Mauricio Gutierrez
President and Chief Executive Officer at NRG Energy
Thank you, Kevin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for your interest in NRG. I'm joined this morning by Alberto Fornaro, Chief Financial Officer. Also on the call and available for questions, we have Elizabeth Killinger, Head of Home Retail; and Chris Moser, Head of Operations. This is my 25th earnings call as CEO, and I wanted to start with a quick look back on what we have achieved. Over the past six years, we have transformed our company from a complex industrial story into one that is much simpler and focused on our core strengths. Along the way, we have made significant progress in our strategy to get closer to the customer, optimize our generation portfolio to serve those customers, strengthen the financial health of our company and created significant shareholder value. We now turn to the next phase in our evolution of growing our business and realizing the potential around the customer. I am excited about the future and look forward to sharing our progress with all of you in the months to come. Moving on to the three key messages of today's presentation on slide four.
Our business delivered results in line with the 2021 guidance, effectively navigating supply chain constraints and volatile market conditions, further validating the strength and durability of our model. Next, I am pleased to report that we have successfully executed our winter storm Uri mitigation plan, and we are increasing 2022 capital available for allocation. Finally, we continue to advance our five-year strategic road map in moving closer to the customer and our commitment to being excellent stewards of shareholder capital. The '21 financial and operational results are on slide five. Beginning with our scorecard. We executed on all our priorities. I want to thank all the employees at NRG for maintaining focus during a challenging year, which included a global pandemic, Winter Storm Uri, asset sales and the integration of Direct Energy. Importantly, we were able to operate through these conditions while setting another record for safety. This is the fourth straight year we have set a new company safety record, an incredible accomplishment worthy of recognition. Direct Energy integration remains ongoing, and we are on track to achieve our run rate synergies. During the year, we outperformed our initial expectations, achieving $175 million versus our original expectation of $135 million.
This integration is led by the same team and supported by the same governance of the transformation plan, which gives me the utmost confidence in our ability to reach, if not exceed our run rate targets. Following multiple years of rightsizing our business, 2021 marked a significant milestone in capitalizing our best-in-class consumer services platform. We added roughly three million customers to our portfolio and expanded the scale and scope of home, power and natural gas services. Also during the year, we monetized 4.8 gigawatts of noncore fossil assets in our East and West regions. And now the retirement of 1.6 gigawatts of coal assets in the East and signed an additional 800 megawatts of renewables PPAs. Next, we continue to adhere to our disciplined capital allocation principles. In late 2021, we announced a $1 billion share repurchase program to be completed throughout 2022. We also increased our dividend per share 8%, in line with our stated dividend growth rate of 7% to 9%. In June, we held our Investor Day where we revealed our five-year strategic road map to create significant stakeholder value, by moving closer to the customer while also returning significant capital to our shareholders.
Moving to the right-hand side of the slide for the financial results. We delivered $433 million of adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter, 31% higher than the prior year. This brings our full year results to $2.42 billion of adjusted EBITDA, 21% higher than the prior year, primarily driven by the acquisition of Direct Energy and excluding the impact from Winter Storm Uri. Finally, we are maintaining our 2022 adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow before growth guidance ranges. We are seeing promising results in mitigating winter supply chain constraints, and I look forward to updating you next quarter. As a result of our Winter Storm Uri mitigation plan, we are increasing our 2022 capital available for allocation by $212 million, which Alberto will discuss in more detail. Now turning to Slide six for a brief update on the ERCOT market. Following Winter Storm Uri it was clear that market reforms from wellhead to lightbulb were necessary to improve grid resilience. In the months following the event, we actively engaged in discussions with legislators, regulators and other market participants to introduce comprehensive and competitive solutions across the entire system to address areas that failed.
In 2021, Texas made significant progress in hardening the electric grid through power plant and transmission weatherization standards, improved market design with changes in scarcity pricing, ancillary reforms and consumer protection improvements. In 2022, we expect Texas to expand its focus on hardening the natural gas infrastructure and implementation of Phase two of power reforms, which includes resource adequacy by establishing a load-side reserve requirement and on-site fuel security. I want to commend the Texas governor's office, legislature, PUCT and ERCOT for taking swift action and accelerating effective reforms that would normally take years and addressing them within months. While our work is not done yet, we believe Texas performance through a tough winter is a strong reflection of effective actions and policies. Moving to the right-hand side of the slide for an update on the financial impact from Winter Storm Uri. I am pleased to announce that we have successfully executed our mitigation strategy. Today, we're updating the net financial impact from the storm to $380 million from our prior expected range of $500 million to $700 million. Now turning to slide seven. It is important that we recognize our ESG principles and highlight a few of our 2021 accomplishments.
