Gerardo Norcia
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at DTE Energy
Thanks, Matt. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. This morning, I'll discuss how we continue to deliver for our key stakeholders and highlight the successes we've had across all of our businesses this year. Joi will provide you with an update on our regulatory proceedings as we continue with our customer-focused investments to improve reliability and transition to cleaner generation while maintaining affordability for all our customers, and she will discuss the significant progress that we have made so far to further improve reliability and we build the grid of the future. And Dave will provide a financial update and wrap things up before we take your questions.
So let me start on slide four. We're having a very strong year so far in 2024, giving us confidence that we will deliver on our 2024 operating EPS guidance. As I said on our previous call, we are also positioning ourselves to deliver strong results in 2025 and beyond. We remain confident that our plan will deliver a long-term EPS growth rate of 6% to 8%, support a healthy balance sheet with strong cash flows and minimal equity issuances and continue our commitment to deliver affordable energy to our customers. Our long-term growth is driven by the required capital investments in reliability and clean generation that we need to make for our customers. And these investments are supported by the recent independent audit of our electric distribution system, which I'll talk about more shortly, Michigan Energy legislation, which continues to push the pace of decarbonization and deployment of renewables and by infrastructure recovery mechanisms at both of our utilities.
As we continue to wrap up a solid 2024 and finalize multiple regulatory proceedings we are updating our five-year plan, and we'll provide the details of that plan on our year-end call. This plan will continue to support these customer-focused investments in grid reliability and cleaner generation as we advance our capital investments to support these initiatives. I am excited about the opportunities we have in front of us and look forward to sharing the details of our long-term plan on the year-end call. As I said, we are having a successful year in 2024, and our success is the result of our team's focus on all of our stakeholders, including our customers, our communities and our investors.
Our team continues to consistently deliver as a result of our strong culture. We were recently informed by the Gallup organization that our employee engagement ranks in the 94th percentile globally among thousands of organizations. As I've said before, our high level of employee engagement is our secret sauce at DTE for continued success. DTE was also recognized as a Best Place to Work for disability inclusion, receiving a top score of 100 on the Disability Equality Index, the world's most comprehensive benchmarking tool for large companies to measure disability inclusion inside their organization. This award was a tremendous honor, complementing our recognition with the Best Employers Award for Excellence in Health and Well-being, which I mentioned last quarter.
Our highly engaged team remains focused on delivering excellent service to our customers. as we advance toward our goal of restoring service to all customers within 48 hours after a storm. In August, our service territory was impacted by an extreme weather event that included wind gust that reached over 75 miles per hour. As a result of the extensive improvements we are making to our system and processes, we restored nearly 65% of our customers in 24 hours, which is the highest 1-day restoration in company history for a storm of this size, and nearly 95% of our customers were restored within 48 hours. I extend our sincere gratitude to our teams who worked tirelessly to get the lights back on for our customers.
We also faced extreme heat this summer as temperatures climbed to over 90 degrees for an extended period. Our system held up well in these conditions, but I'm very proud of our team's efforts to take care of those most vulnerable customers as they experience the heat. Our energy efficiency program was able to assist low-income customers by installing nearly 1,000 free air conditioner units to those in most need across Metro Detroit to keep them cool.
Moving on to our communities. We take pride in supporting the communities where we live and serve. While being best for the world is always part of our company's aspiration, every August, we lean in even more to give back to the communities. During this year's Month of Caring, DTE team members made a difference across the state as they helped out at food pantries, cleaning up parks and many other volunteer events. Our employees spent 5,000 hours giving back to our communities. I would also like to take a moment to commend and appreciate the 500 contract line workers and tree trimmers, along with 100 DTE line workers who went south to help with the hurricane relief. In the last few weeks, Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton hit Florida Gulf Coast and then flooded several southern states with drenching rain. Millions were without power, and I'm glad our team was able to assist others in need. And as a matter of fact, I received 20 letters from elementary school students in Georgia that really were very grateful for the work that our team did in Georgia. So thank you again to our team for doing something extraordinarily positive in Georgia.
And for our investors, we are in a really great position to deliver on our earnings target this year and are well positioned for the future. Our long-term operating EPS growth rate remains at 6% to 8%, with 2023 original guidance as the base for this growth. And this solid financial strength in our constructive regulatory environment allows us to continue to invest above our generated cash flows for improved reliability and cleaner generation. As I mentioned, we will provide our typical forward-looking disclosures on the 2024 year-end earnings call. Our updated plan will reaffirm our commitment to deliver premium shareholder returns that our investors have come to expect.
Let's turn to slide five to highlight some of the achievements across our portfolio. We are achieving success and progressing on key initiatives across the company. We are progressing toward constructive outcomes for our rate cases at both DTE Gas and DTE Electric. While there is still work to do to ensure the outcomes do not put pressure on our near-term ability to complete our customer-focused investments, we believe these outcomes will ultimately support the investments in grid reliability and cleaner generation that we need to make on behalf of our customers. And we are expecting these constructive outcomes in November for DTE Gas and January for DTE Electric.
Additionally, we received the final report from the independent audit of our electric distribution system as directed by the Michigan Public Service Commission. We really appreciated working with the independent audit team over the last year, and we appreciate the insights of recommendations to further improve our system. Joi will go over some of the key items from the audit, but one key takeaway is the confirmation that our proposed investment plan is what is needed to achieve the significant reliability improvements that we have committed to over the next five years, which is reducing power outages by 30% and cutting outage time in half by 2029.
We are continuing to progress on these investments and reliability improvements this year, and our customers are seeing the benefits of this work. As I mentioned, we had one of our most effective storm restorations in our company's history in August, demonstrating that our efforts to improve processes and automate the grid are working. Joi will provide some detail on our progress in this area. But I'll just say that we are making great progress on all aspects of our plan as we transition to a smarter grid, update existing infrastructure, rebuild the older sections of the grid and continue our significant tree trimming efforts.
We are also making significant progress in our renewables build-out at DTE Electric. Last month, we broke ground on three new solar parks and have three additional solar parks currently under construction. Together, these projects will add 800 megawatts to our renewable portfolio, which is enough to power more than 220,000 homes. And each project is supporting our MIGreenPower voluntary renewable program, which continues to grow with 2,500 megawatts now subscribed, a nearly 100,000 residential customer subscriptions.In our DTE Gas, we continue to progress on our gas main renewal program this year as we modernize the gas transmission system and our distribution system.
And finally, at DTE Vantage, we are advancing a number of custom energy solutions, RNG and carbon capture and sequestration projects. We highlighted the project at Ford Motor Company earlier this year to support Ford's new plant in Tennessee. This project is underpinned by a long-term fixed fee contract and is scheduled to go into full operation in November. We also began construction on an RNG project that is expected to go into service by the end of the year.
Now I'll turn it over to Joi to give some highlights on our regulatory front and reliability improvements. Joi, over to you.
