Good morning. Welcome to the PPL Corporation Annual Meeting of Shareowners . Copies of the PPL Corporation proxy statement annual report and rules of conduct are available at the links on the meeting site. If you experience any technical issues, we strongly encourage you to check your internet connection, close and restart your browser, or try another internet browser. The presentation today may include forward-looking statements based on currently available information which involve risks and uncertainties. The presentation may also refer to non-GAAP measures when discussing the company's financial results and earnings forecasts. Before we begin, please take note of PPL's cautionary statement and non-GAAP information posted on the meeting site. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Craig Rogerson, Independent Chair of the Board of Directors of PPL Corporation. Please go ahead, Mr. Rogerson.
Good morning. I'm Craig A. Rogerson, I serve as the Independent Chair of the PPL Board of Directors and will preside over today's meeting. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareowners. We are pleased to again hold our annual meeting of shareowners in a virtual format to increase access and participation. The virtual format offers an efficient means to host the meeting, allows our shareowners to attend the meeting from any location, and affords shareowners the same rights as if the meeting were held in person. This includes the ability to vote your shares electronically during the meeting and ask questions in accordance with our rules of conduct. I'm joined today by PPL's Corporate Leadership Council, including Vincent Sorgi, President and Chief Executive Officer. Joe Bergstein, Jr., Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.
Wendy Stark, Executive Vice President-Utilities and Chief Legal Officer. Angie Gosman, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer. Dean Del Vecchio, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology and Innovation Officer. Lonnie Bellar, Executive Vice President, Engineering, Construction, and Generation. Dave Bonenberger, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Utilities. Jeff Jankowski, Vice President, Corporate Secretary, and Deputy General Counsel-Corporate, will serve as secretary of today's meeting. The heads of our major operating subsidiaries are on the phone with us today. Also joining today's meeting, we have our judge of election and representatives from Deloitte & Touche LLP, our independent registered public accounting firm. Finally, I'd like to introduce our fellow members of the Board of Directors who are joining Vince and me on today's call. They are Art Beattie, retired Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Risk Officer of Southern Company.
Raja Rajamannar, senior fellow of Mastercard Inc. and former Chief Marketing and Communications Officer and President of Healthcare for Mastercard. Heather Redman, Co-founder and Managing Partner for Flying Fish Partners. Linda Sullivan, retired Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President of American Water Works Company, Inc. Keith Williamson, President and Director of the Centene Foundation and former Executive Vice President, Secretary, and General Counsel of Centene Corporation. Phoebe Wood, Chief Executive Officer of KirtleyWood LLC, a board advisory firm, Principal of CompaniesWood, and retired Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer of Brown-Forman Corporation. Armando Zagalo de Lima, retired Executive Vice President of Xerox Corporation. Now I'm pleased to call the meeting to order. The polls are now open and will close after presentation of the last proposal.
Only share owners who held shares as of March 4, 2026, the record date for this meeting, are entitled to vote shares. If you have already voted your shares, there's no need to vote again. If you would like to vote your shares or change your vote, you may do so until we close the polls by following the instructions on your screen. At today's meeting, we will first conduct the business portion, which involves four management proposals as described in the proxy statement. After the polls close for voting on these proposals, Vincent Sorgi will provide an update on the company's performance and business strategy. If we experience a technical malfunction or other disruption that is not resolved within a reasonable time, then, as Chair of the meeting, I may deem the official business complete, the polls closed, and the meeting adjourned.
Following Vince's presentation, we will turn to the question-and-answer session and answer the questions submitted on the annual meeting website. Share owners may enter their control number to log in to the annual meeting website and may ask a question at any time during the meeting by navigating to the Ask a Question field and clicking Submit. We will conduct the meeting consistent with the rules of conduct posted on the PPL website and available through the link at the lower right corner of your screen. Now let's move ahead with our meeting. At this time, we will appoint a Judge of Election for today's meeting. Tracy Oats , formal delegate from Broadridge will serve as our Judge of Election. I will now ask Jeff Jankowski to confirm the notice and quorum and to present the business matters of the meeting. Jeff, please go ahead.
