Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp. Common Shares

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Algonquin Power and Utilities Corporation 2020 fourth quarter and full year earnings webcasting conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star then one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star, then zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Amelia Tsang, Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us this morning for our 2020 fourth quarter and year-end earnings conference call. My name is Amelia Tsang, and I'm the Vice President of Investor Relations at Algonquin Power and Utilities. Presenting on the call today are Arun Banskara, our President and CEO, and Arthur Kasperczak, our Chief Financial Officer. Also joining us this morning for the question and answer part of the call will be Jeff Norman, our Chief Development Officer, and Johnny Johnston, our Chief Operating Officer. To accompany our earnings call today, we have a supplemental webcast presentation available on our website, AlgonquinPowerandUtilities.com. Our financial statements and management discussion and analysis are also available on the website, as well as on CDAR and EDGAR. Before continuing the call, we would like to remind you that our discussion during the call will include certain forward-looking information, including but not limited to our expectations regarding future earnings and capital expenditures and the expected impact and outcomes of the recent severe winter storms in Texas and the central U.S. At the end of the call, I will read a notice regarding both forward-looking information and non-GAAP financial measures. Please also refer to our most recent MD&A filed on Cedar and Edgar, and available on our website for additional important information on these items. On our call this morning, Arun will provide an overview of our Q4 and full year 2020 performance. Arthur will follow with the financial results, and then Arun will conclude with an update on our strategic plan for the business. We will then open the lines for questions. I ask that you restrict your questions to two and then re-queue if you have any additional questions to allow others the opportunity to participate. And with that, I'll turn it over to Arun.

