Altius Renewable Royalties Corp.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ARR Q2 2021 Financial 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 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Flora Wood, Corporate Secretary. You may begin.

Thank you, Brian, and thank you to all who've joined us for our Q2 results call. We have a short slide presentation, which is on our website and showing on the webcast. The main purpose of this call quarterly is to give you a forum where we'll have Brian, Ben, and Frank available to speak and for questions. And for those of you on the webcast, I'll point out that questions can only be asked on the conference call. With me today are Brian Dalton, CEO of ARR, Ben Lewis, CFO of ARR, and Frank Gatman, CEO of Great Bay Renewables. Brian's going to speak first, and we'll then hand over to Frank, and you can address questions to any of us during the Q&A. We're using forward-looking statements and have a disclaimer on slide two that applies to both the comments we make and any discussion during the Q&A. And with that, I'll hand over to Brian to start.

Thank you, Flora, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We are now a half year beyond ARR's IPO. We're very happy to note that this out-of-the-gate period has been characterized by a strong run of execution against two of the critical objectives that we set out to achieve on behalf of our shareholders. Specifically, these were to see the deals we had in place with developers TGE and Apex result in a strong flow of royalties as a result of their sales of pipeline projects to end sponsors and owners, and to deploy the capital available from both the Apollo Earnings Agreement and the IPO at continuing attractive rates of return. As to the first objective, we have seen new royalties created through developer pipeline financing investments relating to six projects with a total expected capacity of 1,295 megawatts during these past six months. These include 745 megawatts of wind projects in Kansas, Indiana, and Texas, and 550 megawatts of solar projects in Indiana. These deals have brought up a list of very strong counterparties and power customers that include Weck Energy, Invenergy, Leeward Energy, an Omer subsidiary, and Facebook. On the second front, we have made announcements describing a total of US$55 million in new capital deployment, arguably putting us quite a bit ahead of schedule against the pace we guided towards during the IPO. The first $20 million deployed was through a follow-on investment with leading developer Apex, whose overall development pipeline continues to grow strongly and is currently estimated at more than 25 gigawatts. We have now been successful in increasing our investment levels with both of the developers we have funding relationships with, which we believe is the ultimate testament to the partner-like nature of our capital and its attractiveness to those that are responsible for sowing the grassroots seeds of the renewable energy transition. More recently, we provided US $35 million in royalty financing to major developer and operator Long Road Energy and its newly built 250 megawatt Prospero II solar project in Texas. This marks the first investment we have made directly into the project financing level capital structure of a renewable energy installation. We feel this has significant implications for the pace of future potential capital deployment that this is obviously the stage within the overall development cycle of the sector in which the vast majority of capital is required. It in no way should be seen as a signal of our abandonment of early stage developer financing, quite the contrary in fact. We see it simply as an exciting additional avenue of potential growth to pursue. With regards to this new investment, there seems to be some confusion as to why we contributed 11 million to it before the Apollo earning commitment has been reached. Our apologies for this. It's essentially normal course structuring for transactions of this type and relates to the fact that Prospero 2 is an operating project, and so we wanted to make the investment in a separate subsidiary, which we call GBR2, separate from our existing development stage investments that are housed within GBR1. Going forward, we would expect to complete any additional operating stage investments within GBR2, and any additional developer investments within GBR1. As part of this structuring, it is worth noting that Apollo has increased its overall earning commitment to $91 million in order to keep the joint venture structure on equal footing going forward, and it's also worth noting that the governance structure for GBR2 mirrors that of GBR1. We hope this clears up any confusion. In concluding my remarks, I believe it is now safe to say that royalty financing has become a real thing within the renewable energy sector and that ARR has been a key driver of this. Looking back over the past two years, Frank and the management team at our GBR joint venture subsidiary have led the origination of U.S. $145 million in funding commitments. This funding has thus far resulted in the creation of royalties covering over 2.5 gigawatts of advanced development to operating stage renewable power projects. and provided further pipeline exposure to almost 30 gigawatts of additional early-stage projects. We've become more enthusiastic about future growth possibilities with each passing week of ongoing business origination work. With that segue, I turn over to Frank for some high-level remarks about the continuing rapid evolution of the sector and how we are fitting in before we then open the floor to your questions. Over to you, Frank.