Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Avista Corporation Annual Shareholders Meeting. Your speaker for today will be the CEO of Avista Corporation, Dennis Vermillion. Dennis, the floor is yours.
Well, thank you, and good morning. I'm Dennis Vermillion, President and CEO of Avista. Welcome to Avista's 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders and thank you for joining us this morning. This is the first time we've held our Annual Meeting in an all virtual format. Due to the public health and safety concerns of COVID-nineteen, we are utilizing this format today with audio only.
We've strived to make this meeting as inclusive as possible by offering our shareholders the same opportunity to participate as during our past in person meetings. Now let's look at today's agenda for what we'll cover during our time together. First, we'll conduct the business portion of our meeting. If there are any shareholders who have not yet voted, you may vote during this virtual meeting by clicking on the vote button on your screen. The polls will close after this meeting concludes.
Those who are voting this morning can be assured that their vote will be included in the final results. After the business portion of our meeting, I'll turn to our business update by discussing what steps we're taking to manage through the COVID-nineteen pandemic and our plans to navigate the weeks months ahead. I'll then review some of our business and operating highlights from 2019. And after my remarks, Mark Theiss, our Executive Vice President, CFO and Treasurer, will provide some of our financial highlights from 2019 and Q1 of 2020. As always, there will be time at the end for you to ask questions.
If you have a question, please feel free to submit your question at any time by typing it in the text box located at the lower left corner of the screen. We'll try to answer all questions submitted in connection with today's meeting and unanswered questions will be addressed on our Investor Relations website after the meeting. As we begin this morning's meeting, I will caution you that we will be making forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, which are subject to change. I would direct you to Avista's Form 10 ks, which was filed with the SEC on February 26, 2020, and Form 10 Q, which was filed on May 8 for reference to the various factors, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated to the extent these factors are not discussed in this meeting. Those documents are available on our website.
Before I start the business portion of the meeting, I'd like to announce that the Board has approved payment of the quarterly dividend of $0.405 per share. I'd also like to introduce our Board members who are all participating in this virtual meeting. You'll note that the names of all of our Board members and their backgrounds appeared in your proxy statement: Christy Blake, Don Burke, Becky Klein, Scott Ma, Scott Morris, Jeff Phillips, Mark Roscoe, Heidi Stanley, John Taylor and Janet Widman. This is also a great opportunity for me to thank each one of our directors for the amount of time they dedicate to our company. Now for our officers, you'll note that the various areas for which the officers are responsible appeared in the annual report.
So I'll introduce them by name only. Our officers are Kevin Christie, Brian Cox, Marion Durkin, Greg Hessler, Leticia Hill, Jim Kensock, Ryan Kressold, David Meyer, Heather Rosentrader, Ed Schlecht, Jason Thaxton, Mark Theiss and Connie Hulbert. At this time, we'll convene the business portion of the meeting. The Inspector of Elections has informed us that a majority of outstanding shares held of record and entitled to vote as of the close of business on March 10, 2020, the record date of this meeting, are represented at this meeting. The first matter to be considered at this meeting is the election of directors.
11 directors are standing for election for a 1 year term. The Board recommends a vote for each Director. There are no other nominations. The second matter to be considered at this meeting is the proposal by the Board of Directors that the shareholders ratify the Board's appointment of the firm Deloitte and Touche LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm for 2020. The Board recommends a vote for this proposal.
I'd like to note that representatives from Deloitte and Touche are attending this virtual meeting. The 3rd matter to be considered is an advisory non binding vote on the company's executive compensation. The Board recommends a vote for this proposal. As you are aware, a large majority of our shareholders have voted in advance of this meeting. The preliminary voting results as of this morning show that all proposals have passed.
That concludes the business portion of our meeting. Before we look back on 2019, I'd like to acknowledge what we're all going through today. We've been in the eye of the coronavirus storm for several weeks now and we still have a ways to go. The coming weeks and months will continue to be difficult as businesses that were suddenly shuttered figure out how to safely reopen as stay at home orders are loosened. We're already seeing the economic impacts ripple from business owners to employees to families.
Each one of us has been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic and we hope that you and your loved ones are safe and in good health. Thankfully, no Avista employees have tested positive for COVID-nineteen so far and the same is true for AEL and P's employees in Alaska. And I'm just extremely proud of how our leaders and our employees have responded to this crisis. Avista has taken action to respond to the evolving COVID-nineteen situation and preserve the health and safety of our customers, employees, contractors and communities. Today Avista continues to actively manage through the pandemic.
The policies and procedures and protocols that we developed while we ramped up in record time are serving us very well. Early on, we successfully transitioned more than 1300 employees to work remotely and even some of our call center representatives have been for some time now taking customer calls from their homes. We've identified critical functions within our and made arrangements to ensure the safety and health of these employees who continue to work on-site or out in the field. Although we've shifted our operational approach, we remain focused on continuing to meet the needs of our customers. And once again, our employees have stepped up to meet this challenge.
