Contact Energy Limited (CEN.NZ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Foreign Language] Good morning or welcome. Before I kick off our proceedings with the karakia this morning, I firstly wanted to formally welcome everyone here today, not only on behalf of Contact, but most importantly, on behalf of mana whenua. I welcome you guys here with [indiscernible] and I started off my [indiscernible] by first paying homage to our sky father [indiscernible] and [indiscernible] mother [indiscernible] in between. I then moved on to acknowledging those who have passed on before us as if it wasn't for the struggles, trials and tribulations, we wouldn't be here today. I then moved on to acknowledging everyone in this room, and I welcome you guys here to my ancestral Mountain [indiscernible] that stands behind us. And also welcome you guys here to the headwaters of all [indiscernible] River. They start behind us in the valley below us and then traverse its way through the valley out in to the pristine beautiful waters of Lake Taupo. So welcome. The karakia that I'm about to perform this morning as a karakia that recites the [indiscernible] or the genealogy of geothermal energy. It then goes on to mention a few sites of significant cultural significance that lay within the contact operational fields, particularly those that are in close proximity to the development currently underway to me, which I believe you guys will have the opportunity at seeing later on this afternoon and your guys too. So welcome. And the karakia goes a little bit like us. [Foreign Language] [Presentation]

[Foreign Language] That was awesome. Thank you. You will get a chance to meet our later as one of our employees, but more important Manafinewa, it's in there with Dom and they will be taking around later. And just a reminder of the privilege we have, particularly in here in Taupo you will get a taste of that later. So welcome to Capital Contact Energy Capital Markets Day and the launch of Contact31+. We are delighted that you're able to be here with us. And sorry -- just the usual disclaimer. Now the team today, obviously, myself, Dorian, most of these names will be familiar to you, but I do want to also emphasize, and there will be some underlying themes here. We have very quietly renewed and refreshed the leadership team of contact and preparation for Contact31. So Dorian, who's known to all of you, obviously, has moved across to development, renewable growth. Matt has very successfully led the integration. We're going to talk about that later today. We welcome Carolyn. And so that -- and obviously, Matt Forbes stepping up into the CFO role and Tighe taking that overarching technology role. And Jan and I are still here, obviously. But that overarching process of both the stability and renewal is something that I see -- you will see repeated over the day. So introducing Contact31, delighted to be to be presenting this to you today. It's been a lot of hard work to get here. But I do want to take just a bit of time to reflect in this part of the day on what has gone before where contactors today and where the New Zealand market is right now. So look, I'm not going to spend too much on time. Contact26, it's not often a CEO gets a privilege of talking about a strategy launched 5 years ago. And is not going to have a red face turning up in 5 years' time and representing it. But Contact26 has transformed us. And there's been bumps on the way that we have delivered. The market needs even more renewables and flexibility. And we at Contact are incredibly well positioned to seize that market opportunity. And most importantly and what I hope you get a sense of today is that we have a clear plan for playing into that market opportunity. This is Contact26. And I just want to pause to reflect on where we were and where we are. We have led decarbonization over the last 5 years until all intents and purpose, the New Zealand electricity system is on its way to being decarbonized. We have led renewable growth, and we have delivered value for our investors. You can see the plants we've constructed. You can see the fantastic work that Matt and now Carolyn are doing in the retail place where even those numbers now are out of date. We're probably at about 666,000 connections. You can see the delivery for shareholders an incredible value in that EBITDA growth. And you can see the shareholder returns that have been delivered. Contact26, the fundamental premises we have delivered. We're bigger, we're cleaner, and we're stronger. We now have almost 12 terawatt hours of renewable generation across hydro geothermal, solar a little bit of thermal left and win PPAs. We do expect to be over 95% renewable. We have grown the EBITDA from $540 million in 2021, $450 million in 2020 to over $980 million we expect in this financial year. Retail numbers out of date, 666,000, and we are now from being probably the most least diversified and that's why we had the incredible thermal fleet we had to the most diversified renewable generator in the country. Now that's us what about the market? Look, the energy transition is leading to an increasingly volatile renewable energy supply. That's a function of wind and solar. Customer needs and behaviors are changing. They are electrifying, they're moving off gas. We actually do see the new demand coming through, long promise now delivered. It's actually turning up the securing of the aluminum smelter deal, but now the conversions of dairy and to gas and the like have really done have just trigger that. And we do have better clarity on key market risk. Now in developing the strategy, we're not assuming it's all going to be sunshine and roses. So one thing we learned from Contact26 is that there will be changes that you have to meet head on. There will be challenges, there will be difficulties. And so in preparing the strategy, Charlie, Matt and the team have done an incredible job of getting a range of scenarios which lines up with international best practice and testing the strategy against that. And that's really important to know. So we are ready for those bumps. We are ready to pivot and what you see today is a clear plan, but do not doubt that there is flexibility in that plan as well. Look, the transition, the volatility, who saw that gas supply decline. It's been rapid. It's been precipitous and it has fundamentally changed the nature of the building blocks of our economy here in [indiscernible]. There is increasing investment in renewables to meet that demand, demand growth. But what that has led to is the absolute phenomenal volatility that you now see in the market both on an intraday but also going ahead intraseasonal and that's something that we need to explore as we go over the day. Now everyone's electrifying. EVs are still coming. There will be flips and flops in government policy, but the fundamental driver of the rapidly declining cost of EVs means they are an inevitable part of this economy going forward. You see the committed investment to electrification by major industry players. They are not leaving New Zealand. We're sitting down and we're talking with them and we're helping them electrify. They are staying, preserve the jobs for our children and our grandchildren. You see the good plans where we were able to move our mass market retail households onto time-of-use plans and help them participate in the energy transition. And you can see over a terawatt hour in demand response, which is now available to the market for both intraday but also intraseasonal. It's pretty incredible. None of this was there 5 years ago across the market. Yes, I'll put up a few of these graphs on my time. Haven't I? No, but you can see it's actually 2020 and 2021 may have felt a bit empty, but you can see the kick up there. We'll take it. And we do expect that demand growth to happen and to happen rapidly now. The collapse in the gas market, the conversion of dairy processing, meat processing and general agriculture processing make that an inevitability. There is upside opportunity with the Advent and rapid growth in data centers, if we can attract them here to [indiscernible], and there are other sources of industrial processing. The fact that James and managed to secure a New Zealand steel with that electric arc burners is a great fill up for New Zealand and for us. And we expect the metal processing to actually increase. All in all, combined with the electrification of every household, your households, we expect demand growth to continue to grow steadily up to FY 2030. Finally, enough compared to 2021 when I presented the first strategy, we have a lot more clarity across key market risks. Collectively, the industry has solved the problem of the aluminum smelter with not a 10-year but a 20-year deal. The Huntly firming option in response to the slight drama last August was rapidly arrived at by industry participants and provides a further terawatt hour dry year cover which is the right thing for the nation to ensure ironically that we can get on with that renewable build. The government-led Frontier report was a stable outcome. And the electricity industry, we ourselves, put out our BCG report, the energy to grow. It's a fantastic report. I don't agree with anything in it, but that's the idea of an independent report. It's thoughtful. It's fact based. It has a plethora of data in it. And I think it's a good basis on which the industry can plan and move forward and provides a clear guiding light about what is going to happen over the coming years. So Contact, well positioned to capture that market opportunity presented by those relatively unique dynamics. We have the most diversified existing portfolio in New Zealand market, solar, battery, geothermal builds are well underway and that suite of technologies, which we can provide is unique to us. We also have the largest national renewable pipeline across geothermal, wind and solar, and Dorian is going to talk a lot about that today, and we welcome your questions on that, test us. We are New Zealand's leader in geothermal operations capabilities. We have over 50% of the national geothermal generation. We have built 80% of the national geothermal output since 2015. We are the most trusted retailer in the business, over 30% lower cost to serve than our peers, which has been achieved off some pretty smart technology investments. And we have the third most loved and trusted energy brand. By the way, #1 and 2 are fighter brands, of which one doesn't exist anymore, which sort of gives you we are well ahead of the pack of our true competitors. And so I introduced you to Contact31. I'm not going to spend a lot on time on this slide because you're going to have it repeated to you 400 or 500 times over the next 5 years. you will get to know it well just as you got to know Contact26. But we do intend to extend our advantages New Zealand's geothermal leader. We do intend to lead on new flexibility investment in New Zealand. We do intend to build into new demand with wind, solar and geothermal, as I mentioned, and we do intend to lead the energy transition at home. What this adds up to is we move from leading New Zealand's decarbonization to leading New Zealand's renewable energy future. It's bigger, it's broader. It's more ambitious. It's not just about decarbonizing the decarbonizing and electricity sector. It is a fundamental transformation and leading that transformation of renewable of energy supply to the nation. We will do this as well, and this is important to talk this through. empowered people and leaders. We have a fantastic set of highly intelligent, capable people who have the battle scars of Contact26 and are well ready to deliver on Contact31. We have fantastic relations with our stakeholders. Look, it's light family, you don't agree all the time and sometimes you do wake up in the morning at a bit of a grump, but that does not mean and that does not undermine that fundamental commitment to each other for generations to come. And that's the way we think about our relationships with our stakeholders. We're both here for the long term, and we both value that long-term nature of the relationship. Technology has played a huge role in Contact26 behind the scenes, smart investment. We have over 80% of our interactions in digital and retail are digital now. We can see each individual customer down to the half hour and able to direct pricing changes and engagement and product offerings as a result of that digital smart. And we intend to invest further off that. every investor presentation you go to will talk about Agentic AI and how much it's going to transform. We are going to do that. We're investing to it. We're doing that off a track record of delivery. We just won't talk too much about it because we have a lot to talk about, but don't doubt our commitment to the continuing transformation through a technology investment in this company. And that's very much linked to the productivity. We recognize that the cost increases that have hit the industry over these last 5 years, we have to turn and face into that challenge. That is important. And so turning into that through automation, digitization, through simplification, just making life a lot simpler for our people is going to be a key theme going forward. So this is different. When I presented Contact26, we did not make very extensible commitment. We sort of tweaked one out about, I don't know, $700 million in FY '25, a couple of years after when we got a bit more confidence. But we are putting a pole in the ground on the site. We're putting a stake in the ground. These are the outcomes that we expect. We expect 250 megawatts of committed geothermal. And you'll have seen a few surprises in the pack that was released to date 30 hopefully. We will have 500 megawatts of battery. We will have wind. We will have solar in large amounts. We will continue to that market-leading cost to serve. We will grow our EBITDAF to $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion. We will add 300 basis points to our return on invested capital, and we will grow that dividend to over $0.50 per share. Now at that point, I am delighted to hand over to our Chief Renewable Development Officer, Dorian Devers. Please welcome him.