We created a sustainable framework with a strong foundation based on our corporate values and our sustainability program that brings all stakeholders working together with a common purpose from our customers, to our employees, to our operations. Our sustainability program consistently upholds a high standard of accountability and transparency across the pillars of environmental leadership, social focus and strong governance. I want to start with an update on our environmental leadership. As you know, we committed to a stringent decarbonization path in line with the 1.5-degree Celsius scenario, which has been certified by the Science Based Targets initiative. That means reducing our carbon emissions 50% by 2025 and net 0 by 2050. As you can see on the right-hand side of the slide, since 2014, we have reduced our carbon emissions by 44%, and we have a clear line of sight to our 2025 goal. So just to put this in perspective, this is equivalent to taking 5.8 million passenger vehicles off the road for a year.
In addition, as advocates for the electrification of transportation, in 2021 we set a goal to electrify 100% of our light-duty vehicle fleet by 2030, further demonstrating our commitment to progress. All these efforts have resulted in the diversification of our revenue streams to cleaner solutions. Since 2014, coal generation as a percentage of revenues has decreased by 80% and now represents less than 5% of our total revenues. If you recall, not long ago, coal made up almost 1/3 of our revenues. We still have much work to do, but I am confident we are on the right track and have the right team to succeed on our goals. On the social front, our engagement with our employees, communities and customers continues to advance. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, in 2021, we once again achieved top-decile employee safety performance. We also implemented employee programs to support financial, physical and mental well-being. Our diversity, equity and inclusion value continues to shape our culture and inform our decision-making as we strive to unlock the power of DEI as a way to better understand our customers and the communities we serve, while also making our team stronger.
In our communities, we supported more than 750 nonprofit organizations through our philanthropic arm, Positive Energy. We also focused our volunteer efforts on food security through virtual and in-person food donations and packaging meals for those in need. And for our customers, we are always innovating. We have been a leader in facilitating renewable energy for our residential customers as well as providing a path for small- and medium-sized businesses to participate in the sustainable energy transition. And as we all know, more than ever, the home is the center of our lives. So we continue to advocate for individual customers' choice in the products and services that best suit their values and lifestyle delivered with reliability and affordability. Finally, regarding our strong governance, I am particularly proud of our transparency in reporting and accountability on our goals. In just this last past year, we released our 11th annual Sustainability Report, our fifth reporting compliance with SASB standards and 12 CDP or climate disclosure project questionnaire. We also formally issued our first TCFD or task force on climate-related financial disclosure as a way to improve and ensure our stakeholders have the right tools to make informed decisions and track our progress.
In 2021, we issued our second sustainability-linked bond. If you recall, we were the first company in North America to do it back in 2020. These bonds tie our financing cost to achieving our carbon reduction goals. As you can see, our culture of sustainability is ingrained in every part of our organization, and we continue to play an integral part in our transition to a consumer services company. I am looking forward to sharing more details of our ESG journey with you later this spring in our 2021 sustainability report. Now I want to provide you an update on our growth program. As I shared with you during Investor Day, our focus over 2021 and '22 is twofold: optimizing the core and setting the stage for growing the core. In terms of optimizing the core, we continue to remain on track to integrate Direct Energy into our business and have been successful in optimizing our generation portfolio to support our customer-facing business. We are also making solid progress on our efforts around growing the natural gas and dual-fuel customer portfolio. Let me give you a couple of specific examples for both. One, we are seeing early success in achieving our customer count by leveraging our existing and long-standing partnerships with big box retailers to sell natural gas and expand our geographic footprint.
Second, we are advancing our digital experience so customers can easily enroll in both electricity and natural gas plants. These efforts are relatively new, and I will share more details as we make progress later in the year. Now moving on to growing the core. You will remember that our plan is focused in two areas: Energy Services and Home Services. The housing picture on the left really gives you a sense of the various customer solutions that are on our growth road map. Some of these solutions are already operational, such as power, natural gas and storage while others such as solar and EV are in the pilot or development phase. The table on the right slide provides the status on each of these targeted customer solutions. The important key takeaway is that we are not starting our growth program from zero. We have meaningful existing capabilities to deliver many of our targeted customer solutions, and we are leveraging those capabilities as we speak. For those customer solutions that are not currently operational, we will use 2022 as a staging period for us to prudently test and learn, optimize our participation model and refine the go-to-market approach such that when we get to 2023, we will have confidence in deploying capital against that growth. Moving to slide nine.
As you can see, our capital allocation track record is cycle appropriate and directly in line with our road map to stabilize, rightsize, redefine and now enhance our company. During 2016 and '17, our primary focus was simplifying and strengthening the balance sheet. In 2018 and '19, with the balance sheet significantly improved, we were able to shift to returning capital to shareholders and grow. In '20 and '21, the Direct acquisition meant more of our capital shifted towards growth and debt reduction. Now moving to 2022. We turn our focus towards achieving our per share growth objectives and growing into our investment-grade credit metrics through the full realization of Direct Energy run rate earnings and our growth program. And like I said earlier, 2022 remains a staging year for growth, which provides significant excess cash to be returned through dividends and share repurchases. I will provide you an update on the remaining, unallocated cash throughout the year. So with that, I will pass it over to Alberto for the financial review.
