Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. Limited Partnership Units

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the BEP first quarter 2021 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 CEO, Connor Teske.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2021 conference call. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that a copy of our news release, investor supplement, and letter to unit holders can be found on our website. We would also like to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements on this call. These statements are subject to known and unknown risk, and our future results may differ materially. For more information, you are encouraged to review our regulatory filings available in CDAR, EDGAR, and on our website. To kick off today's call, I will first provide an outlook on the business and an update on our recent growth initiatives. Then, Wyatt will provide an overview of our operating results, as well as our balance sheet and funding plan. Following our prepared remarks, we look forward to taking your questions and comments. Our business performed well in the quarter. We continue to focus on acquiring quality assets for value, enhancing cash flows through our operational capabilities, and maintaining a strong balance sheet. All of this with the objective of delivering total returns to our investors of 12% to 15% growth on a per unit basis over the long term. The tailwinds for renewables are accelerating. governments and businesses around the world are intensifying their focus on decarbonization. With each passing quarter, governments are committing to greater emissions targets and business leaders are adopting plans to transition their businesses towards net zero. Over the past couple weeks, the United States, the EU, Canada, and Japan have each announced plans to reduce emissions by approximately half by 2030. The UK announced plans to reduce emissions by almost 80% by 2035. These plans will require significant capital as well as the operating expertise to build out and implement more efficient and sustainable solutions. As this occurs, growth opportunities are expected to increasingly favour investors who have global platforms and strong development capabilities. This will position us to participate in the accelerating build-out of renewables. Our power marketing expertise allows us to provide green power to businesses across all sectors of the economy. And further, due to our size and expertise across all major renewables technologies, we are increasingly seeing attractive large-scale opportunities to help businesses transition existing generation to cleaner forms of electricity production as utilities and power producers begin a multi-decade decarbonization process. Looking forward, we remain focused on participating in growth from both the continued build-out of wind and solar, as well as the increasing demand for decarbonization and energy transition solutions. We will now go through a few of the key highlights for the quarter. We generated FFO of $242 million or 38 cents per unit, a 21% increase on a normalized per unit basis over the same period in the prior year. We progressed approximately 6,000 megawatts through construction and advanced stage permitting and added nearly 4,500 megawatts to our development pipeline. We invested or agreed to invest $1.6 billion or nearly $410 million net to Brookfield Renewable, of equity across a range of transactions, including onshore wind, offshore wind, utility-scale solar, and distributed generation in the United States, Europe, and India. We also issued a $350 million perpetual green subordinated note at a fixed rate of four and five-eighths, and our balance sheet remains robust with $3.4 billion of available liquidity and no meaningful near-term maturities. And finally, we raised over $850 million, or approximately $410 million net to Brookfield Renewable from asset recycling initiatives, including the sale of mature onshore wind portfolios in Ireland and the United States at attractive values, returning approximately two times our invested capital. Next, we'd like to spend a few minutes walking through recent growth in corporate contracting initiatives. As the opportunity to invest in renewables and decarbonization expands, we continue to exercise a value-oriented approach to growing our business. We remain disciplined in focusing on opportunities that play to our strengths. where we can invest for value, then leverage our operating capabilities to increase cash flow, as well as deploy incremental capital at attractive returns to grow our existing businesses over time. Recently, we executed on a number of transactions that highlight this approach. For the past several years, we have monitored the offshore wind sector while not investing. But as the technology has grown and matured, we have become more comfortable. In this quarter, we closed our first investment in offshore wind. It included a pipeline to build three gigawatts of capacity supported by attractive contract structures over the next several years. Similarly, in