The 2021 Alliant Energy Annual Meeting of Shareowners will begin. I'd like to welcome Amy Davis, Vice President, Communications and Marketing. Please go ahead, Mrs. Davis.
Good morning, and welcome to Alliant Energy's 2021 Annual Meeting of Shareowners. I'm Amy Davis, Vice President of Communications and Marketing. Thank you for joining us this morning for our annual meeting. With me is John Larson, Chair, President and Chief Executive Officer and Robert Durian, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We'd be pleased to address your questions relating to the company.
You can submit questions electronically by clicking on the Ask a Question box on your screen. You are now seeing the rules of conduct for guidelines and submitting questions, and we have allotted 15 minutes to address questions at the end of the meeting. Now, I will turn the call over to John.
Thank you, Amy. And to our share owners, welcome to the meeting. Safety is a core value at Alliant Energy, one we live every day. I'd like to ask Robert Durian to help us all keep safety top of mind by providing a safety message before we begin our meeting.
Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. I'm happy to provide this share in collaboration with our partners in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. My share is inspired by 2 events of the past year. The first was the polar vortex across the Midwest in February and the second was a derecho windstorm last August that caused such terrible destruction across Iowa.
I would simply remind everyone to take a few minutes to make sure you and your family are prepared for a significant weather event. Being prepared means something different for every person and family. Whether in a home or in an apartment, we should all have a plan for an emergency. For example, know where to go when severe weather strikes. Also, create an emergency supply kit including food, water and medications.
And finally, plan how your family will connect if normal communication channels are down. It doesn't have to be complicated. Any plan is better than no plan. I hope you find that you'll never need it, but if you do, you'll be very glad you have it. You can find a lot of planning resources for extreme weather at the ready.gov website.
Great safety reminder, Robert. Thank you. Our meeting today will have 2 sections. First, I'll report the voting results for the 4 proposals listed in the proxy. Then we will address submitted questions.
To begin, I'll call the Alliant Energy Annual Meeting of Shareowners to order. When you receive your proxy statement and ballot, you are asked to vote on 4 proposals. Each proposal is outlined in the proxy statement. All shareowners as of March 19, 2021 can vote their shares. If you've already voted, your vote has been counted.
If you have not yet voted or would like to change your vote, you can do so online. Voting will close in the next few minutes. While we're waiting for any final votes, I'd like to acknowledge the members of your Board of Directors, all of whom are attending this meeting. I also want to recognize our executive team and thank them for their leadership in delivering another great year of operating and financial results. Also attending this meeting are Deloitte and Touche, our independent registered public accounting firm and Broadridge Financial Solutions, the Inspector of Elections.
The proxy did show that we received one shareowner proposal from Stephen Molloy of Potomac, Maryland. I'll now ask Mr. Molloy to present his proposal.
Good morning. Can you hear me?
Good morning. Mr. Malloy, you will have 4 minutes to present your proposal. Please proceed.
Okay. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Steve Molloy. Fellow shareholders, my proposal is about honesty and accountability for management.
Honesty and accountability are the key legal duties management owes us, but we are getting neither. I am asking that management report to us on what is being accomplished by spending money on emissions cuts that are not mandated by the government. For example, management has committed to 0 emissions by 2,050. Meeting that goal is impossible, if not just foolish, and certainly it will never actually be enforced unless we are to live without electricity. The grid cannot be operated without the reliable and affordable baseload power provided by coal, natural gas and nuclear power.
Claims to the contrary are sheer nonsense and management knows this. So management is lying to us. And just why has scheming management put off a 0 emissions date to 2,050? Well, it knows it won't be at Alliant 30 years from now to be accountable when the plan inevitably fails. In the meantime, management is happy to virtue signal and profiteer by ripping off our customers with pointlessly higher electricity prices.
Even if you believe the science fraud that powers the climate hoax, here is the indisputable reality. Alliant currently emits about 2 100 of a percent of global emissions. That's 0.02% of global emissions. Alliant could stop emitting today and forever and it would make no difference to climate. In fact, the entire United States could stop emitting today and forever it would make no difference to global climate.
