Philip J. Lembo
Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President and Treasurer at Eversource Energy
Thank you, Joe. And this morning, I'm going to cover several areas, 2021 results. Our 2022 earnings guidance, an updated five year regulated investment plan and long-term outlook, an update on some of the current regulatory proceedings and finally, additional details around our offshore wind investment plan. So let me get started. Start with the 2021 results on slide 15. Our GAAP earnings for 2021 were $3.54 per share compared to $3.55 in 2020. In the fourth quarter of 2021, GAAP earnings were $0.89 per share compared with GAAP earnings of $0.79 in the fourth quarter of 2020.
All those periods include acquisition costs, primarily related to our purchase in 2020 of the assets of Columbia Gas in Massachusetts, which we now call Eversource Gas of Massachusetts or EGMA. As I noted on our third quarter call, 2021 full year results also include charges related to the settlement agreement in Connecticut. Excluding those nonrecurring charges, we earned $3.86 per share in 2021. That's up 6% from $3.64 in 2020.
For the fourth quarter, excluding these charges, we earned $0.91 per share in 2021 compared with earnings of $0.85 in the fourth quarter of 2020. To break down the earnings into segments, electric transmission earned $1.58 per share for the full year 2021 compared with earnings of $1.48 in 2020. Higher earnings resulted from continued investment in our transmission system. We invested just over $1.1 billion in our transmission facilities in 2021 and I think that's compared to just about $960 million -- $964 million, to be precise, in 2020.
And that's for -- the reason for that was it's mostly replacing obsolete equipment and improving reliability and resilience in the region. Our electric distribution segment earned $1.61 per share in 2020 excluding the settlement charge -- excluding the settlement charge, this compared to $1.60 in 2020. The higher revenues were largely offset by higher O&M, depreciation, property tax and interest expense. And really, these higher expenses stem from our ongoing investments to improve service and reliability for our customers.
We invested about $1.25 billion in our electric distribution system in 2021, and this is up from just under $1.2 billion in 2020. Our natural gas distribution segment earned $0.59 per share in 2021 compared with earnings of $0.40 in 2020. This growth was driven primarily by having a full year of EGMA earnings included in our financials in 2021, and this is compared to less than three months of EGMA earnings in 2020. This also includes the ongoing investment in safety and reliability of our natural gas systems where we invested about $800 million in 2021.
Our water distribution segment earned $0.11 per share in 2021, and this is down $0.01 from $0.12 in 2020. The small decline primarily reflects the sale of the water delivery system around Hingham, Massachusetts that occurred in 2020. We continue to invest in clean and reliable water delivery with investments in our water segment totaling $144 million in 2021. This is up 13% from the prior year and about double from where it was when we first acquired Aquarion in 2017.
Excluding acquisition-related charges, the Eversource Power segment lost $0.03 per share in '21 compared to earnings of $0.04 in 2020. This change is largely due to a higher effective tax rate. Overall, as Joe covered in his remarks, we are very pleased with the strong year we had as we successfully overcame many challenges and delivered very positive results for our customers and for all of our stakeholders. From 2021 results, I'll turn to our 2022 guidance in slide 16. We are projecting recurring earnings of between $4 and $4.17 per share this year, compared with $3.86 we earned in 2021.
The midpoint of that range reflects a 6% increase over 2021. This range excludes the remaining costs we expect to incur as we complete the integration of EGMA operations from NiSource to Eversource systems in 2022. The primary growth drivers are our ongoing investment in our electric transmission segment, where we expect to invest approximately $1.1 billion in 2022. The higher revenues from our distribution segments much of it relates to ongoing reliability and resiliency investments with existing recovery mechanisms in a performance-based revenue adjustment at NSTAR Electric.
