AGL Energy Limited

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Agile Energy 2023 Half Year Results Briefing Conference. All participants will be in listen only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. I'd now like to hand over the conference to Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Damien Nix. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Damien Nix speaking. Thank you for joining us for the webcast of Agile's first half result for the financial year 2023. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of this land where I'm presenting from today and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the various lands from which you are all joining from and any people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander origin on the webcast. Today, I'm joined by Gary Brown, Chief Financial Officer. Before we commence, I'd like to say that I'm truly honoured to have been appointed as the Managing Director and CEO of this incredible organisation, which has a vast history spanning over 185 years. This is certainly an exciting time to lead AGL as we strive to deliver upon our refresh strategy and accelerate the decarbonisation of our customer and generation portfolios, supported by a highly experienced board and management team now in place. I'd also like to congratulate Gary on his confirmation as CFO. Today's results reflect a challenge first half performance, driven by the impact of plant outages during unprecedented energy market conditions in July, when our resulting short position was exposed to high pool prices, together with prolonged outage of Luoyang Unit 2, which was caused by a generator rotor defect. Earnings were also impacted by the closure of Liddell Unit 3 in April 2022, reducing generation volumes, as we indicated in our FY23 financial guidance update in late September. The first half also saw another disruptive period for the energy markets through the implementation of domestic commodity price caps and a mandatory code of conduct for gas producers. And I'll speak to the impact for energy markets and our business later in the presentation.

Overall, our half-year underlying... Welcome to the Conference Centre. Please enter your passcode followed by the hash key or press star then zero to speak with an operator. Please enter your PIN number followed by the hash key. Your passcode has been confirmed. If at any time you need assistance, please press the star key then zero to speak to an operator. The conference is now being recorded.