Hello everyone. It was good to be back amongst this group. I've missed you all. I mean that we're going to -- we're going to start off by talking about execution. You're always only as good as the last project that you have delivered. We know we need to earn the right to invest in the next project by delivering on the last one. This is probably a little bit controversial to say this, but in some ways, the issues we've had with the construction of Tauhara have proven to be a blessing in disguise because they've really opened our eyes to what's required to operate in the construction space. We professionalized in that area. We brought in new capability. We put in place best-in-class processes. We have a world-class major projects team that oversee the construction of all of our projects. They work in an integrated way with a development team, ensuring we really understand how mature our projects are as we work towards the final investment decision, and we understand the risk that we are taking. It now means that we really talk a common language across the whole of contact when it comes to project delivery. And that actually goes right the way up to the board, as you'd expect. I now see it as actually being a point of difference for us, which is important when you consider the renewable development pipeline that we have in front of us. Now I said you're only as good as the last project that you've delivered. We've delivered. And for us, that was Te Huka III. It was delivered pretty much on time and on budget, and it's delivering a 14% internal rate of return. We also have the beds project, so that's at Glenbrook under construction at the moment and the Kowhai Park solar project under construction at the Chris Dutch Airport, and they're both going very well, and we expect them to be on time and on budget, too. It means that when you consider across Tauhara, Te Huka III, Kowhai Park and the BESS, we would have deployed $1.4 billion of capital for a weighted average IRR of 13%. These are all growth projects, and we'll be providing a positive momentum to our return on invested capital, which Mike mentioned. Matt will be happy about that as well. That KPI has been too low for too long, and you can blame the previous CFO for that. The other major project, which we've got going on, which you'll see today is Te Mihi. We've actually renamed it to Te Mihi Stage 2. We like to rename our projects at Contact. I guarantee this will be the last name change for that project. This is the partial replacement of Wire and that project, too, is going very well. It's not quite at the halfway mark, but it's expected to be on time and on budget, which is important development pipelines. So we win the bragawatts competition, don't me, Mike. We have the biggest pipeline across renewable energy and across Grisko batteries. We've had to tidy up some of the comparisons across the industry to being honest. We've taken our bragawatts components. So anything that's already been constructed. We've taken out of pipelines, anything that's considered do not have a great deal of meat on the bones like pre pipeline stuff or advanced options that don't have any land access agreements, all that sort of stuff. And we've done that to us as well. So we think this is a fair consistent view of pipelines. Stepping back a bit and being a bit more modest, it's not all about the size of the pipeline. It's actually about the quality of the pipeline and an organization's ability to deliver on it. And in terms of quality, we're very happy with our the size of our projects are relatively large, which talks to capital efficiency. The capacity factors of projects are pretty good, which talks to high-quality resources and locations are good, which we'll talk about with batteries, which is important. But it's also important around diversification and help new projects integrate with your portfolios. Good to see we've got more wind in our pipeline in solar because we see more sustainable long-term returns from onshore wind. I'd like to see a bit more geothermal, and we've got a plan for that, and you'll see that in the next few slides. And like everyone, we would like to see more of this stuff to be being consented. But I'm not overly worried about that. As a country, we need affordable reliable and renewable electricity, and we will only get that through a fit-for-purpose consenting process. So I'm confident that we're going to get there as a country. In terms of building effectively, you could you could say that a big development pipeline in the wrong hands is actually a liability. But as I said earlier, I now think our major project delivery is actually a point of difference for us, and therefore, you can trust us to build out this pipeline. The proof is in the pudding. If you look at our last delivered project, like I said, that went well. And we've got 3 projects going on at the moment under construction. That's unprecedented for contact. And as I said earlier, they're all going well and in fact, 2 of them are actually very close to completion. So talking a bit about geothermal. So we are New Zealand's leading geothermal operator and developer. You probably didn't know but in the last 4 years, 28% of all the global investment into geothermal has happened in New Zealand. And then within New Zealand, 80% of that -- roughly 80% of that has been contact. So you follow the money with this stuff. The more money you invest, the more you learn, the more your capability goes up, the more IP you develop. So that tells me that New Zealand is a center of excellence for geothermal. And then within New Zealand, you look no further than contact energy. I'm just getting into the geothermal pillar around extending our advantage is New Zealand's geothermal leader. I'm not going to go through this slide. I'll go through some more detail that this is important. It's in here. It shows you what we're aiming for in FY '27 as a target and FY '31, and we'll be coming to these, and we expect you guys to hold us accountable. So geothermal is no different from other renewables. We've seen big escalations in the cost of building it over the last few years. Tauhara, if you remember back at Fed was $4 million a megawatt Te Mihi now Te Mihi Stage 2 it was $7 million a megawatt. But in spite of those increases, as we've just talked about, we're still seeing high-quality returns coming out of our geothermal projects, and that talks to the core capability that we have. We have a culture of incremental innovations across geothermal drilling, in particular, the geological reservoir modeling that we do, the drill bit design have now got our drilling costs down to world-class. Problem we have around geothermal is this 2 other major components of building plants. We've seen big escalations in the cost of the plant itself and the cost of the steam field. So these are our areas of focus. Steam field has gone from costing about twice what you spend on drilling to now around 6x what you spend on drilling. So we need more innovations across procurement and design, and that will reinforce our position as a global and New Zealand's leader around geothermal. Unfortunately, as an industry, we've got into the situation where there's only one plant OEM servicing the market pretty much. So we need to bring in more competition. That will bring costs down. And importantly, it will also increase the capacity within the market to build more geothermal. We also need more innovation across steam field design, in particular, looking at areas to reduce steam field pipeline costs. opportunities to challenge seismic code, look at the materials of the pipelines are made out of bearing pipelines potentially or even looking to consolidate the size of the steam field recognizing there'll be a trade-off there because that will consolidate all of your wells, which will likely lead to higher make-up drilling. But these are all really exciting opportunities that we're looking at going forward, which we mean that we can sort of confidently predict that our dollar per megawatt of building geothermal will come down and be in the range that we've got on this slide. We're very good at managing our geothermal resources in a sustainable way, and that means where we see an opportunity to increase fluid consent, we'll back ourselves to take those opportunities, but to do it in the right way. We're going to continue to deepen our relationships with local EV and look for mechanisms to share benefits and Chris will talk about some of those types of things. I guess one of the new pieces of news that we're going to talk about today is Tauhara as a field, we now believe is bigger than we originally thought, and we're going to request up to an extra 70 megawatts of fluid consent on that field. That will mean we can build up to an extra 150 megawatts on that field going forward. Tauhara is also our highest quality geothermal field. So the returns that we get on investing into that field are the highest, so we're going to prioritize that. And our next investment is going to be a 50-megawatt plant, which we're looking to take a final investment decision in FY '27. That's important because our renewable -- our energy system needs more baseload renewable was so speed is important, but we won't be cutting corners around our process around ensuring that we have the right maturity though, when we hit a final investment decision. We will then build out the remaining 100 megawatts of Tauhara after we've done Te Mihi Stage 3. Now that's the final installment by the way of the replacement of Wairakei I guess the key thing there is we're going to request an extra 20 megawatts of fluid consent. That's a very small increment on the existing content that we have on the Wairakei field. but it's very important because it allows us to fuel a 100-megawatt power plant, which is what we want to build. When you're building geothermal, as you well know, you have to be at least 95% capacity factors to ensure that you're getting the right returns on your assets. So what that means is we'll have incremental volume of Wairakei of 0.5 terawatt hours, and that's over and above, obviously, we're replacing the Wairakei volumes. And we've also got the 150 megawatts on Tauhara. So collectively, that's 1.7 terawatt hours of additional geothermal resource or output. It adds to the 5.2 terawatt hours that we've got to date, taking us close to 7 terawatt hours when this is complete off existing fields. Now when I joined Contact back at the end of 2018, I think we were at 3.2, 3.3. So we will more than double our geothermal output once this is complete, which is an outstanding achievement. Greenfield geothermal resource. So it's not as high quality as existing fields. I should go about same. If it was, they would have been developed by now. However, the innovations that I just talked about around design and procurement, we think make greenfield expansion investable. We're also looking at oil and gas drilling techniques that could be applicable to geothermal. So for example, you hear a lot about enhanced geothermal systems in the U.S., which is built on the back of oil and gas drilling techniques. Now we'll look to see if some of those could be applicable to New Zealand's more conventional geothermal fields where you've got heat you might have fluid, but you lack a bit of permeability. You could potentially use those techniques to remedy that situation. They'd also complement very nicely the skill set that we have in Western Energy, which is our geothermal services business. All of that stuff makes greenfield expansion more likely. Greenfield expansions in our view are only viable if you overlay contacts deep capability around drilling, and the learnings that we've got from the many kilometers of steam field that we've developed over our 2 projects because as I said, to actually get these opportunities to be investable, you've really got to get the cost of the steam field down. So we think a realistic target over this period is to look to develop a 50-megawatt opportunity. So that's the geothermal section. So we're now into wind and solar. So with wind, we want to do it differently. There's no point just copying what others are doing. We want to create more value for contact for our customers and also for the communities where we're building these wind farms. And we're going to accomplish that in 3 ways. You can see our projects on the chart are projects are a bigger scale than the projects that have historically been built in New Zealand, which drives increased capital efficiency. We want to introduce more competition to the wind area and market. We have a similar issue in our view, in wind to what we've seen in geothermal. And we want to work with a partner and get the benefits of working with a partner and that does include off-balance sheet financing in a similar way to what we've done for solar. I see all 3 of these topics lowering the long-run marginal cost of our projects relative to market to the point where it can stimulate new market demand with high-quality counterparties in the vicinity of where we're building our wind farms, and this has broader New Zealand in benefits around economic growth, jobs and tax income. I'd see this new market volume as being an offtake to the wind farm with their credit worth as some volumes helping underwrite the investment, but also reducing risk around market price and transmission of building a bigger wind farm. I'd also see contactors being an offtaker to this wind farm, ensuring that our growing portfolio gets access to that low LRMC electricity. And also, it will help replace some those Mercury wind PPAs as they roll off. Also, one of the key things we look to around wind, but also a generation that we're building is making sure it's diversified. We want volumes that add to our portfolio and complement it. So we're looking for uncorrelated generation we won't be chasing the highest capacity factor projects because they tend to be in areas where there's already a lot of generation, and therefore, the price capture rates are relatively poor. It's good to see on the list there. We've got a few Manawa projects. When we acquired Manawa, the -- we didn't assume any value from the development pipeline. That wasn't because we thought it was bad. It was just because Contact had its own one. So now bringing these in and actually looking to build some of these projects, the NPV is now additive to our business case. I would also say what we did assume a lot of value from though was the capable people that we brought over from Manawa and they really have complemented our development team. So the choice to win partner is going to be an important one for us, but we have a good track record here. When we entered solar as a new technology, we did it alongside Lightsource bp, and that has been very successful for us. We're going through that process at the moment, there are, of course, going to be trade-offs, different partners bring different attributes. You could go with infrastructure funds. You've got low cost of finance, but they tend to work better for projects when they are fully built and contracted. You can go with partners with development expertise like IPPs, OEMs or EV, they tend to work better in the early stages of development. We most likely want one partner, and we want that partner to come in at the development stage. So we know this is an important decision for us that we're working through at the moment. And when we've got an update on it, we'll communicate that to the capital markets. The other thing to mention about wind experience because you could say, well, we haven't actually built any wins. So what sort of experience do you have around that? You've got a few PPAs in your portfolio, but that's it. We actually have a disproportion of experience. We have the roaring 40s team, win team working exclusively for us, and they've built a lot of Meridian's wind turbines, wind farms. We've also now got, as I said, the Manawa development team around wind and solar, and they've got experience going back to Trustpower and Tilt and we have a small but carefully formed wind team in contact. So you bring all 3 of those groups together, which was the point of the inflation. And we actually have a very experienced wind development team, which is going to be very important for the delivery of this strategy. So now on to solar. So our key advantage of solar is who we're partnered with. We've partnered with one of the largest and most successful IPPs in terms of Lightsource bp. We get access toward their expertise or their experience around procurement and supply chains. And this really puts us in a strong position, we think, relative to other solar developers in New Zealand. Contact is the off-taker to our joint venture with Lightsource bp. We take at least 80% of the volume that's generated. And whilst we get the financial benefits of the high leverage that's in that joint venture, pass through to us through a relatively, what, very competitive PPA price. It does mean that we're taking more operating leverage as we have a long-term contract for a fixed real price to acquire generation into the future. So the risk around that is market price risk and overbuild of solar, for example, However, we're managing that by contracting some weighted load long-term PPAs in proportion to the solar generation that we're building. And you can see on the chart there that we've already contracted enough summer-weighted load to cover the generation -- solar generation from Kowhai Park and Glorit. The other chart sort of just shows how closely aligned dairy load shape is with solar generation and why it's so important to pay those 2 things up. The last thing I'd say on this slide is there's sort of added impetus to our solar strategy at the moment because with the decline of natural gas any sector that can get off natural gas, we want to support that happening, not just because we want to sell them to renewable electricity, but we want to get them off natural gas because that frees up the gas for other sectors, our sold schools, that aren't ready to transition on to renewable electricity yet. So our solar strategy has broad benefits than just the direct benefits to contact energy. We have a pipeline of 3 terawatt hours around solar, but we're only looking to build out 1 terawatt hour through the strategic horizon. Clearly, if there's a lot more growth coming through, we'll look at that. Four projects there. It's good to see, again, another Manawa project on this, the Algar project, which is already consented. As I said earlier, we're going to build into increased summer-weighted load. That's going to deliver attractive returns but it also minimizes our market price risk. It's also worth noting that all of our solar farms will be equipped to integrate DC-coupled batteries. That's a very efficient way to add additional battery capacity to the system. And the reason is it's a solar farm and the battery can share an inverter. The inverters are a relatively high component of the capital, so there's a neat capital synergy there. Now we would have already minimized our market price risk on our solar through the summer weighted PPAs I mentioned, so we could run any battery for merchant, maximizing returns, which ironically are going to be highest if there is an overbuild of solar. So that provides a very neat natural hedge to our portfolio. So now on to the flexibility section of our strategy. So we think the overall size of the bars or grid scale battery markets at the moment is about 900 megawatts. And that's about displacing thermal capacity that's currently used in AD flexibility. The economics of good sale battery is improving because the cost of the fuel for those thermal assets is going up. We also see the size of the best market growing, and that's because peak demand is growing faster than overall demand that's driven by retail load. And we see good scale batteries as servicing that peak demand. They're also going to play an important role because with the forecast of 1.6 gigawatts of new intermittence coming online by 2030, grid-scale batteries are going to have to firm play a big role in firming that. They're also very important in terms of reducing regulatory risk. They are one of the few tools that we've got as an industry to reduce prices in the short term. Remember, electricity prices a high because of the risk mitigation or risk management tools to cover dryer risk are relatively expensive. And what batteries do is by displacing the hydro and the thermal that was previously used for daily flexibility they allow that flexibility to be used for seasonal flexibility, displacing some of those more expensive risk management tools like [indiscernible] response and Misonix gas. So in terms of where contact is with its batteries, we've got 100 megawatts coming online in February 2026 at Glenbrook. Our intention is to take a fit of a final investment decision on another 200 megawatts early next year. Also at Glenbrook that will mean in 24 months' time, we'll be operating 300 megawatts of batteries in the North Island. We then have a further 700 megawatts, which are either consented or going through a consenting process at the moment. So I guess the key question here is a contact point difference and why do we feel that we should be taking a leadership position. On that last point, I mean being very honest, we have less flexibility than others. And therefore, we have more to gain and they have more to lose from an overbuild of beds. So we think we should be taking a market leadership position around that. in terms of points of difference, that strategic relationship that we've built with New Zealand Steel, which has got us access to their Glenbrook site and the ability to build 500 megawatts is so key. One of the main ways you can differentiate yourself on a grid gale battery is getting access to a great location. And that is one of the best locations in New Zealand because it's so close to Auckland. The other topic is the OEM partner you choose. Our first battery is going very well. It comes online, like I say, February 2026. That's with Tesla. We've had very few issues going through that process. We obviously keep an eye on what others are doing and other OEMs that are out there, and we're comfortable we pick the right one to the extent that we will use Tesla for the next battery and we will also do it at Glenbrook. So we'll get all of the learning curve benefits of that, which will lead to a more speedy implementation process and more cost-effective one. As I said earlier, the other strategic advantage of batteries is they provide a nice natural hedge to your portfolio. If there is an overbuild of solar, and you see prices depressed in the day, which would be a good line from charge, obviously, and then they discharge at night when the sun comes down, driving increased value for you. The last point is, which is very strategic. When you consider 24 months' time, 300 megawatts of greater scale batteries operating in the North Island for contact. We'll have 350 -- or already have 350 megawatts of fast start peaking. And we've now got all of Manawa's hydro schemes in the North Island we've actually got an equivalent of market-leading capacity, flexible capacity in the North Island. We're up there with the market leader, albeit our capacity is more expensive but just having that amount of flexibility in the North Island is incredibly strategic going forward. I'm going to talk a little bit here last couple of slides on long-term options for dry year risk. Now people talk about an energy security issue around dryer risk. I don't think we actually have an energy security issue. We have more than enough fuel to cover dry year risk. Dry year risk used to be about 5 told hours. There's been 300 megawatts of geothermal that's become online or is coming online, which is providing baseload renewable in the winter, even in the dry year. So that 5 terawatt hour is now well below 4, and we've sketched it out on the chart, how you would mitigate for 4 terawatt hours of dry year risk. The problem we have as a country is the cost of those mitigations is very expensive, which is causing prices to be elevated. So what we're doing at contact and what I think the rest of the industry is doing as well is we're trying to come up with new ways to displace some of that more expensive risk mitigations because what that will do is it reduces regulatory risk, it's good for consumers, but it also supports the economic switching into renewable electricity, which will drive more growth. Some of the things we're doing is an industry around this. You can see there's a lot of intermittence that are being built and that have already come online. So when the sun is shining, the wind is blowing, that means the hydro operators are moving out of the way, which naturally means you would carry higher lake levels into winter. And that's good because that provides more mitigations for dry year risk. I've talked about the benefits of grid-scale batteries that displaces hydro and thermal fuel that can now be used for seasonal flexibility and dry year cover, that's good as well. And anyone who's got an existing hydro scheme should be looking at their consent and seeing through the fast track if they can get them reconsented for more flexibility, and you hear a lot of companies talking about that, including us. In terms of some of the more specific things that we're doing at Contact, we've just signed a very long gas deal with Greymouth. It's a relatively expensive gas in 7 years and the market is in a state of flux. There was a lot of risk with that, and we had a lot of conversations and due diligence around whether we should sign that or not. We got ourselves comfortable with it, though, because it allows us to fuel our peakers into the long term. And whilst it's expensive gas, it still produces electricity, which is very competitive to provide seasonal flexibility than some of the existing tools that are out there in the market. And that will also support lower prices as well, which is good for regulatory risk. The -- it also allows us to use that gas to retail business, as I said earlier, to support household sectors that aren't ready to transition, which is also very important out supporting the broader energy system. We also -- the second topic is we're looking at ways to optimize new renewables coming on to the energy system to provide as much firmed energy as possible. So we're always looking at what technology to build, when to build it, what combinations of different technologies and where to build it. Because what we're trying to do is actually create more firmed electricity going on to the electricity system, but also into our portfolio. So if you're building a North Island wind farm, you then build a South Island wind firebase they're less correlated you put some -- you build a solar farm and then you put some flexibility with a battery. Across those 4 things, you can get something that is a lot closer to baseload renewables. That's how we think about integrating what we're -- our development pipeline with our own portfolio, but it's also importantly how we think about integrating it with the energy system to create a more secure energy system for New Zealand. The last topic is around hydro generation and flexibility. And I saw the Meridian Investor Day last week, and I was very happy that they were also talking about it because with the -- all of the intermittence that are coming online over the next 10 to 20 years, I agree with them. I think hydro has to play a role, an increased role around generation and flexibility. We're looking at it in terms of 3 tiers. The first is relatively low risk, low cost, and this is around sort of replacing old assets with more efficient ones. You were already doing this with things like the Roxburgh runners. Manawa's got a great asset enhancement program, but we can do more of that sort of stuff. Manawa has got some really small ideas, actually. They they're replacing turbines now. We're looking to replace turbines with low flow ones, which better align to the conditions which drive big efficiency gains. So there are some exciting things that we can do in that space. The second tier is around -- we've got 25 hydro schemes here that we've acquired from Manawa that haven't tended to have a lot of growth capital made available to them. I'm talking sort of tens of millions of dollars here. So when you put some money like that aside, it's amazing what type of ideas start to come out around ways in which you can create more generation output, but also more flexibility. So that's the second tier of stuff that we're looking at. And then the third tier is sort of big end of the town, that stuff on the Cooper, and that's when you start getting into pump hydro. Now we're lucky that we've got Todd Meats joined us from Manawa. Todd will the Head of generation at Manawa, was on their executive team, got an amazing CV because before that, it's development and before that, it was doing hydro in the U.S. So it's tailor-made for this role. And now he's looking at all of these different options and working out a plan as to what we should be prioritizing and what sequence we should do these in. And actually, I should just -- I've got a few of my team here today and it's worth them putting their hands up and we just introducing them quickly because they're here today as subject matter experts. Hopefully, they will validate what I've just been talking about for the last half an hour. But I'll start with Todd, do you want to put your hand up? We've got Robin Baxter. So Robin looks after our major projects team. So he deals with all of the construction. Mike Dunstall, the living legend of geothermal. So he's responsible for geothermal development for context. You probably know, Mike. James Flannery, another legend of the industry. He's responsible for market development. If you've got any BESS questions or even through grade CO2 questions, you can talk to him. And Paul Buffer. Paul is from Roaring Fortis. And so if you've got any wind questions, Paul is the person to talk to. So just to finish, look, we have a high degree of ambition to lead renewable growth and flexibility for New Zealand. Critical to our success will be will be the strong relationships we have with our stakeholders. So that I would invite Chris Abbott, he's our Chief Corporate Affairs Officer. So he's going to put a bit of meat on the bones around our approach to that.