They're being flexible. They're thinking outside the box to figure out new ways to get things done. By working together, we have kept the lights on and the gas flowing for our customers while still maintaining a great customer experience. We're also focused on understanding the impact this crisis has on our customers and communities and we're finding creative ways to help them. For our residential customers, we've increased assistance to our most vulnerable customers and for those customers who may be experiencing hardship for the first time.
We were one of the first utilities to suspend collections and disconnects and late payment fees. We revised our extended residential payment plans, plus we're expanding hardship grants for customers in need. We're also supporting hard hit small business owners by developing a suite of small and medium business services, which include payment arrangements, advice on federal stimulus programs and other offerings to help small and medium businesses stay in business and help sustain our economy after the pandemic has passed. At the community level, we're honoring all of our financial contributions to nonprofit organizations and corporate sponsorships, even though many community events have been canceled. Avista's charitable giving across all 5 states totals more than $1,100,000 and includes more than $865,000 towards relief from the impacts of COVID-nineteen.
I am optimistic that our support will have a lasting and meaningful impact on our communities. And in just a bit, Mark will share more details about the measures we're taking on the financial front. Like the rest of the nation, we're facing forward. We're planning ahead by identifying the appropriate criteria to decide when and how we will transition employees back to a more normal work routine when the time is right. We realize we cannot just flip the switch and return to business as usual.
Instead, we will intentionally dial up activities and monitor their impact on our ability to safely and reliably provide our essential services. We know that a growing number of our customers are hurting and struggling to make ends meet. And let me just say, in the midst of these uncertain times, we will keep doing what's right. And we will continue to show care and compassion to our employees, to our customers and to the communities we serve as we provide the energy that is so essential to our lives. Now let's turn our focus on 2019.
It was an extraordinary year. In many ways, 2019 marked the beginning of a new era on several strategic fronts. It certainly was the beginning of a new era for me as I stepped into the role of Avista's Chief Executive. When my longtime friend and mentor Scott Morris retired and we are all so grateful for Scott's leadership over his long and distinguished career. In my new role, I have full confidence in Avista's future.
It's been a little bit more than a year since Avista established our clean energy goals. Remember, we plan to serve our customers with carbon free electricity by 2,045 and carbon neutral electricity by the end of 2027. I've taken several significant we've taken several significant steps in 2019 toward achieving our goals and building a clean energy future. We signed a 20 year power purchase agreement that more than doubles our wind generating capacity with the addition of Rattlesnake Flat Wind Project in Adams County, Washington. The wind facility the wind energy facility will provide Avista with approximately 50 average megawatts of renewable energy and has 144 megawatts of nameplate wind capacity.
We expect deliveries to start later this year. We're also making progress in building the foundation for Avista to join the Western Energy Imbalance Market. This will allow Avista to access more diverse energy resource mix from a broader regional market, so that most cost effective generation can be dispatched to meet the energy needs across the entire market footprint. By joining the Western Energy Imbalance Market, Avista will be part of a more modern, flexible and cost effective system that can provide clean, reliable and affordable energy to our customers. We are taking several steps to move this effort forward, including upgrading equipment, integrating software and securing Western Energy Imbalance Market in April 2022.
Beyond adding more renewables to our portfolio, we know that new innovations will be needed to reach our clean energy goals and innovation has always been part of Avista's DNA. Now Avista has given innovation an address. It all started with the bold vision where several years ago our Chairman Scott Morris envisioned creating the 5 smartest blocks in the world. Avista provided the land to make it possible. And when we recruited the right partners to share our vision, the result is the 0 energy, 0 carbon catalyst building and the adjacent Scott Morris Center For Energy Innovation.
When construction is completed in just a few months, a centralized system will provide energy to multiple buildings in a shared energy model we're calling an eco district. It's an innovative approach to sharing energy that could ultimately transform how the grid operates. We're creating a living laboratory and bringing together some of the best and brightest minds in the energy industry to reimagine our future and what it can bring. When we talk about a new era for our customers, we're defining how our customers experience Avista. We continue to invest 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in our utility infrastructure to best serve our customers well into the future, and that includes our Washington Smart Meter project, which is now nearly 75% completed and is on track for most installations to wrap up by this fall.
Not only is this one of the largest capital projects in our company's history, It also puts customers squarely at the center of our focus and will provide a variety of benefits including timely information for customers to better manage their energy usage. This transformative technology is foundational to our future and opens the door for Avista to partner with customers in new and exciting ways. To help us provide a more personalized customer experience with each customer interaction, we also kicked off a multi year project to implement the customer experience platform in 2019. This is a single interface that will access customer information from multiple internal systems, enabling a more holistic view of the various points of interaction that a customer may have with our company. The technology also empowers employees with new tools to stay connected with customers like never before.