Thank you, Craig. I have been informed that notice of this meeting was properly mailed to the share owners of the company. Our judge of election has taken the oath and has informed me that sufficient shares are represented at this meeting in person or by proxy and therefore a quorum is present. I will now present the matters to be voted on. The first proposal to be considered at this meeting is the election of the nine directors nominated by the Board of Directors as disclosed in our proxy statement. The Board recommends a vote for each of the nominees. Proposal 2 is an advisory vote to approve compensation of the named executive officers as disclosed in our proxy statement.
The Board recommends a vote for this proposal. Proposal 3 is the request by the company for approval of the PPL Corporation Second Amended and Restated 2012 Stock Incentive Plan. The Board recommends a vote for this proposal. Proposal 4 is the request by the company to ratify the Audit Committee's appointment of Deloitte & Touche LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm of PPL and its subsidiaries for 2026. We are pleased to have representatives of Deloitte & Touche with us on the phone today. The Board recommends a vote for this proposal.
Thank you, Jeff. If you have not yet voted your shares or if you wish to change your vote, you may vote now by clicking on the Vote Here button on your screen. We will now pause to allow share owners to vote.
Thank you for voting. I now declare the polls closed. Next on our agenda is a brief business update from PPL CEO Vincent Sorgi.
Thank you, Craig, and thank you to everyone joining us today for PPL's 2026 Annual Meeting of Share owners. It's an honor to address our share owners on behalf of our more than 6,500 employees who come to work every day with a clear purpose: To provide safe, reliable, and affordable energy service to the customers and communities who depend on us. Our people are the foundation of everything we do. They respond in the toughest conditions, operate increasingly complex systems with precision and care, and continuously look for better ways to serve customers and manage costs. At PPL, we continue to deliver on our promises and strengthen our position as one of the leading utilities in the U.S. Over the past several years, we have fundamentally reshaped PPL. We've built a strong and experienced leadership team aligned around a clear strategy.
We've strengthened our balance sheet and improved our operational performance. We have positioned the company to lead through a period of rapid and consequential change in the energy industry. Today, energy demand is rising at a pace we have not seen in decades. Data centers, electrification, and advanced manufacturing are driving significant load growth. At the same time, severe weather is becoming more frequent and more intense, placing greater demands on energy infrastructure. These forces are converging, creating both challenges and opportunities for well-positioned utilities. The good news is that PPL is built for this moment. In my remarks today, I'll highlight our progress and review our prior year performance. I'll discuss how we are executing our Utility of the Future strategy and share how we are positioning PPL for sustainable long-term growth while keeping customer affordability front and center.
I'll close with a few thoughts on PPL's outlook and our commitment to you, our share owners. First and foremost, providing electricity and natural gas safely, reliably, and affordably to our 3.6 million customers remains our top priority. In 2025, our teams once again delivered outstanding operational performance. Across our footprint, we achieved 1st quartile or near 1st quartile electric transmission and distribution reliability. At our Kentucky Utilities, our generation fleet delivered top decile performance nationwide. In our gas operations, we outperformed our targets for leak response times, enhancing safety and service for our customers. These results were achieved in the face of increasingly severe weather. Our crews responded to major storms across our service territories, restoring power safely and quickly while supporting one another and our communities. Their work reflects not only technical skill, but also a deep sense of responsibility and care.
A commitment formally recognized by the Rhode Island House of Representatives in March, when Rhode Island Energy's electric and gas teams were honored for their response to the historic blizzard of 2026. At the same time, we continued to invest heavily in our systems to strengthen resilience and prepare for future needs. In 2025, we executed $4.4 billion in critical infrastructure investments. These investments focused on hardening and modernizing the grid, replacing aging equipment, deploying advanced technologies, upgrading natural gas pipelines, and beginning construction of new generation resources in Kentucky. These investments are essential to maintaining reliability, addressing growing demand, powering economic development, and protecting customers over the long term. Affordability is a central pillar of our strategy, and it starts with cost discipline.
In 2025, we exceeded our O&M savings targets, achieving approximately $170 million in annual run rate savings from our 2021 baseline. These savings matter. Every dollar we save through efficiencies helps limit pressure on customer bills and allows us to self-fund investments that improve service, reliability, and resilience. Across our jurisdictions, we take a disciplined, collaborative approach to regulation, one that starts with early engagement, transparency, and a clear focus on customer outcomes. We work closely with regulators and stakeholders to ensure needed investments are well-planned, efficiently executed, and balanced with affordability. Our goal is straightforward: maintain safe and reliable service, strengthen resilience for the long term, and do so in a way that earns regulatory trust and delivers value for both customers and share owners. In Kentucky, construction is underway on new, highly efficient natural gas combined cycle generation, solar generation, and battery storage.