Thanks, Dorian, and [indiscernible], I'm Chris Abbott. I'm the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer. The Contact31 strategy, as Mike has said and will be often repeated today as to lead New Zealand's renewable energy future. And as Dorian's kind of just run through, we're focused on extending our advantage as New Zealand's geothermal leader, leading a new flexible generation and building into new demand with wind and solar. Strong and respected relationships with our stakeholders will be absolutely key for us for it to achieve our ambitions, ensuring that we retain both the social license to operate and also that we can augment our existing generation infrastructure into the future. Building on these strong foundations, the Contact31 strategy will maintain enduring trust with stakeholders. While we also uphold our environmental commitments, which I'll talk a little bit more about shortly. For that reason, we're continuing to strengthen both our capability and capacity in this area. It will be a critical enabler for the execution of our strategy. The integration of Manawa has significantly increased the diversity and span of contacts operations and the breadth of our stakeholders, too. We recognize the important status and contribution of tangata whenua in particular, I mean, we're fortunate to have developed strong and solid and enduring partnerships with our EV across New Zealand. The integration of Contact in Manawa, for example, has increased our EV relationships from 6 EV to 44 EV, and we engaged today with approximately 200 MALDI entities. We've developed a comprehensive tangata whenua framework that sets out our clear approach around partnership grounded in the treaty, ensuring mana whenua involvement and decision-making and cultural integrity. Its goal is to embed [indiscernible] and trust-based relationships that support sustainable development and respect manner. And as Dorian has spoken about, we will continue to explore opportunities with tangata whenua for new and deeper strategic relationships, investment and partnerships. In respect to local communities and landowners, we've established and enduring relationships where we operate. These are communities in which we invest and these are the communities where our staff and our family and their families live and working. As we pursue our renewable growth aspirations under Contact31. We recognize how important it is for early and proactive community engagement is. As Mike said, we will not always get it right. from every stakeholders' perspective, but we will always focus on maintaining enduring trust with stakeholders and working together for mutual benefit. In respect to the government, our focus is to engage closely with all political parties to explain the importance of renewable generation investment and also the government policy and regulatory settings and environment that will best get us there, and we love all political parties equally. Last week, as Mike mentioned, to BCG released an interesting report. Mike doesn't agree with it all, but you can have a debate with him on that later. The Energy to grow report. This shows that New Zealand is developing renewable generation at the fastest rate in New Zealand's history and Contact's $2 billion investment under Contact26 is a great example of this. The recent market review and energy task force reflects broader concerns with the electricity market. This includes the impacts of energy hardship on household and industrial customers with recent energy cost increases, exacerbated by the faster-than-expected gas decline impacting the wholesale market. significant increases in distribution and transmission charges on consumer bills are also having a material impact. At the same time, businesses and critical users have struggled to contract gas as a result of the faster-than-expected diminishing gas supply. We've been really focused as a company on responding to these challenges. For residential customers, which Carolyn will talk you through in more detail later on, we are helping householders to share their load through the good plans. And to support energy well-being, we've launched a $5 million good initiative and removed impediments of those in energy hardship such as removing disconnection and reconnection fees. We all want the New Zealand economy to grow and businesses to not only survive but to thrive to support businesses in critical industries. As Dorian and Mike spoken about, we've secured up to 10 PJ of gas that enables us to support these gas-reliant businesses. And we've also signed all of government contract. Gas supply deal to support core service providers such as schools, hospitals and prisons. As you know, the Contact26 strategy is to lead New Zealand's decarbonization, and we expect that for FY '26 generation, we'll be greater than 95% renewable well on our way target to meet the net zero from generation activities by 2035. Our decision to acquire additional gas to support New Zealand's critical industry will increase our scope 3 emissions in the short term. But as Dorian has talked through, we are focused and our ambition is on the demand growth opportunities that transitioning our industries from fossil fuels to renewable electricity presents. So we maintain a clear pathway to be net zero by 2035 in respect of our generation activities. We expect to retire the Taranaki combined cycle plant in the next 2 to 3 months, John, meaning contact will no longer have thermal baseload generation in our portfolio. The complementary nature of the contact of Manawa hydro generation assets will also deliver a significant decarbonization benefit with contact some weighted and Manawa winter-weighted generation further reducing the need for thermal peaking. Our battery investment similarly will help optimize our portfolio and further displace thermal peaking and normal hydrological years. Today, we reinject all greenhouse gas emissions from our Tahoka geothermal plant, and we're continuing with initiatives to capture and reinject emissions from our other geothermal operations as well. As Dorian has mentioned, we will explore options to develop and augment our hydro generation seeking additional flexibility from existing schemes, new opportunities around brownfield hydro and finalizing early concept pumped hydro or with a potential to further significantly reduce dermal peaking, and we were unable to mitigate Contact's investment in forestry partnerships will offset residual emissions. Contact was the first company in New Zealand, first energy company in New Zealand, sorry to set science-based targets back in 2018. Our key target is to reduce absolute Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 45% by 2026, which uses 2018 as a base year. This is aligned with the Paris Agreements 1.5 degrees Celsius pathway. We expect to overachieve this target in 2026, and we're in the process of developing new and long-term science-based targets beyond 2026. We're confident that our renewable growth ambitions that Dorian talked through will directly benefit the environment. This will be delivered in many guys. Our Contact31 investments will further reduce emissions from our portfolio. We'll also be supporting New Zealand business and the industry to carbonize and grow with renewable electricity. And the example discussed earlier was the agreement with New Zealand Steel to power the new electric arc furnace at Glenbrook. Practically speaking, and cut coal use and eliminate around about 800,000 tonnes of CO2 annually, which represents approximately 1% of New Zealand's emissions. Our Contact31 ambitions will further capitalize on these type of opportunities to deliver decarbonization for New Zealand. Investment under Contact31 will also support nature and biodiversity. Te Mihi 2 and 3 investments will end geothermal fluid being released into Waikato River that minimizes our ecological impact, but also importantly, addresses cultural concerns. We've got clear principles and its clear strategy to deliver on our aspired development, and I'm confident we will be able to do so. We will always engage early with stakeholders on proposed projects will always undertake environmental assessments at pre-site feasibility and will assess opportunities to mitigate impacts early as we progress through the consenting process. where mitigation isn't feasible or possible, we'll also consider how we can offset the impact. A good example of this is the South Island wind farm, which is currently in the fast track consent process for a second time. We expect the panel's decision next April. As part of that consent, we proposed a comprehensive pest eradication and fencing program. This is an example of where our investment will ultimately improve environmental and biodiversity outcomes. We were to put it mildly frustrated by the decline last year of our original application under the COVID-19 Fast Track legislation. And certainly, we don't agree with what we believe is flawed analysis in the panel's decision. Ironically, this investment and the proposed steps we agreed as part of a consent was supported by [indiscernible] Environment South and the Department of Conservation, but unfortunately, not 3 panelists. Inevitably, the first panels decline has led to a further delay in cost and securing consent for this important project. One universal truth across the country is that the current resource management legislation acts as a handbrake on both investment and infrastructure, but also it's failed to deliver improving environmental outcomes. All political parties regularly expressed to my concern about the constraints from today's approach to consenting they all have different views on how to fix it. The current government is intending to introduce draft legislation on the 8th of December. It's something to look forward to. If it's enacted, the new legislation would take effect next year. with a significant bidding down period after that. I think what's important to note is that contact has significant experience in resource consenting and we continue to work effectively within the confines of whatever the current legislation instruments we may have. For example, we're onto the fourth and we will see beyond the fifth iteration of the fast-track consenting regime. We'll continue to use existing consenting pathways and capability to support growth aspirations, and we take a tailored approach according to the specific project. For example, for batteries, where we have the support of communities and the potential in visual and ecological impact is low. We'll continue to use the existing pathway, which we know well. We're also using fast-track legislation, which is, as I mentioned, is now into its fourth iteration to consent projects at pace and ensure that we can deliver projects at a competitive long-run marginal costs. Even in Fast Track, we'll always ensure meaningful engagement with stakeholders, which is often an after sider concern about this legislation. It's in our long-term interest to do so, and it's also the right thing to do. We currently have 7 projects in the fast track process at various stages of development. That includes, as Dorian mentioned, South Island wind farm, the Glori'ts solar farm, which is unfortunately currently under appeal by Forest & Bird, the reconsent of 3 Manawa hydro schemes. And we also have 2 wind farms, courtesy of Manawa that are preapproved for application within the Fast Track approvals Act. So despite a challenging consenting environment, we're really confident that, that contact can deliver against our development aspirations. We've got capable people, and we are building more capacity and capability for renewable development under Contact31. So with that, I'll open it up to the floor for questions, and Dorian and I'll -- with Dorian, we'll just kind of sit up here and I stand up here, and I think he's a microphone to you.

