ReNew Energy Global plc

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Renew 3Q 2025 Earnings Report. All participants are in listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Anunay Shahi. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We put out a press release announcing our results for fiscal 2025, third quarter ended December 31st, 2025 last night. And a copy of the press release and the earnings presentation is available on the investor relations section on Renews website at www.renews.com. With me today are Suman Sinha, our founder, chairman and CEO, Kailash Vaswani, our CFO, and Bashali Niram Sinha, co-founder and person sustainability. After the prepared remarks, which we expect will take about half an hour, we will open the call for questions. Please note, our safe harbor statements are contained within our press release presentation materials and materials available on our website. These statements are important and integral to all our remarks. There are risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ easily from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. So we encourage you to review the press release we furnished in our Form 6K and the presentation on our website for a more complete description. Also contained in our press release presentation materials and the annual report are certain non-IFRS measures that we reconcile to the most comparable IFRS measures, and these reconciliations are also available on our website in the press release presentation materials, and our annual report. It's now my pleasure to hand it over to Sumanth.

Yeah, thank you, Anand. Good morning, everybody, or good evening or good afternoon. Glad to have you all on our earnings call for the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Before we get into our business and the updates for the quarter and the nine months, let me give a short overview of the macro environment related to our industry and in the past three months. In India, the GDP growth rate which had declined to 5.4% in Q2 fiscal 2025 is expected to again pick up from Q3. Inflation is also benign with RBI cutting rates by 25 basis points earlier this month after a fairly long period of time with further cuts rate cuts being anticipated during the year. We anticipate that Indian domestic banks should pass on these benefits to borrowers like us, thereby reducing borrowing costs for infrastructure companies and making projects more attractive. Power demand has also increased from December 2024 and the recent union budget also had a strong focus on boosting consumption, which is encouraging. The renewable energy environment looks promising with more than 50 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity already auctioned during the year. Therefore, while the US equity markets for renewable energy companies remain challenging, the underlying fundamentals governing renewable energy in India continue to remain quite robust. Let me now turn to updates about Renew. Renew has now entered the 15th year of its operations and we proudly celebrated our anniversary recently. From our modest beginnings in 2011, we have expanded our footprint to almost 11 gigawatts of commissioned capacity. I extend my heartfelt appreciation to all of our shareholders, our employees, customers, lenders, advisors, whose unwavering support has been instrumental in our journey since day one. Now, let me turn to highlights from our business on page six of the presentation. Over the years, we have maintained our leadership in project execution and commissioning greenfield projects. I am pleased to report that we have achieved one of the highest year-to-date megawatt commissionings with approximately 1.3 gigawatts and an additional 150 megawatt hours of batteries commissioned so far this fiscal year and a total of 2.6 gigawatts delivered since December 2023. With this, our operational portfolio now stands at 10.8 gigawatts with a 26% increase year-on-year. Our total committed portfolio now stands at 17.4 gigawatts representing an impressive 27% growth year on year and an additional 1.1 gigawatts since the last earnings call. We have secured 3.9 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity and 600 megawatt hours of best through auctions so far this fiscal year, bringing our total pipeline to approximately 24 gigawatts plus 2 gigawatt hours of batteries, representing one of the largest renewable energy portfolios in India. A notable trend this year has been the strategic shift towards more complex projects with the majority of our auction wins this fiscal originating from such projects. While we are not aggressively seeking additional capacity in the near term, we continue to adopt a disciplined approach targeting auctions that offer attractive return profiles. With the decline in battery prices, the market has seen increasing number of battery plus solar solutions auctions. We are excited to announce that we won our first solar plus battery energy storage system tender this year. We remain confident in meeting our targeted megawatt installations by the end of the year. This includes about 600 megawatts, which is subject to timely regulatory approvals and build out of transmission infrastructure. Our manufacturing facility continues to expand towards its full potential and is now producing about 10 megawatts per day of modules. Additionally, we have been able to secure an aggregate order book of about two gigawatts till date, doubling it in a quarter. These modules and cells are expected to be delivered over the course of the next fiscal. Our manufacturing facilities have produced by this time in aggregate about 3.6 gigawatts of modules and about 300 megawatts of cells till date. Continuing our path towards world-class ESG practices, Renew was also recognized as India's highest rated pure-play renewable energy company by ASLP. Let me now hand it to Kailash for finance and other highlights.