This is an integral part of our strategy to put the customer at the center of all that we do and we believe this new platform will be a real game changer for our customers and how we serve them into the future. Of course, in addition to these technology projects, we continue to wisely invest capital to maintain and upgrade our utility infrastructure, the pipes and wires of our business, if you will, to modernize our system to ensure that we can serve our customers, stay with safe, reliable energy, while also strategically building our clean energy future. In closing, let me come full circle. I mentioned earlier that we are entering a new era. Major events like the coronavirus crisis will certainly have lasting impacts.
Life as we know it has been forever changed by this global crisis. However, our commitment to you, our shareholders, remains constant. We will run a strong business that benefits all of our stakeholders. We remain committed to weathering this pandemic storm with all the strength and determination we can bring to bear on these uncertain times, and we continue to put those we serve firmly at the center of everything we do now and always. At this time, I'll turn the program over to Mark Fies, who will provide the highlights of our financial performance.
Thank you, Dennis, and good morning, everyone. Before I begin, I'd first like to express, as Dennis did, my gratitude for our employees. These are unusual and historically unusual times and yet they're working tirelessly to keep our business moving forward for all of our stakeholders. I want to thank them for their service and commitment to our customers, our communities and our shareholders. I'd also like to offer a little safe distancing tip.
If you take a hockey stick and hold it out in front of you, it's about 6 feet. Everybody knows I love hockey, I had to have a little comment on that. Turning to our business and operating highlights. Our financial performance in 2019 was very strong. We had earnings of $197,000,000 or $2.97 per diluted share, and our earnings benefited from customer growth in both our natural gas and electric businesses.
Our other businesses had strong earnings primarily related to the sale of MetalFX and net investment gains on our non regulated investment activity. It is important to remember that our earnings included $103,000,000 termination fee from the Hydro One transaction. Net of the remaining transaction costs and income taxes, this contributed about $1 per diluted share to our 2019 earnings. Dennis described earlier more of our significant capital projects and we continue to be committed to investing the necessary capital in our utility infrastructure. Between Avista Utilities and AEL and P, we invested $442,000,000 in utility infrastructure in 2019.
Also in 2019, we reached settlements in all of our general rate cases with approvals by the commissions in Oregon and Idaho, these settlement these rate case settlements put us on track earning our allowed rate of return. Turning to 2020, we announced our Q1 results last Friday, and our Q1 results were lower than our original expectations. This was largely due to the resolution of several important regulatory matters in Washington during March. The orders were issued by the Washington Commission in the remand of our 2015 general rate case, cost of replacement power related to an unplanned outage at Colstrip in 2018 and our 2019 general rate case. Although this resulted in a negative impact to earnings of about $0.10 per diluted share, we believe that the outcome was reasonable for both customers and shareholders and puts these proceedings behind us.
We also had increased operating costs, including some that were COVID-nineteen related, such as bad debt expense. As announced last Friday, we have lowered our 2020 consolidated earnings guidance due in parts to the regulatory items that we I mentioned in the Q1, the expected increased costs and lower loads due to COVID-nineteen, and we also had lower income at our other businesses, which caused us to lower our guidance. We estimate Avista Utilities capital expenditures to be about $405,000,000 in 2020. We expect AEL and P's capital expenditures to be about $9,000,000 in 2020. It's possible that a prolonged economic restrictions or business interruption from the COVID-nineteen pandemic could cause us decrease in our utility capital expenditures.
As Dennis mentioned, we just approved the Board just approved our dividend this morning for this quarter and we continue we expect to continue to grow our dividend. We raised our dividend 4% in 2019 and another 4.5% in February of this year. This was the 18th consecutive year that the Board has increased the dividend and we expect the annual dividend growth of 4% to 5% to be part of our targeted long term payout ratio of 65% to 75% of our earnings. Regarding liquidity, as of March 31, we had $182,000,000 of available liquidity under our lines of credit. In response to potential liquidity needs due to the pandemic, in April, we entered a 1 year credit agreement of $100,000,000 which is expected to be used to provide additional liquidity and for general corporate purposes.
Financial and operator highlights that I plan to share this morning. So I'll turn the call back over to Dennis, so we can answer any questions you may have.
Well, thank you, Mark. At this point, I'd like to open it up for questions. If you have a question, please enter it into the text box at the lower left corner of the screen of this meeting site.
Okay. The first question that came in, excuse me, with less use from the commercial industrial clients and the inability to make up this loss of revenue from residential customers, is there any remedy or program that the state can offer Avista?
Well, thank you for that question. Remember that certain of our commercial customers, we have decoupling for a certain class of our commercial customers. And for other commercial and industrial customers, we will file through the deferral mechanisms for potential recovery. We filed those in all states where we will hopefully include COVID related costs in those filings for future recovery. I guess another opportunity would be to seek support through future general rate cases.