Have any burning questions for Dorian?

Just a quick one. Have you guys updated your long-run wholesale price path base that was putting in I think you had $115 million to $125 million before? And then to follow on that, the to me 2 fill-in project, how is that costing look relative to -- sorry, the new fill-in 1, how is that cost looking relative to me to?

We have updated our price path that it's $115 million to $125 million. Yes. Safe to say at Idaho 2025 [indiscernible] so no change there. I think that sort of aligns with what we're hearing all around the place with others as well. In terms of our Te Mihi -- you talked about Te Mihi Stage 3...

Will fill-in 1, the 50 megawatt...

The Tauhara 2?

Yes, Tauhara 2.

Yes. We're working through that at the moment. It will be in the range that we're sort of indicating in the [ 6.5 to 7.5 ]. Every project brand, as you know, will be different. It depends whether we need to drill reinjection wells, we might not, but we may. And obviously, if you have to do that, the number of clots pipeline you get to need to build, but also which OEM we decide to use as well as we're pretty keen to try and take up a bit of competition in the marketplace as well, which should be good for the project. And we do have some of those innovations that I talked about. Some of those are sort of ready to go on new projects as well. So we're looking to overlay all of that sort of stuff into it, but it's Mike cause it a geo sprint. So we're working quickly to get it all firmed up, get the right design done and to get a very good economic case together at the same time. So be good project.

Thanks, Dorian. Shall we leave the dividend and debt questions for Matt?

A couple of things for me. Just on the consenting, I guess context had a couple of hiccups, if you had to say over the last year. Is there anything from -- I mean, you can see to see that there are some real challenges with the process and I guess certain parties like to appeal things. But I guess any learnings through that from your perspective at things that you could potentially do a little better going forward?

Yes. So yes, good question. So there's obviously -- there's been 3 incidents over our real time. So one, as I mentioned, the South Island wind farm, and that was a decision to decline by the panel, and we're in the process. We -- and we don't think we could have done anything different is our view, and we remain confident that we will get that. But unfortunately, we don't have confidence around the panel, and that's been reflected to us. The second one with probably bigger learnings is in respect of Lake Hawea. So we applied under the fast track to have a variation in our operating range and to gain access to the [indiscernible] security supply additional capacity. That was done somewhat in haste and at the request of a government as it was legislated. And so you had the opportunity to put projects into the Schedule 2 of Fast Track, Fast Track Act. The reality, I think, is -- and this is probably our main learning from this one is that we probably didn't take a community along with us quick enough. We can operate at pace so we can write quite good applications. But actually, you need to take a community along with us. So that was a learning for us, and we are currently evaluating Ultimately, the minister didn't feel comfortable in allowing it to progress to a panel. And so we are currently looking at and reviewing that. The third one in respect of Glorit solar farm, which is -- so we were successful and we received a panel. Ultimately, Forest & Bird, 3 minutes before the closing time chose to make an appeal, and that's on a point of more. It's a technical issue. Again, so we expect we've got a confirmed hearing in February next year. And in March, we will hopefully have a decision and we're relatively confident on the edge. But I think what really -- the key for me is how we engage meaningfully and early on it. We know for projects like Hawea. It's a very difficult ask for communities. -- it will be far easier for us to do nothing. And so we've just got to lean into it, and that's about us engaging early and consultant early.

One other thing I'd add on that is just making sure we've got more items in the fire. There's a lot of stakeholders at play when you're going through process. So you can't just have one project going through the process and assume that it's going to pop out the other end consented in a timely way. So you need to make sure you've got a funnel of projects going in there so that you have a lot more certainty that you're going to have consented projects pop out the other end in a timely manner so that we can continue building. So we've done more around that. and Chris is actually putting a lot more resource into our consenting team as well, which will better enable us to do that.

And just a second question for me, a bit more detail, I guess, batteries you're looking at 2 hour batteries or maybe going to 4 hours. And I guess the other question on there is just around where you're seeing CapEx trends for those future projects?

Yes. At this stage, we're still looking at to our batteries. They still make more sense. We're seeing no -- there's no sort of economies of scale, if you like, from sizing up to 4 hour batteries. They just cost twice as much money, so there's no benefit there. In terms of the trends around where we're actually seeing the CapEx coming, it's coming down at a rate of knots, which is great to see. It's -- I think Meridian's on over the first off sort of $1.8 million a megawatt, we and came in at sort of $1.6 million, $1.5 million, $1.6 million. The we're comfortable that the next one that we take fit on early this year will be significantly that. So the economics are looking good. We're going to need to be smart about the second battery. It's obviously more megawatts than the first. The market has changed a bit. The reserves market is flooded at the moment, but that makes sense, I think Meridian are driving a lot of that, but that's aligned to their business case and ensuring you can get more volume across the HVDC, which we value and we benefit from as well. But going the other way, the cost of gas has gone up significantly since our first business case. So that's sort of arbitrage of prices when you charge and sell, it's got a lot more attractive. So overall, the economics of these things is improving in our view, and they really do support our portfolio in the North Island. So that's what it's been something incredibly valuable to the energy system.

Present a couple of questions on geothermal. I seem to be sort of 3 prizes that everybody is thinking about the super critical resource that at least GNS are getting very excited about the low to mid-temperature sort of 5 terawatt hours that Mercury have put on the table and the northern TV fields that are protected at the moment and could be unlocked. What are you most excited about? Could you discuss each of those 3?

Yes. I mean we're -- typical critical stuff is really interesting. I mean it's a big bet for someone like us to make. So we're happy that the government is doing it, but it's really interesting, they're looking into it. It's not a moon shot, it's an earshot. So -- and we're supporting that alongside Mercury. I think some of the stuff that really interests us actually is what you're seeing in the U.S. around the enhanced geothermal systems and some of the technology that's coming across from oil and gas is supporting that, as I said in my presentation, those types of techniques being used on conventional fields that we have in New Zealand. And I think there's definitely value we see there, making existing fields better, making sure you can access all of your consented fluid on existing fields, leveraging some of those techniques is going to be very important. The most the most valuable resource is the existing fields. As I said, they're the ones that they've been developed first for a reason because they are the highest quality. And over time, as you develop a better understanding of those reservoirs like we've done with Tauhara then pushing to get additional fluid concept, where you're comfortable that the field can handle that and going about that in the right way with support from the consenting team and Chris' team and making sure you're engaging with the right stakeholders and partners around that and sharing value with things like that. That's -- that, in my mind, is going to be the best thing for us to go after in the short term, and that will deliver value across the board. I think the greenfield stuff, we talked about that. That means Mercury, we're talking a bit about that as well. We've got slightly different property views around the magnitude of it. We think it is definitely worth pursuing, but we're looking at something smaller. We think something like 50 megawatts is something that we should be targeting over the next the next 5 years. But as I said with that, that's going to be -- that's not easy. With the price of -- the cost of steam thought going up so much, those fields aren't really investable as long as you if you don't have the innovation to actually get the cost of steam pipelines and things like that down. So you've got to overlay that type of approach to actually get those types of opportunities so that they returns. So I'd say supercritical great, and there'll be some learnings that come out of that, but it's not for our balance sheet. The extending existing fields we can. It's the most valuable thing. And if you can new technologies help doing that brilliant and then the greenfield is probably the next cap-off the rank for us. Stuart -- Steve sorry. It's been a long time.

Just a question in terms of your linkages between demand growth and new projects. Obviously, you highlighted the sort of the 3 possible scenarios in your thinking. So I imagine this is a very similar story to what you said for '26, which is a lot of the big projects you will be gating will presumably require some proportion of sale to new electrification to underwrite them. Do you have a sort of a thought in mind in terms of the gating for FID, which projects, and I'm assuming all of those would be additional to the sort of the growth you already see baked into FY '30. Some commentary about that.

Yes. I mean, we -- we're not -- you saw our solar what we're doing there. We're not specifically linking solar in terms of a PPA to a particular project. The counterparties that we're working with who are moving off natural gas on to renewable electricity, the timing of their projects isn't going to perfectly align with the timing of our solar projects. For example, the uncertainty around the consenting process doesn't help with that as well. So we're trying to ensure that we get alignment at a portfolio level so that we can see the right amount of summer weighted load in our portfolio to cover our solar generation that we're building. So that's how we're working on that for solar. In terms of wind, yes, I think where we're looking to get counterparties to support around that. As I said, when you're building bigger wind farms, there is more risk around market pricing and transmission. So therefore, it's important that you have a counterparty in the geographic vicinity of your wind farm to help reduce that risk. So that's going to be an important component of that. I mean what that means is our contact portfolio gets the benefits of the oversized wind farm and the low LRMC as well through that, but could we get access to the electricity and it's the cheaper price than we would have got if we've done it sort of on our own, if you know what I mean level. So that's how we'd approach it. geothermal may or may not. There's -- obviously geothermal aligns very neatly with displacing baseload thermal data centers. You saw we did some stuff with Microsoft. So we may look at some opportunities around that. But we're comfortable the energy system needs baseload renewables, and therefore, would be comfortable building that without having an offtake PPA.

Great. And just a follow-up, confirmation on the maturity in this morning. So we should think that batteries and geothermal differently on balance sheet wind, as you said, off balance sheet. Are you looking for one partner for all wind projects? Or is that one partner per project, just to be clear? .

It would -- we're working through that at the moment. I'd like to think it would be one partner for more than one project, similar. I think the -- what our relationship with Lightsource bp and how that's worked, I think, is a good sort of test case for us and something that we'd look to as a good example of what we're aiming for. and you'd probably look to try and do multiple projects and get a sort of programmatic approach to this, which will play into things like the per megawatt you get for the wind as well if you've got a program ahead of yourselves. So that's most likely where we'll end up.

Just a quick question on phasing geothermal. I think you've got a consent for 80 megawatts are Tauhara Stage 2. Just wondering what the decision behind going for 50 and then 100 layers.

It's the -- I guess it's speed. So it want to do 50 relatively quickly to support the energy system. We're still -- we're comfortable with the resource reservoir can handle 50. The -- we do want to leave a little bit of insurance there for makeup for Tauhara if required. So that's why we're not sort of building out in short order, the entire 80 that we've got available to us now. So it gives me a little bit more time for that.

Is there a transmission capacity constrained? And I think you're talking to that in Tauhara Stage 3 which may lift the CapEx per megawatt?