Thanks, Sumanth. Turning to page 7, we are committed to bringing in efficiency in our operations and reducing costs while we continue to deliver profitable growth. This quarter, we saw 500 basis points improvement in margins primarily driven by our cost optimization initiatives, and lower provisioning than the previous comparable quarter. Our DSOs, which is debtors to sales outstanding, saw a 22-day reduction from Q2 of this year, solidifying our balance sheet and improving our cash flows. When PLFs trended lower this year compared to last year, due to which we have reduced the FY25 EBITDA guidance range to 74 to 78 billion rupees. and the cash flow to equity guidance to 11 to 13 billion rupees. When providing guidance for the current fiscal year, we assume weather similar to FY24, while actually we've experienced lower wind PLFs almost every quarter, and fourth quarter is also below the same quarter in the prior year so far. Lastly, the new shareholders have received a non-binding offer by a consortium comprising of CPP Investments, Mazdar, Adia, and Sumanthana. The special committee comprising of independent directors and advised by Rothschild and Linklaters have been in discussion with the consortium regarding the offer. While we understand that our stakeholders are eager to know what's going on, however, you'll appreciate that currently we cannot comment on the timing or status of the process and we will report to the market as soon as there is a development at our end. We will not be able to comment further on the offer at this stage. Let me turn it back to Samant.

Yes, thanks, Kailash. Turning to page 9, I'm happy to report that we have been able to increase our operating megawatts by about 26% year-on-year, and our total operating portfolio now stands at 10.8 gigawatts. During the last 12 months, we have been able to commission over 2.6 gigawatts and have commissioned about 1.3 gigawatts so far in this fiscal year. In addition, our total contracted portfolio has also grown by about 27% to 17.4 gigawatts. During the year, we signed PPS for approximately 3.8 gigawatts of RE capacity and our committed capacity is now 17.4 gigawatts along with 800 megawatt hours of this. While the auction market provides ample opportunity to grow, we continue to be disciplined in our approach to bidding. We are selective and conservative in our bidding and so far this year have managed to secure 3.9 gigawatts of RE in the current fiscal year along with another 600 megawatt hours of BES. We do see that batteries will play a significant role in providing grid balancing in the future and provide flexibility to grow with more certainty on returns. We have won our first solar plus best bid in the current fiscal and will continue to focus on these bids as well. Our capital recycling program also continues as earlier as we signed an agreement to sell a 300 megawatt Secchi solar asset with the transaction expected to close by March 2025 with valuations in line with our past capital recycling transactions. Turning to page 10. Execution remains our core strength and time and again we have demonstrated our ability to build large-scale projects efficiently and within budgeted costs. On the solar construction front, we have already commissioned 1,120 megawatts this year with an additional 175 megawatts in the final stages of regulatory approvals. Moreover, 400 megawatts of solar projects are fully erected and will move towards COD approvals. The peak power project has also been commissioned under the PPA and we have also commissioned almost 800 megawatts of our RTC project. In the wind segment, we have commissioned 140 megawatts year to date with another 500 megawatts of turbines already installed and ready for grid connection. While most of the work has been completed at our end, last mile connectivity and administrative hassles could have a minor impact on the commissioning timelines. Our manufacturing business is turning out to be a significant competitive advantage for us. On one hand, we get access to uninterrupted supply of high efficiency modules. On the other hand, external sales enable in generating cash for the company and help de-risk the business. The business generated an EBITDA of approximately INR 560 million in Q3 of fiscal 2025. Our manufacturing facilities have produced an aggregate of 3.6 gigawatts of modules to date and is approaching an average daily production rate of nearly 10 megawatts every day. As we ramp up production, our sales team has played a crucial role in securing contracts for surplus capacity. To date, we have secured an external order book of 2 gigawatts, which includes 1.1 gigawatts of sales plus modules, a volume we aim to deliver over the next fiscal year. Lastly, our cell facility started commercial production in the current year, in the current quarter, and has already doubled, has already produced over 300 megawatts of cells. We have achieved an industry-leading efficiency of 23.2% for our cells, underlining our commitment to quality and high standards. I will now hand it back to Kailash to go through the finance section.

