Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. Limited Partnership Units

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the BEP third quarter 2020 results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. It is now my pleasure to introduce Chief Executive Officer, Conor Chesky.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter 2020 conference call. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that a copy of our news release, investor supplement, and letter to shareholders can be found on our website. We 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 are encouraged to review our regulatory filings available on CDAR, EDGAR, and our website. To kick off today's call, we would like to provide an outlook on the business and an update on our recent growth initiatives. After my remarks, Wyatt will provide an update on our operating results as well as an overview of our balance sheet and funding plan. Following our prepared remarks, we look forward to taking your questions and comments. We continue to establish ourselves as the preeminent renewables franchise and are playing a significant role in assisting the world to achieve its decarbonization goals. Over the last 20 years, we have developed and scaled our renewable power platform to 38,000 megawatts of operating and development assets globally, and we have established deep expertise across all major renewables technologies. Our focus continues to be on building a leading, differentiated business and fostering relationships with governments and businesses around the world to support their transition to a greener future. Our strategy is simple and remains unchanged. We acquire for value, we finance our businesses on an investment-grade basis, and we enhance value of our assets through our operational capabilities. This strategy has proven to be effective over many years and through economic cycles. Looking ahead, we believe that the global trend towards decarbonization will continue to accelerate, leading to increased adoption of renewable technologies. As this occurs, Market conditions will increasingly favor investors such as ourselves with a diversified business that can drive value using both our global scale and our depth of operating expertise. We are currently seeing increasing opportunities in our strategies of additionality and energy transition. This includes growing asset classes and technologies that leverage our existing knowledge such as distributed generation, green hydrogen, and flexible capacity, and we expect this trend to continue moving forward. We would now like to take a few minutes to talk through the broad range of transactions we executed recently, which we believe highlight the unique strengths and differentiated value of our business. In total, we agreed two transactions, which will see us invest approximately $900 million of equity, or $250 million net to Beth. Our largest transaction was the completion of the previously announced merger of Terraform Power on an all-stock basis. This transaction was immediately cash accretive, expands our wind and solar business in North America and Europe, and further enhances our position as one of the largest publicly traded pure play renewables businesses globally. Concurrent with that merger, We also completed the special distribution of Brookfield Renewable Corporation, which has led to increased demand and enhanced liquidity for our securities. We also recently closed the acquisition of a 1,200 megawatt shovel-ready solar project in Brazil, one of the largest solar projects globally. This project is now over 75% contracted under long-term agreements, and we intend to leverage our local our marketing expertise to contract the remaining generation, and we also intend to use our global scale to drive down equipment procurement and operating costs to deliver value over time. This week, we announced our intention to launch an offer to privatize Polenergia, a scale renewable business in Europe, in partnership with the current majority shareholder. The investment represents an opportunity to invest in a leading onshore wind platform and provides an attractive entry into the offshore wind sector in Europe through a 3,000 megawatt development pipeline, which we expect to construct over the next five to seven years in partnership with an experienced offshore wind developer. We also recently acquired a portfolio of loans from one of the largest non-bank financial companies in India, for approximately $200 million. The investment, which is secured by approximately 2.5 gigawatts of operating assets, is expected to earn returns in excess of 15% and further expands our presence in the region. We also recently funded the final $400 million tranche of the $750 million convertible securities investment we agreed to make into TransAlta Corporation at the beginning of 2019. These convertible securities provide us with the option to convert into an interest in TransAlta's 813 megawatt portfolio of high-quality hydro facilities in Alberta. We can make this conversion at our own election between 2025 and 2028. based on a multiple of 13 times the average annual EBITDA for the three years prior to conversion. The investment, which was the culmination of a multi-year dialogue, enhances our strategic relationship with the company to help it in advancing its goal of transitioning to a low-carbon energy future. Lastly, today we announced a split of our units and shares on a three-for-two basis. While splitting the units and shares has no effect on the value of the company and costs us virtually nothing to do, it keeps the unit and share prices within a reasonable range for investors. In conclusion, achievement of the world's decarbonization goals will require significant capital and operating expertise. This plays to our strengths, and as a result, we believe there will continue to be significant growth opportunities for our business for many years ahead. With that, we'll turn the call over to Wyatt to discuss our operating results and financial position.