Thank you, Amelia, and a very good morning to those who've been able to join us on this call and online. Given that this is our year-end earnings call, I want to provide some highlights and speak to performance. both financial and operational for 2020. Firstly, on financials, I'm pleased to report steady year-over-year growth in our key financial metrics. 2020 adjusted EBITDA of $869.5 million increased 4% year-over-year and our 2020 adjusted net earnings per share of 64 cents compares to 63 cents reported last year. There were three particular events, COVID, weather in the central region, and delayed closing of Delco that impacted our results. Despite these, management was able to pull a number of levers, including cost savings, to continue our growth trajectory. We exited the year with $13.2 billion in assets, a 21% increase over last year. Secondly, in terms of shareholder value creation, we continue to generate consistent outstanding returns as proven by our record on delivering total shareholder returns. In 2020, the company delivered total shareholder returns of 21.5% on the New York Stock Exchange compared to the 22.7% for the utility index and 15.3% for the S&P TSX capped utilities index. Last year, we reported annual dividends per share of 61 cents which represents a 10% annual increase for the 10th consecutive year in a row. Thirdly, on operations, the company undertook many successful growth initiatives and achieved numerous milestones in 2020. We continue to focus our efforts on Alcancon's three strategic pillars, growth, operational excellence, and sustainability. For those of you who may have participated at our Virtual Investor Day in December, we discussed this at length. We operate through two businesses, regulated and renewables. What is unique about us are our multiple levers of growth that support our two businesses and which gives us high confidence in delivering outstanding returns. One lever of growth is acquisitions. and we completed two utility acquisitions in 2020, Essam and Ascendant. With the addition of these two utilities, Algonquin now has over 1 million customer connections within our regulated footprint. Additionally, both acquisitions are expected to provide opportunities for future growth. With New York American Water, We submitted our regulatory application to the New York PSC last year. We are currently going through the settlement process, and the hearing date is scheduled for mid-May. We continue to expect this transaction to close in 2021. On the renewable energy business, the company made its largest renewable energy acquisition acquiring a 51% ownership interest in a portfolio of three operating coastal wind facilities with a combined generating capacity of 621 megawatts in south coastal Texas. These three wind facilities have already achieved commercial operations. The acquisition of a 51% interest in a 240 megawatt South Texas coastal facility is expected to occur in the first half of 2021 once the facility reaches commercial operations. We continue to prove out our CNI growth lever as Algonquin remains very well positioned in the CNI space where important long-term customers are supporting renewables growth as they are looking to achieve their own sustainability goals. As further proof of concept, we signed a framework agreement with Chevron last year for the potential development of over 500 megawatts of renewable energy facilities. This has been an area of focus for us, and we are working hard to progress that portfolio and expand our customer base. 2020 also marked the company's largest construction program in our history with approximately 1,600 megawatts of renewable energy projects under construction. To put that in context, these new projects approximately doubled the amount of our overall renewables portfolio. Within our renewables business, two of our projects The Great Bay 2 solar facility located in southern Maryland and the Sugar Creek Wind Facility located in Illinois both achieved full commercial operations last year. Furthermore, two more projects are nearing completion with more than half of Alta Vista Solar's 80 megawatts successfully placed in service with a power purchase agreement with Facebook. and the remaining megawatts are expected to be completed by the second quarter of this year. Our 492 megawatt Maverick Creek Wind Facility in Texas completed commissioning on 111 of the 127 turbines and has long-term power purchase agreements with General Mills and Kimberly Clark. Maverick was recently recognized by the American Clean Power Association as the fourth largest single-phase wind project in U.S. history. An important lever of growth on the regulated side as we transition to lower carbon energy is our Greening the Fleet initiative. We continue to progress well on our Midwest Greening Initiative with the development and construction of three wind farms for a total 600 megawatt capacity as we work to generate and deliver more cost-effective, diverse, and sustainable energy options to our customers and communities. The 150 megawatt North Fork Ridge Wind Facility has achieved full commercial operation while the 300 megawatt New Osho Ridge and 150 megawatt Kings Point facilities are anticipated to be placed in service prior to the end of this month. Moving on now to operational excellence. In a mission-critical industry like ours, safety is always an area of focus. And so I'm pleased that we have just passed the impressive milestone of an entire year without a single lost time injury. I'm very proud of our employees and management for continuing to stay focused on safety first, even while we had to transition into a very different work environment given COVID-19, and the priority of keeping our employees and communities safe from the pandemic. The importance of reliably providing the essential services of electricity, water, and natural gas to our customers has become even more apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our diversified asset base and our emergency preparedness highlighted our resilient business model, which has meant that our essential services to customers have not been impacted. As a proof point of how resilient our business model is, the pandemic had a relatively low impact of two cents in adjusted net EPS for 2020. With the onset of the pandemic, we focused on cost containment strategies without sacrificing safety and reliability. In the first half of 2020, we announced we were targeting $15 million of savings for the full year. And I'm pleased that we were able to significantly beat that, delivering $24 million in savings for the year. 2020 marked the first full year of contribution from New Brunswick Gas and St. Lawrence Gas. The integration of these two utilities into the Algonquin Liberty family has gone well. as growing the business organically in these two facilities is a key initiative. As with all our previously acquired utilities, we strive to share learnings among our utilities with the aim of driving consistent improvement in our key performance metrics that drive value for our customers and investors. And finally, we remain firmly committed to sustainability through the inclusion of environmental, social, and governance values in our broader corporate strategy and day-to-day operations. I want to provide a few highlights from 2020. In March, the closure of our Ashbury coal generation facility in Missouri will allow us to reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by 955,000 metric tons. In the latter part of 2020, we increased our disclosures around sustainability by releasing our first ever Climate Change Assessment Report in response to guidelines established by the Financial Stability Board's Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, PCFD. We also released our 2020 Sustainability Report, which not only outlined our progress on our ESG goals, but provided a higher level of disclosure details around our nine priority issues. And in 2021, you'll see us adding additional ESC-linked goals to our compensation program metrics. Overall, I'm pleased with the progress we've made in 2020, given COVID-19 and all its challenges, and I'm confident we'll continue to benefit from our strong, resilient, and diversified business model in 2021. Before turning to Arthur, I want to comment on storm Uri and the Midwest extreme weather event which occurred last month. First and foremost, our thoughts are with the many people whose lives have been disrupted by the extreme weather events. Since the events began, Our teams have worked tirelessly under very challenging conditions to keep our customers and communities safe and to maintain our system reliability and resiliency. I would like to thank our dedicated employees for their teamwork and continual commitment to our customers. In our renewables business, we currently have a total of approximately 2,550 megawatts of wind, solar, and hydro projects in operation, including our 51% interest in three south Texas coastal wind facilities. In accordance with our strategy, our portfolio of assets is very diversified across 46 facilities, 15 states and provinces, and seven ISOs. We believe this diversified portfolio will continue to be a major advantage in the face of climate change. In Texas, we have a diversified operating portfolio of approximately 965 megawatts across five locations, two inland and three coastal. This provides the wind resource diversification outlined during our 2020 investor day. The Texas portfolio also benefits from off-take diversification. Maverick Creek, 492 megawatts, and our 51% interest in the East Raymond 200 megawatt facility both operate under long-term unit contingent power purchase agreements. On the remaining Texas assets in operation, we are hedged using long-term fixed financial swaps with a total combined hedge position of approximately 120 megawatts. We saw no material impact at the coastal winter assets, while storm Uri did have a major impact on our Senate assets. In total, our estimated exposure remains what we announced earlier in our press release of $45 to $55 million before potential mitigating impacts. We have asserted force majeure at our standard facility, given the large scale market failures and extreme weather events. Storm Uri was very unusual in the level of impact across a very large geography and temperatures fell to six degrees Fahrenheit near our standard facility. lower by nine degrees compared to the lowest ever recorded temperature in the last 100 years. Since there may be a dispute and possibly litigation, we do not intend to speculate today on our legal position. There are also ongoing discussions regarding potential Texas government or regulatory intervention. including questions on the $9,000 a megawatt hour pricing. And this could be another mitigation to our estimated $45 to $55 million exposure. In our regulated business, which comprises approximately 70% of our portfolio, we are diversified by modality and operate in 16 jurisdictions. Despite the extreme weather conditions, The regulated service group's electric and gas operations performed well during a sustained period of increased consumption. We did encounter some weather issues in our central region, and in accordance with instructions from the SPP, we did some limited load shedding. The utilities did incur incremental commodity costs during a period of record pricing and elevated consumption. The incremental commodity costs incurred by the company are expected to be substantially recovered from customers over an extended period. We do not expect any material financial impact to our regulated business. With that, I'll pass it over to Arthur We will speak to our Q4 and full-year 2020 financial results, as well as the financial impact of the Midwest Exchange Weather Event.