Thanks, Samant. Turning to page 12, our operational portfolio has seen a 26% year-over-year increase in megawatts, underscoring the strength of our EPC execution capabilities. Our cost optimization efforts are showing results and equal time margins have expanded significantly from 75% to 80% in the current quarter and improved by 240 basis points for the 9-month period. Ended December. Adjusted EBITDA rose by 11% year-on-year, primarily impacted by weaker-than-expected wind performance. We also continue to see improvement in DSOs. Our DSOs now stand at 72 days, our lowest ever, and a 22-day reduction over the previous quarter. If you look at the year-on-year EBITDA walk, while newly commissioned projects contributed an additional 2.8 billion rupees in revenue, but lower than expected build resource led to a revenue reduction relative to guidance of rupees 1.6 billion for the quarter. Furthermore, asset sales during the period resulted in a comparative revenue reduction of approximately INR 900 million rupees. Partially offsetted by the rupees 1.1 billion savings in the quarter that we achieved through our cost optimization initiatives, such as internalization of O&M that was earlier outsourced to OEMs, SG&A reduction, and a reduction in discretionary spend along with a lower one-off impact. Let me now turn to page 13. All of India has been impacted by poorer wind resource in fiscal 2025 compared to last year, details of which are there on page 23. While we base our initial guidance on weather being similar to fiscal 24, however, wind PLS have been below fiscal 24 levels and solar PLS have also been slightly lower. While our cost optimization initiatives have helped mitigate this impact somewhat, we still have to make a revision to our FY2025 EBITDA guidance due to the rupees 4.7 billion impact on account of weather. In Q3 FY25, portfolio level wind PLF stood at 13.5%, a decline from 17% over the previous year. During the first nine-month period, absolute wind PLFs have fallen by almost 240 basis points. Although wind performance has been lower than anticipated, our cost optimization initiatives have helped mitigate part of the impact due to savings of Rs. 2 billion in the first nine months of the current fiscal year. Turning to page 14, in spite of the lower than expected EBITDA performances, we continue to be committed towards being disciplined in our leverage. Our operating project leverage ratio continues to be below 6x using trailing 12-month EBITDA rather than the runway figures, which under normal weather conditions should improve slightly. Let me now hand it over to Vaishali for comments on ESG.

Thank you, Kailash. Turning to page 16 and reviewing advancements in Renew's ESG initiatives and targets now. 2024 has been a stark reminder of our climate reality. With global temperatures surpassing the 1.5 degrees centigrade threshold, the importance of sustainability has never been more evident. At Renew, we remain unwavering in our commitment to this cause. Over the last quarter, we have made significant strides in the following areas. ESG ratings. Renew's performance in the highly regarded S&P Global corporate sustainability assessment has been a major highlight for us in this quarter. We became the highest rated pure play renewable energy company in India by achieving our highest ever score of 73 out of 100. Additionally, we made history as the first company from India's electric utility sector to be included in the prestigious S&P Global CSA Yearbook. Green certifications. Renew's Jaipur Manufacturing Plant achieved the highly acclaimed LEED Gold certification, further reinforcing our commitment to a green and sustainable set of operations. Leadership awards. In the past quarter, Renew has received nationwide recognition from leading publications and organizations. We were named Company of the Year by FirstView for our business excellence, innovation, and renewable energy leadership. Our solar, wind, and hybrid plants secured the CII Performance Excellence Award, while Financial Express honored us as the winners in the Clean Energy Champion category at the Green Sarthi Award. Now turning to slide 17 to review the progress made across our ESG targets. Renew remains committed to achieving its SPTI-validated net zero targets. The development of our decarbonization roadmap for manufacturing is underway, and we are advancing efforts to reduce scope 3 emissions through the ongoing assessment of a sustainable supply chain, which includes detailed supplier ESG assessments, target setting, and advanced Social responsibility is integral to our business, driving community stewardship, volunteerism, and equitable development. This commitment propels us towards our goal of impacting 2.5 million lives by 2030, with our programs already reaching over 1.4 million lives impacted. In Q3, we made considerable progress in this regard. We distributed 163,000 blankets to those who needed them the most. Solar electrification of 46 schools is underway, and 55 digital labs have been established across the country. As part of our salt pan work program, we are upskilling women, and a total of 595 women have been trained to date, with 150 completing their training in quarter three. As part of our company-wide sustainability target, we remain on track to achieve both our short- and long-term rating goals. These ratings underscore the impact of our first integrated report, and we look forward to building on this momentum and reporting our progress with the release of our second integrated report in 2025. I will now ask Kailash to cover Guidance.