Thank you, Connor. Our business performed well in the quarter, supported by strong asset availability and contributions from organic growth and recent acquisitions, most notably the privatization of Terraform Power. Additionally, we advanced key strategic priorities, like the special distribution of Brookfield Renewable Corporation, and maintained a robust balance sheet and access to capital. During the quarter, we generated FFO of $157 million, or 38 cents per unit, a 12% increase from the prior year. On a normalized basis, our results were up 28%. Turning to our segment results, During the quarter, our hydroelectric business delivered FFO of $113 million. While generation for the quarter was below the long-term average, driven by drier conditions across our fleet, year-to-date generation has been roughly in line with long-term average. As we have consistently emphasized, we do not manage the business on under or over performance of generation relative to the long-term average, in any given period. Instead, we remain focused on diversifying the business from both a geographic and technology perspective, which mitigates short-term exposure to resource volatility and regional or market disruptions. Across our hydroelectric portfolio, we continue to focus on securing contracts that value the uniqueness of our fleet as a generator of dispatchable carbon-free electricity, and ancillary services. Subsequent to the quarter end, we agreed to supply 100% renewable energy to one of the first planned industrial-scale green hydrogen production plants in North America and over 90% of JPMorgan's real estate operations in New York. These transactions demonstrate our ability to address diverse customer needs for renewable supply across both wholesale and retail energy markets. Additionally, in South America, we signed 25 contracts in the quarter with high-quality, credit-worthy counterparties for a total of almost 2,000 gigawatt hours per year, substantially contracting our recently acquired solar development assets in the region. Next, our wind and solar businesses continue to generate stable revenues and benefit from the diversification of our fleet and highly contracted cash flows with long-duration power purchase agreements. During the quarter, these segments generated a combined $126 million of FFO, representing a 70% increase over the prior year, as we benefited from contributions from acquisitions, including our increased ownership in Terraform Power and a 33-megawatt development of solar projects commissioned during the quarter. Finally, we continue to advance our global development activities, including progressing our almost 2,700 megawatts of assets under construction diversified across distributed and utility-scale solar, wind, storage, and hydro in eight different countries. We're also progressing 1,100 megawatts of advanced stage projects through final permitting and contracting. In total, we expect these projects to contribute over $150 million in FFO annually. Our financial position continues to be in excellent shape. We have $3.3 billion of total available liquidity, and our investment-grade balance sheet has no material maturities over the next five years, and approximately 90% of our financings are non-recourse to BEPS. During the quarter, we continued to take advantage of the low interest rate environment and executed on $900 million of investment-grade financing, including a $425 million Canadian dollar 30-year corporate green bond issuance, which brings our total green finances to date to over $4 billion and extends our average corporate debt duration to 14 years. We also continue to execute on our capital recycling program of monetizing mature de-risk assets. During the quarter, we closed the sale of the final project in our South African portfolio. Since acquiring these assets as part of a broader global transaction in 2017, we have returned almost $200 million of capital, representing over two and a half times our initial investments. Following the quarter, we also executed the sale of a 40% equity interest in an 850 megawatt wind portfolio in the U.S. and 47 megawatts of operating wind assets in Ireland for total proceeds of over $400 million. Given the robust market environment for de-risk renewable assets, we are increasingly seeing opportunities to monetize our mature assets, where we have completed our business plan, at attractive values. We will only do so when we feel the value of being offered is greater than that we would gain by holding the assets and only to the extent we expect to recycle that capital into more attractive investment opportunities over time. Looking ahead, we continue to focus on growing our business and executing on our key operational priorities, including maintaining a robust balance sheet, maintaining access to diverse sources of capital, and servicing value through enhanced cash flows from our existing portfolio. We believe that we have established ourselves as one of the few entities with the scale, track record, and global capabilities to partner with governments and businesses to help them achieve their goal of greening the global electricity grid, while earning a strong total return of 12% to 15% for our investors over the long term. That concludes our formal remarks for today's calls. Thank you for joining us this morning. And with that, I'll pass it back to our operator for questions.