Arthur? Thank you, Arun, and good morning, everyone. As Arun mentioned earlier, in 2020, Algonquin has again shown its ability to accretively grow earnings through its stable, regulated services and long-term contracted renewable power businesses. Our fourth quarter 2020 consolidated adjusted EBITDA was $253.1 million, which is up approximately 10% from the $230.4 million we reported in the previous year. The regulated services group delivered $161.8 million in operating profit in the current quarter, which compares to $159.4 million in the same quarter last year. The increases primarily reflect the implementation of new rates and the contribution from ESSAL and Belco, which both closed in the quarter. This was partially offset by decreased customer consumption, primarily at our central utilities due to warmer than usual weather. The Renewable Energy Group reported fourth quarter divisional operating profit of 102.9 million, which compares to 85.9 million in the same quarter last year. The increase represents generally higher production across our renewables fleet during the quarter. Our Q4 adjusted net earnings per share came in at $0.21, which compares to $0.20 reported last year. Our results were positively impacted by cost savings implemented during the quarter, a solid performance from our generation facilities, and a contribution of the SAL and the BELCO acquisition. but were partially offset by the unfavorable weather in the central region, as mentioned earlier. For the full year, adjusted net EPS came in at $0.64 in comparison to $0.63 recorded in the prior year. The 2020 results included a full year contribution from New Brunswick Gas and the St. Lawrence gas systems, which were acquired late last year, as well as the implementation of new rates at our Calpeco and Granite State electric distribution systems. The results were negatively impacted by decreased consumption resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as significantly unfavorable weather experienced by the central region in early 2020. The delay in the closing of Delco also weighed negatively on our results as compared to our expectations for the year. Despite these challenges, the year-over-year growth in adjusted net EPS demonstrates the stability and resilience of our business model. Now I'd like to provide a few more financial updates from the quarter. First, on the COVID-19 pandemic and its financial impacts. We have seen the impacts of the pandemic on consumption patterns continue to ease as the economy reopens. The impact of the regulated services group's divisional operating profit was less than $1 million in Q4, with full-year COVID-19 impact coming in at $14.7 million, or $0.02 in adjusted net ETFs. As reported previously, in the second quarter, we began implementing cost containment strategies in response to the demand decreases caused by the pandemic. I'm pleased to report that in the fourth quarter, we were able to achieve expense reductions of approximately 6 million, which brings the full year cost savings to 24 million. I'm also pleased to report that all of the reductions were made without compromising on safety, security, and reliability of the services we provide to our customers. About a third of these reductions occurred naturally to reduce travel and other similar expenses. A third was related to timing, and a final third was related to ongoing savings we were able to drive in our business and has been factored into our 2021 earnings expectations. Before turning things over back to Arun, I'd like to provide a brief update on our 2021 guidance. In 2021, our results are expected to benefit from the addition of approximately 1,400 megawatts of new renewable generation capacity completed late last year or early in the first half of this year. In addition, we expect to benefit from the first full year of operations of Delta, Essel, and the Texas Coastal Wind Portfolio. Factoring in these benefits, in total we expect our 2021 adjusted net earnings per share to be in the range of 71 the 76 cents, which is consistent with what we communicated at our investor day last December. As Ruben mentioned earlier, last month our operations were impacted by extreme winter storm conditions experienced in Texas and parts of the central U.S. The most significantly impacted facility was the Senate wind facility, which has a financial hedge in place that imposes an obligation to deliver energy. Because of the unusual market disruption related to the extreme weather events, that facility was required to purchase power for an extended period of time at exceptionally inflated pricing to cover the production shortfalls under its hedge. This is expected to result in a six-cent negative impact to 2021 basic net earnings per share, which is calculated before any potential recoveries. We view this market disruption on the Senate facilities as unusual and not representative of the ongoing operating performance of this company. And those have excluded its impacts from the 2021 adjusted net earnings per share expectations discussed earlier. With that, I'll now hand it back over to Arun to outline our growth plans.