These investments will support reliability, enable economic growth, and advance a cleaner energy mix while keeping costs manageable for our customers. Affordability also depends on factors outside our direct control, particularly energy supply costs in our deregulated markets. In Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, rising wholesale power prices have been the major driver of higher customer bills. The long-term solution is clear. More reliable, dispatchable generation is needed to better balance supply and demand. That reality has shaped much of our strategic focus. In Pennsylvania, we are addressing these challenges in a responsible way. Last year, we announced a joint venture with Blackstone Infrastructure to support bring-your-own generation solutions for large load data center customers under long-term energy supply services agreements. This joint venture is designed to match new generation directly with new demand, ensuring that large load customers bear the generation costs needed to serve their facilities.
When done responsibly, large load customer growth will improve system reliability, lower transmission costs per customer, and lower wholesale power prices as new supply is added. That is exactly where we are focused with our large load strategy. While PPL's involvement in the joint venture is through a new unregulated subsidiary, we are not re-entering the merchant generation business per se. The long-term energy supply service agreements we will be entering with hyperscalers will have utility-like risk profiles and will not expose PPL to energy and capacity price volatility like the traditional merchant generation business model does. Apart from our joint venture activities, we continue to support legislation that has been introduced in Pennsylvania to address resource adequacy and generation supply in PJM.
The legislation would support the use of long-term contracts with independent power producers, helping to de-risk generation investment and enable the timely development of new supply. The Pennsylvania legislation would allow utilities to build and own generation as a backstop to competitive markets when needed to ensure resource adequacy and support long-term energy affordability. This approach is not about replacing markets, but about complementing them when they are not delivering sufficient or timely supply. In Rhode Island, we've announced our participation in the offtake for a natural gas pipeline enhancement project, which will bring additional daily supply into the state and broader New England region, lowering our reliance on and exposure to higher spot purchases and expensive LNG. We are also actively engaged with stakeholders as the state considers its own proposed legislation that would permit utility ownership of generation assets.
At the same time, we are taking proactive steps in several of our jurisdictions to help manage near-term bill impacts while continuing to invest for the future. In Rhode Island, for example, we are proposing significant bill credits under our proposed hold harmless commitment, and we are supporting our more vulnerable households through proposed tariff changes in our pending base rate case filing, all while still moving forward with the infrastructure investments needed to strengthen reliability and resilience. This balanced approach allows us to support affordability today without compromising the long-term performance of our energy networks. Economic development remains strong across our footprint as well, and PPL continues to play a vital role in enabling projects that create jobs, strengthen local economies, and enhance long-term community investment. In Pennsylvania, we're supporting a very active data center development pipeline with more than 28 GW of projects in advanced stages of planning.
In Kentucky, demand growth is also strong, with a development pipeline approaching 13 GW led by data centers and advanced manufacturing. Across both regions, our responsibility is clear: to plan carefully, invest responsibly, and protect our customers while supporting growth that benefits our communities and the broader economy. Turning to our financial performance, 2025 was another year of execution for you, our shareowners. We delivered ongoing earnings of $1.81 per share, in line with the midpoint of our earnings guidance and representing solid year-over-year growth. From 2024 to 2025, our Board increased PPL's common stock dividend by nearly 6%, extending our track record of predictable dividend growth. We maintained a strong balance sheet that provides flexibility as capital requirements across the industry continue to rise. These results reflect disciplined planning, constructive regulatory outcomes, and strong day-to-day execution across the company.
They also reflect years of intentional work to reshape PPL into a focused, financially strong, and operationally excellent regulated utility. Beyond our operational and financial performance, we remain deeply committed to the communities we serve. In 2025, PPL and its affiliated foundations contributed more than $15 million to organizations and programs that improve quality of life and help our communities thrive. Our employees volunteered more than 28,000 hours of their time, supporting local needs with the same dedication they bring to their work every day. As we look ahead, our Utility of the Future strategy continues to guide our decisions and investments. That strategy is straightforward and deliberate. We are building utilities that are stronger and more resilient in the face of more severe weather. Smarter through grid modernization, automation, and advanced data analytics.
