opportunity will be sitting.