Thank you, Arthur. Before we close out our prepared comments this morning, I want to give an update on our growth initiatives and capital plan. At our December investor day, we updated our five-year capital investment program, which projects $9.4 billion from 21 through the end of 2025 to be spent across our two business groups with the emphasis on regulated services. We have identified projects that make up the entire $9.4 billion with most of them under construction or in advanced development. This core $9.4 billion does not include any further M&A beyond previously announced transactions or any success from our 3.4 gigawatt pipeline of greenfield opportunities. Over the last year, we have bolstered our internal resources and software tooling to focus even more on greenfield development opportunities that are originated by us. For many of these opportunities, we already have site control and are in the interconnection queue, and we will work to bring this into construction in 2023 and beyond. Before we open the lines for the question and answer period, we remain very excited about Algonquin's businesses and prospects. With society and economies working hard to minimize carbon emissions and many countries coalescing around a net zero carbon by 2050 goal, Algonquin's regulated and renewables businesses are well positioned to contribute to and benefit from this decarbonization transition. Our three strategic pillars of operational excellence, growth, and sustainability will be a key foundation as we continue to build the business and bring long-term value to our shareholders. We remain well-positioned to continue to execute on our growth strategies while pursuing our sustainability goals, guided by maximizing operational excellence on behalf of our stakeholders, including investors, employees, and customers. With that, I will turn the call over to the operator for any questions from those on the line.

At this time, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Rupert Murr from National Bank. Your line is open.

Good morning, everyone.

Good morning, Rupert.

So if I could start with the Texas weather event. You discussed the incremental commodity costs of the regulated utility business in the Midwest. What's the scale of that incremental cost, and can you talk us through how this will manifest itself in the financial results? Do you Do you book higher costs and revenues here? Are we going to see an accrual on receivables? Can you just tell us how we should be looking at that, please?

Sure. Sure. So the total cost is expected to be in the neighborhood of around just over $200 million. Primarily all of those costs are expected to be passed through to our customers, although the timing over the pass-through is obviously subject to discussions with our regulators. We do expect to set up regulatory assets with respect to those commodity costs.

Okay. All right. Very good. Thank you. And then looking at the Texas event and as well as all of the growth you have on tap right now, can you give us some thoughts on the balance sheet strength today, your liquidity position and capital needs for the remainder of the year to fund your construction?

Sure, Rupert. So we have a very strong liquidity position. As you know, we've got regular, about $1.5 billion of committed credit facilities, and we've also called it beefed up our liquidity position with another $1.6 billion of term facilities. So right now we're sitting at about $2.8 billion of available liquidity to us, which certainly is sufficient to fund our ongoing capital plans, but honestly we plan to also be in the capital markets later. this year raising some funding.

Very good. I'll leave it there. Thank you.

Thank you, Rupert.

Your next question comes from the line of Sean Stewart from TD Securities. Your line is open.

Thank you. Good morning. A couple of questions. I see that subsequent to year end you sold a 32% stake of SL down. pretty shortly after acquiring it. Can you give us some of the rationale, especially as it looks like you sold it at a little bit of a discount to the initial purchase price?

Sure, Sean. Good morning. So look, while we are very, very comfortable with Chile as a country risk and a business risk, this was our first major investment in Chile. And if you look at the structure of ESAL, it had a strong local partner initially, and through the tendering process, they tendered their shares. We always believed that as a first transaction, strategically it was very important for us to have a good, strong local partner who could help us with all kinds of things locally. And so, Toesca was a very natural choice. We have known them for a while, and they not only know the local energy and water sector very well, they in fact also own 50% of another water utility in Chile. So they were a very, very natural partner for us. So it was really a strategy that we had in place long before the final acquisition of SL took place. And, no, it was not at a discount.

Okay. Just like a modest one in our math, but maybe I'll follow up on that. Second question, page 22 of the MD&A goes through, some of the variances in the quarterly results for the regulated segment. There was an other bucket of $9.9 million that goes through several items. I'm wondering, Arthur or Arun, if you can go through some of those elements specifically and help us clarify that figure and the impact on the results.

Sure, Sean. I'll try to We could start with that. And it really is a bunch of items in there. One of the things is we obviously, as you're aware of, contracted services at some of our utilities. And that revenue tends to be a little bit more chunky. So it's just a matter of, I guess, timing compared to last year of that revenue. I'm referring to Fort Benning facility as an example. We also have our SAWS utility that we actually ended up recognizing some interest in last year that didn't reoccur this year. So that was just a matter of a comparative. We also had just lower ASEDC capitalization this year compared to last year. So it's a bunch of things all put together.

Okay. Thanks for that, Arthur. That's all I have for now. Thank you.

Thank you, Sean. Your next question comes from the line of Julian Dumoulin-Smith from Bank of America. Your line is open.

Hey, good morning, team. Thanks for the time and the opportunity. Good morning, Julian. Hey, thank you so much. Listen, a couple different questions for you guys. Maybe to start higher level, can you elaborate a little bit more on ITC-PTC extension here? Just how are you thinking about the impact to your business? I mean, obviously you guys have this accelerating opportunity, a number of different counterparties, Chevron, for instance. Just can you elaborate a little bit on how you think about the cadence of the opportunity here?

Hey, Julian. It's Jeff. And I just want to, if you could reiterate the very beginning of that question on the ITCPTC opportunity, just to make sure that I. Just with the extensions here.

