Jason P. Wells
President, Chief Executive Officer at CenterPoint Energy
Thank you, Jackie, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to begin by extending our deepest sympathies to our families and communities impacted by the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. The destruction caused by this year's hurricane season is undoubtedly tragic. However, it is times like these that truly bring out the best in our industry. A few weeks ago, we saw the utility community come together to send more than 50,000 utility workers from at least 43 states, the District of Columbia and Canada, to support hurricane restoration efforts across the Southeast. From CenterPoint, we contributed to the effort by sending personnel representing nearly a third of our electric frontline workforce to assist in the restoration efforts for Helene and Milton.
As many of you know, the Greater Houston area benefited greatly from the same mutual assistance framework during Hurricane Beryl, where we called upon 13,000 workers from approximately 30 states to help restore power to more than 2 million customers. I want to thank all of our frontline teams as well as others throughout the industry that answered the call to help get the lights back on for the millions of people impacted by the destructive hurricanes we've experienced this season.
On today's call, I'd like to address five key areas of focus. First, I'll briefly touch on the third quarter financial results. Second, I'll discuss the progress we've made and future goals with respect to our Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative, or GHRI. Third, I'll provide an update on our various regulatory efforts. Fourth, I'll highlight the organic growth we continue to experience, particularly in the Houston electric service territory. Lastly, I'll conclude with the initiation of our earnings guidance for 2025.
Today, we reported non-GAAP EPS of $0.31 per share for the quarter. In addition, we are reaffirming our full-year 2024 non-GAAP EPS guidance range of $1.61 to $1.63 per share. This represents 8% growth at the midpoint from our 2023 results. Chris will provide additional details on our financial results in his section.
Now, I'd like to provide an update on our ongoing execution of our electric operational plan, the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative, which we launched in early August. As you may have seen, we have already made significant strides towards strengthening the resiliency and reliability of our grid in the first phase of GHRI, as well as enhancing our communications with our customers. These actions have been informed by learnings from internal and external reviews, engagement with stakeholders and benchmarking with high-performing sector peers.
During the third quarter, we took immediate action and accelerated our plans to deliver an unprecedented level of work. This includes removing higher-risk vegetation across 2,000 line miles, replacing over 1,100 poles with new poles capable of withstanding extreme wind, and installing over 300 automated reliability devices to help reduce the number and duration of customer outages. We accomplished all of this work before the end of August and ahead of schedule.
With respect to improving our communications, we launched our new and updated outage tracker on August 1st. This tool is designed to enhance the customer experience during times of service disruptions. Additionally, we've stated our commitment to hire senior emergency preparedness and response at communications leaders to bolster our leadership team. I'm pleased to share we have hired leaders for both of these positions that bring a wealth of industry experience and will accelerate our efforts to improve our preparedness and response in our customer experience during emergency events.
We believe our more proactive communications approach is already positively impacting the customer experience through more timely information. These are great first steps and I'm proud of the progress thus far. But we have heard the call to action, and we are committed to doing even more in the second and third phases of GHRI for the benefit of our customers and our communities. These next two phases will focus not only on reducing the number of outages, but also reducing the outage time customers experience through investments designed to create a self-healing grid. I want to underscore, however, that GHRI does not represent the beginning of our enhanced resiliency investments. This is merely a continuation and acceleration of the work we started well-ahead of this year's events.
Over the last few years, we have focused our resiliency investments on our electric transmission system, which is the backbone of our grid. Our transmission resiliency work included upgrading our transmission structures to better withstand extreme winds, elevating our substations to mitigate flood risk and converting our older 69 KV transmission lines to a more robust 138 KV standard. This work has already produced tangible results during the [Indecipherable] May in Hurricane Beryl in July. Our hardened transmission system withstood the extreme winds and sustained relatively little structural damage. In fact, while other Texas utility customers sustained prolonged outages due to damage on their transmission system from Hurricane Beryl, we did not experience any customer outages due to our transmission system.
As we now turn our attention to accelerated investments in the distribution system in the next two phases of GHRI, we believe we are well-positioned to make rapid improvement. Currently, a little over 46% of our Houston electric distribution system is underground, which on a proportional basis is more than twice the industry average. Our opportunity is to harden above-ground feeders to those communities through smaller, more targeted investments that should yield impactful results for approximately 60% of the customers that are served by underground service. This feeder blitch is expected to have the additional benefit of substantially reducing the total outage numbers and accelerating restoration for other customers as resources can focus on the remaining circuits earlier in the restoration process.
Another area we believe we can make meaningful improvements on our distribution system is with respect to increased circuit segmentation and automation. Equipment such as intelligent grid switching devices and trip savers help create a self-healing grid by isolating outages to fewer customers, rerouting power around impacted areas and automatically restoring power without manual intervention where there is no structural damage. Presently, approximately 30% of Houston Electric's overhead circuits have at least one automation device. As part of Phase 2 of GHRI, we anticipate installing 4,500 trip savers and 350 intelligent grid switching devices before the next hurricane season, which will allow us to nearly double the number of distribution circuits with automation devices in the Greater Houston area. Our investments and work during this phase are anticipated to save our Houston area customers over 125 million outage minutes annually. Over the next five years, we plan to not only deploy even more devices, but also optimize their capabilities by employing AI-based modeling. We plan to share additional details regarding our future resiliency investments on our fourth quarter call, which will take place after we have filed our system resiliency plan. As a reminder, our revised system resiliency plan will include approximately $5 billion in resiliency investments from 2026 through 2028, an increase of approximately $2.5 billion over our previously withdrawn system resiliency plan. Chris will go into more detail in his section, but I want to highlight that even with the inclusion of these incremental resiliency investments, we anticipate Houston Electric's customer delivery charge increases will track in-line with the long-term rate of inflation over the next 10 years.