And I suppose Washington the Washington legislature could always pass something in the future and we would, of course, be engaged in any discussions around that as we move forward. Thank you for the question.
Okay. The next question is, as your 2 largest shareholders are large passive ETF holders and are becoming more involved in activism, does your Board and executives need to be alarmed?
Thank you for that question. We believe we need to run a world class utility and provide a fair return to our shareholders. And that is what we are focused on as we move forward into the future.
Next question, is the dividend secure?
Yes, the dividend is secure. In fact, in my remarks, our Board authorized payment of the quarterly dividend just recently.
Okay. The next question is, how many shareholders are attending this virtual meeting? And do you plan to use virtual format going forward?
Well, we currently have 83 shareholders attending this virtual meeting and that is excuse me. We have 46 shareholders and then there are others that have signed on as public. So 46 shareholders attended this meeting and as far as using this format in the future, it's something we will certainly evaluate after today and we'll assess over the next years whether or not it makes sense to go this direction. So we will decide that at a later date.
Okay. Next question is being in Washington, do you have any partnerships with top technology private public companies to help Avista in technology? And as a follow on to that, does Avista use robotics?
Good question. Thank you for that. Yes, we work with a variety of technology companies really from all over the country, but certainly with those in Washington as well. And we will continue to do that as it makes sense for our business. In fact, we recently partnered with Microsoft to provide Wi Fi hotspots in some of our world communities.
So as a result of the COVID crisis, the connectivity for people is important and that's just one example where we were able to step up and provide a service to some of those in our rural communities and we're really proud about that. The second part of your question around robotics, yes, we do use robotics in the IT, information technology area. And we also use drone technology for a variety of inspection and maintenance activities and it's something that we continue to monitor as this technology advances. And as it makes sense to employ in our business to meet our goals, we will continue to do that.
Next question is, will your company be a better company as you learn through this crisis and no going back to the old ways?
Well, absolutely. That's a good question. Obviously, as we ramped up quickly to our current state of operations and as we look forward, we are taking the time to evaluate what we are learning and what works well for us and what things we can employ as to gain efficiencies and to keep our employees engaged and to interact with customers and communities, what things we can put in place for the long run. So absolutely that process is underway and we will implement these things as we continue to evaluate.
Next question. Is Avista on the map in the ESG area?
As we discussed in our proxy, we have been actively engaged in environmental, social and governance issues since our founding really. We are among the cleanest energy producers in the country when it comes to greenhouse gases with half of our existing generating capability being clean and renewable. We filed our IRP in Idaho recently and it lays out our goals or lays out our plan to achieve our clean energy goals of being carbon neutral by 2027. And actually, it lays out a framework where we can make substantial progress. There's still work to do around that, but we're making good progress on the environmental front.
As far as social responsibility, we actively pursue employee health and safety initiatives and supporting our communities. We've done a lot around that with regard to the COVID-nineteen crisis. And one of the things we're very proud about is we were named one of the most ethical companies in
the world
by Ethisphere for 2020. So it's something that we are quite proud of. And on the governance side of things, we continually score well on that. So having said that, we are working on our disclosures to better tell our story and we do have a group internal that continues to look at ESG and how we can improve in those areas.
Next question. Is Avista prepared for the 2nd wave of COVID-nineteen?
Good question. We are prepared. We have the policies and procedures that we have put in place to get us to this point to operate in what we're calling a sustained critical operating mode will serve us well with regard to any second wave that might come. And as I mentioned, we are because we are an essential service provider, we are of course looking at CDC and state and local health information and the experts in our various states that we serve and what the plans are there. But we're mindful of our unique role as an essential service provider.
So we will be reengaging and bringing people back to work in a much more measured and cautious way to protect against any kind of second wave. And we've also I need to recognize our supply chain and sourcing professionals in our organization have done just a great job in securing the PPE, the personal protective equipment and the other things that our people need, our employees to to continue to do their job safe.
And the final question is, are you still handing out ballpoint pens as a souvenir?
Well, we are not handing them out today since this meeting is virtual. But if you would like some ballpoint pens as a souvenir, send us an email and we'll make sure we can get you a souvenir ballpoint pen. Okay. It looks like there are no further questions. I'd like to close by one more question.
Sorry, one just came in. In what states do you face competition from other utilities and other companies?
Well, we do not face any direct competition from other utilities. And certainly with other companies, there's efforts by some technology companies to employ some of their technology with our customers, but we have we believe that we are serving our customers well and again running a strong and world class utility is our answer and the best way to provide value to our customers. Okay. There are no further questions. At this point, I'd like to close by saying thank you for attending today's annual meeting.
Have a great day.