Thank you, President Joines. Sometimes when I hear how long I've been working at Blue Ridge Energy, it's a little bit humbling to think about being here, but I love what I do, and I love working for you and member-owners. I want to thank you for being with us today and joining us in this annual meeting. I especially want to thank you for the opportunity that I've been entrusted with to serve as your chief executive officer. There's been mentioned a couple of times how difficult COVID-19 has been for our operations, for our employees, for you and our communities, our members, but I'm grateful to you and I'm grateful to our employees that we work together. We got through this very difficult time, got through these serious challenges. 

We were able to work with our team. All of our employees keep all the energy flowing to you and to make it through those worst days with every employee of this cooperative fully employed. I'm proud of that and I'm proud to share that with you. I think that's why we were able to deliver such strong performance to you in 2020. I'll look at our key performance indicators last year. Once again, our employee team just outdid themselves. We've had a long run for many years delivering top-notch results. I think it's because our employees truly believe in our motto, we work for those who own this cooperative, so we should give nothing less than our very best. We live that every day. 

When I had to take a quick overview of some of the key performance indicators, one that I'm really, really proud of is the consumer, American consumer satisfaction index, which measures member satisfaction. We scored 89 in that last year. The average cooperative in America electric cooperative average 73, that is significantly higher level of service and say to us that our members believe that we serve you well, and that we serve you with a servant's heart. Our propane and fuels company, we scored a perfect 10 out of 10 in customer satisfaction. I'm just very, very proud of those. Then the other things that I feel really good about in our results from 2020 is the performance and reliability for electric operations query in the country for keeping the lights on at 69.44 minutes on system average interruption duration. 

That's how we measure how often you have an outage, how long you're interrupted. That's just incredible service when you consider the terrain that we serve in the weather that we have. Again, we're continuing to have outstanding safety results. We have a strong safety performance culture. We have employee-led safety teams. We're very proud of the results that we're achieving in employee safety and in public safety. It's been mentioned by Katie about our rates. I have to say that too, because I'm so pleased that we've been able to have such incredible Work Smart results, good favorable wholesale power cost and our subsidiary results that benefits from both these for-profit companies. We've had opportunity to go eight years without raising your rates. We just think that's an outstanding result to be achieved. As we look the future, the 2020 year is behind us and here we are mid mid-year 2021. 

We spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about our vision for the future, and what's the strategy that we need to embrace to keep this cooperative performing well and providing the kind of results that you deserve as our members. We recently announced a new brighter future vision that we've been sharing with you that has three key pillars in it. The first is to enrich the lives of our members in the communities that you live in. We do that in a lot of ways, through economic development, through the loans and grants that Joy talked about, through the REDLG program with our fire departments and other ways. We do it through youth programs and lots of member involvement programs, and just so many different ways that we are continuing and plan to continue to enrich the lives of people in our community and the members we serve.

We also have embraced a low carbon goal. We've set a goal to be 50% below 2005 levels by 2030 and carbon neutral by 2050. We're developing initiatives to help us achieve this. I think it's important that I state that this goal is not a political goal. This is a business goal. We believe in looking at our business when we set this goal around carbon, we believe we need to have in the generation mix, nuclear, natural gas, solar, wind, hydro. I think to come, there'll be battery storage and things as we get splashed to those to a more favorable place. It's a more of all of the above because we believe we have to provide reliable, affordable, and sustainable power to you. 

If we don't meet all three of those standards, then we will have failed in our vision. The final pillar of our vision is low cost. We can't pursue a low carbon agenda that causes damage to your pocket book. We've got to do all this together very smartly. We've got to make our grid more efficient, more resilient. We got to work with people for more distributed energy resources out on the grid in ways that enable us to meet these three pillars of our vision in a very effective way that we're helping our environment, we're helping your pocket book and we're keeping the lights on regularly. We don't see something happen here, like happening down in Texas this past February.

We also have other initiatives we're excited about. We're under construction in our 11-megawatt utility scale solar. If you're in Caldwell County, that's going to provide a lot of economic benefit for our members. We're pleased with that. We have five community solar gardens that have been fully subscribed to, we actually have a waiting list now. People wanting to subscribe to a panel. We're continuing to provide lots of energy efficiency rebates as members improve their home energy efficiency. We've got the B2B program going full-Scale now. Lots of people participating. You'll be hearing more about beneficial electrification. 

One of the major programs in that is electric vehicle and the encouragement of people to engage with and consider purchasing an EV. You'll be hearing more from us about that in the days ahead. We would also say that we've been developing and working with the board to provide advanced net metering or time of use rates that are available for people who want to home charge their electric vehicle, or if you want to have a whole house advanced time of use rate or if you want to steam that up with rooftop solar. A lot of exciting things happening. In the wholesale power cost area, which is a major component of our rates.

We buy power from Duke Energy Carolinas. We will wholesale power contract and we continue to experience very excellent wholesale power costs. You'll be hearing from us after we meet with our board this afternoon after the annual meeting and share some information with them. You, the members will be hearing from us, and expect to be receiving really nice refund very soon in the next period of time here. We'll be excited to share that with you after we meet with the board later today. This past year in our generation fleet with Duke, we saw much less coal being used, a lot more solar, a lot more hydro with all the rain we've had and a whole lot more natural gas. That has all come together to contribute to a lower energy cost and a lower carbon footprint.

I've been sharing with you that we're in the midst of one of our largest capital investments in Ashe and Watauga County as we bring the 230 KV line over from Ashe County with Watauga County. We're now building the second phase with that line in Watauga County. I'm really proud to share with you that we're building that with Blue Ridge Energy crews. We have our own linemen and field management on site building that line and gives us great opportunity for training, gives us great insight for maintenance and reliability and that our own people have built the line and they understand how to operate it. That's very important, some 17 miles of line that we're building, finishing up to a new 230 KV substation in the Rosewood community of Watauga County. 

That's going to allow us to provide reliable and resilient electric service to our mountain counties for many, many years. Additional initiatives that you're going to be hearing us talk about is advanced metering, we're getting ready to do some change outs to our automated metering, which is an advanced system that allows to have much, much better meter data for you. We're putting in a new meter data management system. I think the ability to work with you, our members in your homes, and with distributed energy resources and provide a whole new level of usage data for you to manage your home energy bill with is going to be incredibly exciting.

That'll be rolling out over the next three years. I'll be remiss if I didn't say we're also experiencing, as I've been sharing with you a significant number of us, baby boomers, retiring. We're seeing a lot of employee retirements happening. A lot of people being promoted from within, a lot of recruiting. I'm really pleased to say we have a large number of people who apply for our jobs, and we're really attracting some crème of the crop talent. As I go around and talk to our new employees, I'm just excited. When we retire, we're going to turn this over to the next generation team that's going to take Blue Ridge to an even higher level. 

Let me just say thank you to all of our employees. Those of us that have been around for a while, and those that have just joined this cooperative and just thank you, employees for the incredible year of service and the results that you deliver to 2020. Now, our culture here is based on strong values, hard work, and a deep belief that providing great service to our members is what we're here for. We have a strong commitment to our communities, a family-based work environment here, and we honor and appreciate people, whether that's members or employees.

We operate with a servant's heart and we will continue to do that in the days ahead. That will enable us to deliver top-notch results for you, our members, year in and year out. I'm proud to tell you also that we just received from our magazines, best places to work in North Carolina award, again for the sixth time. I think it symbolizes the fact that our employees understand and embrace that our purpose here is to make life better for our members and the communities where you live. Thank you very much.