India, one of the largest and fastest growing renewable markets globally, we have continued to grow our business following our initial investment in 2017. Having expanded our capabilities in the region, we are now seeing a steady pipeline of opportunities to incrementally add to our platform at attractive returns. Recently, we signed or closed a few transactions we would like to highlight. The first is Shepherd's Flat, which is an 845 megawatt wind farm in Oregon, that includes one of the largest repowering opportunities in the world. Once completed, we expect total generation to increase by approximately 25%. We are making good progress on the repowering and are also advancing a 400 megawatt new build development project that was included as part of that transaction. We also made an investment in Polenergia, a scale renewable business in Europe with an interest in a 3 gigawatt offshore wind development pipeline. We believe Polenergia has tremendous growth prospects and we are well positioned as both a supportive operating partner and a capital provider to that business. Further, we acquired Exelon Distributed Generation, a DG business comprising of 360 megawatts of operating capacity with an additional over 700 megawatts under development. we now own one of the leading DG businesses in the United States with deep operating, development and origination capabilities and an almost 2000 megawatt portfolio that generates high quality contracted cash flows that are diversified by both geography and by customer. And lastly, on the back of a relationship established through our acquisition of a portfolio of loans from a non-bank financial company near the end of 2020, We signed an agreement which gives us the right to acquire a 450 megawatt shovel-ready solar project from one of the largest developers in India. The project is expected to be commissioned by the end of the year and is backed by a 25-year power purchase agreement with a high-quality state utility. We expect to invest $70 million or $20 million net to Brookfield Renewable of equity in the project and are targeting 20% plus returns. Looking ahead, we believe the global trends towards decarbonization will continue to accelerate and impact all industries. This will lead to increased adoption of renewable technologies, the electrification of industry and transport, and the conversion of carbon intensive processes to cleaner methods of production. The dramatic increase in demand for green power has shifted industry dynamics in favor of businesses that can provide differentiated solutions and the ability to meet customers large-scale 24-7 green power or unique load shaping requirements. Our diversification across geographies and technologies including base load dispatchable power positions us well to capitalize on this trend. Further, our corporate contracting expertise allows us to acquire development projects that are not yet fully contracted at attractive returns with less competition. We have the ability to then utilize our global contracting capabilities to source long-term contracts with high-quality counterparties, both enhancing and de-risking a project's future revenues and allowing us to generate attractive returns on our capital with strong downside protection. As a result, we are seeing an opportunity to accelerate the build-out of our 27,000 megawatt development pipeline. Leveraging our deep customer relationships, we dispatch clean energy to over 700 credit-worthy customers globally. In the last quarter, we signed 29 agreements for approximately 2,300 gigawatt hours of renewable generation with corporate off-takers across all major industries. including many of the largest counterparties by market capitalization in the world. Let us walk you through a few recent examples of our contracting activities. First, we leveraged our global platform and relationships with a number of leading global technology companies, including signing an agreement to support the development of almost 100 megawatts of solar capacity to power data centers in the US Northeast. We also signed agreements to provide green electricity to leading industrial companies and manufacturers, including a tailored solution for a large U.S. manufacturer that bundles both a long-term PPA from a new build development with a zero-carbon retail agreement. In addition, we signed agreements to provide green electricity to several global energy players, including the supermajors, as well as with a hydrogen company for their planned industrial-scale green hydrogen production plant, the first of its kind in North America. We also signed PPAs to provide global utilities with carbon-free generation, including with a Spanish utility to support the build-out of 150 megawatts of solar capacity in that region. And finally, we signed an energy agreement with JPMorgan Chase to supply clean, renewable electricity to over 500 of the real estate operations in New York State from our hydroelectric facilities in the region. With that, I'll turn the call over to Wyatt to discuss our operating results and financial position.