Yes, yes. Not for Tauhara 2, but Tauhara 3, would be, yes.

Does that still keep the cost within the guided range of [ 6.5 to 7.5 ]?

We'd like to think so, but we need to work -- that's still quite a way out. So we still need to work through that.

Cool. The second question just on batteries. Talking to a couple of your peers, obviously, last week as well. They talked to a market size sort of closer to 600-odd megawatts. You seem to be a bit more positive on the outlook. Just keen to hear your thoughts on why that could be the case and what could happen if there's an overbuild?

Yes. I mean the -- as I said, I mean, we're pretty comfortable with the market size at 900 megawatts. We see it is displacing the role that the capacity is playing at the moment in the marketplace with daily firming. We see it as dynamic. I mean we see it's growing all the time. Retail peak demand is growing faster than overall demand. So that growth is going to get catered for by grid scale batteries. So we're pretty comfortable that the market sized that at the moment. I guess it's a little bit of a moot point because we're not going to get to 900 megawatts of batteries in the marketplace in the next couple of years. So -- and as I say, with the market growing as well. I don't think there's huge chance of that being an overbuild. If there are -- if there is, as I said, our position is we have less flexibility than everyone else. So we benefit from an overbuild of batteries to a certain extent as well, our portfolio. So that's why we're comfortable moving into this mission as a leader.

Any more questions? Thanks for the questions. And thanks, Chris and Dorian. [indiscernible], easy one.

Wairakei, IMB, can you just remind us how we should think about the current output of those plants phasing out? It's always a confusing thing to model?

Yes. I'm sort of renewable growth, not business as usual operations. So I could -- the plan is, George, you want to take this or better...

So I think the easiest way to think of Wairakei extension is we have Wairakei A, which has 3 11-megawatt machines. And it will be retiring that middle of next year. and we'll be extending the 330 megawatts units in Wairakei B and part of the Wairakei binary up until 2031. We'll be operating that somewhere from 80 to 90 megawatts depending on the fluid that is available from Te Mihi II once that is powered up and the ability to flex up when we also have outages across some of our effort stations, so that's the type of volume we'll be targeting out to middle of 2031 when that station will be fully retired.

Okay. Thank you. Thanks to Chris and Dorian. We're going to be switching gears now and actually changing the furniture to have a panel discussion led by Louise Wright, our Head of Communications and reputation that will be focused on an update on our integration with Manawa. I'll let Lou make the remaining introductions.

Thank you, Shelly. [indiscernible] I am Louise Wright or Lou Wright as everyone calls me my friends at Contact, and I'm the head here of communications and reputation. Joining me here to talk about uniting our companies, the Manawa contact story, some people who -- that's very, very dear to the heart because they have been living and breathing it in the last few months indeed. So with me today is our Chief People Officer, Jan Bibby; our Director of Integration, Matt Bolton, who many of you may remember is our former Chief Retail Officer; and of course, our Chief Generation Officer, John Clarke, welcome. Now this is going to be a conversational session with Jan and Matt and John will share some of their insights into the integration process. And it's been one of the most significant mergers undertaken in New Zealand in recent times. Now with these anecdotes and their insights, as I've said, it is conversational. So unfortunately, we're not going to have time for questions in this session because we are going to break for lunch. But I'd really encourage you afterwards. If you do want to have a chat at the lovely trio when we've broken for food, just feel free to have some questions there. So John, let's start with you. Ready. Now Manawa has 25 hydro schemes across the North and the South Islands. Now some of them have been operating for some time, almost 100 years. What's been your impression of these assets?

Okay. Look, these are truly an impressive set of assets with an incredible history behind them. And the scattered through some of the most beautiful parts of New Zealand. I think I have the best job at contact where I get to boondoggle through New Zealand, having a look at every damn be a culvert ponding canal that there is to see. But there's a beautiful elegance to how these things actually stitch together and harvest water for these schemes. But what I was actually deeply struck by was the care and custodianship that the people who are supporting and operating these assets feel towards them. And Manawa was a professional organization. They had really good asset management processes well aligned to ISO 55000, which meant company strategy was aligned with engineering projects with asset maintenance and with day-to-day operations. And the asset strategies were well matched to the value that each scheme delivers in itself. Look, there's always room, and I always like to chase ways to improve performance and safety. And it's important when bringing 2 organizations like this together, that we learn from one another that we somehow take the best that both has to offer to come out with something that is greater than the sum of the 2 halves, and a great example around that is dam safety. Manawa was -- and was a significant owner of dams in New Zealand and have a really robust dam safety process. Now we're taking that on board and actually applying that to our [indiscernible] dams as well. But at the same time, we're strengthening that with our automated dam monitoring system and our very robust process safety, engineering practices to get something that is actually better than what we both had previously. And that really important because it's not always just about reliability. It's also about maintaining the trust and confidence of the communities in which we operate. And one other great thing is the proximity of the most of the Manawa sites. So within 100 kilometers of Contact's existing operational footprint, which means we can continue to collaborate, we can share resources and we can provide engineering support and Manawa has a really robust enhancement project already underway, which is going to deliver up to 78 gigawatt hours of generation improvement for key replacements of turbines and generators, some life enhancement projects and some significant dam safety enhancements. And there's already key project wins on the board. Manawa work has delivered Matahina and Waipori, the Breena restoration and significant dam safety works and High Bank and Coleridge continue to be in flight. And these projects will deliver long-term value, both from generation uplift reduce maintenance and enhance reliability. So I guess, in summary, these are a really robust high-value set of assets, and there's a lot of opportunity for us.

I think I'll obviously say I've heard anyone talk about an engineering company is beautiful elegant over. Now Matt, it's been 4 months since Manawa and Contact came together. As integrated Director, from your point of view, how has that process been going? What insights can you share? And can you update us on the promised synergies?

Yes. Sure, Lou. Look, it's fair to say M&A activity is not context, D&A would had simply -- would head Western kind of went quite long with Manawa $2.6 billion. So the thought process around it didn't start on the 11th of July, clearly. We actually kicked this into action with an integration office August last year. And actually, our plan had sort of about 1,400 initiatives that we wanted to complete actually pre-close and then post close through to Christmas this year. So a significant amount of effort probably knocking on the door of 50-odd people at contact working on the program at any one time to ensure that the lights stayed on, how people stay safe, the assets keep running. In terms of reflections on where we're at now, look, as we head into Christmas, probably 4 major topics for me as I thought about it from the 11th of July until the Christmas break. The first is people, and Jan will talk a little bit more about that shortly. But we're well through bringing the operating models together for the 2 businesses. That was critical for me and for the business. This was about a culture program, not just about the synergies on acknowledges room, but we needed to bring this business together really well to would continue to run. We're largely through that now, which is superb. We've been able to migrate to 2.5 -- about 2,500 ICPs, the C&I business into our Simply environment now that allow us tied to decommission their platforms and start a decommissioning work. All of those ICPs have been migrated across now. Half of them are being built out of the Simply platform, the other half from the first of December and that's going incredibly well with no impact on those customers. So a significant milestone for that part of the business. Tim's here from our trading team. We've done a lot of work in the trading space and the commodity risk space to bring one view about the commodity risk, how we think about commodity risk and trading across the 2 portfolios. That's going exceptionally well, and I would invite you to talk to Tim over the break as well to think about how trading is going with the combined portfolio. And then final thing for me, being the retail guy is the 2 brands will come together. We've been able to give the name of Manawa back to [indiscernible], but we'll bring the 2 brands together this side of Christmas. So as you -- as we come out of the January break, you will just see largely see contact in market. So some pretty significant milestones for the business there. In terms of synergies, I know you'll be interested. Yes, we are well on track to hit the $28 million annualized run rate within the 12 to 18 months. So we're pretty comfortable that is happening. It's -- there's a lot of hard work there, but we're comfortable we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. John's, of course, talked about the portfolio or the asset refurb program. We feel we're pretty comfortable with the portfolio benefits and of course, the mercury repricing into the current wholesale environment. I'm sure the math isn't too hard to see there, but we feel we'll hit that number as well. Lou?

Thank you, Matt. 1,400 initiatives. So here we go. With any business acquisition, Jan, bringing 2 entities together, it's highly disruptive to a business, the long one, the size of contact and the size of Manawa. How have you been managing this while ensuring that contact keeps its focus on delivering what we've promised to our strategy?

Yes, there's no doubt that when someone announces a potential acquisition, everybody wants to be involved. But not everybody can, which is why we set up a dedicated integration management office established all of the relevant work streams that we knew we needed to and appointed some of our really good people to lead those work streams. And that group collectively developed the plan that Matt just talked about that had about 1,400 initiatives in the program system that we were tracking to. At the same time, we constantly reinforce to the rest of the business that we don't get the right to acquire a business and integrate it unless we keep our own business as it is running and performing really well. So that was a consistent message over the months. They probably saw some of their colleagues who are pouring a lot of hours into developing that plan and thought they were probably better off during BAU. But there's no doubt that we just had to keep reinforcing we have to deliver our plan while we build the plan for the integration for quite a number of months. We didn't even know whether it was going to go hit or not. It would be fair to say it's gone really, really well. We are on the cusp of completing the operating model change. So on the 3rd of November, we migrated 127 people across from Manawa into the contact payroll and system, and they have subsequently been paid once. So that's gone well. And we welcome another 40 to 45 people on the 8th of December across onto the contact system. And that pretty much leaves all of that operating model change now completed, and we had targeted to do that by the end of December. So we're well on track. I've done in my career, I've led and been involved in quite a number of acquisitions. And I have to say this is probably the one that's gone the best of any I've been involved in. And I really believe that was down to 2 things. One was the absolute meticulous planning to the very last detail that we did; and two, was putting the right people onto that program to plan and keeping the rest of the business running really well.

Thank you, Jan. Now Matt, Manawa is a smaller business in for focus on managing cost. So how is the new contact going to leverage this expertise as we deliver cost and capital efficiency with Contact31?

Look, the first , I show the room here that Contact was also pretty diligent with its cost management and the performance in the retail business, I think, is a great example of that to invest in the right places. However, you've always got to enter these things, and John mentioned earlier, you need to learn, and I think that's where Contact's culture is now I think the insight for me is that Manawa was a business that had to -- well, thrive through a lot. If you go back over the last decade, go back to the sale of Tilt, you go in 2017, you go to 2020, hey, let's set a retail business. You check in a couple of CEOs along the way and then contact tipped up and said, hey, let's buy this one all at the same time of keeping their lights on the business running their peel safe. It is a very diverse business with very different assets, albeit in the hydro space. So there's a bit of magic in the DNA that we were really curious about. What I think we're seeing so far and John has alluded to it, Manawa does bring a different -- the team there does bring a different lens to the same problem. And we are learning all the time about how to do things slightly differently. We've had the asset management or the dam safety view there. We'll continue to see that look across the coming months. We have a number of the team, as Jan just said, coming onto the contact team. So we're learning all the time. It's fair to say that, as I mentioned, they look at it differently. It's a good challenge point for us to embrace and I'd like to see some 1 equals 3 off the back of it.

Thank you, Matt. John, we've talked a lot about contact and the portfolio benefits of bringing the hydro schemes together. But now you're operating in this combined portfolio. What have you learned? And how are these really going to show up in practice?

Okay. Firstly, we've just absolutely pleased and blown away at how well these 2 portfolios can stitch together. And it's not just vary anymore. We can actually see it in the numbers. Manawa assets do have a clear or file and winter biases the exact opposite of our [indiscernible] scheme. And it's been really good to see our earnings volatility has dropped significantly. And you only have to look at August, September, really to see that where we could flex the assets around each other where we saw win dipping on off. We saw [indiscernible] gas savings, and we saw the [indiscernible] flexibility coming to the fall back by the hydro assets. So within the first few months, we have identified way lift earnings by about $15 million, and that's without increasing any risk, and that's absolutely awesome. The context has also shifted a little bit since we started the due diligence around the Manawa acquisition. We've landed the Greymouth gas deal. We have the strategic reserve at Huntly in place, and we've managed to shift a bunch of gas and electricity deals, and we see further opportunity ahead of us in fixed price sales. So I mean, to be able to achieve that alignment across portfolios is critical, and we've made solid progress on that front with spot market optimization with portfolio modeling and long-term channel strategy management. So the 2 trading teams have come together really well and we now have a combined set of portfolio tools where we can test scenarios and capacity decisions under different inflow and wind conditions. Stand-alone, both companies would have been at the risk limits. But as a combined entity, we can take on more sales without actually pitching those limits. So we're confident we can commit to further sales through winter 2026 and beyond and trading modeling and efficient frontier analysis has shown that the combined portfolio can handle significantly more fixed price sales for exactly the same level of risk. So lower risk, greater asset diversity means we can commit to more fixed price sales to commercial and industrial customers and help insulate them from the spot market. So bottom line, the integration, look, we've delivered what we said we would, and we believe there's more to come.

