Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. Limited Partnership Units

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the BEP third quarter 2019 results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participant lines 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 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star, then 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Sachin Shah, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our third quarter 2019 conference call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that a copy of our news release, investor supplement, and letter to unit holders can be found on our website. I also want to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements on this call. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, and our future results may differ materially. For more information, you're encouraged to review our regulatory filings available on CDAR, EDGAR, and on our website. Our business continued to perform well in the third quarter as we advanced our key strategic priorities. Our priorities remain focused on deploying capital for value, improving our operations, and maintaining our high levels of liquidity in a strong balance sheet. Our objective, as always, is to deliver total returns on a per-unit basis of 12% to 15% over the long term. We remain committed to continuing to broaden our investor base, facilitating increased demand and enhancing trading liquidity for Brookfield Renewable. As our business continues to grow and globalize, we are seeing increased demand from prospective investors. As such, we are pleased to announce that we are creating a structure that that will allow our investors additional optionality to invest in Brookfield Renewable through either the current partnership or through a newly created publicly listed Canadian corporation known as BEPC, both of which will provide investors access to the same globally diversified renewable power portfolio with a strong track record of growth. BEPC will be created via an effective stock split and the Class A shares should be economically equivalent to the existing LP units as they will pay identical dividends and distributions, and the BEPSI Class A shares will be exchangeable into the LP units at any time at the auction of the holder. We believe this initiative should support the expansion of our investor base by attracting new investors that are currently unable or unwilling to invest in our LP structure due to tax reporting or other attributes. and will allow us to be eligible for certain indices or ETFs that the BEP LP units are not eligible for. During the quarter, we acquired a 200 megawatt recently constructed fully contracted wind farm in China for $45 million net to BEP. We also continue to advance our distributed generation joint venture in the country, commissioning 8 megawatts of rooftop solar and advancing an additional 12 megawatts that we expect to be online by the end of the year. We continue to remain disciplined and measured on growth in China by looking for high-value, low-risk investment opportunities. We also advanced the build-out of our development projects globally. We remain on track to close our acquisition of a 50% interest in Exelio, a premier global solar developer in the fourth quarter, which will significantly enhance our solar development capabilities. We also progressed construction of 150 megawatts of capacity, 960 megawatts of advanced stage projects globally, including 60 megawatts of wind repowering projects in the United States. Finally, subsequent to the quarter end, we invested an incremental $50 million into Terraform Power as an investor in its recent $300 million equity issuance. Following this issuance, our proportionate interest in Terraform Power is largely unchanged, which for BEF is approximately 30 percent. Terraform Power recently closed its acquisition of a 322 megawatt distributed generation portfolio in the U.S., making it one of the largest owners and operators of distributed generation across the United States. I'll now turn the call over to Wyatt to discuss our operating results and financial position. Wyatt?

Wyatt Goulden Thank you, Sachin, and good morning, everyone. During the third quarter, we generated FFO of $133 million up from $105 million during the same period in the prior year. In the third quarter, our hydroelectric segment generated FFO of $125 million, up 20% relative to the same quarter in the prior year. While generation for the quarter was below the long-term average, driven largely by drier conditions in the U.S. Northeast and Canada, generation so far this year has exceeded the long-term average by 5%. As we have stated for many years, we do not manage the business based on under or over performance of generation relative to the long-term average and do not factor this into our planning. Instead, we remain focused on diversifying the business from both a geographic and technology perspective, which mitigates exposure to resource volatility and regional or market disruptions. Additionally, we continue to advance initiatives to extract additional value from our hydroelectric portfolio. For example, earlier this year we qualified our 820 megawatt Sogamosa hydro facility in Colombia, which has 12 months of reservoir capacity, to provide grid stabilizing ancillary services, which is expected to add an incremental $3 million to our FFO on an annual basis. Our wind and solar segments generated a combined $72 million of FFO, up 20% relative to the same period in the prior year. We benefited from contributions from our operating growth initiatives, including 210 megawatts of wind acquired in India, 51 megawatts of wind capacity commissioned and acquired last year in Ireland, and significant cost savings realized from the implementation of Terraform Power's new long-term service agreement for its North American wind fleet. Our storage and other segments generated $6 million of FFO during the quarter as our portfolio continues to provide critical grid-stabilizing ancillary services and backup capacity to increasingly intermittent grids. For example, in August, the UK experienced a major electricity disconnection event that resulted in a blackout affecting more than 1 million customers. Between 60 seconds to four minutes after the disconnection event, our First Hydro portfolio, which represents 75% of the UK storage capacity and has very fast ramp-up capabilities, provided more than half of the power used to restart the grid. We were the critical link to restarting the electricity grid in the UK on that day. We continue to work with all stakeholders to highlight the strategic importance of First Hydro in the UK and bear swamp in the U.S., and how the scale and speed of their response capabilities can be instrumental in managing the grid. Our liquidity position remains robust with $2.5 billion of total available liquidity. During the quarter, we continue to take advantage of the low interest rate environment to execute on $2.3 billion of financing and approximately $210 million of capital recycling initiatives. raising a total of $320 million of incremental liquidity to BAP. During the quarter, we issued a $600 million Canadian dollar investment grade corporate green bond offering through which we completed the early refinancing of our 2020 corporate maturity. This issuance represents the largest corporate green bond ever issued in Canada and our fifth green bond issuance to date for total outstanding green bonds of almost $2 billion. This bond was issued in two tranches, 10 and 30 years, which nearly doubled the average term of our corporate debt to over 10 years. We also advanced our capital recycling program, and subsequent to quarter end, closed the sale of two mature European wind portfolios as private investors continue to view high-quality, contracted renewable power assets as a proxy to government bonds, but with a higher yield. The first sale was of our 68-megawatt wind portfolio in Northern Ireland, which we developed between 2016 and 2018. The second sale was of our 123-megawatt wind portfolio in Portugal, which we acquired in 2015 and subsequently de-risked by enhancing the capital structure and renegotiating the O&M contracts on better terms. Together, these sales generated proceeds of $186 million or $74 million net to BEPS, and crystallized an 18% compounded annual return since acquisition. Looking ahead, we continue to focus on executing our key priorities, including maintaining a robust balance sheet and access to diverse sources of capital, enhancing cash flows from our existing business, and assessing acquisition opportunities. As always, we remain focused on delivering to our unit holders long-term total returns of 12% to 15% on a per-unit basis. We thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to updating you on our progress in that regard. That concludes our formal remarks. Thank you for joining us this morning. We'd be pleased to take your questions at this time. Operator?