Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. Limited Partnership Units

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Brookfield Renewables' first quarter 2024 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 will 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 speaker 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 2024 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 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 on our website. On today's call, we will provide a review of our first quarter performance, our role as a key enabler in the growth of digitalization and AI, and our recently announced agreement with Microsoft, and then we will hand it over to Esper Nemi a senior vice president on our investment team, to discuss the growth opportunities we are seeing in the current market, as well as our asset recycling initiatives. 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 a strong start to the year, generating record funds from operations in the first quarter, benefiting from our development activities and acquisitions. Our operating business continues to grow and diversify, helping to improve the durability of our results and deliver on our distribution growth target. As the accelerating global trends of cloud computing, digitalization, and the adoption of AI continue to drive significant growth in the demand for power, we are fortunate to be a key enabler of one of the most significant growth trends in recent history. The leading global technology companies who reported results over the past two weeks all highlighted significant increases in their capital budgets to fund cloud and AI infrastructure growth. The role that computer chips play in delivering the compute power behind AI is well understood by the market. But to execute on the number of computations that make AI such a powerful tool, you also need an immense amount of energy. The market is only starting to understand this need, and power demand estimates to supply the growth in cloud computing and the adoption of AI have grown significantly in recent months and quarters. However, existing energy infrastructure is simply not adequate to meet the demand from AI, meaning sourcing sustainable, renewable power at scale is now on the critical path to delivering the rollout of AI globally. In this regard, We recently signed a landmark renewable energy framework agreement with Microsoft, where we expect to deliver them over 10.5 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity in the United States and Europe between 2026 and 2030. Our strategy of building a business with leading platforms across the most important power markets globally, supported by our centralized teams, provides us with a unique development and operating capabilities whereby we are able to leverage local relationships for permitting an interconnection and our global relationships for procurement and contracting to deliver a volume of capacity that is difficult to match. This first-of-its-kind agreement between us and Microsoft is a natural development in the long-standing and well-established relationship between one of the largest buyers of power and one of the largest renewable power developers and operators globally. The agreement supports Microsoft on a path to achieving their energy procurement needs to support their rapidly growing business in a sustainable manner, while also enhancing our position to achieve or exceed our targeted growth by identifying the key requirements for new capacity, including the location of the capacity and the timeline to deliver. Through the agreement, we have identified projects that are in various stages of development that can be offered to Microsoft under a pre-agreed standard form power purchase agreement. With the well-defined framework that aligns the two parties to work together, we are confident in the potential of expanding on this agreement going forward and furthering our position as a key partner to support the growth of Microsoft's business. This agreement already includes provisions to increase its scope to deliver additional renewable energy capacity within the US and Europe and beyond to other regions, including Asia-Pac, India, and Latin America. The partnership is a testament to our differentiated offering, which is characterized by our access to capital and credibility to deliver scale, clean power solutions from our extensive pipeline of advanced stage projects, which are well positioned from an interconnection and permitting perspective in many key data center markets globally. While this partnership is a first of its kind, given the significant scale of investment required to meet the increase in energy demand, we believe we are uniquely positioned to be a key enabler of growth for the largest technology players through similar arrangements. Our access to scale capital, sizable development pipeline, which is now almost 160 gigawatts, and our ability to commission significant capacity concurrently to meet this demand all together differentiate us as a partner. We are also uniquely positioned to provide a tailored solution to help address our customers' needs. Our ability to provide scale 24-7 clean power solutions through the combination of our large portfolio of existing hydro assets, our leading nuclear business, and other renewable power capacity from across the technology spectrum also distinguishes our offering. This is translating into favorable contracting opportunities. With that, we would now like to turn the call over to Esper to discuss our robust growth pipeline as well as our asset recycling initiatives.

Thank you, Connor, and good morning, everyone. Our pipeline of attractive growth opportunities is as robust as ever, given our access to scale capital, strong operating business, and market conditions, where not all counterparties are necessarily as well situated, creating a favorable environment for new investments. In the foreseeable future, there is a need for greater amounts of capital for renewables than is available. As Conor mentioned, electricity demand is accelerating as a result of growth in digitalization and electrification and renewables, which are the lowest cost source of bulk power generation in most regions and countries now. and they're aligned with net zero targets, are among the most likely sources to meet this growth. In 2023, renewable capacity additions globally grew by 50% compared to the prior year. However, renewable power developers and operators who are not prepared for a higher interest rate environment or are unable to manage through supply chain challenges have seen their business models disrupted. This has created an opportunity to invest for value. With our business, which remains insulated from such headwinds, we are ideally situated at the clean energy center between capital and opportunities. Our access to scale capital means we can execute on large opportunities where there are fewer viable partners, and risk-adjusted returns can therefore be very attractive. Larger companies can often attract stronger management teams and have embedded growth opportunities, which when combined with our capital and capabilities, can allow us to unlock additional value creation that others cannot. We're excited about the opportunity to add scale businesses and platforms in attractive markets where we can compound our competitive advantages. We're also able to leverage the expertise of our global investment teams and our operating capabilities to strategically enter new markets, which enables us to look at a broader range of opportunities. Thus far this year, we have advanced several growth initiatives that, when closed, would add operating capacity and near-term growth to our development pipeline. And based on our current pipeline, we are optimistic that capital deployment will accelerate throughout the rest of the year. On asset recycling, the market for the right type of renewable power asset continues to strengthen as the outlook for interest rates has stabilized. 2023 was a very strong year for capital rotation, and we expect to continue that trend this year. Our large and growing portfolio of contracted operating assets with fixed rate, non-recourse financing, and pipeline of de-risk projects are in high demand from lower cost of capital buyers. For scaling development activities, we have a growing pool of projects to monetize and crystallize strong returns. We are fortunate to have launched a significant pipeline of asset sales into this environment, which we are advancing across technologies and geographies, with the consistent characteristic being the de-risk nature of the assets. In aggregate, we are targeting to generate $3 billion of proceeds, or $1.3 billion net to bet this year at attractive returns. With that, I'll pass it on to Wyatt to discuss our operating results and financial position.