I mean, does this provide a greater sort of five-year view on what you think you can do? I know this is out of cycle with your typical December updates, but I'm just curious with, you know, given that we've got these extensions of labor.

Yeah, I think, well, there's a couple of things. We are very keen about the Biden administration and where they're going to take things and what extensions will go above and beyond what we've already seen. And obviously, the ability to improve some of the economics within our 9.4 billion pipeline to the extent that they're able to qualify for that incremental PTC ITC. The most significant is the ITC extension, allowing projects to come online a little bit later on the solar side. And so we do see upside in the 9.4 billion pipeline on the timing of some of those projects and the ability to bring more projects which aren't yet secured, but obviously we're always looking at the ability to bring more projects in that will take advantage of that full ITC.

Also, to add to that, Julian, where it should really help us is on our 3,400 megawatt greenfield pipeline. With the extension of the ITCs and the PTCs, obviously the economics on those projects will be even better than what we had projected before. And again, as a reminder, that 3,400 megawatt greenfield pipeline is above and beyond our $9.4 billion five-year project.

Yeah, understood. And then if I can go back and look at some of the details here, I just want to understand the New York American water piece of this. Can you talk about the confidence in getting that closed here? I mean, I know there's lots of talk in the state, difficult to discern exactly what's going to transpire there. And on the Texas front, just force majeure, anything specific we should be watching there and what you're assuming in that six cents? I just want to make sure I understand what the six cents assumes on outcomes there. Sorry, just like the loop. Thank you.

Sure. Julian, let me start with the New York American water, right? So, as you know, there is a lot that has been very in the public realm, and I'm not going to repeat that, but our conversations and discussions with the Commission has continued. The hearings are set for mid-May. As you know, Governor Cuomo has come out with a bill, and one of the elements of that bill is to look at potential municipalization. We obviously welcome that opportunity to have a public dialogue around the benefits and not of municipalization versus private participation. And we are still confident that that acquisition will close in 2021. Just as context, though, I should point out, you know, we did close St. Lawrence Gas in New York State, and that was an approximately 18-month process. you know, because of our presence in 16 different jurisdictions, we have a pretty good view of how long different regulatory processes take. And so, we believe that we'll be in that kind of a timeframe. Your second question. what i believe around texas and force majeure um yeah our announcement was a full uh you know 45 to 55 million dollar uh impact before any uh potential mitigations right and so we have uh already issued a force majeure uh notice uh i believe the the we obviously remain confident in the provisions under which we issued that. Obviously, because it could get into dispute or a litigation situation, I don't want to comment more on that. The other potential litigation is, as you're well aware, Julian, there's a lot of discussion going on at the texas legislature at the puc there around the merits and not about the nine thousand dollars a megawatt hour uh pricing and whether uh there's a possibility of part or all of that being rescinded uh we see that as another potential mitigation because uh in by and large from every commentary out there there was a large scale uh market failure so there are some of those are some of those mitigations we're uh thinking about but that is not included in the 45 to 55 million dollar uh number we get and we uh gave in our release thank you so much really appreciate it thanks julian

Your next question comes from the line of David Casaday from Raymond James. Your line is open.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Just my first question here, just as it relates to your wind build-out in the Midwest, you know, as that customer savings plan, I guess, completes, Over the next year or so here, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the potential for future renewables and the rate base there in the Midwest, and I guess maybe even how storage could play a role there as well.

Hey, David, good morning. So let me answer the first part of the question, and I may turn that over. So in terms of the 600 megawatt wind project, in fact, one of them is already online, North Fork. And the two others, Neosho and Kingspoint, they're scheduled to come online, in fact, by the end of this month. So they're clearly very, very advanced in terms of being in operations. We do believe that there's more opportunities out there in terms of substituting wind or solar for other forms of thermal generation, but I'll turn it over for more context.

Yes, so good morning, Johnny Dunstan. So as part of our ongoing review of our IRP plans as part of our central IRP organization, we're always looking ahead at what opportunities we have to make sure that we've got the right generation to meet our load. Within our plans at the moment, we have another 50 megawatts of solar to be put into place and then 20 megawatts of more sort of solar and storage on a sort of more of a community type basis. And then we continue to review that analysis each year as we go forward. We've still got a number of other aging facilities that are part of our generation fleet there. And as those opportunities present themselves, we'll be putting them into office.

And David, as you know, I mean, greening the fleet is a very key lever that we have where we believe we have unique expertise, especially with our experience around tax equity. As you know, in CalPICO as well, we've added a number of solar generation into that rate base. We are excited about potential opportunities in Bermuda as well because that certainly is all thermal generation. So this is something that we are continuously evaluating, and you'll obviously continue to hear more from us on our greening the fleet initiative.

That's great, caller. Thank you very much. Maybe just one more from me. I guess in Europe you've started to – Looks like some opportunities in Spain and then I guess a few renewable opportunities in Colombia as well. Just curious how you see the outlook and the development of projects progressing through AGES. Just any comments that you could provide there on the momentum you're seeing in those markets.