More to come back to people, Jan. People are really critical to everything that we do in our success. In Contact, we're renowned for our transformational ways of working and a particularly strong culture with our people. But can you tell us about your strategy across capabilities and culture for the combined business because how is this going to support the execution of Contact31?

Yes. Look, we are super proud of the culture that we've created at contact. And it's fair to say that the Manawa team were equally proud of the culture that they had created and in particular, because they created it off the back of the Trustpower Mercury event. So they were pretty new in creating a bit. They're very proud of it as well. And there are many -- there's many similarities between us in terms of our culture, and there are some nuances. And I really do believe if you bring those things together into something you can create something pretty special. So we've kicked off a program of work to define what are the cultural attributes that we need to make sure that we can successfully achieve on our strategy. And then we've also done an assessment on what are the capabilities that will be required both kind of the core capabilities and the critical capabilities that will be needed to achieve it. We know we have the best talent available in New Zealand working for contact. And so if we continue to grow and inspire those people and empower them to come to work and do their very best work every day, then that will help us to ensure our success. John talked a little bit about our custodian chip. The thing that I've been really amazed by is that the passion and the belief of all of our people and what they do. They care deeply for our assets, they care for our customers, our communities. And most importantly, in many ways, they take the very best care of themselves and their colleagues, so that they can turn up to work every day and go home every day to the things that matter most to them. I think it's a super exciting time now as we start to define the next phase. And if we can really empower and inspire our people, then we can collectively lead New Zealand's renewable energy future.

Thank you, Jan. And that's a perfect and a really good point for [indiscernible]. Thank you, Jan. Thank you, Matt, and thank you, John. Now back to you, Shelly.

Thanks. Thanks to our panel, and thanks to the presenters from this morning. We're now going to take a break. And for those of us watching online, we'll be on pause for the live stream, and that will resume at 12:40. And so we'll see you then. [Break]

Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you enjoyed lunch. I'm Carolyn Louis, and I'm really excited to be here today to share with you the retail strategy and how we are going to lead the transition in the home. Today, I will cover the highlights from Contact26, the latest market trends that have shaped our strategy, our strategic priorities and how we will transform and modernize the retail business for the future. Over Contact26, our retail business has delivered strong performance across a number of areas. We are focused on being a trusted retail provider through initiatives like removing contracts and disconnection fees to make it simpler and easier for customers and to build trust. And more recently, we launched the good initiative to support those that are in hardship or vulnerable in our communities. We committed to invest $5 million this year in expanding the number of customers we can support with well-being credits and to grow our partnerships with community organizations with wraparound services so that we can continue to reach those that are really hard to connect with. We are now a true multi-services provider with over 1/3 of our customers having electricity plus either gas, broadband or mobile with us. This delivers both better retention and growth in EBITDAF with every additional gas, broadband and mobile connection delivering incremental margin. We have continued to drive innovation and greater customer value in market. Our good plans that offer free or discounted off-peak power have proven to be popular with our customers with 34% of our electricity base now being on our good plans. Our good plan customers have higher NPS are more likely to stay and have helped us shift peak load. We've also released 3 Flex products to enable customers to get even greater value with water sorter, our BP out-of-home EV charging partnership, offering our customers discounted charging at selected times and our virtual power plant pilot. We have now grown our customer connections 29% to 650,000 while also maintaining our lowest cost to serve energy retail position in market. A big driver of our improved cost to serve has been the growth of our digital channels with now 80% of interactions being managed by digital. Over the last 5 years, we have made great progress in cementing ourselves as a truly multi-services provider in the market. So we are ready to build on these foundations and take advantage of the next opportunities on the horizon. The retail market continues to evolve and change. Regulatory oversight is increasing. With the increased focus on energy affordability, we've seen a large increase in regulation and requirements, requiring us to give customers more choice, make it easier to compare plans and save money. Locally, all the large Tier 1 energy retailers have invested in new technology stacks to improve customer experience and market agility. We expect that this will intensify competition and increasingly provide customers with more innovative and choice. With the cost of living challenges, customers are seeking more value and actively engaging shifting their electricity consumption to save money. Many of our customers on good plans are looking for ways to save money by taking advantage of our free power periods by turning on their dishwasher or their dryers after 9:00 p.m. or saving all of their washing for the weekends. There is a growing segment of savvy customers who are looking to further electrify by investing in EVs, solar and batteries, giving them greater ownership and freedom over their energy usage. Agentic AI is growing every day, and we're seeing globally energy retailers are transforming their operating models and building out AI radically to change how they service their customers while delivering more experiences. Our retail strategy is focused on leading the energy transition at home. Like our broader Contact Energy strategy, we have a role to play to support to electrify and contribute to New Zealand's renewable energy future. We have 3 key strategic priorities. Firstly, to attract and reward key customer energy profiles and locations and product bundles to optimize lifetime value while we're also reducing cost to serve. We will do this by building out advanced segmentation that builds on Contact's unique attributes. The key is where we see opportunity is to win customers around our growing generation footprint across New Zealand, targeting gas users and those with a higher propensity to multiproduct customers in the future. Secondly, harnessing digital and AI technology to make every interaction easy and personal. We see an opportunity to invest in technology to deliver both a better customer experience and greater efficiency. And finally, empowering customers to shift usage to off-peak times through demand Flex, virtual power plants and our good plans. Our market-leading time-of-use plans have demonstrated that customers are keen to engage in energy products where the right incentives are in place. This gives us a strong platform to build out further products to enable customers to shift usage in the future and be rewarded for it. The key outcomes that we'll be focused on over the next 5 years is with the future retail technology stack a key enabler for our whole retail strategy, we will target to select and commence execution of a new technology stack in FY '27 with all customers live on the new platform by FY '31. We will continue to reduce cost to serve per customer, decreasing it to $90 per customer by FY '31, enabled by a new technology platform being embedded across the retail business. And finally, lifting retail Demand Flex from 10 megawatts today to 65 megawatts under management over the period as customer electrification and adoption grows. To secure our cost-to-serve advantage, we will invest to modernize our retail technology stack. By consolidating our retail systems into a single modern retail platform, this will give us the opportunity to simplify our product portfolio and our end-to-end processes, which will enable us to leverage AI to automate and further digitalize service. There are global examples where conversational AI has reduced wait times and average handling times. We will transform our business to operate more efficiently and build out people capabilities to harness the benefits of modern technology to remove customer pain points and enable us to resolve customer issues more efficiently. Technology platforms are evolving rapidly over the last few years. So we have the opportunity to take advantage of these enhancements, particularly with AI being natively embedded in many of these platforms now. We will take an iterative approach to the delivery program and ensure that we're delivering value at each phase while minimizing business disruption. We have shifted our approach to cost to serve and taken a customer-centric approach to our cost to serve per customer calculations so that we can align to the global benchmarks and ensure that our ambition to reduce cost to serve is best in class. Retail Demand Flex is a key opportunity for our customers to take even greater ownership over their energy usage while also improving contact load share. The overall market for Retail Flex is between 500 and 700 megawatts in New Zealand currently, with the market continuing to expand as the number of residential connections and smart devices grow and more meters are upgraded. We have been actively expanding our hot water sorter program to shift load to off-peak periods. We currently have 10 megawatts under management across 24,000 ICPs. This is creating value for our customers on time of use plans, and we see even greater value creation with a shift from scheduled load control to dynamic load control. Our EV pilot on virtual power plant platform that uses AI to automatically charge EVs during low demand periods is providing insights into how we can unlock further value for both customers and the grid. We expect that there will be continued growth of EVs, batteries and smart devices in the home, and that will expand the segment of customers looking to participate in the energy transition. This creates the opportunity to build out Flex propositions and improve Contact's load shed by reducing the demand peaks. Contact's retail business is focused on supporting all New Zealanders through the energy transition, and we will do this by delivering an enhanced customer experience through expanding our digital and AI capabilities to create an easy and more personal experience that reduces the customer reasons to call us and time to resolve when there are issues, providing customers with ways to take even greater ownership over their energy usage that delivers value both us and them and continuing to innovate and deliver great value through our multiproduct offering across energy, broadband and mobile, particularly supporting our gas customers through the transition as the gas supply continues to taper off. And importantly, focusing on energy well-being by supporting those that are the most vulnerable in our communities through the good initiative. Contact's retail strategy is about leading the energy transition at home, delivering value innovation in ways that customers can take greater ownership over their energy use. We're building a future-focused retail business that's ready to support Kiwis through the evolving energy landscape. As you can see, our strategy to lead the energy transition at home is deeply connected to our ability to leverage our tech advantage. With that, I'll invite Tighe Wall, our Chief Technology Officer, to speak to this.

Hi, everyone. And now the part you've all been waiting for, and I'm sure traveled long and far to hear, technology. I made a joke at dinner last night that I was going to talk for an hour about consenting, and I'd like to think that Jeremy wasn't disappointed when I told him it was actually going to be 15 minutes about tech. So the strategy process has been really nice for us from a technology perspective to slow down for a second and take an outside-in view of what we've been up to for the last 5 years. Most of the time or historically, technology organizations talk about what they've been up to if they're having problems. We're actually doing the opposite. Things have been going quite well for us, and we've been building confidence, and you'll see some of that delivery through the Contact26 strategy now. One challenge we have at Contact when it comes to tech is that there's a lot of work to do across an organization our size. My last employer was quite a bit bigger, and we tried to address the same problems Contact does, and we're getting a heck of a lot more out of every dollar we spend here at Contact. So we're surgical in what we choose to actually focus on and everything has to have a direct line of sight to benefit. In the generation business, which we started focusing on in earnest about 3 years ago, we've invested a lot of effort into our well management in the geothermal business. This means we can more tactically schedule our work of those wells to ensure we're getting the most capacity out of our plant. And we've also started to roll out AI agents, a theme of all of these discussions I'm sure you're having with your portfolio companies around vast amounts of HSE, health and safety and process safety data. There are lots and lots of documentations, lots and lots of observations coming through. So we're using AI now to look across all of those and surface new trends so we can ensure we're improving on our safety journey. Along with generation, we've also increased our focus on trading. Tim got a plug earlier, I'd encourage you to talk to him during a break or dinner tonight about some of the work our team has been partnering up with his to deliver. This is actually, for us, a new area of opportunity that we'll double down on, as you'll see in a couple of slides. With some smart work from Tim's team, some platform expertise and data science and engineering from my team, the teams are significant amounts of opportunity here. And along with this, from a platform perspective, we delivered Hitachi's trading and risk management platform last year, the first of its kind for a Tier 1 retailer in New Zealand. Carolyn talked a bit about retail, and this is a nice theme about the sort of surgical investment we've made. You don't hear Contact talking a lot about these investments historically, but we are leading in lots of ways in the retail business. First and foremost is that investment in self-service. So we started at 40% of self-service interactions 5 years ago, now we're up to nearly 80%. And what that means is when a customer on a multiproduct bundle calls us, they get through sooner and get an expert faster when historically, we had a lot of people calling us to ask questions about their bills and things like that. We've also invested a lot in the data platform here, and this is going to provide an interesting foundation for us when it comes to all of the things I'll talk about, whether that's trading generation or -- most organizations and a lot of the other CTOs with whom I speak are now learning the hard way that agentic AI doesn't come first. It's the data readiness, the data migration, the data cleansing, and that is how you actually get opportunity from agentic AI. And we've invested in the right thing first, along with capability and data governance so that we can accelerate into the agentic era. Corporate has become an increasing focus of late. A lot of that is around automation, as you might imagine, in the HR space, whether it's onboarding or offboarding or finance. And we've also put in a new platform for our procurement team so they can deploy modern procurement practices, and we can get the most out of every dollar we spend. And then I've mentioned along the way here some of the investments we've made. We had early partnerships with AWS, early partnership with Databricks, and Databricks has assessed our capability on their platform as the most mature in New Zealand. So we're going to double down on that over the next 5 years and take advantage of it. So from a pure technology perspective and one thing that's different about Contact 31 than '26, '26 had technology embedded in all the strategic pillars, which means we had lots of opportunity and made lots of gains in the pillars. But now we have more opportunity from an enterprise perspective, like taking that retail data platform and scaling it the enterprise. And so we'll take that foundational element we've built, and we'll now step into a more vocal leadership role for New Zealand. And this does not mean AI and agentic AI for the sake of AI. We'll continue that rigor around direct line of sight to delivering benefits for the organization, but we'll also give people the right tools or continue to give people the right tools to do their job more efficiently. Over the past year, we've also been -- or I've also led a rebuild of the entire tech team from the bottom down, and we're already starting to squeeze costs out of the technology business while delivering more capability to Contact Inc. We'll continue on that. We'll rearchitect the organization. We'll get slimmer, we'll get faster get more effective. And then the ticket to the game here is stability and security. We will not take our eyes off that prize. Everything we do will be built security first, and we'll shift security from a stage gate at the end of a sort of regret for the business to something that unlocks value and becomes a strategic enabler. I almost don't want to say this out loud. Our availability or our on-time rates are actually higher than a lot of big technology companies you see out there, and we want to strive to maintain that. Every time I read about an AWS outage or Azure or you may have seen the outage this morning on your depending on your provider, it reminds me how important this is for us and how we will not take our eye off this. So what does this mean for Contact 31? In generation, we continue to make sure we get the most out of our consents out of the plant we've already built and give people the tools they need to do their job even better because as we bring more megawatts online, our cost base won't scale up to meet that, so we need to become more efficient along the way. When it comes to trading and Flex, and I'll invite John Clark up to talk about some of the sizzle part of the presentation after this, some of the direct things we've done in trading. And you've already heard some work about -- or some of the work we've done with making sure that we're using our trading portfolio and platform to get the most value out of our assets. Carolyn talked a bit about retail. We will be putting a fair amount of effort into replatforming retail organization. As you all know or probably remember, we did a bit of an SAP upgrade a couple of years ago, which left our CRM upgraded, which has left a lot of opportunity for us. It was almost a gods in hindsight that we didn't plow ahead with our plans because now the tools are there, they're more advanced. And each one of the potential options has already been rolled out at another Tier 1 electricity provider in New Zealand. So we will not need to configure those for the New Zealand market. They will be ready for us and ready to go. We will put more effort into corporate. Productivity is going to be an increasing focus in Contact31. And this is making sure we're doing this in a very smart way, along with agenetic AI, but also the basic tools around automation and data availability. And then in that data and enterprise tech space, simplification, simplification -- along the way here, we'll be delivering the integration. Most of the work for has been done from a people perspective. The culture work is underway. The technology work is just getting started. We've got a bit of a pipeline ahead of us, but a lot of strong capability and some really good starts when it comes to integrating all of the applications and platforms into a single streamlined contact environment. You can see along the bottom there, a couple of the trends or how we've staggered this over time. We will need to build a bit of capability to deliver this. But as I've said, we've built the foundations, we've built the confidence and the team is up for stepping into it. So with that, I'll invite my colleague, John Clark, to the stage to talk about some of the work the technology and trading teams have done together.

