Southern Company Town Hall Webcast – Thursday, April 16, 2020 Rough Transcript
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Southern Company Town Hall Webcast – Thursday, April 16, 2020 Rough Transcript Operator: Welcome to the Southern Company town hall webcast on April 16th, 2020. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you would like to ask a question via the web interface, simply type your question in the ask a question box and click send. If any participant has difficulty hearing the presentation, please submit your question via the same tool. I will now hand the presentation over to Tom Fanning, chairman, president, and CEO of Southern Company. Please go ahead, sir. Tom Fanning: Welcome, everybody, to this virtual town hall. I think in times like this, I love that phrase, communicate relentlessly. I don't think there's more we can do than keeping each other informed. And I think through the thought leadership of folks like Chris Womack and others, we decided this format may prove to be beneficial to us all. And to those of you who have not been on a call like this, this is going to feel like something we do about every two weeks. In fact, during the coronavirus, we've been doing it for a while every day, and then maybe three times a week. Now we're doing it about twice a week. This will feel like a Southern Company Management Council call with a little bit of an expanded universe. I know we have people all over the system listening, so let me just fill you in, roughly, on who's on the Southern Company Management Council. President and CEO of Alabama Power is Mark Crosswhite. Georgia Power will be Paul Bowers. Anthony Wilson, Mississippi. Kim Greene, our gas companies. Stan Connally, our EVP of operations. Steve Kuczynski, our president of Southern Nuclear. Chris Womack, president of external. Chief legal counsel, Jim Kerr. Mark Lantrip. He runs a whole broad range of things, including Southern Power, PowerSecure, a lot of our marketing and creative ideas. Drew Evans, of course, our CFO. Our three-headed monster of human resources, Sloane Evans, James Garvie, Jeff Peoples. Particular focus on Washington DC and all the activity going on there. Bryan Anderson's on the phone. And look, there's others on the phone as well. So we're happy to first give a pretty quick overview as to what's going on in the system. And then what I want to do is open the line up for questions. And we've already received several of them via email. But anything that comes to mind, I'd love to hear what's on your mind. So without further ado, let me go ahead and get going. This is a challenging time, when you consider the videos we've done on the coronavirus. We've been able to keep great momentum on Vogtle 3 and 4. We'll give you the latest and greatest there. And then we had these storms that really started in Texas and Arkansas and Louisiana and came barreling through the Southeast and up the Eastern Coast. Our guys did a terrific job managing that crisis. And I think we got the power on in a spectacular manner. So thanks for all them. And we'll get some updates on how that went, plus any recent activities from our regulators and policy makers. Before we get into all of that, though, please understand that everything we do is predicated with safety. And in fact, every call that we do as a Management Council begins with a report on safety and also a report on representation. So I'm going to start this call off like all the others and ask Stan Connally to kick us off with some safety information. Stan? Stan Connally: Great, Tom. Thank you. And look, thanks to everybody out there listening. Safety is our first value under our values. And I can assure you all, not only by the conversations I've been in, but by watching your actions, I can tell safety first has been at the forefront of how you've dealt with everything we've dealt with over the last few weeks. Look, this is probably the most broad safety message or briefing I've ever done. I mean, we've got people scattered out all over the country, scattered out in homes and places of business, where people are still working at our company locations. And so the diversity of the safety message is pretty complex. But I just thought today, maybe quickly, I'd get three quick things. I think that when things get complex, it's best to keep things simple. And I got TranscribeMe 1 three safety messages I wanted to just share with this group as we think about what we're going through and what we're going to continue to go through. The first one-- and I know in many ways, many folks in our company are working alone, whether at your home, or you're kind of doing remote work, or you're a lone worker. I think it's always important for us to remember being mindful of our individual surroundings, and recognizing that the person most responsible for your safety is you, the individual. And I would just ask that you don't let safety wane in your daily work planning, whether you're coming to a business location or you're working from home. Please take some time every day to individually think about safety and own that. The second one-- and I think this is tough right now, but y'all have done a great job as a company maintaining a team environment, even as we've gone through what we've gone through in the last few weeks. And I think it's just important that we not forget being each other's brother and sister when it comes to safety, is still an important part of our safety success. Now that's different in how we pull that off. Sometimes it might take a phone call, or a safety briefing on a radio, or doing it on a conference call. Whatever it is, we just need to not forget that the team environment that we work in is one of the key ingredients to our safety success. And just ask that everybody remain their brother and sister's keeper as we work our way through this. And the last one, it means a lot to me over my career. And I think it's more important now than ever before. And that is, be here now. We at the Management Council have talked about the many distractions that our team has in front of them right now. It's clearly the physical distractions and the third party or the environmental distractions. But there's mental distractions too. And we all manage that very differently. And I think we have to recognize that. But if we can find a way to simply be here now, focusing on the here and now when it comes to safety. I've seen us rise to the occasion in a lot of tough times in Southern Company. Storms, outages, you name it. We had one of those this week. And our team always rises to the challenge when it comes to those kinds of things. And I think it's because we can find a way to be in the moment and be here now. And I would tell you, now, more than ever, from a safety perspective, being here now is a key ingredient. So take personal responsibility, be each other's brothers' and sisters' keeper, and be here now. I think if we can maintain those principles that may feel old in some ways, but they're core of what we do on safety, we'll all get home to our families every day and through the end of this pandemic. Thanks for what you're all doing. Please stay focused on safety. It will remain, always, our first value. Tom, turn it back to you. Tom Fanning: Thanks, buddy. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks, bud. Hey, let me-- keeping everybody healthy and safe, while continuing to provide value and reliability and low prices to customers, has always been our top priority. And we all have to work hard on doing everything we can to stop this virus as best we can. What I'd like to do now, just to follow the safety speech, is to ask Sloane to give us an update on what the latest statistics are with respect to the spread of the virus in our company. Sloane? Sloane Drake: Sure. Thanks, Tom. So currently, we have 91 confirmed cases. 10 of those have since recovered and returned to work. And let me just quickly give you an overview of what that looks like by each operating company. So for Alabama Power, there are 7 confirmed cases. 1 has recovered. For Georgia Power, 5 confirmed cases. 4 have recovered. At PowerSecure, there are 4 confirmed cases. 1 has since recovered and returned to work. For SCS, it was 9 cases. 1 has returned. For operations team, there are 4 confirmed cases. For Southern Gas, there are 7, and 1 has returned to work. Southern Power, no confirmed cases. For Vogtle 3 and 4, there are 52 confirmed cases. And for Southern Nuclear fleet, 3 confirmed cases, and 2 have returned to work. Tom Fanning: Hey, Sloane, give it to us by location, if you could.