Thank you, Vishali. Coming to our guidance, we are reaffirming our megawatt guidance for the year, which includes 600 megawatts, the commissioning of which is dependent on timely regulatory approval and timely build-out of the transmission infrastructure. While we have a good handle on execution, we are impacted by weather and its seasonality. We are lowering the range of our full-year 2025 expectation on adjusted eBuilder, and cash flow to equity guidance. On the other hand, we are happy to update the runway guidance for our targeted portfolio of 17.4 gigawatt, which is up 1.1 gigawatt since the last quarter. With that, we'll be happy to take any questions.

Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star 2. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Justin Flair with Roth Capital Partners.

Hi, thanks for taking my questions here. So first off, why don't you start just on the wind PLF? You know, Q3, the PLF was lower than it has been historically here. Was wondering, is this just the result of lower wind speeds in India broadly? Was there any other issue or any factors in terms of the performance of your specific projects? And then wondering if you could just talk about how you've seen wind PLS trend into Q4 and whether or not we're seeing a return to kind of historical averages.

Yeah. Yeah. Hi, Justin. Look, the PLF reduction was entirely on account of wind. Wind speeds in Q3 were significantly lower. And so you should assume that the entire delta and PLF was an account of wind speed differentials from the long term averages. That is really what caused the decline in revenue along with that. So far, wind speeds in Q4, it's always obviously early to comment on it, are getting closer back to normal. So I would say they're not entirely back to normal, but they are certainly not as, you know, quite as bad as they were in Q3. So that's where we are right now.

Got it. Okay. And then I wanted to see, you mentioned that rates could be lower than India here. I was wondering where you think, you know, rates could settle for your project finance, you know, what you think the outlook is there. And then how much of your debt do you think could benefit from lower rates here in the near term? And if you could potentially quantify what the potential impact might be, that could be helpful.

Yes, I can state that, yeah. So, Justin, as far as the rate reduction is concerned, so, you know, we're yet to see the transmission of that from the lenders into their lending rates. But, you know, whether we have rates which are linked to short-term benchmarks like three-month treasury bills, there, you know, we have started seeing the benefit of that because the short-term rates, have started reducing. But that would be a small component of our portfolio. I think the overall variable rate part of the portfolio, you will see some reduction happen, which is around 30-35% of our portfolio would be borrowing from domestic institutions where some part of this benefit we will see. But when the transition happens, how much will happen? that will be known as more time goes by. Right now, we have not seen any bank significantly cut their marginal cost lending rates, which is the MCLRs. And hence, we have not benefited on the large part of our portfolio, but on a small part, which could be less than 10%, which was linked to very short-term rates, we started seeing that benefit. But that is, in any case, that was more of a leading indicator. Those rates have in any case gone down and hence, we got that benefit earlier before the rate cut also happened.

And Kailash, the long-term outlook, is it an outlook?

So long-term outlook, again, with inflation being tamed in and governments focusing on, you know, encouraging more growth, also, you know, encouraging more consumption, I think there would be continued reduction in rates, which is likely to happen. Only caveat there is obviously the currency, where, you know, to some extent, you know, given that the rupee had depreciated quite sharply against the dollar, that could be one thing which would be playing on the government's mind in terms of how much to reduce and how fast to reduce. Because, you know, obviously then that will result in a flight of capital.

Got it. Okay. And just one more, curious on the battery plus solar solutions here, I was wondering if you'd talk about the anticipated product returns and how those compare to, solar projects or more complicated, you know, round-the-clock projects? How attractive do you see the returns there?

Yeah, you know, I think a lot depends on the assumptions that you make on the pricing of batteries, obviously, when you make the bid. Now, prices of batteries have continued to go down quite substantially, as we all know. And so, therefore, wherever we have batteries and whatever batteries we have in our portfolio, are looking attractive because the assumptions that we made on pricing were relatively conservative. And because of the reduction in pricing, we are sort of looking at, I think, attractive returns on those. I would say that plain Manila solar probably, you know, in a way gives us just the lower returns of the three. And then you have solar plus storage and then you have the FDRE bits, which are probably the highest return. The delta between them is probably, in terms of ILR, is maybe 3%, 2% to 3% or thereabouts, with solar plus best being somewhere in the middle. But eventually, when we get to execute the projects, it may be that best prices have gone down to a level that we actually end up doing quite well on those projects as well.