But don't take my word for it. Listen to Joe Biden, who said in his recent address to Congress that even if we go to 0 emission, it's ultimately not going to matter. Biden Climate envoy John Kerry said that both the U. S. And China could go to 0 emissions tomorrow and the climate problem is not solved.
Cary then later added that the whole world could go to 0 emissions by 2,050 and the imaginary problem would still not be solved. The underlying math is simple and it doesn't matter on your view of what passes today as climate science. So, Alliant can achieve nothing on climate, absolutely nothing, except cynical virtue signaling and immoral profiteering. And to further underscore the pointlessness of Alliance extracurricular climate activity, consider that China is currently building an amount of coal power equal to the entire U. S.
Coal fleet. China has no actual plan to cut emissions. It was just reported that China's emissions are up 9% over pre pandemic levels. India plans to double its coal production by 2024, an amount that is twice current U. S.
Coal production. And the continent of Africa still has 600,000,000 people without affordable and reliable electricity. They will be burning coal too. It's no wonder the United Nations reports that emissions are increasing with no end in sight. Management's 0 emissions goal is a total joke.
Money spent on climate is a total waste. Management's discussion of its climate related activities is totally false and misleading. Management is totally violating its legal and fiduciary duties to us. Perhaps management could prove me wrong by producing a requested report, but our dishonest management doesn't want to admit that emissions cuts are a giant hoax and fraud. Instead, management wants to surf the climate scam and use and abuse shareholders and rip off customers.
This conduct is gross. Vote yes on proposal number 4. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you, Mr. Molloy. This proposal was discussed in the proxy statement and your Board recommended a vote against the proposal for the reasons outlined on Page 64. The voting and time for submitting questions to be addressed during the meeting is now closed. We value hearing from our shareowners and we will answer many questions later in this meeting.
All questions, including any submitted after this point, will be addressed and posted to our investor website. I'm told that a quorum of shares is present. I will now share the preliminary voting results. First, each of the nominees to the Board of Directors has been elected. 2nd, the executive compensation proposal was approved.
3rd, Deloitte and Touche has been ratified as our independent registered accounting firm. 4th, the shareowner proposal was rejected. These results are preliminary until verified by Broadridge. The final results will be detailed in an 8 ks filing with the SEC in a few days. This concludes the business portion of the Annual Meeting.
The meeting is adjourned. Now, I am pleased to turn over the microphone to Amy, who will moderate the question and answer session of our call with members of our executive team. Amy?
Thank you, John. We're pleased to address questions submitted by our share owners and we have several that have been submitted today. I'm first going to turn to David De Leon, President of our Wisconsin Energy Company. David, we all see more and more electric vehicles on the road and a share owner is curious how all those new EVs might affect the future of our electrical grid and having enough capacity to charge those cars and trucks?
Sure. Good morning. So the short answer is that we will be fine when it comes to capacity. In all of our clean energy blueprint studies completed, consider that there will be more electric vehicles on the road that will require charging, and that includes our Alliant Energy vehicles. Last September, we announced our plans to electrify all of our light duty vehicles by 2,030.
The capacity is factored into our plants and as we continue to work with customers and understand their needs, we will make adjustments if needed to our distribution system. So we will also do the simple things to help manage capacity like encouraging customers to charge their EVs during off peak hours.
Thank you, David. I'm now going to turn to your counterpart in Iowa, Terry Koba, President of our Iowa Energy Company. Terry, the cold weather situation in Texas earlier this year got people wondering about extreme weather events and how our current and future generation mix are set up for continued reliability in severe cold or heat. Could you share a little bit your thoughts on that?
Sure. Thank you very much, Amy. Just like David talked about how we factored more electric cars into our clean energy blueprint, we also factored in weather extremes. We know that our customers will see at least one long hot spell every summer and I will grant you there are times when the wind doesn't blow. But on those hot summer days when energy demand is at its absolute peak, the sun is about the most reliable source of energy I could possibly think of.