Those higher revenues will be partially offset by anticipated increase in depreciation, property tax and interest expense related to our customer-focused investments. On slide 17, you see that we are reiterating our long-term earnings per share guidance in the upper half of the 5% to 7% growth rate of core regulated businesses with 2021 recurring EPS of $3.86 as the base level. To be clear, this guidance excludes earnings from offshore wind projects.
And on slide 18, you can see that the primary driver of this growth is our regulated capital program, which continues to make our energy and water delivery system safer, more reliable and more resilient for our customers. We expect to invest approximately $18.1 billion in those systems over the five year period of 2022 through 2026. That compares with a $17 billion investment plan we discussed with you a year ago, which was for the period of 2021 through 2025.
On the distribution side, we assume that we'll invest nearly $400 million over the next five years on grid modernization and electric vehicle charging infrastructure in Massachusetts, which is somewhat above our recent spending levels there. We received timely recovery of these investments with a return. In Connecticut and New Hampshire, we have not assumed any grid mod investments at this time. As you can see on slide 19, these investments in our core business are projected to produce a rate base CAGR of approximately 7.1% over the forecast period.
Slide 20 lists the investments that are included in the five year estimate and what remains outside of it. Note that we continue to exclude AMI from our core capital program. As Joe indicated in his remarks, dockets to implement AMI are very active in both Massachusetts and Connecticut, and may be concluded later this year. However, they are not yet at the point where we should be including them in our capital forecast. Altogether, implementing AMI in the two states would require about $1 billion of investment in order to deliver long-term customer savings, enhance grid resiliency and enable clean energy benefits.
Also excluded from our five year forecast are certain transmission investment opportunities. ISO New England studies indicate that about $500 million of onshore investment would be needed to interconnect nearly 3,000 megawatts of offshore wind through Cape Cod in the southeastern portion of our service territory. Since the nature and timing of these investments are still under evaluation, we have excluded it from our capital guidance.
I should emphasize that we would expect such projects to be incremental investments in our core regulated business. They are not related to our three offshore wind projects, which, as you saw in the earlier slide, connect through New York and Rhode Island. So in addition, it is also becoming clear that significant additional transmission investment beyond the $500 million will be needed to reliably tie in the 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind that Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island are targeting. These investments will extend beyond our forecast period and such are not included.
They are excluded from the forecast. Finishing up my discussion on the regulated business, I'll first turn to a review of our current regulatory items. As you can see on slide 21, we continue to await FERC's ruling on several items. The first of the four complaints that were filed beginning back in 2011, challenging the return on equity authorized for all the New England electric transmission owners. The others are generic dockets, one looking at the 50 basis point RTO adder and another looking at transmission incentives.
On the distribution side, we are currently operating under multiyear rate plans in most of our distribution jurisdictions, the L&P's base rate freeze was approved as part of the comprehensive settlement Joe mentioned earlier. PSNH is in the second year of a multiyear rate plan. Our two Massachusetts natural gas delivery utilities are operating in the early years of 8- and 10-year rate plans. Yankee Gas is nearing the four year mark since its most recent rate review, and we are currently evaluating when its next review will take place.
Therefore, our primary rate review this year will be at NSTAR Electric in Massachusetts. Slide 22 covers the key elements of the review. We filed it a month ago and expected decision around December 1, with new rates to take effect at the beginning of 2023. There are several components to the filing and a couple of the key ones are noted on the slide. So let me pause here to summarize -- we expect to deliver another very positive year performance for our customers, shareholders and all stakeholders in 2022.
Our long-term earnings growth continues to be in the upper half of the 5% to 7% range through 2026 from our core regulated business. Our long-term growth rate is supported by a projected rate base growth of 7.1% and -- we have upside opportunities in the areas of grid modernization, AMI and incremental transmission development that are not part of our current forecast. The investments I've discussed thus far have been in our regulated business.