Got it. That makes sense. Okay. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Mahit Manroy with Mizuho.

Hey, good morning from over here. Thanks for the questions. First, just on the solar manufacturing, you guys have, I think on the last call, you said you're at 10 megawatt per week run rate. Could you just remind us what the run rate is on the cell and module for you guys and how to think about the the backlog, how much of that should be, do you expect revenue recognition on a quarterly basis going forward here?

Thanks. Yeah. So, look, I think I'll talk about the production and I'll ask Elash to answer on the revenue part. On the production part, we are sort of between 10 and 11 megawatts right now per day of modules. That's the rate that we are producing at right now. So if you want to analyze that, you know, assume 350 work days, then you get a sense of where the megawatts is from an overall standpoint. The eventual goal is to get that to over 12, 13 megawatts a day. So we are sort of moving in that direction quite well, given that some part of our module capacity was commissioned fairly recently. On the cell side, we are producing between 3.5 to 4 megawatts every day right now. And that is something that, again, is getting close to what the expected production rate was or needs to be on a steady state basis. And the more important thing almost there is that the efficiency levels on sales is actually among the highest in the country right now. So our team has been able to really stabilize the plant at a fairly high operating efficiency level. So that's positive. On the revenue side, Kailash, would you like to take that?

Yeah, sure. So again, you know, Mahit, just to clarify, most of the revenues from capital sales, which happens to the renewable energy arm of Renew that is all capitalized into the balance sheet because obviously it's within the groups on consolidation it gets knocked off. So for third party is what we have reported our numbers for the first time this time. So for the first nine month period which was largely most of the sales happened in the quarter, we had 3.4 billion of revenues. and around, you know, 60, 600 million rupees of EBITDA that, you know, for the current period. And going forward, obviously, as and when third-party sales happen, then, you know, similar amounts would then be reported for the third-party portion only.

Gotcha. And maybe just a follow-up on the module side. Then, We see a lot of Chinese companies and maybe U.S. companies also claiming ownership of Topcon patents and a bunch of lawsuits, not in India but other regions. But is that a concern for you? Are you seeing any of those port over to the Indian market?

I think, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I was just saying that, see, we in any case not, mostly companies who were exporting into the U.S., that's where, you know, most of these actions were taken, given that we did not have any exposure to the U.S. market in terms of exports. We didn't see any, or we don't plan, expect to have any such impact.

Got it. And just one last one. On the 300 megawatt cell transients, not sure if you talked about it but could you talk about the multiples you're expecting on those or you know if they're in line or better than what we saw in the past sales you had yeah Mahit so it's commented obviously in the presentation but basically it's in line with our you know past recycling initiatives gotcha sorry but no appreciate the comment thank you

Your next question is from Nicole Magania with Bernstein.

Thank you for taking my question. My first question is on the broader renewable space. While the government is pushing on their plans, we are hearing some headwinds, you know, land availability for wind, transmission access, which seems to be alluded to in the presentation as well, and even PPA signings. So, if you could share some color on these aspects, is Venue facing similar challenges or how does the company see it on these aspects?