Cleaner through a thoughtful transition of our generation mix, and more efficient by leveraging technology and disciplined cost management strategies. Innovation plays a critical role in our strategy as well. We are expanding the use of advanced digital tools to improve planning, optimize asset maintenance, and enhance the customer experience. From advanced metering and distribution automation to emerging applications of artificial intelligence, these technologies are helping us operate more efficiently and make better decisions every day. We're also investing in our people. As the industry evolves, so do the skills required to succeed. We are providing our employees with new tools, training, and development opportunities to ensure they not only survive this period of intense change, but they are able to thrive in it. Building on our strong foundation, in February, we introduced an updated business plan that extends and strengthens PPL's long-term growth outlook.
For 2026, we issued ongoing earnings guidance of $1.90-$1.98 per share. We extended our targeted 6%-8% annual earnings growth rate through at least 2029, with expectations for growth near the top end of that range. We're targeting annual dividend growth in the 4%-6% range to support reinvestment, continuing 80 years of consecutive quarterly dividends to our shareowners. We outlined a $23 billion capital plan from 2026 through 2029 to continue strengthening reliability, modernizing the grid, and constructing new generation resources. Importantly, this plan maintains a strong focus on affordability and credit quality. It does not include the potential upside from our joint venture with Blackstone, which could contribute additional earnings during this plan period, depending on project timing and customer commitments.
That said, we continue to make meaningful progress advancing the joint venture as data center growth accelerates and large load customers increasingly recognize their responsibility to bring dedicated generation solutions alongside new demand. This alignment is reinforced by the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, under which major hyperscaler customers have affirmed that new large-scale data center load will be supported by new generation resources rather than relying on existing resources, helping to lower costs for our existing customers while supporting resource adequacy. As we execute this base plan, opportunities remain. Competitive transmission, additional infrastructure to support economic development, and further generation needs as demand grows all represent potential upside over the longer term. In closing, the state of our company is strong. We have momentum behind us, clarity of our strategy, and confidence in our ability to execute.
The energy industry is changing rapidly, but the fundamentals of success remain the same: safety, reliability, affordability, and trust. We are committed to delivering safe and dependable energy for our customers, supporting the communities we serve, and creating long-term value for you, our shareowners. Thank you for your continued investment in PPL and for your support of our company and our people. That concludes my remarks. I'll now turn it back to you, Craig.
Thank you, Vince. I now ask the Judge of Election to submit her report.
Mr. Chair, the Judge of Election of the 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareowners of PPL Corporation hereby provides the following preliminary voting results for each of the matters presented at the meeting. The individuals listed in the company's proxy statement as nominees for directors each received more than 580 million votes, and therefore nominees Arthur P. Beattie, Raja Rajamannar, Heather B. Redman, Craig A. Rogerson, Vincent Sorgi, Linda G. Sullivan, Keith H. Williamson, Phoebe A. Wood, and Armando Zagalo de Lima have been duly elected directors of the company to hold office until the next annual meeting of shareowners. The Judge of Election reports that the company's proposal to approve the compensation of named executive officers has been approved by shareowners receiving more than 580 million votes.
The Judge of Election reports that the company's proposal to approve the PPL Corporation Second Amended and Restated 2012 Stock Incentive Plan has been approved by shareowners receiving more than 580 million votes. The Judge of Election reports that the action of the Board of Directors in the appointment of Deloitte & Touche LLP as independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2026 has been duly ratified.
Thank you very much for your report and for assisting us today. We will be reporting the final vote results in a Form 8-K to be filed within four business days. We'd like to take your questions now. As a reminder, shareowners who would like to ask a question may do so by navigating to the Ask a Question field on the virtual meeting website. As noted in our rules of conduct, we ask that each question be limited to a single topic and be succinct. We have allotted approximately 20 minutes to answer questions today. Any questions pertinent to the meeting and not answered during this time will be posted with answers on our website as soon as practical and will be available until one week after posting. Ryan Hill, Vice President of Corporate Communications, will read questions submitted by shareowners. Ryan, do we have any questions?
Thank you, Craig. We received a few questions in advance of today's meeting, all tied to data centers. I think I can sum up the questions with one overarching question, which is why has PPL decided to support the development of data centers?
Thanks, Ryan. Vince, I'll turn this one over to you.
