Altius Renewable Royalties Corp.

Good day, everyone, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Altius Renewable Royalties First Quarter of 2022 Financial Resource Conference Call. 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. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. And please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to our speaker today, Ms. Laura Wood, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Delphine. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q1 call. Our press release and filings were released yesterday after the close, along with the new investment announcement. And both of these are available on the website. This event is being webcast live, and you'll be able to access to replay the webcast. along with the presentation slides that are on the website at ARR.energy. Brian Dalton, CEO of ARR, and Frank Getman, CEO of Grace Bay Renewables, are both speakers on the call. And in the Q&A, we'll also have Ben Lewis, CFO of ARR, available for questions. The forward-looking statement on slide two applies to everything we say in our opening and during the Q&A. And with that, I'll turn over to Brian for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Flora. Thank you, operators. And thanks, everyone, for joining us today. As usual, I'll keep my remarks fairly brief before introducing Frank Kettman, the CEO of the GBR operating business. And he'll overview the quarterly performance and outlook for the sector generally and our investment opportunities more specifically. It was another positive quarter for ARR, and another key milestone was reached, that being the achievement of the first positive cash flow at the operating JV level, and the number of our producing royalties grew to six during the quarter. As the year progresses, we are expecting additional announcements regarding construction progress that will bring clear visibility and continuation of this growth trajectory. I can also attest that the GBR team was extremely busy during this quarter in developing new relationships and advancing a variety of royalty investment opportunities. These included for both operational-level assets as well as new developer relationships. Regarding the latter, we announced last night that we are providing royalty financing to the U.S. Development Division of newly formed Blue Star Energy. This investment shares similarities with our other prior investments in TGE and APEX, but also some differences that we think are appropriate to how the market has been evolving, and that also recognize the pedigree and track record of the Bluestar founders and teams, which ranks amongst the most successful in the sector over the past decade or so. Excuse me. Bluestar is a startup, and its initial project portfolio is actively in the process of being assembled. The list can be considered earlier stage in that regard than the prior developer financing structures. We did, however, gain sufficient comfort in our due diligence that the knowledge base and relationships of the team will easily translate into a sufficient number of projects and likely well beyond, fulfill our investment goals. Another difference is that our base return is not capped by the achievement of defined hurdle rates in this case. The number of defined megawatts we are due does provide our previously stated return thresholds based upon current price assumptions. However, to the extent that these vary, our returns will as well. We have been clear in our state of belief that renewable power prices have strong tailwinds related to both overall demand factors and also because of marginal cost pressures across the entire power generation complex. We therefore see more potential for base case upside with this investment than our prior developer deal and think it makes for a nice mix within the overall diversified portfolio. Final difference is that we added a small component of equity participation to the direct royalty financing. This obviously recognizes the increasing attractiveness of quality development pipelines within the overall renewable sector as more players seek to gain entry. We do know, for example, how lucrative equity participation in APEX would have been if we had added at the time of our royalty financing. We also really like, in this case, gaining exposure and visibility into the broader ambitions of Blue Star and see the corporate participation, including a board seat, as potentially leading to additional investment opportunities. potentially to expanding our royalty offering more internationally. With that, I'll turn things over to Frank for some remarks before opening things up for Q&A.