Good morning, everyone. I'm Steve Mills, Chairman of Black Hills Corporation's Board of Directors, I'd like to welcome all of you to our annual shareholders meeting. We very much appreciate your attendance, whether in person or via webcast. In accordance with the notice of meeting, I call to order the 2023 annual meeting of shareholders of Black Hills Corporation. Those of you attending in person were given an agenda for this meeting as you entered the meeting room. We will conduct this meeting in accordance with this agenda. On the reverse side of the agenda is a list of rules of conduct for this meeting. In fairness to all shareholders and to conduct an orderly meeting, we intend to adhere to these rules.
Before proceeding to the business portion of the meeting, I would first like to introduce to you the company's board of directors. Our company is very fortunate to have such a distinguished and broadly experienced group of directors, and their contributions are key to the company's ongoing success. The directors' biographies are included in our proxy statement, and I'll introduce the board members now. Please stand as you're introduced. Linden R. Evans, Barry M. Granger, Tony A. Jensen, Kathleen S. McAllister, Robert P. Otto, Scott M. Prochazka, Rebecca B. Roberts, Mark A. Schober, and Teresa A. Taylor. Thank you, directors.
Also present with us today are Scott Loveless and Kristen Cargin from the firm of Deloitte & Touche, our independent public accounting firm, and Spencer Flodin of EQ Shareowner Services, who serves as our Inspector of Elections. Spencer has executed the prescribed oath of office, which will be filed with the minutes of this meeting.
Black Hills Corporation shareholders of record at the close of business on March 6, 2023, were entitled to vote on matters coming before this meeting. I have an affidavit of mailing certifying that all shareholders as of that date were mailed a notice of meeting, a proxy statement, a proxy, and the company's 2022 annual report to shareholders. At the close of business on March 6, 2023, the company had approximately 66.3 million shares of common stock outstanding and entitled to vote. A list of shareholders of record on that date and the number of shares owned by each has been prepared by EQ Shareowner Services, the company's transfer agent and registrar.
A preliminary report by the Inspector of Elections on the number of shares represented at this meeting indicates we have represented, either in person or by proxy, more than 91% of the outstanding shares eligible to vote today. Therefore, we have more than the necessary 50% of the shares to constitute a quorum. On behalf of the Board of Directors and management, I'd like to express my appreciation to all shareholders who have voted or returned their proxies. All shareholders of the company eligible to vote at this meeting have been furnished a proxy statement dated March 15, 2023. Four specific proposals are set forth in the proxy statement. Shareholders who intended to present additional proposals or director nominations at this annual meeting were required to provide notice to the company by January 26, 2023.
The company did not receive any such notifications, therefore, no proposals or director nominations will be accepted from the floor today. The four proposals set forth in the proxy are as follows. Proposal number 1 is for the election of 3 directors to serve until the annual meeting in 2026 and until their respective successors are duly elected and qualified. Scott Prochazka, Rebecca Roberts, and Teresa Taylor have been nominated for election as directors of the company based upon the recommendation of the Governance Committee of the Board of Directors. As a reminder, the board's Governance Committee consists only of independent directors. Our second proposal is to consider the ratification of the appointment of Deloitte & Touche LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year 2023.
While not required by law, the board submits this selection of Deloitte & Touche for ratification by the shareholders as a matter of good corporate governance. Our third proposal is to receive an advisory vote on the executive compensation of our named executive officers, as disclosed in the proxy statement. Our fourth proposal is to receive an advisory vote on the frequency of the advisory vote on our executive compensation. For those shareholders attending in person, the meeting is now open for discussion relating to these four proposals. Once again, please observe the rules which govern this meeting, which were provided to you as you entered the room. If you want to speak now on any of these proposals, please proceed to the microphone in the middle of the room. Comments? No questions or comments specifically relating to these four points. We'll proceed.
Are there any shareholders present in person who have not previously voted in person or by proxy, or shareholders who wish to change their vote? If so, please proceed to the voting table in the back at this time. Since there's no shareholders indicating a need to vote this time, I declare the polls are now closed. Our Inspector of Election informed me prior to the meeting that all four proposals have received more than the required number of votes to pass. The Inspector of Election will tabulate the final vote results, and we will disclose these re-results in a report on Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the next few days. Now I'd like to ask our President and CEO, Linn Evans, to come up and give a brief presentation on the company's business. Following Linn's presentation, we'll take additional shareholders' questions. Okay.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Before we go any further, I'd like to introduce the officer team that are here with us this morning and a couple of other folks. As, say your name and your title, would you please raise your hand and indicate you're here. Wes Ashton, VP of Customer Experience and Communications. Franki Coulter. Franki is our VP of Human Resources. Nick Gardner. Nick is our Vice President of Natural Gas Utilities. Mark Eyre. Are you here, Mark? Hey, Mark, in the back. Thank you. Mark is our VP of Operations for South Dakota Electric. Donna Genora. I haven't seen Donna this morning. Donna is our VP of Tax. She bought a new house yesterday. John Hill, Vice President of Natural Gas Engineering.