Right here comes to sizzle. Welcome to my Ted Talk. Look, Tighe already mentioned, we've proven we can execute some good digital capability in the trading area. We have the trade deal capture. We've market-making algorithms out there. And we also have a very strong trading portfolio optimization tool. But we haven't stopped there. So I mean, our trading and technology teams, they've engaged with energy trading operations in overseas environments, and we've done that because the free exchange of learnings and insights can take place as we operate in noncompetitive markets. And the transition, I think, has been characterized by rapid change over the last 5 years. There's more intermittent generation. There's changing markets. Spot markets are getting more volatile. Grid-scale batteries are coming in. It's the beginning of the home retail integration and growing residential solar and distributed resources. So what does that mean for our trading and technology? Heuristics, whereby you operate by a rule of law have given way to methods of optimization, volatile markets, they require agile responses. Business-led solutions need to guide the priorities. You need a dedicated technology support, working closely with your trading business. Off-the-shelf optimization for incumbents can be dangerous, and it's better to control the IP. So in-house development of intellectual property, tools and trading strategies with in-house expertise becomes very important. So digital trading to me, it's a people capability as well as a risk management initiative. We're having the right people capability in trading and digital creates a competitive advantage through developing digital tools and advanced analytics to iteratively improve portfolio modeling, drive faster insights, improve algorithms and trade our energy optimally. What it really means is we get the energy nerds working really closely with the computer geeks. We have a deep level of market understanding in our trading subject matter experts working with the digital and technology experts to deliver improvements all the while maintaining a clear line of sight to delivering and value while taking on and understanding what is acceptable -- and the next steps in our trading technology road map will center on creating a centralized platform for both the and contact trading desks, embracing further optimization techniques in our trading tools in anticipation of more volatility and unlock the flexibility of our assets, be they hydro, thermal and the incoming batteries. Other markets use optimizers for real-time dispatch, introducing automation and algorithmic trading to maximize gross margin. This is essential in systems with high renewables and volatile prices to enable dispatchable assets to target high-price -- so for our portfolio, in the near term, this means the the first integration program requiring algorithmic trading tools online first quarter of 2026 and the Clover scheme with its large flexible hydro asset suitable for optimization. So background on Howard, I'm not going to explain what's on the slides as much from other people in the room than me who can just explain how machine learning works. But it's essentially, it's a decision support tool for Clyde and it physically models river flows, reservoirs, station performance, takes into account operational constraints and regulatory compliance around minimum flows and then it mathematically optimizes determining the optimal schedules linked to the market conditions. It runs daily over a 36-hour horizon and its outputs are compatible with our other trading tools. So the benefits are it. It maximizes value by aligning operations with market opportunities to circa just under $8 million per annum. It manages risk and ensures compliance, and it's also extendable to other hydro schemes, and we will adopt this approach for some of the other schemes. Background on Batman. Look, it's an automatic trading tool for the It optimizes bids and offers in the energy and reserve markets up to 72 periods ahead. Through data integration, it takes in price forecast and real-time telemetry. It puts it through an optimizing engine, which accounts for marginal storage value, factoring cycling costs and efficiency. And then it converts that optimization result into a compliant set of bids and offers. And it has this dynamic decision-making whereby it adapts to the state of charge and the market conditions, which is changing all the time. It handles the complexity of short duration storage at 2 hours. It enables real-time responsiveness and automation and is scalable for future assets. And if you have any questions on how works and how regression works, our Head Energy Nerd, please stand up. Tim Boyce, who runs our wholesale trading team would love to take some questions on that. Thank you.

We'll now take questions on any of the last presentations, retail, technology, digital trading.

Just curious as to the migration time line for your new tech platform. It looks like you've been pretty generous in giving yourselves 3 or 4 years. Hopefully, it will be shorter than that. Just wanting to get your views on why you had that in the presentation?

Because we didn't really say what all our other targets were between FY '27 and FY '31. So that's -- it won't be FY '31. We will get into detailed design, feasibility, vendor selection in the first 6 months of next calendar year. And then my expectation it will take somewhere between 18 months and 2 years, but it really comes down to the vendor we go with and the partner we choose to work with and what makes sense for both the customer base, our business and minimizing business disruption.

And the second question, your cost to serve is already very low. As you migrate, are there any components of that current low cost to serve that you can bring over to, I suppose, the next way of operating when you migrate systems?

Yes. I guess our cost to serve is a very good platform to build from. And so I've spent quite a lot of time in our call centers trying to understand the size of the opportunity. And I know that once we can consolidate our 14 systems that our call centers use to service customers down to 1, there was huge amounts of efficiency in terms of average handling time, after call work and leveraging AI agents to kind of do some of the prequalification piece. So overseas, people are using conversational AI to do verification of the customer and to do intent. And so that can save up to 45 seconds on a call. And so if you think about our average handling time is 11.5 minutes, then there's actually quite a lot of opportunity to reduce that further, either deflect it straight into a digital channel or put it through to a human and that average handling time will come down as well. So absolutely, we'll take what we've got today into the new world and then we'll build from there. But we're not waiting for the new platform. We're already building our agentic tools right now. And so I expect that cost to serve will continue to slightly guide down before we get to the new platform.

Just 2 questions on the algorithmic trading. So firstly, how mature is algorithmic trading in New Zealand versus other markets?

I think we do what we do very well. It's hard to find an asset mix or a situation that maps directly to people in other markets. From an algorithmic perspective, the team saw that we're on par with our Australian counterparts. The difference we saw was in the level of automation of decision-making and execution, and that's one of the areas we can catch up pretty quickly, I think. I'll leave the more detailed version of that for Tim.

And just secondly, there's been some concern in some other markets around extended use algorithmic trading. Are you aware of any concerns about the use of algorithmic trading in the New Zealand context?

For us, I think it's that automation component where we still have a human in the loop on nearly everything, if not everything. And so for us, it will be a bit of a learning process. And this is true not just of trading, but all of Contact when AI agents pick up the pace and are able to execute more of the end-to-end value chain, where humans are in the loop and when they're not. So by our nature in the trading environment, we're a bit risk-averse when it comes to automating our trading execution. And I think we'll just take a journey over the next couple of years together.

Just on your existing SAP system, I understand SAP will cease to support the ISU modules from 2027. Is that the date that you're working to the drop-dead date that you're working to?

No, it's not. Those modules, we're actually off of and we will be off of the third one by the end of this month. So our ERP and billing were refreshed 2 years ago. We moved to SAP 4HANA. The CRM, we did not touch. It is end of life in 2030. That's driving some of the dates around the replatforming in retail. And then we'll explore whether billing from a capability perspective is something we need to get into along the way.

And just on that last point, sort of billing and reconciliation for real-time pricing, is that particularly complex in New Zealand?

Would you like to answer this or shall I?

Yes. We've made a more complicated. We can get into how our system is set up. When SAP was deployed during our big painful migration a decade ago, the system was configured for ICPs. It was built for an energy-only environment. Nearly right when that project ended, we became a multiservice provider and ever since have been adding bolting on products to an electricity-first system, which means there's a lot of manual back-end processes and that sort of thing. It also means that every single multiproduct customer we've had to configure a new product for and now have over 10,000 products, along with 27 distribution companies for all of whom we need to design unique products again. So it's a little complicated in New Zealand because of the distribution network set up. It's a little bit even more complicated because the way SAP was configured 10 years ago. And so the replatforming itself will help us simplify a lot of that, take a lot of the back-end effort out. But as an industry, New Zealand, we don't find to be particularly onerous compared to Germany, for example, or U.K., where we talk to other energy retailers.

Just on your cost to serve. You've got a target of $90 per customer. So how much of that decline from $110 is due to increased customer number?

None really. Most of it is coming from great efficiencies out of the call center and the back office. So we have quite a big back-end operations team just because of what Tighe talked to you about is we've got a very complex product catalog at the moment and there's a lot of manual work request falling out. So a lot of that saving will come from our back-end operations automation and from our call centers.

just curious about your assumption in terms of customer growth. Is it you're not expecting much growth? Or you think even with meaningful customer number growth, you'd expect the marginal benefit you get from a cost to serve point of view is marginal as well?

Yes, it's not massively modeled on big customer growth. I think it will play out differently over the next 5 years, depending on what happens with the wholesale price and as our generation capacity grows. But at this point in our connection growth is based on effectively BAU, what you've seen over the last few years.

Would you be looking at a single tech platform vendor for both mass market and C&I? Or do you think there's a possibility you'd go for a separate vendor for each?

I think there's a possibility. At this point, we're starting from a capability perspective. So what will unlock the most value and what's the quickest way to get there. We'll also be looking at productivity improvements and having stand-alone platforms for both C&I and retail are headwinds in that regard. That being said, the C&I platform has gone pretty well recently, particularly with the migration of the customers into our Simply environment, but at the same time, we've built some gas billing capabilities for C&I into our retail environment to handle the all of government gas contract. So I think the short answer is everything is on the table, and we'll chase the value.

Is there a possibility you may -- so I guess what I'm hearing is there's a possibility you may retain your current C&I capabilities and choose a separate vendor for mass market?

We haven't made that determination yet.

Just had a quick one on Retail Flex capacity. I found that chart pretty interesting in terms of the TAM at 500 to 600 megawatts. Fast forwarding the clock, FY '31, you're targeting 65. I imagine the 500 or 600 grows pretty substantially as well. So it's a 10% market share on that number now, sort of pretty small number. I would have thought in FY '31. Just wondering what the bottleneck is or what the constraint is to get...

It's a complex ecosystem to, I guess, get the whole ecosystem moving the same direction because it's dependent on having the right meter, it's dependent on customers having the right devices in the home. And so there's an addressable market and then us trying to grow our share above our current market share. And so I think there's a lot of dependencies on that. That's why we're not quite sure exactly what the road map and the path is going to be to that target, but we've got 5 years. We're going to be putting in a new platform and the market is going to change. Are there any other questions? Thanks to our speakers.