Yeah, hi. So, you know, I think that the allusion that we made to transmission issues really is a very sort of small issue, which is that there's a bay that we're connecting to in one of our projects. that day is getting ready a month later than it was supposed to. And because of the March 31st deadline for commissioning, therefore, it sort of, you know, puts a little bit of a question mark on or ambiguity on whether that is going to then get done before March 31st or not, whereas we're going to be fully ready from our side. But, you know, whether it happens on March 31st or if not, then it will happen 10 days later. So that is not, you know, such a big issue from an overall revenue standpoint. generation standpoint and so on. I think the bigger issues that you're addressing or you're raising are around land and general connectivity, availability and PPSID. So let me try to address those quickly. So as far as we are concerned on transmission, we have got all the connectivity for all of the 24 odd gigawatts of pipeline that we have got fully in hand. So we don't have any issues around connectivity right now. and in fact we have surplus connectivity I think as you had yourself written in a report some time ago. We have surplus connectivity and therefore any new bids that happen we will actually be in really good position to use some of that land based connectivity that we have to win those auctions. You know, we are also able, based on the connectivity's commissioning dates, we're also able to, you know, in some ways, smooth out that execution of this 24-odd gigawatts over the next few years' time. Now, there may be delays in some of the connectivity coming up by a few months here and there, but by and large, the delays are not more than that. And therefore, if you plan your execution out reasonably well in terms of which projects go into which substations and so on, by and large, those get delivered. As I said, there could be a few months here and there, but the delays are not more than that. So, I would say that Connectivity is becoming a problem for those companies that have not proactively blocked the connectivity earlier, which fortunately is something that we had done. So therefore, connectivity per se is something that is fine as far as we are concerned. As far as land is concerned, land is... a problem in wind it has always been a problem in wind projects and that is why if you see a lot of our increase in our commissioning is happening out of solar not so much out of We don't expect that wind is something that is going to exceed maybe 5 gigawatts a year in the country over the next, you know, few years. Maybe the next two, three years, we'll probably end up just doing about that much capacity in wind. As an industry, I'm saying. And our share within that will be, you know, whatever it will be based on our own commissioning plans. So land is definitely a problem. And particularly in the last six to nine months, where a lot of projects have been done in Maharashtra. There were specific issues on account of certain Minister of Defense issues, because of the elections that were coming up and then local law and order problems that I'm sure you've read about in the press. And frankly, that has also impacted us in terms of our commissioning timelines. Otherwise, we hopefully would have got some of the wind projects commissioned by this time. So, that always is something that we have to bake in to our plans that wind projects do take longer to get commissioned than solar projects very often. And then as far as PPAs are concerned, on the PPA signing, I would say that this year there has been reasonably decent progress on PPA signings given the large backlog or the large amount of bids that have happened the last two years. The fact that out of the maybe 120, 130 gigawatts of bids that have happened in the last, you know, this current financial year and the previous one, there are only maybe 30 to 35 gigawatts of unsigned PPAs. But the balance of it is all got signed. So I would say that there is a lot of headroom that is built up now in terms of signed PPAs. If you were to look at that as another indicator of what capacity additions may happen in the near term. So my sense is that the balance PPS will also get signed. And I think at this point, the government is wondering, not wondering, but is considering slowing down the pace of bids potentially to allow the old bids to get signed. And that is perfectly fine because the pace of bidding has been extremely rapid. So I think it will give all of us a little bit of reading room to just reassess where we are and look at our execution pipelines. and so on. So I think that would be a healthy thing in my opinion. So my sense is all the people eventually will get signed or at least the most amount of them will get signed.

Makes sense. I appreciate that. Second question I had is the solar cell business. I mean, very timely commissioning of the manufacturing plant. But when you see some peers, we understand you have captive use, but when we see some peers, they talk about cell prices, domestic cell prices being around 14, 15 cents per wattage per cell, domestic cells. We were expecting sort of a higher impact of that. So do you see in the coming quarters, it could be a sizable number that the manufacturing business could throw up for profitability?

You know, for sure, I think sell prices in the market right now are fairly attractive. And we are not selling any cells to ourselves. We are selling modules to ourselves right now. And we are selling cells into the market outside, into the external market, simply because most of our projects don't require domestic cells at this point. So all of our cells will be going into the external market. And so to that extent, we will actually gain from the pricing that is in the market right now. And that will, of course, start getting reflected in our P&L as we go forward. We are selling at a lower price than where the market is at, just by the way. So that is not the case. So you should assume that wherever the market is, you know, we are also sort of at the same point.

And one last question I had is, I mean, the dollar has moved much faster than many of us anticipated. So just on the heading front, I wanted to understand both on the debt and the KPEX front. So debt, is it all hedged by swaps or is it options as well? And on the KTX front also, whatever exposure we have, are we hedged on the currency side?