Thank you, Connor. During the first quarter, we generated FFO of $242 million, or 38 cents per unit, reflecting solid performance as our operations benefited from strong asset availability, growth, and efficiency initiatives. On a normalized basis, our per-unit results were up 21% year over year. With an increasingly diversified portfolio of operating assets, limited concentration risk with counterparties, and a long-term contract profile, our cash flows are highly resilient. while generation for the quarter was marginally below the long-term average, driven largely by drier conditions in New York. We expect this variability and therefore manage our business for the long term. Further, we are continuously diversifying the business. This increasingly mitigates exposure to any single resource, market, or counterparty, and our variability becomes less and less every year. During the quarter, our hydroelectric segment delivered FFO of $170 million. Across this portfolio, we continue to focus on securing contracts that value the uniqueness of our fleet as a generator of dispatchable clean electricity and ancillary services. Our wind and solar segments generated a combined $158 million of FFO. We continue to generate stable revenues from these assets and benefit from the diversification of our fleet and highly contracted cash flows with long-duration power purchase agreements. There was severe winter weather in the quarter, in particular in Texas. The conditions did not have a material impact on our financial results due to our operating and power marketing capabilities, which reacted to mitigate risk. We are proud of how our teams performed during these difficult times keeping our employees safe and our operations running. Our energy transition segment generated $33 million of FFO during the quarter. Our portfolio continues to grow as we assist commercial and industrial partners achieve their decarbonization goals and provide critical grid stabilizing ancillary services and backup capacity required to address the increasing intermittency of greener electricity grids. Our financial position continues to be strong. We have approximately $3.4 billion of available liquidity, and our investment-grade balance sheet has no meaningful near-term maturities, and approximately 90% of our financings are non-recourse to Brookfield Renewable. We continue to take advantage of the low interest rate environment and executed on $3.1 billion of investment grade financings, including a $350 million four and five eighths fixed rate green perpetual subordinated note offering. The notes have the same accounting and rating treatment as our preferred LP units. We also continue to execute on our capital recycling strategy of selling mature de-risk or non-core assets to lower cost of capital buyers while redeploying the proceeds into higher yielding opportunities. The proceeds from these transactions will be used to fund growth opportunities executed in the quarter as well as our robust future growth pipeline. In April, we agreed to sell our remaining 360 megawatts of operating assets and development pipeline in Ireland and approximately 270 megawatts of ready-to-build wind assets in Scotland for an aggregate equity value of approximately $450 million. We entered the European renewable market in 2014 with the acquisition of Borgash's wind portfolio in Ireland. When we acquired this business, it was part of a state-owned utility with approximately 300 megawatts of operating wind capacity. Under our ownership, we grew the business to over 700 megawatts of total operating assets by building out the development portfolio, and we expanded the development pipeline to approximately 1,000 megawatts. Consistent with our strategy when we enter new markets, we use this investment as a stepping stone to grow our business across Europe, including the acquisition of our development pipeline in Scotland in 2015. Today, across Europe, we have expanded our capabilities to become a fully integrated platform with extensive corporate contracting, operating and growth capabilities. Following the completion of these sales, we will have more than 300 employees and over 10,000 megawatts of operating and development assets in the region. With this sale, we will have fully exited our initial investment in Ireland, having previously sold 375 megawatts of operating assets. In aggregate, we generated more than 15% compound annual returns on this investment. These sales are expected to close in the second quarter. We also signed an agreement to sell 390 megawatts of wind assets, primarily in California, for a total equity value of approximately $370 million. generating returns of approximately two times our invested capital. Under our ownership, the facilities were substantially de-risked by completing our business plan, which included developing several of the assets, establishing long-term revenue certainty, reducing operating and maintenance costs, and optimizing the capital structure. This sale is expected to close in the third quarter. Looking ahead, we continue to focus on growing our business and executing on our key operational priorities, including maintaining a robust balance sheet and access to diverse sources of capital and surfacing value through enhancing cash flows from our existing portfolio. We believe that with our scale, track record, and global capabilities, we are well-situated to partner with governments and businesses to help them achieve their goal of greening the global electricity grid. We believe the prospects for growth of our business are better than they ever have been, and we look forward to further opportunities to provide capital and solutions to drive decarbonization. As always, we remain focused on delivering on our long-term total return targets. That concludes our formal remarks for today's call. Thank you for joining us this morning. With that, I'll pass it back to our operator for questions.