Sure. So I do want to give context first, right? So, you know, we are by and large a North American energy and water company, right? And, you know, some years ago when we acquired our business in Atlantica, we also felt the need for a development entity that would go after non-regulated international businesses. So the scope of ages is just that, you know, non-regulated and international. And the two markets that we have been targeting are Spain and Colombia because we believe that from a country risk, business risk, potential opportunities and our own position in those markets, we believe that we have advantages in those markets. As you saw, I mean, we have, in fact, dropped down a couple of those assets in Colombia already into Atlantica. We are progressing well on a number of those solar opportunities in Spain as well, and we'll update you as we make more progress. The other thing I do want to remind you is that none of those projects are part of our $9.4 billion capital plan, so they would be above and beyond.

Perfect. I appreciate that. Thank you. I'll get back in the queue. Thank you, David.

Your next question comes from the line of Rob Hope from Scotiabank. Your line is open.

Morning, everyone. Two follow-up questions for me. The first is just on the 2021 capital outlook. The renewable energy at 1.4, 1.75 is pretty robust there and over half or around half of the five-year total spend. Is that just kind of timing of all the investments or are you baking in some of your, we'll call it, lower probability or earlier life stage investments there? Or is that really just kind of cleaning up the rest of Maverick, Sugar Creek, and Blue Hills?

Hey, Rob. Good morning. So let me try and answer your question. So when we were at Investor Day and we showed you that $9.4 billion capital plan, We also showed that really a large portion of that is what we report to have already locked and loaded because, as you know, in 2020, that was our largest construction year in our history. We have around 1,600 megawatts of wind and solar projects that were coming into operation. So, basically, when you look at it that way, right, I mean, Sugar Creek, for example, that has now recently come online. Our acquisition of our Texas Coastal Wind Facility, which is, in fact, the largest acquisition on our renewable side, that happened earlier this year. North Fork Ridge came online. And we have some large projects that are also coming online fairly shortly, including on the regulatory side, you've got Kings Point and Neosho. And then on the renewable side, you've got Maverick and Alta Vista also coming online. So it's just that a large portion of that 1,600 megawatt construction is really coming in line in the first quarter and in the second quarter. And so that's what accounts for a large portion of that capital investment plan happening early in 2021.

All right. That's great, Keller. Appreciate that. And then just as a follow-up, you know, at the investor day, you did say that 2021, you could be looking at mandatory equity instruments to fund a capital plan. You know, is that still the case? And does the Texas, you know, Texas will weigh in credit metrics a little bit here, but should we assume that, you know, the equity in the plan that you outlined in December is pretty front and loaded here?

I don't know. It's hard to, Yeah, I mean, I think you can assume what we laid out at Invest Today holds with respect to our funding plans. And to your question about mandatory, yes, it's a product that we still are looking at. And, I mean, as we think about, you know, what probably the predominance of our financing would be, it would probably be through mandatories. But, again, we're still evaluating.

Excellent. Thank you.

Thank you, Rob.

Your next question comes from the line of Mark Jarby from CIBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Thanks. Good morning, everyone. I'm going to follow up on the last question, Arthur, for you, and just in terms of some of that pressure from the higher commodity costs and the Texas losses potentially. Have you guys spoken to the renewable energies in terms of how they would look through this or deal with this in terms of any hit to FFO to debt, and does that push you to maybe reengage on the ATM earlier now?

Good morning, Mark. Yeah, we obviously have spoken to the rating agencies, and it's still the early days. We're not the only company that's obviously going through this. I think the rating agencies are still evaluating. Obviously, this is transitionary, but it does weigh down on the credit metrics from the top line. So, I mean, we view our capital plan more on a long-term basis anyway, so I wouldn't look at this as... necessarily impacting our capital abundance significantly.

Okay. And then in the fourth quarter, the O&M costs on the utilities had a real material step up year over year, and also from the prior quarter. I appreciate that SL and Bell Corp come into the fold now. Can you maybe break it down in terms of how much of the higher O&M comes from the new assets that have been added in this quarter and then other factors that might have played into the higher OPEX for the utility segment?

Yeah, I don't have the exact breakdown for you, but I would say majority of it is due to the new acquisitions. I mean, I could just give maybe anecdotally when you think about seasonality, a utility like Delco will earn about 70% of its earnings will come in the late spring to call it early fall months, right? So it is really... seasonally shaped here, and from that perspective, you may see a bit of an impact on mortgages.

Sorry, so you're saying that maybe top-line revenues for Belco are a little lower, but the fixed operating costs are fairly still flat across the quarters? That's right. Okay, I'll leave it there. Thank you. Thank you, Mark.

Your next question comes from the line of Nelson Ng from RBC. Your line is open.