Now I'll turn to our offshore wind partnership with Orsted. Joe mentioned earlier, our JV with the Orsted has signed contracts in place for about 1,760 megawatts of offshore wind, and we've locked in approximately 80% of the costs we need to bring our three projects into service. To date, we've invested about $1.2 billion in the JV, which includes some development and acquisition costs that are not directly related to the three projects. In 2022, we expect to invest an additional $900 million to $1 billion in the three projects.
Over the remaining years of our forecast, we expect to invest an additional $3 billion to $3.6 billion to complete and bring into service all three projects. These estimates fully reflect certain cost increases that we've encountered over the past few months that were covered earlier in Joe's remarks, as well as our estimates of our costs going forward. Last year, we told investors that we would provide more visibility into our financial expectations for our offshore wind investments. So providing you with the range of expected -- of the expected investment levels over the next several years as part of that.
And as we said before, the benefit on earnings from the large projects and to service in 2025 is not projected to be significant. However, assuming Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind and to service in 2025, we expect offshore wind earnings to add between 6% to 8% of the net income we expect from our core regulated business in 2026. The benefit on Eversource's cash flow beginning in 2026 is likely to be much more significant.
Since Eversource is currently a cash taxpayer, and we expect to remain one, we expect to use investment tax credits and accelerated depreciation for tax purposes in a highly efficient and effective manner, and that's just based on today's tax code. Changes are currently being considered in Congress to spur more clean energy investment that could significantly enhance our projected cash flows and returns.
Potential changes include utilization of a direct pay option, allowing an increase of tax credits to 40% for meeting certain domestic content requirements and raising production tax credit to the -- raising production tax credits to the ITC equivalent of 30%. Any of these potential changes could have significant positive implications for this business and cash flows and none of these changes is reflected in the offshore wind guidance that I noted earlier.
Historically, we have guided that our offshore wind projects were expected to generate mid-teens returns based on a standard Eversource 60-40 debt equity structure. Those returns are higher are achievable with enhanced clean energy benefits contemplated by the build back better plan. But even with no changes to the current tax code, we now expect our offshore wind equity returns to be in the 11% to 13% range. So still accretive for the Eversource investor and highly supportive of our state's aggressive clean energy goals.
So to summarize offshore winds, our projects are making excellent progress and continue to project in-service dates as previously forecast. We, like other developers, have very recently experienced higher costs associated with global supply chain and vendor capacity issues. But perhaps like most other U.S. developers, we have a very clear line of sight on 80% of our costs, and we continue to work closely with Orsted to identify savings opportunities.
Despite some higher costs, we continue to project offshore wind earnings that are higher than in our regulated businesses. The closing of today's call, I want to discuss our financing plans. As we've always done, we expect to finance our capital needs in a balanced way through a combination of internally generated funds, new debt issuances and common equity. We intend to maintain the existing strong credit ratings that we currently have with the rating agencies.
Given the level of investments contemplated in this five year outlook, we are planning to add an incremental $500 million to our equity needs over the next several years. When we first discussed issuing equity three years ago, we outlined a multipronged plan to raise equity capital. The first $2 billion plan was comprised of $1.3 billion in block equity and $700 million through an at-the-market or ATM program. Separately, we announced that we would use about $100 million a year in treasury shares rather than open market purchases to fund our dividend reinvestment and employee stock programs.
So to help fund the updated investment plan and allow us to maintain our strong financial profile and credit ratings, we are now increasing the size of our expected ATM program by $500 million. So to a total of $1.2 billion. In addition, we expect to continue to fund our dividend reinvestment and employee stock programs using treasury shares, and this is expected to be about $600 million over the next five years.
Finally, as you can see on slide 23, we continue to remind investors of our long track record of positive performance. This slide shows that over the decade since Eversource was created, we have consistently achieved the earnings and dividend growth we targeted even back in 2012, while achieving very strong operating performance. We also have significantly enhanced our ESG profile, which certainly ranks among the best, if not the best, in the industry.
So we thank you again for joining us this morning, and I'll turn the call back to Jeff for Q&A.
