Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. Limited Partnership Units

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Brookfield Renewables first quarter 2023 results conference call and webcast. 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'll need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Connor Teske, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2023 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 websites. 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 CEDAR, EDGAR, and on our website. On today's call, we will provide an update on our business and our recent development activities. Ignacio Pazares, a managing director and head of our European investment team, will highlight some of our recent transactions. And then lastly, Wyatt will conclude the call by discussing our operating results and financial position. Following our prepared remarks, we look forward to taking your questions. We had an excellent start to the year with strong financial results, good progress advancing our development pipeline, and success with respect to our growth initiatives. We generated funds from operations of $275 million or 43 cents per unit, a 13% increase from the same period last year, representing the progression to higher run rate earnings as our investments in new generation and various commercial initiatives come online. We also followed up on what was a very robust year for growth with a strong first quarter. signing transactions for almost $8 billion of equity investment alongside our institutional partners, or over $1 billion net to Brookfield Renewable. Together with prior transactions, these investments position us to achieve and likely outperform our $6 to $7 billion capital deployment target over the next five years. This includes our landmark transaction to acquire alongside our institutional partners Origin's energy markets business, Australia's largest integrated power generator and energy retailer. With this transaction, we will add a strategic platform in the country to leverage our deep development expertise to invest a further 20 billion Australian dollars, enabling us to build out 14,000 megawatts of new renewable generation and storage facilities. This investment in clean replacement generation capacity will enable the responsible retirement of one of Australia's largest coal-fired power plants and make a material difference to achieving the country's net zero goals. The acquisition and planned decarbonization of the business is an example of the type of investment that is necessary to meet global net zero targets. We are excited about this transaction and the potential it brings to grow our business in a highly attractive market and generate strong risk adjusted returns for our investors. Our success in deploying large scale capital is a testament to our track record, as demonstrated by our ability to attract discretionary co-investment from some of the largest and most sophisticated investors around the world. This has been critical in allowing us to further diversify our business and take on large scale investments where we see less competition. As we have discussed in the past, our access to partnership capital is a key differentiator, and while beneficial in all instances, it is particularly advantageous in the current market environment. With Brookfield's first Global Transition Fund nearly fully committed, we are preparing to participate in the second fund. Based on the positive feedback received to date, we are optimistic that the second fund will both broaden the number of institutional partnerships as well as provide a larger pool of capital to invest alongside, positioning us to continue to execute scaled transactions at very attractive risk-adjusted returns. Touching briefly on the broader market and recent events, over the last few months, we all witnessed significant market and interest rate volatility on the back of persistent inflationary pressures and stress across the banking system. However, our business continues to be very resilient. Our generation portfolio is currently 90% contracted and has a weighted average remaining contract duration of 14 years, and approximately 70% of our revenues are linked to inflation. We also operate essential, low-cost infrastructure with gross margins of over 70% that are well protected throughout the business cycle. Going forward, our business plan and targets remain unchanged, and we do not anticipate any meaningful operational or financial impact from recent events. Our financial position also remains strong with almost $4 billion of available liquidity. We have always prioritized financing our business on an investment grade basis with a focus on long duration, matched currency and fixed rate debt. As a result, we do not have any meaningful exposure to interest rate variability or any material debt maturities over the next three years. On our development initiatives, we commissioned approximately 700 megawatts of capacity in the quarter, completing projects in seven different countries around the world. We are on track to commission approximately 5,000 megawatts of capacity in 2023, which we expect to contribute an additional $70 million of FFO net to Brookfield Renewable. We also progressed the other approximately 19,000 megawatts of projects in our advanced stage pipeline, maintaining our targeted commissioning dates. With that, we will turn it over to Ignacio to highlight some of our recent announced investments, including Exelio, where we increased ownership in a business we know well. Ignacio, over to you.

Thank you, Connor, and good morning, everyone. As Conor just mentioned, I will go through our most recent deal activity, which is mainly taking place in India and around Exelio, apart from Origin, which was just covered. But before we get into the details, it would be good to provide some background. And as most of you may know, the investment environment for renewables and decarbonization assets remains highly compelling. Things like demand for clean energy from corporates, increasing focus on energy security, government-supported electrification, and decarbonization targets continue to be key trends supporting new investment. And with this backdrop, we have made significant progress growing our business globally over the last few months. Starting with India, we have executed two large-scale transactions, tripling the size of our business in the country. First, we entered an agreement with Avada, a leading renewable platform with over 11,000 megawatts of operating and development assets to provide a structured US dollar financing solution that gives us significant debt-like downside protection as well as equity-like upside. In addition to Avada, we also agreed to acquire a 55% stake in CleanMax, another leading renewal platform also based in India with four and a half gigawatts of operating and development pipeline and a plan to build over two gigawatts over the next five years. With these two acquisitions, our operating and development platform in the country will stand at approximately 21,000 megawatts. To provide some context around our growth strategy in India, similar to Brookfield's broader approach to new geographies, we have now been on the ground in the country for more than five years on the renewable side. and have gone through a strong learning curve by predominantly making smaller scale investments. This has provided us with strong insights into the market dynamics, reaching a point in which we're now ready to scale our business in the country in a transformational way by tripling its size through these two transactions. Moving away from India, we also entered into an agreement to acquire the 50% stake in Exilio that we did not already own. To refresh everyone, we made our original investment back in 2019, acquiring 50% of the business. And this past month, we agreed to acquire the remaining 50% of the company with a plan to syndicate about a third of the overall ownership to co-investors. This was a situation where we could put capital to work in a business we know better than anyone else, given our existing position, and double down on what we have has already been a very successful investment that continues to have a strong outlook. What attracted us originally to Exelio was that it was a fully integrated solar development platform with a global presence in key solar markets where we saw significant growth potential. The business also has one of the strongest management teams out there and excellent capabilities around contracting and procurement. Therefore, our Xcelia investment is a great example of an opportunity where we were able to take a very strong standalone platform, for all the reasons I just mentioned, and add significant value through our ownership. This value creation has taken place since acquiring Xcelia by successfully implementing our initial business plan. which was mainly focused on delivering on growth, returning equity through asset recycling, and adjusting the capital structure to create a self-funding business model. But I would like to particularly focus on the asset rotation strategy of Exelio, where in the last three years, we've generated over one billion of equity proceeds from asset sales. This is more than doubling the invested capital in those projects that we sold. The proceeds from these sales have been used to return almost half of our initial investment and also reinvested into new construction and future development. Growing the development pipeline from 5,000 megawatts at entry back in 2019 to over 12,000 megawatts today. We believe this has also been important to prove the value that Exilio is able to create through development. or in other words, that the business can not only grow at a fast pace, but do it at strong returns and capital. Finally, going forward, we expect Xcelia to continue benefiting from robust industry tailwinds and its leadership position in most of the markets where the business is present, to further enhance its profitable growth pace while maintaining its self-funded business model. With that, I'll turn it over to Wyatt to discuss our operating results and financial position. Thank you very much.