Sure. Thanks, Craig, thanks to shareholder for the question. This is obviously a hot topic, especially in Pennsylvania and Kentucky for us, there are really a number of reasons that why we've made supporting data centers a strategic priority in our service territories. First, I've talked about this in the past, they are critical to America maintaining its economic competitiveness, of course, there are national security implications as well. If you bring it closer to home in our territories for our customers and our communities, with affordability such a big issue right now, data centers are positive for customer affordability, they're positive for our shareowners, when done right, they're positive for the communities where they're built.
I'll walk through why that's the case, starting with affordability, and there are really a few reasons why they support lower electricity bills. First, PPL Electric Utilities in Pennsylvania, they pay significant transmission costs to PJM, which is our regional transmission operator. Those costs are allocated to all of our customers, including our residential and small business customers. When data centers connect to the transmission grid, because of the size and the type of load that they are, they get allocated a large portion of those fixed transmission costs that the utility pays. That ends up saving our existing customers money on their bills. With the current 28 GW that we have in our pipeline that I mentioned, we estimate that will reduce the bills of an average residential customer by about $20-$25 a month.
Data center companies now have agreed to pay for new generation assets to be built in support of their data centers. As these new plants get built, that will increase the supply of electricity generation in the market and will also lower wholesale power prices, which gets passed on directly to our customers. As wholesale power prices come down, so will electricity bills. Finally, connecting data centers to the grid, it does require a certain amount of upgrade to the transmission system, and the data centers are paying for those upgrades. They pay anywhere from 50% or more of the cost of the upgrade directly for the upgrades. The utility's not paying those, the data center's paying it directly. They pay for the rest under the tariff that they have to pay.
Our existing customers are getting significant upgrades that they otherwise would need to pay for, but the upgrades are being paid for by the data center companies, and those upgrades will result in better reliability for these communities. We also have put in very strong safeguards to ensure that costs don't shift back to our existing customers if the data center, for some reason, does not connect to the grid or does not connect at the same level that they had promised or had expected. These include required prepayments that they have to make, there's credit support they need to provide, and then there's a minimum usage commitment that they make for a period of time so that our existing customers are not at risk of paying for infrastructure that is needed to serve a data center.
Really, importantly, I really want to stress this point, these affordability benefits flow to utility customers where the data centers are connected, not somewhere else. When data centers connect in our Pennsylvania service territory, for example, those benefits flow to our PPL Electric Utilities customers. If a data center connects somewhere else, say, New Jersey or Virginia or Maryland, they do not get those benefits. Going back to the generation part of the equation, this is precisely why we've created our joint venture with Blackstone. It's really designed to help match new demand from the data centers with new generation, and that will strengthen grid reliability, resilience, and affordability, as I mentioned before.
Really, the two main issues that we hear about with data center development are, and electricity and on the electricity side, potential risk to reliability on energy bills. Data centers can actually improve reliability for our local community, as I mentioned before. On construction of the data centers themselves. Approached the same way. We've seen cases where projected water usage is higher than communities expect or feel comfortable with, and that can be a challenge to those facilities receiving local support. At the same time, we've met with many developers who have listened to the concerns of our local communities and have opted for designs that use very little water. At the end of the day, it's an important issue to get right, and particularly for the data centers if they're looking to win local support.
In addition, many of the companies that we're dealing with, they wanna be true partners with the local communities, helping to provide new well-paying jobs, both during construction but also afterwards when the data center is in service. They want to invest in community projects that are important to the local community, and of course, providing significant property taxes that can be used in multiple ways for that community, including lowering existing property tax bills. If you go back to the bottom line that I started with, done right, data center development coupled with investment in new generation can help lower overall energy costs for our customers while at the same time improving reliability. At the same time, they can provide a whole host of positive benefits for the communities that we serve.
For shareowners, supporting data centers provides a return on the investments needed to connect them, and then more substantially, the returns related to the generation that we plan to build with our joint venture with Blackstone. This truly is a win-win opportunity for both our customers and our shareowners, and it's why we've made it a strategic priority to support them.
Thank you, Vince. Craig, we have no further questions.
Thanks, Ryan. With that, the Q&A portion of our meeting is concluded. I thank all of you for participating in today's meeting and for your continued support of PPL Corporation. The meeting is now adjourned.