Sustainable growth
Supply chain and diversity
Every day, we strive to improve life with energy by strengthening our communities through growth and development opportunities.
Realizing this goal means building strong partnerships with diverse businesses.
In 2022, we spent approximately $758 million of direct spend with suppliers to support our utility operations and better serve our customers. Of that spend, 37% was completed with businesses within our eight-state service territory. We also remain committed to supporting the small and diverse local businesses in our communities. In 2022, our spend with small businesses, women and minority-owned businesses and other diverse suppliers represented 15% of our total dollars spent.
Black Hills Corporation is committed to safety, diversity, environmental leadership, social responsibility, and ethical business practices. These fundamental values guide how the decisions we make today are the right decisions for tomorrow. We expect our suppliers of goods and services to adhere to these fundamental values and apply them to how they do business. Our Supplier Code of Conduct describes our expectations in more detail.
Direct economic impact
Our social impact adds economic value within our local communities. We play a critical role in the ecosystem providing jobs and benefits to our employees, by paying taxes, community giving and purchasing goods and services to maintain and upgrade our vast network of electric and natural gas system infrastructure. In 2022, our direct economic impact was estimated at $1.34 billion.
Financial performance
We marked 139 years of delivering energy to customers in 2022, a testament to our long-term strategy and financial strength. Sustaining Black Hills Energy into the future requires solid financial performance to provide the necessary capital to invest in our customers and communities. Our financial results in 2022 reflected our ongoing investments to better serve our customers and support their increased demand for energy.
For 2022, we reported earnings per share of $3.97. Results were driven by disciplined cost management, fair returns on invested capital and ongoing customer growth. We were proud to provide safe and reliable service to our customers through Winter Storm Elliot in December 2022. Our solid financial position allowed us to successfully carry the financial burden from that storm, on behalf of customers, as we set in place recovery plans and gained approval from regulators for those plans.
Success in serving the growing needs of our customers requires consistent investment and a forward-thinking operational team. In 2022, we deployed $598 million of capital primarily for safety and resiliency and to meet ongoing customer growth. Maintaining that focus, we are forecasting capital investments of $3.5 billion over the next five years. We are balancing investment needs against strengthening our balance sheet and customer costs, particularly in the current inflationary environment. In striking that balance, we are projecting capital investment of approximately $600 million for 2023, while continuing to focus on financial discipline and placing an intentional emphasis on fostering our continuous improvement culture.
We completed 52 consecutive years of dividend increases, one of the longest dividend increase track records in the natural gas and electric utility sector. In this time, we increased our dividend by $0.12 to $2.41 per share and averaged an increase of 5.9% annually over the last five years. This remarkable consistency speaks to the leadership, vision and perseverance of our company. We are equally proud that the company has paid dividends to our shareholders every year since 1942, or 80 years, another illustration of our resiliency and commitment to creating sustainable value for our shareholders.
Capital investment
Our team successfully executed our customer-focused capital investment program, prudently deploying $598 million in 2022 to improve the safety, reliability and resiliency of our extensive electric and natural gas infrastructure systems, while also expanding our renewable energy offerings. Our long-term, programmatic approach to planning and prioritizing resources forecasts capital investments of more than $3.5 billion, in 2023 through 2027, to further enhance the safety and reliability of our infrastructure and meet our customers’ growing energy needs.