Brian Iverson, Senior Vice President of Regulatory, Government Affairs, and General Counsel. Todd Jacobs, Vice President of Growth and Strategy. Marne Jones, Vice President of Electric Utilities. John Jorgensen, Vice President and Chief Security Officer. Richard Kinzley, Senior Vice President and former CFO. Rich will be retiring here soon. His wife, Cindy, is here with him. Let's do Cindy. Thank you both very much for your service and your friendship over the past 22 years that I've been with this organization. You will be missed. Thank you. Erik Keller, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. Amy Koenig, Vice President of Legal and Corporate Secretary. Mark Lux is not here, I believe. Madeline Macapugay, Vice President of Internal Audit. Kimberly Nooney, Senior Vice President, Treasurer, and brand new CFO as of April 1. Tom Stevens, I think he's traveling.
Brian Weber, I saw Brian, Vice President of Electric Transmission and Distribution Strategy and Engineering, the longest title in the company. Congratulations. I'd also like to introduce Mr. John Howard. John was our Lead Director for many years, retired a few years ago and had a very instrumental part to part of my career. Thank you, John, for being here. Last but not least is my bride, Gloria. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your love and support. All she does at home allows me to spend the time I need to do this job. Thank you to her. I'll start this presentation this morning by saying a sincere thank you to our shareholders. We have a very deep respect for our relationship with you.
We take it very seriously, and we work hard to invest your money, your investment, into our systems as we improve life through energy, across with our energy across eight states and 824 communities. Thank you for your trust in us, especially these last several years. A couple of words come to mind for me when I think about the last few years, and it's resiliency and it's consistency and the importance of both of those in our strategy, in our relationships, and certainly what we strive to deliver to you, our shareholders. We very much appreciate your trust, especially in this unique business environment that we've experienced the last few years. On this cover slide, you see three words: Resilient, Reliable, and Ready.
Those are the words I think of when I think of the Black Hills Corporation team, many of whom are listening into this webcast this morning. Thank you for your participation and your interest in our meeting this morning. Especially thank you for all the work you have done this past year to help us accomplish our tasks. I'm very humbled to work beside each one of you, and I appreciate your focus on delivering long-term shareholder value. Some of my comments this morning will contain forward-looking information. On slide two of this presentation, please review our risk factors. Also, please take a very close look at our SEC filings before you make an investment in Black Hills Corporation. I'll start on slide four.
We're an integrated utility, with the inherent strategic diversity, both in the two fuels that we serve, electricity and natural gas, and the eight growing states that we're able to serve and humble territory. We now have 1.33 million customers. Our electric utilities are in four states with 1.5 GW of generation capacity, and we maintain more than 9,000 mi of electric lines. Our natural gas utilities, depicted in the blue, we serve five states with 47,000 mi of gas lines that we own and operate. We also own and operate underground storage assets, which help us be strategic in how we source gas on behalf of our customers. Slide five illustrates our low-risk utility profile. We're essentially a pure play utility.
98% of our assets are either owned by our regulated utilities or they're contracted to our regulated utilities. In addition to our integrated model, we have fuel diversity and we serve multiple states. I see that as a strategic advantage for us as we have multiple opportunities to serve customers over eight states in various different ways. The right-hand pie chart show that 92% of our total revenues are derived from our natural gas assets and our renewable energy, with the remaining 8% importantly coming from our very dependable and extremely efficient mine-mouth coal generation. This greatly reduces our operational risk on behalf of customers, which was probably most notable during Winter Storm Uri in 2021, when much of the natural gas in the south was froze.
We were able to keep customers going, warm with lights, through that particular storm. Slide 6 outlines some of the very key focuses we had during the year and successes that we delivered as a team. I'll talk about each one of these in the separate slides. I'm very proud, on slide seven for those going and following along, I'm very proud of our operational excellence this past year. I'm particularly pleased to point out that our industry's leading electric reliability. All three of our electric utilities, maintain top quartile reliability, according to the Edison Electric Institute survey for FAIDI results, that's F-A-I-D-I results.
We're also fortunate that we're serving growing service territories that might be best indicated, by the 11, I think about 11 new all-time or winter peaks that we set last year as an organization, indicating the growing territories that we're proud to serve. Our natural gas systems also kept up with lots of growth this past year. It's hooking up new customers throughout all of our states. I'm especially proud of how we performed last December during Winter Storm Elliott, when we kept every customer on through that very unique and extensive storm. We continued to enhance our customer experience this year. We've had another year of improving our Net Promoter Scores as an organization, and J.D.
