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Earnings Calls: 
FPL Group Fourth Quarter Earnings Call
Author: Rozalina Destanova
123jump.com
Last Update: 12:22 PM EST January 30 2008


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The wind power company’s revenue was $3.7 billion, failing to meet expectations of $3.9 billion. Items included an after-tax loss of $58 million for hedges. Adjusted earnings rose to 71 cents a share from 63 cents a share. In December the company received regulatory approval to implement extended power uprights at all four existing Florida nuclear units. FPL expects 2008 full-year adjusted earnings per share to be between $3.83 and $3.93, and 2009 earnings per share of $4.15 to $4.35.


Investors Question and Answers

 
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Sequential Earnings Growth | Quarterly Earnings by Year | Quarterly Earnings Growth by Year

Source: Company filings    Q1:March  Q2:June  Q3:September  Q4:December
 
Moray Dewhurst: We are not looking for any meaningful contribution until 2011, 2012 time frame. The development cycle is longer than even for the wind business and the construction cycle is longer too so we feel good about where we are on the development front but it is going to be further out before it turns into earnings than it would be for comparable effort on the wind side.

Paul Patterson (Glenrock Associates): Are you seeing any impact on demand response or anything with advanced metering?

Moray Dewhurst: On the second part of that question I do not think we are deep enough into the development program to see anything meaningful.

Paul Patterson (Glenrock Associates): On the customer demands you mentioned that there could have been a potential impact associated with non price customer usage or demand but that was hard to model out. Could you expand on that?

Moray Dewhurst: My comment was meant to capture the fact that there has been a huge amount of attention focused on energy issues, energy efficiency issues, climate change, all those things so that has to be present in people’s consciousness. To what extent people may have acted on that and as a consequence changed their consumption patterns of electricity manifesting itself in lower usage, we just do not know. That is something that mechanical model which has a price elasticity term in would not capture. The reality is that our prices as you may recall in 2006 when we had a significant increase in prices driven by fuel, we expected a price elasticity affect and it came through much as the model would have predicted. Now in 2007 retail prices were flat or down, so there should be no price elasticity affect one way or the other. We should go back to whatever our underlying trend is, but the underlying trend was short of our expectations. Possibly customers have begun to change their usage patterns but that is speculative and in any case it is not operational for us to use the predicting where we are going to be in 2008 so that we have little alternative other than to continue to monitor it and learn more as we go along.

Paul Patterson (Glenrock Associates): What the regulatory ROE that you have earned was for 2007?

Moray Dewhurst: We came in the end at 12%; it was better than we had expected mainly due to some working capital issues.

Steve Blishman (Catapult Capital Management): On the wind claim sales, the differential transactions, the contracts at the end when you own full ownership are you selling that power merchant or is that power contracted beyond the ten year period?

Moray Dewhurst: This portfolio has all the 20 year PPAs on it. At the end of 20 years we have all the pure long term upside whatever that turns out to be in a carbon constrained environment, we think it is going to be significant. We also get the vast bulk of the economics back for the second ten years.

Steve Blishman (Catapult Capital Management): You have this SCM auction coming up. Where that likely goes and do you expect that it will represent true capacity prices?

James Robo: We are watching it closely and since we will be a big player in that auction it is not appropriate for us to talk about where we think things are going end up.

Moray Dewhurst: The rules of bidding process are complex but clear is the best way to put it and built into that sort of descending auction format there are a couple of points where the participants get to make some decisions as to what they want to do with their capacity. There are some inherent options that one has in the bidding process and that provides strong incentives for all market players to think carefully about those options as they go through their bidding.

Shalini Mahajan (UBS): Could you quantify the top line pressure that Florida Power & Light Company more specifically in terms of your 2008 EPS guidance for the utility at 215 and 220 which almost had a 30 cents to 35 cents contribution from revenue growth?

Moray Dewhurst: We do not have any update on that at the moment, it is early in the new year and I do not know what else I could put in there. We do not feel as good about the revenue piece but how much that is going to turn out to be I just could not say at the moment. We will get a better view as we go through the first quarter as to what is happening and we will adjust it. In terms of the overall outlook for 2008 for the whole portfolio while there is some weakness in the drivers on that side offsetting that we have seen some strengthening in some of the drivers for FPL Energy so at this stage it is early in the year.

Shalini Mahajan (UBS): Could you elaborate on the offsets because it seems in the differential partnership structure there is some earnings drag from that as well?

James Robo: For 2008 and 2009 any of the impacts from that transaction were reflected in the expectations that we gave you in October.

Moray Dewhurst: The difference between using that structure and a conventional project finance structure is immaterial in the context of the earnings ranges that we set out so it is a non factor in that regard.

Shalini Mahajan (UBS): You mentioned in your comments about some problems with wind turbines. Could you elaborate on that?

Moray Dewhurst: We had mentioned as we went through last year that we continue to experience problems with some of the newer turbines. The technology of these wind turbines is good but it is still not as robust and reliable as we would like it to be and that is most noticeable whenever any of the manufacturers makes a step up and particularly in size or introduces a new gearbox or whatever it happens to be in the design, so we tend to have a few infant mortality problems and the operational people are still working through those on the wind fleet. There is an overall forced outage rate for the full portfolio of less than 3% and we think it is outstanding.

Patrick Forkin (Tejas Securities): Could you give insight into the gating factors on the 50,000 end points that you did last year and 50,000 for 2008?
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