However, today, costs of every element of our business are rising at an unprecedented pace. Since our customers’ rates are typically set based on historical cost levels through a nearly one-year regulatory review, by the time new rates are put in place, they are already inadequate to fully recover current costs and earn a fair return on investment. Of course, rate increases are not popular among customers, even when rates have been far below the industry norm for many years. Therefore, in order to allow our customers to more easily adjust to higher energy prices, and to allow shareholders to earn a fair profit, we must not wait decades for rate increases, but seek smaller and more frequent increases. We must also seek automatic cost recovery mechanisms for large dollar items, like fuel and environmental investments.

The bottom line is that we are now in a rising cost environment following many years of declining costs for our customers. As a result, it is now more important than ever to obtain constructive outcomes for our rate cases in Illinois and Missouri. We must recover our costs and realize appropriate returns on our investments in order to continue investing in our energy infrastructure on a timely basis to provide our customers with the safe, reliable service they expect.