Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. Limited Partnership Units

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Brookfield Renewables first quarter 2025 results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in 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 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd 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 2025 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, and then Hannah Labouchagne, our global head of procurement, will speak to the resiliency of our business and how we are well-equipped to navigate the current dynamics of the global supply chain and continue to deliver on our target returns in an evolving environment. Then, Patrick will conclude our remarks by discussing our operating results and financial position. Following our comments, we look forward to taking your questions. In light of recently announced tariffs on goods and the resulting volatility in the market, we want to start by discussing the current environment for the energy sector and how renewables fit into the significant demand for energy globally, as well as how we are placed to extend our leadership position in a rapidly changing landscape. First and foremost, the most important driver for our business continues to be the fundamentals for energy, which remain very strong today with digitalization and reindustrialization driving accelerating demand that far outpaces supply. We believe that the pace of energy demand growth, the need for baseload power, and adequate backup will require an any and all solution to build out the grid. This includes renewables, natural gas, batteries, and nuclear technologies to name a few. And despite tariffs and the potential impacts on the renewable sector, renewable technologies, particularly onshore wind, solar, and batteries, represent a critical part of the solution to meet the insatiable demand for energy, given their low cost position, their ability to be deployed quickly in almost any region around the world, their mature supply chain, and the fact that they do not depend on imported fuel. Today, we are one of the largest renewable operators and developers globally, diversified across the lowest cost and most mature technologies and the most attractive geographies. with approximately half our pipeline in North America and the other half spread across other attractive markets around the world, which mitigates our exposure to regional dynamics, market disruptions, or resource variability. We are well equipped to navigate near-term supply chain challenges given our scale, global relationships with the largest Tier 1 suppliers, our approach to development, and focus over the past several years to increase purchases from domestic U.S. manufacturers, all of which Hannah will discuss in more detail later on the call. With the strong underlying demand for power and the superior characteristics of renewables, combined with our relationships with the suppliers in the U.S. and globally, we continue to be very positive on the outlook for the business and our ability to deliver on our growth and return targets for shareholders. Moving to our operating results, our business had a strong quarter to start the year, performing well. We delivered strong financial results and made significant progress executing on our plans for 2025 and beyond. Adjusting for very strong hydro generation in the first quarter of last year, our FFO per unit was up 15% versus the prior year period, and on an all-in basis, our FFO per unit was up 7% year over year. These results reflect the benefit of our diverse, contracted global fleet of assets, successful commissioning of new capacity, recently closed investments, and the scaling of our normal course capital recycling activities. We were successful advancing our commercial initiatives as well, including securing contracts to deliver on an incremental 4,500 gigawatt hours per year of generation. We also progressed the delivery of projects to Microsoft, under our Renewable Energy Framework Agreement and continue to view the initial 10.5 GW scoped into the agreement as the minimum we will contract under the framework. We expect to continue to partner with global technology players on both a project-by-project basis and via larger framework agreements, given the persistence of the supply-demand imbalance we are seeing globally. We progressed our development activities and commissioned approximately 800 megawatts of renewable energy capacity in the quarter across our platforms and continue to expect to bring approximately eight gigawatts online in 2025, over double our run rate of commissioning capacity just three years ago. Another byproduct of the recently announced tariffs is that there are lower public market valuations for renewable energy companies despite the strong fundamentals for energy demand. With this and the significant capital required to meet energy demand, we are seeing meaningful opportunities for those with access to capital, carve out capabilities and development expertise to acquire renewable platforms and assets for value. In the quarter, we committed or deployed $4.6 billion or $500 million net to Brookfield Renewable highlighted by the completion of the privatization of NEOIN and by reaching an agreement to acquire National Grid Renewables. With our acquisition of NEOIN, we will drive value creation through the acceleration of their development activities, expecting to double the commissioning cadence from around one gigawatt per year to two, and via the implementation