Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. Limited Partnership Units

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Brookfield Renewable Partners fourth 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'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 speaker today, Connor Teske, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our fourth 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. Before starting, we would like to welcome Patrick Taylor, our newly appointed CFO, to the call. We're thrilled to have Patrick on the team as we continue to add depth and talent to our leadership group. On today's call, we will provide a review of our 2024 performance, and then Wyatt will discuss our growth outlook in the US and globally. And then lastly, Patrick will conclude the call by discussing our operating results, recent asset recycling activities, and our financial position. Following our prepared remarks, we look forward to taking your questions. Now, before going through our 2024 results, We wanted to comment briefly on the current environment. Following several decades of modest electricity demand growth, we are experiencing a dramatic shift in demand driven by the AI revolution, one of, if not the most, significant advancement in technology in our lifetime. This is driving a significant step change in demand for our product, supporting our continued and accelerating growth. And while the renewable sector has traded down in the public markets on weaker sentiment stemming from the new US administration's announced executive orders and potential policy changes for renewables, the simple fact is that the fundamentals for energy have never been better. The low-cost renewable technologies that we have built our business on are the cheapest form of electricity production and are seeing greater demand than ever before. As a result, We believe that low-cost renewables, which are readily available to deploy, will play a leading role in the requirements for any and all increases in generation capacity that we are already seeing unfold. Our focus on the lowest cost, most mature renewables technologies that have the greatest demand from corporate customers and are not reliant on government subsidy has positioned us well to benefit in the current environment. We have no exposure to the sectors of the market which are seeing the greatest headwinds and we feel we are best positioned across the industry to capture the accelerating corporate demand. With our extensive 200,000 megawatt development pipeline, which is highly concentrated in the top data center markets globally. Executing our business plan will create significant value in our company and as market sentiment passes, we expect to see that translate into the price of our shares. The current market dislocation is also presenting significant investment opportunities for us. Our strong liquidity and robust funding model, combined with lower public share prices across the sector and increased uncertainty for private market investors, could also create the opportunity to acquire assets for value and further grow our business. Turning now to our results, 2024 was another record year for our business. We delivered our strongest operating and financial results ever and positioned the business for significant further growth and value creation in the future. We delivered 10% FFO per unit growth year on year as we benefited from our inflation-linked and contracted cash flows, contributions from acquisitions, and the execution of various organic growth and value creation initiatives across our business, including the sale of de-risked operating assets and platforms, which generated strong returns and are now very much a regular and ongoing part of our business. We exceeded our capital deployment targets, investing $12.5 billion in some outstanding businesses, including our investment in global renewable operator and developer, Naoens. During the year, we advanced our commercial initiatives and continued to partner with the largest buyers of clean power globally, signing contracts for almost 19,000 gigawatt hours per year of generation. Again, another record performance and indicative of the incredible supply-demand imbalance in favor of our product. We also signed the landmark Renewable Energy Framework Agreement with Microsoft in May, agreeing to deliver 10.5 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity between 2026 and 2030 in the U.S. and Europe. And today, we are on track to not only meet but exceed our delivery targets. This agreement will assist Microsoft's data center growth and support its investment in AI-powered cloud services, which continue to accelerate. The global hyperscalers are significantly ramping up investment in their data center infrastructure and are expected to continue to increase investment tremendously through the remainder of the decade. Power is increasingly a bottleneck to this planned data center development, and we are seeing these businesses ramp up their efforts to secure supply to ensure the delivery of their growth. Our agreement with Microsoft is a testament to our differentiated capabilities and we expect to continue to partner with the largest buyers of power going forward. This year, we commissioned a record 7,000 megawatts of new capacity globally, almost seven times the capacity we brought online just three years ago. And with our expanding development capabilities, we have also successfully grown our asset rotation activities. We generated a record $2.8 billion of proceeds in 2024 and an average return of 25% IRR and approximately two and a half times our invested capital, crystallizing strong returns for our shareholders and generating significant capital to fund future growth. Again, this positions us well in the current market. We have continued to be uncompromising in how we fund our business, and our balance sheet remains among the strongest in the sector. We executed record financings this past year and finished the year with $4.3 billion of liquidity to opportunistically fund our growth. With our record results, and in conjunction with our strong liquidity and robust outlook for our business, we are pleased to announce an over 5% increase in our annual distribution to $1.49.2 per unit. Since Brookfield Renewable was publicly listed in 2011, we have delivered 14 consecutive years of annual distribution growth of at least 5% per year. With that, we will now turn it over to Wyatt to further discuss our growth outlook in the U.S. and globally and how we are positioned to capitalize in the current market.

Thank you, Connor, and good morning, everyone. As Conrad outlined in his remarks, there has been elevated volatility in public markets, reflecting uncertainty on potential regulatory changes affecting the renewable sector in the U.S. And while we see potential for regulatory changes, we do not expect any material adjustments to the policies that have the greatest impact on our business, as these largely have bipartisan support. More important to our business are the current fundamentals for power. Globally, and in the U.S. specifically, the demand for electricity continues to accelerate at an incredible rate, driven by broad-based electrification of major industries and the global energy grid, and a generational step change in demand for power to drive the AI revolution. We also expect that supportive fiscal policy in the U.S. will drive further growth in manufacturing, data center development, and industry in the country, which will in turn drive further electricity demand. As a result, the growth prospects for low-cost, mature renewable technologies are better than at any point in history, as they play a leading role in any and all increase in generation capacity. Simply put, off-takers of power will naturally take as much of the lowest cost solutions, renewable, before turning to other forms of generations to meet their needs. As growing energy demand is being met with the new build capacity, it is creating two challenges, transmission availability and grid stability. We see large-scale battery systems and distributed generation as increasingly important parts of the solution. The grid-scale batteries being developed today are able to charge when the sun is shining and when the wind is blowing, and then discharge power at other times, enabling a more consistent power supply. Further, by charging when power is cheap and plentiful and distributing when power is scarce and in demand, batteries are increasingly lucrative. Distributed generation is also able to reduce demand during peak hours and provide backup power when grids are strained. The modular nature of both these technologies also makes them relatively easy to deploy almost anywhere. As batteries become more cost-effective, with costs declining over 90% in the past decade, we expect that they will become a significant component of stabilizing the world's transmission grids and supported the accelerated build-out of low-cost, mature renewable technologies. At the end of 2024, we made our largest investment ever in our renewable and power and transition business with our investment in NAON, a leading global renewable platform with best-in-class management and market-leading positions in each of France, Australia, and the Nordics. What may not be appreciated is that NAON is also a leading global operator and developer of battery energy storage systems, a technology that we are increasingly investing in. With growing demand, lower capital costs, and higher potential revenues from stabilizing services, we are focused on deploying capital into battery energy storage solutions in almost all markets. And with this investment, We are one of the largest battery developers globally with 3,300 megawatts of operating and under construction capacity and additional 35,000 megawatts in our pipeline. With the supportive demand backdrop and the combination of our global scale, significant access to capital, and our combined operating and development capabilities across multiple suites of technologies, including hydro, wind, utility-scale solar, distributed generation, and storage, to name a few, we can deliver differentiated solutions to our customers few others can, thereby generating significant value for our shareholders over the long term. And with that, I'll pass it on to Patrick to discuss our operating results, recent capital recycling initiatives, and financial position.