Great, thanks. Good morning, everyone. The first question relates to all the development projects you have on the go. So the big picture, how much do you spend or expense on development costs? I know some of your Canadian peers spend anywhere from like 20 to 100 million. But I'm just wondering where you guys kind of fall within the range. And then secondly,

how does that cost get embedded is it within your is it at the corporate level or is it in the renewable energy level or i know some of it's in ages but can you just give a bit more color on that sure maybe i'll take that jeff nelson and i'll take the first question and maybe arthur can take the second question uh but generally speaking and yesterday we did indicate that we would be ramping up our our spend on new renewables and unveiled the 3,400 megawatt early stage greenfield pipeline. I believe at that time we indicated that there'd be about a two cent drag on EPS as a result of those activities. And so that accounts for the majority of that spend.

Okay, so two cents per year in general is what we should expect.

That's the incremental cost with respect to all the greenfield developments that we're looking at. With respect to your question around how development costs get booked through, I mean, obviously, once a project reaches certain feasibility, it starts becoming capitalized on our books, but the early stage projects are undertaken through AGES, through that development platform. And, again, once they reach a specific threshold, those costs are then reimbursed back to development.

So Aegis does the U.S. developments as well as international? Like it's all done within Aegis?

It's all done within one combined development shop, the Tesla Academy. We call it Aegis. Maybe Aegis is not the right word for it, but it's really our one combined development shop. and those costs just get reimbursed through our results once they actually do achieve a certain possible.

Okay, got it. And then my second question relates to weather. So Q4 weather was warmer than usual, and that was a negative impact. Q1, I guess if you exclude the extreme weather, was probably colder than usual, So would that help your utility earnings in Q1, I guess, aside from the fact that you had to pay a lot for commodities? But can you just give some color as to, like, Q4 was warmer and it was negative, so Q1 was colder, but obviously commodity prices were also a lot higher. So what would be the net impact, obviously excluding the Senate wind facility?

Yeah, good morning, Nelson. This is Johnny. I think it's fair to say that so far 2021 has been a bit of a 20-odd year so far on the weather front. And actually, if you look at the start of the year, January, it was actually a much warmer winter than we were expecting. I think it's fair to say that February has been a bit colder. We're interested to see where March plays out. So in some ways, I would say probably all things considered, it's almost a wash at the moment. And so not a huge, I think, movement either up or down as you look at the various moves that we've seen in the first couple of months of the quarter.

Okay, thanks. I'll leave it there.

Thanks, Milton.

Your next question comes from the line of Ben Pham from BMO. Your line is open.

Hi, thanks. Good morning. I wanted to follow up on some of the questions on the impact on your credit ratings from the Midwest. what are events, and I understand you're normalizing for earnings for sure, like you should, but clearly this is going to be some sort of a cash flow impact. So I'm wondering, really, with your conversation with the credit rating agency, that $50 million, do you get the sense that they're going to capitalize that in your balance sheet, or is it going to flow through your FFO, or they're just going to completely ignore it and normalize it out of their credit metric methodology?

Hey, Ben, it's Arthur. It's early days. Like I said, we're probably only one of the few players that are working through this. But, I mean, I'll just leave it at that to say, I mean, we try to have cushion in our metrics for especially things like this. So, you know, we're not concerned about being able to absorb it.

Okay. So it just sounds like S&P hasn't decided what they're going to do yet.

They have not decided. We had early discussions with them. I mean, they went back and just said, well, how is this going to impact your credit metrics? Full transparency in terms of, obviously, this will have a full impact, but that full impact is absolutely transitionary. So I guess I'll leave it at that, and I'm sure we'll be watching it closely over the next few weeks here. I'm sure they'll take a position.

Okay. I mean, there's going to be more perspective looking at anything. Maybe I can turn to your 2020 guidance, and I just want to make sure I unpack. I mean, you guys kind of unpacked some of the drivers. On the headwinds, you mentioned the COVID-19 impact, two cents. There's the whole average resource conditions, and then some of the acquisitions were delayed. But then on the other side, you've really got surface cost savings and the tax benefit, which I think you said is about $0.05 or so. So it sounds like it's a wash on both sides. So when you look at your missed versus beginning of year $0.05, what else am I missing there in the conversation?

I think you've got to – I just don't think it was a full-on wash. The big impact here was COVID. what was weather, but also obviously the delay in the acquisition. As I mentioned earlier, there's a pretty significant seasonality that transpires with our Belco utility. So we've closed it, call it probably the worst time you can close it during the year, but that's certainly weighing on our results.

Okay. All right, thank you very much. Your next question comes from the line of Richard Sunderland from J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.

Hi. Thanks for taking my questions here. Just wanted to circle back to the incremental commodity costs you outlined at the start of the Q&A. The $200 million, are you able to break it down by jurisdiction and utility?

Yeah, pretty much from the The majority of that's through our Empire utility in Central. Most of our other utilities are on the coast and really didn't get hit so hard. It's our biggest utility by some way. So it's a mixture of increased natural gas costs for running our gas generation fleet and then some incremental costs on the electricity side to serve our local.