Turning to an update of our broader regulatory efforts, starting with Houston Electric. As many of you likely saw, on August 1 we filed our notice to withdraw our Houston Electric rate case filing. This withdrawal allows us to continue to focus our attention on near-term plan execution and long-term system resiliency plan development as we are laser-focused on year-over-year improvements. If the withdrawal is approved, we have stated that we will file a new Houston Electric rate case no later than June 30, 2025, based on a 2024 calendar test year. Outside of the rate case filing, we intend to continue to seek recovery of capital investments made for the benefit of our customers. In the fourth quarter of this year, we anticipate filing to start recovery of both our recent transmission and distribution investments through our TCOS and DCRF capital trackers.
The efficient recovery of these investments is crucial to our ability to efficiently fund future investments. This is why we remain focused on reducing regulatory lag across all of our jurisdictions. Our latest earnings monitoring report highlights the regulatory lag we continue to experience at Houston Electric. For 2023, our weather-normalized earned return-on-equity was nearly 150 basis points lower than our allowed.
In addition to filing for a recovery of our investments, we will also make the initial filing for the recovery of approximately $450 million in storm costs related to the meter ratio [Phonetic].
Now turning to the Indiana electric rate case. A little over a month ago, we filed our proposed order with respect to our non-unanimous settlement proposal. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission has a statutory deadline to issue its final order by February 3, 2025. We want to thank all stakeholders for their contributions to the case as we seek to reach a fair outcome for all parties.
Moving next to the filed Minnesota gas rate case. As some of you may have seen, intervener testimony was filed a few weeks ago. Since then, we have had constructive settlement talks with stakeholders and intend to continue in those settlement negotiations, leading up to our rebuttal testimony deadline of November 12. As you may recall, we have settled our previous three rate cases in our Minnesota gas jurisdiction. Absent a settlement, the Minnesota Commission may consider interim rates for 2025 toward the end of this year.
Finally, I want to touch on our upcoming rate case application for Ohio Gas. In August, our Ohio gas business filed its notice of intent with the Public Utility Commission of Ohio regarding our upcoming general rate case application, which we intend to file tomorrow. Over the last several years, we have had one of the lowest customer gas bills in the state. Our upcoming ASC [Phonetic] reflects an investment recovery rate that will put us more in-line with our Ohio peers. In addition, this larger revenue requirement increase will allow us to more efficiently fund the continued pipeline modernization investments, which we believe contributes to the overall safety and efficiency of the system.
Now I want to highlight the strong organic growth we continue to see, especially in our Texas service territories. While much of my earlier commentary focused on our investments in resiliency and reliability, I want to emphasize that we continue to experience significant growth across Texas, and in particular, the Greater Houston region. Over the last few decades, the Greater Houston region has grown at one of the fastest rates in the nation. We see that growth not only continuing but accelerating through the remainder of this decade and beyond. In fact, we believe our peak load of approximately 22 gigawatts in 2024 could increase by more than 30% by 2030. This potential growth is driven by continued population growth, acceleration of electrification and increases in data center activity.
Houston continues to be an attractive city to live and work. Over the last five years, housing starts have increased over 9% per year-on average, which is more than three times the national average. We see this growth continuing as businesses and people alike continue to migrate to the Houston area. Our industrial load growth drivers are both large and diverse. Our substantial potential future load growth is underpinned by industrial electrification and energy exports, including hydrogen. Houston remains an ideal location for hydrogen developers as it already boasts the largest hydrogen infrastructure in the world, in addition to proximity to the largest port by waterborne tonnage in the United States. Although we still are in the early stages of hydrogen development, we are working with approximately 3.5 gigawatts of projects that are well into the advanced engineering phase.
Outside our more traditional load drivers of energy and energy exports, we see growing potential incremental load from other sectors. Notably, over the summer, we have seen a fundamental shift in data center development. In fact, our interconnection queue for data centers now sits at over 8 gigawatts. While we recognize that not all of this will be developed, it is yet another tailwind in what we continue to believe is one of the most tangible long-term growth stories in the industry. It is with this growth and our customer-driven capital investments that we've made over the last couple of years that gives us conviction to initiate our 2025 non-GAAP earnings guidance target range of $1.74 to $1.76 per share. The midpoint of this range represents 8% growth from the midpoint of our 2024 guidance range of $1.61 to $1.63. Beyond 2025, we are also reaffirming our longer-term guidance, where we expect to grow non-GAAP EPS at the mid to-high end of our 6% to 8% range annually through 2030, as well as targeting dividend per share growth in-line with earnings per share growth over that same-period of time. For our customers, this strong Houston area growth gives us confidence that we will keep increases in electric delivery charges roughly in-line with the forecasted rate of inflation over the next 10 years.
We recognize the privilege and responsibility of being an energy delivery provider for our customers. We will be laser-focused on both enabling growth and advancing system resiliency for the benefit of our customers through the work that we've outlined in GHRI, as well as the investments we will propose in our new system resiliency filing. We look forward to continuing to work with our customers, regulators and others to make improvements for the benefit of all of our stakeholders.
And with that, I'll turn it over to Chris.
