We are raising our corporate credit ratings on U.S.-based energy company Cleco Corp. (Cleco) and its subsidiary Cleco Power LLC to 'BBB+' from 'BBB' reflecting an improvement in the company's consolidated financial measures. Cleco's consolidated financial measures have shown consistent improvement and we expect them to remain in line with the financial risk category we deem as "significant". At the same time, the company has continued its efforts to effectively manage regulatory risk and reduce its exposure to higher risk merchant power operations. The stable outlook reflects our expectation that consolidated funds from operations (FFO) to debt will remain above 20%, debt to EBITDA will be about 3x, and debt to total capital will remain below 50% on a sustained