Power recognized us for our effective communications with our customers last year, especially as we introduced instant text messaging to help our customers be aware of things going on in their neighborhood with respect to electricity and gas. Moving to slide eight. We had continued growth and we delivered value for shareholders last year. I'm very proud of our earnings per share grew by 6.1% over the full year last year. We increased our dividend by 5.2%, and our team successfully and safely deployed nearly $600 million of customer-focused capital last year. Very proud of our regulatory team. They produced another strong and productive year last year. We reached very constructive settlements and rate reviews that were approved for Arkansas Gas and for Wyoming Electric, and we also filed a new rate review for Rocky Mountain Natural Gas LLC.
That's our pipeline located in Colorado, and we think we'll have new rates perhaps in place by late this quarter or early the next. Our fuel cost recovery for Winter Storm Uri was a big issue for our organization to manage through, kept our regulatory department very challenged for a while as we sought recovery for those extraordinary expenses that we incurred to serve our customers during Winter Storm Uri when natural gas prices spiked. I'm pleased to say, by year-end, we had collected one-third of those costs from customers. Slide 9 includes our credit ratings and our financial position as of year-end.
We're committed as an organization to strong investment-grade ratings. I'm pleased to say we maintained a BBB+ equivalent at all three of our credit rating agencies, despite the impacts of Winter Storm Uri in 2021 and the macroeconomic environment that we have experienced during 2022. This chart, one we're very proud of on slide 10, illustrates our 52 years of increasing our dividend. That's a remarkable track record. In fact, we're quite proud of that. It's the longest track record, second only to one other utility in the United States. Slide 11 lays out our targets for responsibly reducing emissions 70% by the year 2040 is our target for our electric utilities. To become net zero by 2035 for our natural gas utilities.
Very pleased, our team worked hard to publish an updated sustainability report last year. We've also provided access to customers that are in Kansas and Nebraska, so they can have access to voluntary programs as a buy natural gas carbon offset. We filed those applications in all of our other states as well, and those are progressing to plan. We also continued our all-of-the-above approach with our generation fuels. We're supporting research, we're supporting technology development in our natural gas generation and our coal generation when it comes to carbon capture technologies and hydrogen fuel limited, to make sure we have the opportunities to provide an all-of-the-above generation of opportunities for our customers. On slide 12, we're advancing very well two electric resource plans that will impact our customers into the future, in the near future.
One of those resource plans is for Colorado, the other resource plan is for South Dakota and Wyoming. Between the two resource plans, we plan to provide up to 510 new megawatts of additional renewable generation and energy storage that the customers will start to see between 2025 and 2030. We have a very constructive settlement in Colorado. Following a hearing, we hope it will be approved soon that we can own The 400 MW we intend to add in Colorado. We've also issued this quarter RFPs, requests for proposals for 100 MW of build transfer renewable generation for our jointly owned and operated systems in South Dakota and Wyoming. I'm very pleased, last year, we received approval to construct our Ready Wyoming project.
That's our 260-mile electric transmission project that's going to benefit customers, going to benefit shareholders, gonna help us with price stability, better access to energy markets, and help us create a more resilient and reliable, more interconnected electric system to support the growth that we're seeing in our communities. We're planning to construct that, start construction on that project later this year and have it completed by the end of 2025. We're also investing in developing growth opportunities with our customers. Hyperscale data centers has become a very important part of our growth. Something very exciting is we see data center growth is particularly growing in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Blockchain technology, we are now serving our first significant blockchain miner, and we're seeing those technologies emerge and become important for us as a growth opportunity.
We're also developing renewable natural gas or RNG opportunities across a very rich agricultural region, as you saw in the slides I showed you earlier. In closing, slide 13 illustrates our results and our continued focus on our strategic execution, and appreciate our team's performance on that. Once again, let me express how proud I am of our team. Thank you very much for what we accomplished in 2022. I'm very humbled to work alongside of you, and I can assure you, as shareholders, we're hard at work in 2023 to deliver as best we possibly can on behalf of shareholders, customers, and our employee team. Thank you for your attendance and your attention during this presentation. I'll turn the meeting back to Mr. Mills.
Thank you. I'd now like to open up the meeting for any questions or comments which shareholders may have. Any questions for Linn on the business or on the meeting itself? Seeing none, as there are no further questions, I'd now like to adjourn the meeting. Before I do, I'd like to thank all of you here at Black Hills who are involved in preparing for this meeting and for helping this meeting go so smoothly. Finally, thanks to everyone for attending the meeting today, and thank you for your continued interest in Black Hills Corporation. Stay safe and keep healthy.