Yeah, Nikhil. So basically for hedging, you know, we use a couple of different instruments. Most of our borrowings from foreign commercial banks or BFIs that are fully hedged using swaps. Some of our bonds also, you know, recently when we had the opportunity of seeing lower hedging costs and the rupee was also fairly stable for the longest period of time below 83%. we had most of that into full swaps, full currency swaps. We have two bonds. One of them has a call spread where there is full coverage up to a certain point and beyond that there's exposure, which is, I think, if I remember correctly, that limit is like 90 or 92 in that range, beyond which we have some exposure. And then there's one bond in which we are exposed till the 90 or 92 point beyond which we have exposure. So it's like a diversified hedging policy that we follow. And, you know, we know what our maximum exposure could be. And it's, again, in line with our stated hedging policy, which is approved by the Board and Audit Committee.

Go ahead. Thank you. Those are my questions. Thanks for answering. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Puneet Gulati with HSBC.

Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity. My first question is, you know, it has been a sports for quite a while now. Are you now baking that also in your, you know, 17.4 gigawatt right in 15 minutes?

So, Puneet, basically the The expectation is that that's obviously a long-term guidance, so we don't make long-term changes into that. It is largely what we've tried to do is that, you know, assume the long-term forecast, which has been corrected based on the experience of the last few years, but not reflected of every year on year performance, for example. And that way we have tried to estimate the long-term guidance. Our expectation continues to remain that, you know, wind does move in cycles. And, you know, this has been an extended cycle, which hopefully will reverse and we should see the dividends of that also.

Understood. And secondly, you also have a lot of unsigned LOAs. And while someone did leave to the side that a lot of it can get signed, There's also guidance notes floating around that say that unsigned LOAs beyond 12 months can be allowed to lapse. Can you comment on what is your view on that?

So, you know, I think, Puneet, there are lots of conversations obviously that are happening in the government. There's also another school of thought that says that cancelling any PPAs will lead to a lot of reputational damage for the government. then the question also becomes what happens to the connectivity associated with those bids? How does that get allocated? So it's a little bit of a complicated question. And also what will happen is that these LOAs or these bids that have happened are bids that predate the ALMM for sales. And so any future bids that happen, which will have to account for domestic sales, will be more expensive. And therefore, the chances are that DISCOMs will realize that those earlier bids are actually more attractive and will look to potentially sign those rather than have those getting canceled. Yeah, that's a good point.

And thirdly, if you can also, you know, comment on the process of buyback. I know you won't comment much, but what is the next stages should we see on the buyback side?

So, Puneet, it's not exactly a buyback. It's an offer by a group of shareholders to buy out the investors, the public investors and with the intention of taking the company private. So, again, you know, as we said in our earlier remarks that, you know, we have got this offer which is being evaluated by the special committee, advised by Rosharan link later and once you know there is a new movement then we will be announcing it.

Okay.

So will the independent board get involved here or is this Yes, so the special committee is a special committee form which comprises of only independent directors. Okay.

And lastly, if you can talk a bit about capacity addition plans for FY26 and specifically some projects which you can commission before June of 2025.

Before June of 2025, in terms of... So I think as you mentioned, there is a 600 megawatt slug, which is what, you know, if it spills over, then it would be commissioned within April of FY26, which is April 25. And apart from that, obviously, you know, we will be giving out our long-term guidance, you know, in our June results. I mean, our March results will come out by early June.

I think it's difficult to give an estimate right away at this stage. So we would advise waiting for the FY26 guidance which Kailash said will come out along with our match results.

Got it. Okay. Great. That's all from me. Thank you so much and all the best.

Thanks, Manish.

I think we have one question from . Do you want to go ahead?

One moment. I'll announce the next question in one moment.

Sure.

The next question will come from Annika Mittal of SBI Mutual Fund. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I have a couple of questions on the . You know, I couldn't catch that question at all.

I don't know if, I don't know whether you guys did, but if you can repeat it, that would be great. It's sort of, you're going in and out a little bit.

Okay, excuse me.

If I can just, Aniket, for someone's benefit, I think I've already got the question. Just correct me if I'm wrong. It's like, you know, our PLS decline has been higher compared to some of the other peers. So it's relative. Is it a function of the region where we are present, where we've seen a bigger decline? Is that your question?

Yes, that's the question. And again, just to understand, will these PLFs now be closer to P90 limits?