Okay, got it. And then thinking around recovery at a higher level, could you run through maybe some offsets to the cost here? And are you simply thinking about amortization period or are there other considerations in terms of the recovery dynamics? I'm thinking in two parts, kind of the the asbury plant recovery could potentially impact as well in the this sort of the pisa dynamics at large so i know thrown out some some kind of different levers there but just curious how you see um the path forward to recovering yeah so certainly in terms of these uh gas and electricity prices we have a approved and well-established process through our fuel and purchase power adjustment pools or fac We file that twice a year on a six-monthly basis, and it's a normal course of business.

As you file that, you then have a six-month recovery period that follows that. Because of the material nature of these incremental costs, we filed with the commission an AAR and accounting order that will allow us to put those costs onto the balance sheet and then have a conversation with the commission around actually what's the right period of time to recover those costs in a way that makes sense for us, the business, but importantly makes sense for our customers. You could imagine this would have a material rate shock, really not the best time for that. And so we still have those conversations with the commission, but in terms of sort of the process of prudent recovery of those, it's well established and approved and documented already. got it just one last one if i could just any any dates or timing to watch in terms of those those conversations with the commission um so it should be between now and april so our fuel adjustment filing is due on the on the first of april so uh we'll be having those conversations really in the next month um to agree on the best way to handle the the air got it thank you for the color thanks

Your final question today comes from the line of Najee Beydoun from IA Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning. Just wanted to go back to M&A for a second. I guess in a worst-case scenario where the New York water acquisition doesn't go through, just wondering if you can talk about your pipeline of acquisitions today and how quickly you can take that capital and reinvest it somewhere else.

Sure. So, Maddy, as you know, historically, we've been a fairly know transaction oriented company uh so uh we have done what something in the range of 20 transactions over the last 20 years or so uh we because of that experience and because of our uh track record of being able to close uh our transactions you know we're always in the mix uh in terms of uh discussions around uh these transactions whether whether it be in a public realm or not. So that's something that we cannot actually pinpoint as to exactly when those transactions might happen or if. And that's why, as a matter of course, we only include on our five-year capital plan, the M&A transactions that we've already announced, that may not have closed. So that's why New York American Water is the only one on a five-year trajectory. To your point, in a worst case, New York American Water doesn't close, would we be able to do another transaction. I mean, we just started our five-year plan and obviously we've got four years, 10 months more to go. So I would be highly confident in our ability to do more M&A transactions.

I appreciate that. Timing is difficult, but it sounds like you're confident that you can find other opportunities fairly quickly. I guess another question is, are there any updates to the Empire rate case, either the appeal process or just any updates we should be aware of on the new rate case that you expect to file?

I don't think any material updates to the appeal process is ongoing. It could take up to a year for that to come through, and we're preparing to file our next case in Missouri later on this year.

Okay. And just one last question on the Chevron framework agreement. Just any updates or, I guess, next steps that you're looking to achieve this year with Chevron?

Sure. So, Navi, as a reminder, I mean, we announced that sometime in the middle of 2020. And so what we have done since that time is we have, in fact, done some joint procurement work to make sure, you know, we have a safe harbor equipment with us. We have also filed four interconnection queue applications, so those are well underway. And we are working through in terms of contractual structures and starting detailed engineering and design on those projects. So we are making good progress. We're happy with the pace of progress we're making. And so, you know, the question is, you know, when will we actually be able to announce something that starts construction? You know, we're hopeful sometime this year. Okay. That's great, Chetal. Thank you. Thank you, Najib.

That concludes our Q&A today. I now turn back to management for closing remarks.

Thank you very much, and thank you for taking the time on our call today. With that, please stay on the line for our disclaimer.

Our discussion during this call contains certain forward-looking information, including but not limited to our expectations regarding future earnings and capital expenditures, future commercial dates, and the impacts and outcomes of the recent severe winter storms in Texas and the central U.S. This forward-looking information is based on certain assumptions, including those described in our most recent MD&A filed on CEDAR and EDGAR, and available on our website and is subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from historical results or results anticipated by the forward-looking information. Forward-looking information provided during this call speaks only as of the date of this call and is based on the plan's beliefs, estimates, projections, expectations, opinions, and assumptions of management as of today's date. There can be no assurance that forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, and you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking information or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and such forward-looking information, except as required by applicable law. In addition, during the course of this call, we may have referred to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including but not limited to adjusted net earnings, adjusted net earnings per share, or adjusted net EPS, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted funds from operations, and divisional operating profits. There is no standardized measure of such non-GAAP financial metrics, and consequently, AQM's method of calculating these measures may differ from methods used by other companies, and therefore, they may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. For more information about both forelooking information and non-GAAP financial measures, including a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the corresponding GAAP measures, please refer to our most recent MD&A files on CEDAR in Canada or EDGAR in the United States and available on our website. And that concludes the conference call.

Thank you, everybody, for joining today. That concludes your conference call. You may now disconnect.