of an asset rotation program, which is already well underway. National Grid Renewables is a fully integrated onshore renewable power operator and developer in the United States with 3.9 gigawatts of operating and under construction assets, a 1 gigawatt construction-ready portfolio, and an over 30 gigawatt development pipeline. National Grid's contracted operating portfolio provides strong downside protection, and we see an opportunity to deliver significant value through the development of National Grid's large, high-quality, advanced-stage pipeline similar to the carve out of Duke Energy's renewables business that we successfully completed about two years ago. In contrast to the sentiment for renewables in the public markets today, we continue to see a bifurcation from private markets where there continues to be robust demand from private investors for our de-risked operating assets and platforms with advanced projects and highly executable growth opportunities. During the quarter, We closed the sale of our stake in First Hydro and phase one of our India portfolio sale on our expected timelines, generating almost three times our invested capital in 20% investment returns. We also reached an agreement to sell an additional 25% stake in Shepherd's Blonde at the same valuation as our previous 50% stake sale, generating almost two times our invested capital and proceeds of approximately $200 million. Looking ahead, we remain well positioned to continue to capitalize on the current market bifurcation, acquiring for value, as well as monetizing our de-risked renewables platforms and assets to lower cost of capital buyers, and in doing so, generating strong returns. With that, we will now turn the call over to Hannah to speak to how our business is well equipped to navigate the evolving supply chain and continue to deliver on our growth and return targets.

Thank you, Connor, and good morning, everyone. As Connor mentioned, current sentiment in the public markets for the renewable sector reflects an elevated level of uncertainty, with investors reacting to tariff announcements and how these duties may impact development project returns, the pace of development going forward, and cash flows from assets operating today. We are of the view that many investors today are not discerning between those in the sector that are diversified and well-positioned to mitigate the potential impacts and those that are not. It's at times of heightened uncertainty when the benefits of our global diversified operating and development portfolio and its associated global procurement network becomes clear. Today, we have a diversified global platform approaching 45,000 megawatts of operating capacity that generates high-quality, resilient, and inflation-linked cash flows. These assets generate a critical resource at the lowest cost in their respective markets and are largely unimpacted by tariffs. In fact, in an inflationary environment, our operating fleet benefits given the index nature of our contracted revenues. Regarding our development projects in progress today, we are substantially safeguarded against fluctuations in input costs due to our approach to development. Our strategy of focusing on minimizing risk by securing our costs while simultaneously locking in our cash flows before investing meaningful CapEx has us well positioned to continue delivering on our target returns. As a result of this approach, Most of our projects currently under construction have fixed-price engineering, procurement, and construction contracts with limited exposure to price increases. And for those where we do retain price exposure, we have taken actions to help limit our impact on our returns and create clauses in our PPA contracts to enable price adjustments. We are well-incentive from the implementation of new tariffs on China specifically. We import a material amount of equipment directly from the country for our U.S. development activities. In the past few years, we have proactively increased consumption of domestic goods in the US through signing framework agreements with OEMs to support the expansion of domestic suppliers and to minimize the impact of previously enacted tariffs on solar panels manufactured in China. With respect to the recently announced updated tariff rates on several Southeast Asian countries as part of the US's anti-dumping and countervailing investigations on solar panels, we are of the view that this further supports domestic US investment and benefits players like ourselves who already have existing relationships with domestic US manufacturers, and the capacity and capabilities to adjust our orders and suppliers for our projects around the world. Furthermore, across our global business, we expect a positive impact on supply chain availability and input costs. Where US developers were a meaningful buyer of equipment from Asian suppliers, we could see increasing quantities of equipment available in other geographies in which we operate, as those suppliers look to diversify their customer base and global players like ourselves could benefit from higher availability and lower pricing. And so, while the environment continues to evolve, we feel that we are very well positioned to continue to offer the most competitive pricing to our customers to meet growing demand for energy in the U.S. and across the regions in which we operate, extending our leading position as a partner of choice to the largest corporate buyers of power globally. With that, I'll pass it on to Patrick to discuss our operating results and financial position.