Yeah, they're probably closer to P90, although we haven't done the exact math. I don't know what the guidance is or what the estimate is that you've got from the other companies. So I really can't make a comparative statement. I would just tell you that the wind in the month of October and November was drastically lower than it has been in prior years and that could be perhaps because the monsoon got extended and you know we had fairly warm sort of periods of time at that time and that is why the usual reversal of wind that takes place from the south west to the north east that took a lot longer to happen than expected, than it normally does. December was closer to average, still not fully at average, and January has been kind of similar to December. And February, of course, is happening right now, so hard to comment. The only other thing I would say is that, you know, at least in North India, this has been a very warm winter, and we need temperature differentials between land and sea to for the northwest winds to flow and that is something that we have not seen as much this winter. And so that I think also has caused this lack of wind this period of time.

No, understood. No, understood. The other question was, you know, just as I look at your pipeline, right, you know, increasingly it's becoming more FDR and hybrid heavy. And in your presentation, you know, sort of thought about the fact that the capacity that you're trying to put up is subject to change, which probably implies that you're looking at, you know, you're looking at battery versus storage over here. Could you just give us some broad in terms of how do we look at the capacity additions for the incremental hybrid project? What sort of configurations are you thinking about in terms of wind, solar, hybrid? So, for example, the HGV and FDI TLCs, you know, the PPT sort of having a relook at wind over there. So, just some color over there would be fairly helpful.

Yeah. So, you know, the configuration is a function of the bid requirement as well as sometimes you have the ability of in certain bids also buying a certain amount from the market and also a function of obviously the pricing of wind, solar and storage. So all of those things impact the configuration. Now at the time that we bid in some of these bids, the pricing was at a certain level and we came up with a certain configuration based on that, the pricing as well as of course all the other parameters that I was talking about earlier, which are the bid requirements and specifications. Now as time has elapsed or is elapsing, some of those relative pricing levels change and as I said for example first of all solar prices have come down quite dramatically over the last couple of years so any bids that happened two years ago for example would now have a different configuration because the price of solar has come down The same thing with batteries. Battery costs have also come down quite dramatically in the last year or so. And so, therefore, you know, what may have required more wind earlier potentially can do, will actually get more optimized or lead to higher returns now with a higher degree of solar and storage and a lower amount of wind. So, this is a dynamic situation in every bid. And obviously, at the time that we sign the PPA is when we have to fix the final configuration. And so, at that time, we rework the models and the basis that we come up with what is the best model, what is the best configuration at that given point in time based on all the costing and so on. So, that and that changes as I said. So, because the cost of solar and storage have been coming down, therefore, we are moving more towards solar and storage in these FDRE bids and less wind. Okay.

The other question was on the O&M part. I think I last mentioned in the remarks that one of the reasons for declining O&M has been the internalization that we've been doing. So if you could go ahead and comment on that, you know, how much of the O&M is now being done internally, what's the scope over there going forward, and how do we look at the, you know, O&M expense portion?

So, you know, we do all, yeah, sorry, okay, carry on, Kailash. Please go ahead.

Yeah, no, so again, you know, just to answer the question, basically for solar, we do all the O&M in-house. For wind, you know, whenever we had like legacy assets, we had legacy long-term O&M contracts with the OEMs. Now, in many of those cases, you know, they were sticky contracts. It was quite difficult to get out of those. So, whenever, you know, we were not able to get out, What we tried to do is we reduced the pricing, we negotiated the pricing, and accordingly, we got some savings. And whenever we could, you know, whenever the free O&M period was over and there was no such long-term arrangement in place, in those cases, we have started doing the O&M in-house for these projects. Exact numbers, you know, we can circle back. But largely, that's what we are seeing. Now, this year, what we have seen is the benefits largely accruing on account of both the reduction in the O&M costs that we had. And because, you know, we had built certain O&M equalization reserves in the past, just to, you know, iron out the difference between the free O&M period and the paid O&M period, because we had a reduction in the O&M cost, we were able to write back some of those reserves because those were no longer needed. And hence, you know, there was that benefit that we saw. in the current nine-month period. Okay.

Just one last question. In terms of the external module sales you did this quarter, what's the quantity or the volume?

Sorry, what was the question? Go ahead. So the question is, what was the quantity of external modules in the third quarter? Okay, go ahead. So it was a little north of 200 megawatts of external field that we booked for in Q3.

Okay, thanks. Those are the questions I have. Thank you.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating and I now disconnect.