In total, our companies and foundations donated more than $20 million dollars to non-profits across our service area, including more than $2 million to direct Covid19 relief efforts.
We spent a record $303 million with diversifiers during the year, and through our Board refreshment, 46% of our Board members now are women and minorities.
In fact, I'm pleased to report that based on preliminary data for 2020, reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 50% or (technical difficulties) 2005 levels.
And we have, as you know, a well-defined plan to achieve a 55% reduction by the end of 2025.
Over the longer term, expect to reduce carbon emissions by 70% by 2030, and as we look out to the year 2050, the target for our generation fleet is net-zero carbon.
It calls for investment in efficiency, sustainability, and growth, and it drives average annual growth in our asset base of 7% with no need for additional equity.
Highlights of the plan include 1,800 megawatts of wind, solar, and battery storage that would be added to our regulated asset base in Wisconsin.
And we have allocated an additional $1.8 billion to our infrastructure segment, where we see a robust pipeline of high-quality renewable projects, projects that have long-term contracts with strong creditworthy customers.
The latest available data show Wisconsin's unemployment rate of 5.5%.
For example, Green Bay Packaging is building a major expansion of its mill in northeastern Wisconsin, the $500 million addition, and is expected to be completed later this year.
At the end of 2020, our utilities were serving approximately 11,000 more electric and 27,000 more natural gas customers compared to a year ago.
Retail electric and natural gas sales volumes are shown beginning on Page 17 of the earnings packet.
Overall retail deliveries of electricity, excluding the iron ore mine, were down 2.1% compared to 2019, and on a weather normal basis, deliveries were down 2.9%.
Natural gas deliveries in Wisconsin decreased 7.9% versus 2019.
And by 2.4% on a weather normal basis.
Meanwhile, large commercial industrial sales excluding the iron ore mine were down 7.1% for the full year compared to 2019, on a weather normal basis.
However, these sales were only down 4.6% for the fourth quarter.
We are using 2019 as a base for 2021 retail projections.
We are forecasting a decrease of 1.5% in weather normal retail electric deliveries, excluding the iron ore mine compared to 2019.
This would represent a 1.4% increase compared to 2020.
For our natural gas business, we project weather normalized retail gas deliveries to decrease by 2.4% compared to 2019, this leaves the projected sales outlook compared to 2020, relatively flat.
We lowered operations and maintenance cost by more than 3% in 2020 and we continue to adopt new technology and apply best practices.
We plan to reduce our operations and maintenance expense by an additional 2% to 3% in 2021.
We accept -- expect [Phonetic] this segment to contribute an incremental $0.08 to earnings in 2021.
As we've mentioned, the very large project, in fact, just days after achieving commercial operation this past November, our share of this project accounted for more than 20% of the solar output in the entire MISO generation market.
If approved, we expect to be in construction in the fall of this year and to invest approximately $370 million in total to bring the facilities in operation in 2023.
And as Gale just mentioned, our ESG progress plan includes 1,800MW of wind, solar, and battery storage.
As you may recall, we were in the midst of a rate review for one of our smaller subsidiaries, North Shore Gas, which serves approximately 160,000 customers in the northern suburbs of Chicago.
We're confident that we can deliver our 2021 earnings guidance in the range of $3.99 a share to $4.03 a share.
This represents earnings growth of between 7% and 8% of our 2020 base of $3.73 a share.
And you may have seen the announcement that our Board of Directors at its January meeting raised our quarterly cash dividend to $0.6775 a share for the first quarter of 2021.
That's an increase, folks, of 7.1%.
The new quarterly dividend is equivalent to an annual rate of $2.71 a share and this marks the 18th consecutive year that our company will reward shareholders with higher dividends.
We continue to target a payout ratio of 65% to 70% of earnings, right smack dab in the middle of that range now, so I expect our dividend growth will continue to be in line with the growth in our earnings per share.
Our 2020 earnings of $3.79 per share increased $0.21 per share compared to 2019.
Starting with our utility operations, grew [Phonetic] our earnings by $0.22 compared to 2019.
This includes $0.08 from lower day-to-day O&M expenses and $0.09 from lower sharing amounts in 2020 at our Wisconsin utilities.
Second, despite the impact of Covid19 and reduced wholesale and other margins, rate adjustments at our Wisconsin utilities continue -- continued capital investment, and fuel drove a net 21% increase in earnings.
Third, we had $0.12 of higher depreciation and amortization expense and an estimated $0.05 decrease in margins related to mild winter weather year-over-year.
Overall, we added $0.22 year-over-year from utility operations.
Earnings from our investment in American Transmission Company increased $0.08 per share compared to 2019.
Recall that $0.07 of the $0.08 were driven -- were due to ROE changes from FERC orders issued in November, 2019, and May, 2020.
$0.04 resulted from the November 2019, order and $0.03 from the May 2020, order.
Earnings at our energy infrastructure segment improved $0.05 in 2020 compared to 2019, primarily from production tax credits related to wind farm acquisitions.
Additional 10% ownership of the Upstream Wind Energy Center and the Blooming Grove Wind Farm came online in early December.
Finally, you'll observe that we recorded a $0.09 charge in Corporate and Other to account for the make-whole premiums we incurred in the fourth quarter as we refinanced certain holding company debt to take advantage of lower interest rates.
The remaining $0.05 decrease is related to some tax and other items, partially offset by lower interest expense.
In summary, WEC improved on our 2019 performance by $0.21 per share.
Our effective income tax rate was 15.9% for 2020, excluding the benefit of unprotected taxes flowing to customers, our rate was 20.2%.
Looking to 2021, we expect our effective income tax rate to be between 13% and 14%.
Excluding the benefit of unprotected taxes flowing to customers, we project our 2021 effective tax rate to be between 19% and 20%.
Looking now at the cash flow statement on page 6 of the earnings packet.
Net cash provided by operating activities decreased $149.5 million.
Total capital expenditures and asset acquisitions were $2.9 billion in 2020, a $345 million increase from 2019.
In terms of financing activities, in the fourth quarter of 2020, we opportunistically refinanced over $1 billion of holding company debt, reducing the average interest rate of these notes from 3.3% to 1.5%.
As expected, our FFO to debt ratio was 15.4% in 2020.
Adjusting for the impacts of voluntary pension contributions and customer arrears related to Covid19, our FFO to debt was 16.9% in 2020.
At the end of 2020, our ratio of holding company debt to total debt was 28%, below our 30% target.
Last year we earned a $1.43 per share in the first quarter.
We project first quarter 2021 earnings to be in the range of $1.45 per share to $1.47 per share.
For full year 2021, we are reaffirming our annual guidance of $3.99 to $4.03 per share.

Summary:
We are using 2019 as a base for 2021 retail projections.