And everybody knows we have cold winters
in the Midwest. So we
build our systems to handle it, which they did very, very well during the cold snap earlier this year, thanks to the great work by our dedicated and skilled employees. In 2020, our generation mix was 34% renewables, 25% coal and 41% gas. We've always worked to have a balanced generation mix and that's why we've been so successful and reliable for our customers. As technology and customer needs change, that balance is naturally going to change itself. In the past, you might have had coal, natural gas and nuclear, and that was balanced.
In the future, it's going to look more like wind, solar, natural gas, battery storage, and likely several other technologies being developed. The key thing is that it's balanced today and our blueprint is carefully guiding the way to being balanced in a different way while still being very reliable and affordable for our customers.
Thank you, Terry. I think David has something to add here. David?
Yes. Thank you. And Terry, I like how you talked about the balance. One point I want to share is that the balance isn't always a 1 for 1 megawatt. So when we talk about adding solar capacity to replace coal fired generation, we plan for something more like 2 solar megawatts being installed for every 1 megawatt of coal and that is done to account for the output of the renewable resource while we maintain reliability of our
system. That's great. Thank you, Terry and David for that detailed response. Moving on to our next share owner, they point out that Alliant Energy uses share owner dollars to sponsor programs and initiatives in the communities we serve. As a regulated business, why should we do that?
And I think this is one that John would really like to speak to. John?
Yes. Thank you, Amy. I sure would. We're very proud and I hope all of you are as well of our efforts to create positive change in Iowa and Wisconsin through our giving programs. They're designed to bring our purpose, which is serving customers and building stronger communities to life.
We provided substantial funding during the pandemic to nonprofits to help our customers with basic needs. One of those key areas of focus is food insecurity. We have an event every year that we call Drive Out Hunger that we're now celebrating. This will be our 15th year that provides significant resources to food banks across all of our territories, and we're very proud of that event among the other programs that we have. After the derecho windstorm last summer, we launched a program called Project Reconnect.
That was to assist our customers who needed electrical repairs before power could be fully restored to their homes. The final phase of this program was focusing on assisting with replanting trees that were destroyed during the derecho. And our employees and retirees also give to their communities, providing over $1,250,000 in personal donations and over 60,000 volunteer hours. When you combine our corporate support with the generosity of our employees and retirees, we provided nearly $9,000,000 of assistance to the communities we proudly serve, demonstrating our values to make things better and do the right thing. We're very proud of the ways our company supports our communities.
I'd like to take this opportunity to say thank you to our community partners, suppliers, employees and retirees. We appreciate everything you do to help us live our purpose.
Thank you, John. We have time for one more question. And before we go there, let me remind you again that we're happy to hear from our shareowners anytime. The easiest way is to email us at shareownerservicesalliantenergy.com. And today's conversation and responses to any questions that we did not address during the meeting will be posted to our website by the end of business on Monday, May 24.
So here's our last question. There's always a lot of interest in politics and political contributions made by our company. So I'm going to ask Jim Gallegos, Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary to talk about our political giving and the controls and transparency we have around that. Jim?
Thank you, Amy. It is important that candidates and elected officials understand the complexities and realities of our industry and recognize the impact their decisions can have on our ability to provide reliable and affordable services to our customers. And we support candidates that support our issues and are willing to engage with us. We have political action committees, which are overseen by boards comprised of employee volunteers. These committees make contribution decisions based on a set of factors that advance the interest of our customers, communities and shareholders and are made without regard for the private political preferences of company executives.
Contributions to candidates are made on a case by case basis. The committees look at many factors, including past voting records and their public statements. The political environment is constantly changing these days and we believe that our transparency and robust oversight serves us well.
Thank you, Jim. We have no further questions, John. So, I'll turn the call back to you.
Thank you, Amy. This concludes our presentation. Please be in touch if you want to know more about our company. Our preference is to have conversations with our share owners throughout the year. As Amy said, any time you have a question, feel free to reach out.
The easiest way is to email shareownerservices at alliantenergy.com. Your questions will be answered promptly. Thank you for attending our annual meeting. Have a safe day.