Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Jonathan Arnold - Merrill Lynch.
Jonathan Arnold - Merrill Lynch
Just a quick question. I must apologize if I missed this but could you be a little more specific about what you’ve assumed in your guidance for sales growth year-over-year in the two territories?
William D. Johnson
I’ll ask Mark Mulhern to respond to that.
Mark F. Mulhern
Good morning Jonathan. You know in Florida we’ve got about a negative 1.5% down for the full year 2009 and Carolinas is just slightly positive, less than 1% positive. So net net we’re probably just slightly negative on the total company basis but expect again some contribution on the wholesale side from what we’ve done in the wholesale contract area in Florida. And the Carolinas have been relatively resilient here. We did have the new customer additions in 2008, the 24,000. I think we have a number like 14,000 new customers assumed in our ’09 numbers in Carolinas.
Jonathan Arnold - Merrill Lynch
Those numbers are weather adjusted. Is that correct?
Mark F. Mulhern
Yes they are.
Jonathan Arnold - Merrill Lynch
And as you look at the seasonal profile your comments on kind of a later in the year recovery, should we assume that you have low enough numbers in that in the first couple of quarters and then it accrues through the second half of the year?
Mark F. Mulhern
I think that’s fair. I think a lot of the large customers, especially industrial customers, are dealing with inventories so they’re trying to work the backlog and have curtailed production. And we obviously saw some holiday curtailments where people got longer suspended shutdowns than we have had traditionally. So I would expect the second half of the year would be better than the first.
Jonathan Arnold - Merrill Lynch
On this filing you’ve made today to the fuel filing and then the proposed deferral of part of the nuclear costs, how – I’m guessing that would be on a – you’d expect that to get addressed on a faster timeframe than the actual rate case itself. And is this effectively two filings? You have the fuel piece and then this other piece or is it all one thing? Could you just talk about the timeline for that regulatory angle.
Mark F. Mulhern
Yes. You know the fuel piece we have that for kind of [inaudible] treatment because we want to flow through the reductions in the April bills for customers. So in other words we would hope to get some response back on the request to allow us to flow through the savings to the customers starting in April and then if we are at the 2010 timeline is what Bill outlined.
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