Hello, everyone. I'm Matt Forbes, CFO of Contact Energy. And today might just be the day that Mike regrets that international search for CFO. It's really great to be here today to share how the Contact financial framework will support our Contact31 strategy and how we're focused on leading New Zealand's renewable energy future while delivering sustainable financial returns. My goal is simple for today. Hopefully, you'll have confidence in Contact's financial stability, understand the discipline that we have around the allocation of capital and understand how adaptable we will be as we execute on the strategy. As you would have seen from the preceding speakers, we've got a lot to cover in this section. So let's dive right in. Contact is uniquely positioned for New Zealand's transition. And on the slide, we have 6 areas of differentiation between us and our peers. We're the country's geothermal leader, delivering baseload energy that is not dependent on weather. And in a highly renewable market, geothermal is special. It provides stability and certainty when other technologies just can't. And our position is strengthened by being New Zealand's second largest renewable hydro operator. And the addition of Manawa gives us diversification, both geographically and via inflows. With batteries, thermal plants, gas storage and thermal contracts, we have the flexibility to manage those demand peaks and any volatility within the market. So the combination of all of these assets gives us real confidence when prices are becoming more increasingly difficult to predict in the short term. As more wind and solar come on, there will be more price volatility. As demand patterns shift, we will see unrecognizable changes in the way prices form, whether it's wet, windy, sunny or demand changes. On the customer side, we now have multiple avenues to market. We have strategic industrial PPAs who now flex their demand. We have commercial customers underpinned with Simply Energy and a nationally significant retail business of which we now have a gas advantage. And so all of this means that we can deliver returns above what independent power producers can earn. Our investment case is compelling. We have that strategic differentiation that I've just spoken about, which translates into more predictable cash flows, backed by the new customer demand and our renewable pipeline means that we can have higher growth. It's this combination of asset quality and market-based channels, which makes Contact the premier investment to deliver New Zealand's decarbonization. Before we look forward, let's just take a moment to reflect on where we've come from through Contact26. We understand that investors have a real choice, and that is why our track record is so important to us. Under Contact26, we consistently beat expectations. We delivered a material uplift in EBITDAF, achieved project IRRs of 13% to 14% on our major capital investments at Tauhara and And when the numbers are tallied for the Manawa acquisition, I'm confident that this project will also receive expectations above our investment case. And importantly, we've been able to adapt to these major construction challenges throughout Contact26. The ultimate report card is shareholder returns and the outperformance against peers really does give us credibility as we move into the next phase of our strategic evolution. Now how do we deliver this performance? Well, here, we outline the contact business model. So the cornerstone of our performance is securing those long-term industrial PPAs via fixed price PPAs, which supported our geothermal investment and ultimately, the geothermal generation volumes. This additional generation also helped us reduce reliance on more expensive thermal generation. Strong channel management and commercial discipline saw improved electricity price yield in line with the improving market conditions over the 5 years. And while delivering that new generation was the priority, we also maintained an admirable cost efficiency with operating costs to gross margin flat over the period, a sign of good cost discipline even as we scale the business for growth. The Manawa acquisition is already delivering on the key transaction hypotheses. First, Contact recognized the value of being long energy in a market where gas was rapidly declining. Since the announcement, ASX futures for 2028 and 2029 have listed well above our long-run pricing expectations as outlined in our business case. And that Mercury PPA repricing is now coming into view. Secondly, building new renewables was becoming more expensive than purchasing when you compare to some of those recently committed wind projects from our peers. And as you know, hydro assets have better controllability and longer asset lives. So that's even before factoring the synergies we will receive from the transaction. Thirdly, risk management. That hydro diversity has reduced our risk. In the 2 months since Contact since Manawa joined the Contact Group, our earnings at risk metrics reduced by $65 million, while our mean or average earnings increased. We all know that a lower-risk business will benefit from a lower cost of capital over time. Looking ahead, if prices hold, we expect a $96 million improvement in EBITDAF from the stand-alone contribution from Manawa as a result of contract repricing, delivery of the cost synergies and portfolio optimization. As Matt mentioned, we are confident in achieving the top end of our $23 million to $28 million cost synergy range. And none of these figures include the development pipeline that Darren outlined earlier, which will further increase the value we expect to realize from the combination over time. In short, gives us ballast. It will deliver strong returns and position Contact as a scale competitor as we enter the next phase of renewable investment. Now let's explore how we think about capital allocation under Contact31. Our priorities are clear and they are sequenced for impact. Firstly, we need to keep the power stations running. Operational performance is a nonnegotiable. It underpins confidence and cash flows. Without station reliability, growth doesn't happen. Secondly, preserve financial strength. We currently expect to be around 2.9x net debt to EBITDA at the end of this financial year. So returning to our 2.6x to 2.8x target is crucial to maintain flexibility through investment cycles. The third is to deliver dividends. They matter to investors and help support the lowest cost of capital, which is essential if Contact is to be the key developer of new large-scale renewables in New Zealand. And finally, disciplined growth. Investors should have confidence that every project must meet our investment criteria, which is to target returns between 200 and 300 basis points above our weighted average cost of capital. You'll notice this category also includes $140 million of time-bound sustaining CapEx investments over the 5-year period. These are classified as stay-in-business CapEx project under our accounting policies, but they are more optional in nature and therefore, required to meet our return criteria in their own right. This includes the extension and decommissioning, completion of the Manawa enhancement program, costs associated with new initiatives as per the Contact31 strategy, including the new retail CRM platform, which obviously may ultimately shift to OpEx if SaaS accounting rules apply. Details of these projects and the timing is included within the appendix, but the message is clear. This is not just another bucket of stay-in-business CapEx to obfuscate rising costs. They're strategic choices that protect the project returns, enhance capability and support overall contact returns rather than just reducing risks. Our investor metrics should give confidence that capital is being allocated appropriately. The company-wide return on invested capital uplift of 300 basis points is on top of project returns. This ensures that good projects with attractive IRRs like Tauhara and aren't offset by operating cost growth or unrestrained maintenance CapEx. The bottom ribbon outlines the order of mitigations that we would use in the case of a downside. I'll now outline how we prioritize the balance sheet. The chart outlines how we decide on whether an investment is funded on or off Contact's balance sheet and why that matters for risk, returns and strategic control. For geothermal, control is critical. It's about managing the resource development and timing, and so these projects will stay on our balance sheet. The same applies to batteries. They're a portfolio asset where coordination between our assets and contracts is crucial, and it delivers the highest value. For our wind and solar investments, the model is different. These technologies benefit from third-party capital, and we'll look to replicate the success of our Lightsource bp solar joint venture in our wind development aspirations, bringing in partners with expertise in procurement and project delivery, which help derisk execution. The table shows our minimum target returns for each of these projects. Just for some context, there is some discrepancies or differences between our current targets and the expected target returns. For example, off-balance sheet solar IRRs currently are well above the threshold for good sites, reflecting the low solar penetration in New Zealand, short build times, favorable tax advantages for contact and strong wholesale prices. Solar is a time-bound opportunity in New Zealand that we intend to capture. The benefits of using off-balance sheet for wind and solar go well beyond financial engineering. They lower the risk in development of the project, bring forward that development capacity within our balance sheet constraints and it gives us the lowest possible project cost as we're bringing in these developers with skills and experience and ultimately allows us to recycle capital for future growth. In summary, we prioritize our balance sheet for the highest returning projects with strategically critical control. We're not afraid of third-party leverage to help support our projects or where it can improve returns for Contact equity holders. As you heard today, we have a clear plan for all of the projects that we want to deliver. And now you know the return criteria that will be applied to every single one of those projects. But with net debt-to-EBITDA expected to be at the higher end of the S&P range for FY '26 and dividends linked to operating free cash flow, understanding how we plan to fund these growth investments is crucial. Our approach starts with growing EBITDAF because higher earnings expand the debt capacity that we are allowed to take on under S&P limits. Next, we'll look to use operating free cash flow beyond dividends. And we also use hybrid debt for equity credit and finally, maintain additional equity options like our dividend reinvestment program. Protecting our BBB credit rating is a nonnegotiable. It gives us continued access to deep liquid international debt markets with the benefits evidenced by our recently issued euro bond of $1 billion earlier this month. Issuances into these international debt markets ensures that we've got stable low-cost access to debt. All of our debt is fully certified green and our weighted average cost of debt is around 5.8% for FY '25. We have a further liquidity runway of $1 billion, which helps us manage risks during a build program. So having multiple funding options, we can back the right projects at the right time, accessing the lowest cost of capital, preserving the flexibility that's important for our credit rating and to support further growth in dividends. Sales channel management, risk management and performance are absolutely linked. No one has a hydrology issue if you've not oversold your position. So here is how our sales channels will evolve as the Mercury and NZAS PPAs roll off and as prices revert to those long-run expectations. First, the Mercury contract will roll off from the fixed price bucket into higher market price channels. And we'll keep the volume in that channel flat as we bring in new industrials to support our wind and solar development. Wholesale prices are expected to moderate back to long-run expectations, which is around $115 million to $125 million in 2024 real terms. While retail netback looks in line with C&I and CFDs on the chart, when it's adjusted for shape, seasonality, location and operating cost to run the business, it's broadly in line with what we believe the long-run price to be. As the prices are currently higher than long-run expectations, this means that retail is temporarily loss-making. But over time, the energy contribution should continue to increase at inflation. Our channel strategy is clear. We look to maintain predominantly long-term channels to provide stability during a build phase while retaining some market linkages for discretionary generation will bring to market. This balance gives us really good flexibility and helps us manage risk as we grow our share of renewables. Contact31 isn't just about growth. Productivity is a crucial part of what we're trying to achieve. And we're targeting a $38 million in run rate savings by FY '27. That is $28 million from the Mine integration and a further $10 million from broader productivity improvements. How will we achieve this? We'll achieve this by leveraging technology, streamlining our processes, and it's also a cultural imperative within our people. If we don't build this efficiency muscle now, we risk falling behind. And this is not just a cost control issue, but in how our broader leadership team grows in their culture and capability. This focus links directly to the people strategic enabler that Jan introduced and sets the foundation for further meaningful cost reductions post FY '27. Our goal is clear here. We want to deliver growth without letting operating costs erode returns. That's how we protect the company ROIC and ensure that every dollar that we invest flows to shareholders rather than suppliers. Bringing it all together with our EBITDAF bridge here. This includes our priority investment targets under Contact31, and we've grouped these initially by online timing and then secondly, by technology rather than a strict build order. You'll see there's already a significant amount of capital already committed. Projects like Manawa and the under construction renewable assets are expected to deliver near-term benefits. Completing these is absolutely crucial before unlocking the next phase of growth that remains subject to FID. Future growth depends on a number of factors: demand growth, favorable consenting outcomes, new wind partnerships and meeting return hurdles. To achieve the EBITDAF target that we have for wind, we must deliver a step change in construction costs. Recent peer estimates for wind would not meet our return expectations without that improvement. You'll see committed projects adding around $120 million, supporting our deleveraging. This takes us to approximately $1.1 billion, with the addition of growth projects subject to FID contributing to a fully ramped exit run rate of $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion in FY '31. This includes all the projects outlined earlier, except for Tauhara II as it is only targeted for FID right at the end of the period. We've also included a range of $0 million to $50 million in incremental EBITDAF from trading and retail investment. While these are really strong business cases, competitive dynamics mean the benefits will most likely be diluted if everyone invests heavily. These are good investments. But we need to be realistic about the delivery and base case outcomes because competition is a real risk of eroding those returns. So it's all about disciplined execution of our committed projects first, then unlocking the next phase of growth as the projects pass our strict criteria. Finally, we bring it all together with sources and uses of gross funding. We expect to invest between $2 billion to $2.5 billion over the next 5 years in growth capital. On screen, you can see our transparent targets using the growth funding framework we discussed earlier. First, the assumptions. We expect revenue growth of 5% to 10% compound annual growth rate, moving from about $3.25 billion to $3.75 billion in FY '26 as we bring more renewable energy to market. This is because under the strategy, we expect to grow our renewable generation from 11.8 terawatt hours to 15.2 terawatt hours. This is a 30% increase in volumes, unlike the price tailwind that we had in Contact26. EBITDAF margins are expected to sit between 24% and 26%, improving from the 24% we've achieved historically as higher cost thermal generation is retired and operating costs improve. Operating free cash flow conversion is expected to remain in line with history between 55% and 60% of EBITDAF as some of those time-bound same business CapEx investments roll off. To support growth and the near-term deleveraging towards our target, dividend increases will likely sit at the lower end of our 80% to 100% payout range initially. But with revenue growth and margin expansion, dividends will continue to rise in real terms. We also control the timing of all FIs to reflect market conditions, the balance sheet position at the time and the company's financial strength. You'll notice that a high proportion of the growth CapEx remains uncommitted. Projects that we are targeting for an FY '26 include the Glorit Solar Farm and the Best 200 at Glenbrook. Finally, we're fortunate to have access to additional equity like support through hybrids and our dividend reinvestment plan, which retains equity. When we brought Tauhara to market in 2021, the investor response during the placement showed there was strong appetite to back high-quality projects in the right circumstances. Contact31 is fully fundable from Contact's balance sheet, supported by the same optionality that underpinned Contact26. That disciplined approach using the right source of funding at the right time for the right project gives us the flexibility to fund growth and dividends. Our financial framework is all about balance. It's about growth and returns. It's about flexibility paired with discipline. We're building a resilient low-carbon business with a focus on shareholder value. That's how Contact is leading New Zealand's renewable energy future. Thank you. I'll now hand over to Mike to introduce the Q&A.

So we'll take our final set of questions now. So anything on the financials or anything from the day that you haven't had answered just yet.

Grant?

Obviously, first question, dividend. So just take what Matt went through. It does imply around about $0.79 of free cash flow for dividends on a run rate 2031. This $0.50 number that's thrown out there, can you talk about how conservative that is? And if you've got a 4-year trailing, should we be considering 4 years post 2031, we will be at least $0.79 of dividend?

I'm glad you can multiply the 5 numbers we put out there, Grant. I think you're about right. Clearly, we're looking at continuing to deleverage and to fund their options within our portfolio. We agree. That's why we're developing all of these renewable assets. We think they're going to throw off a lot of cash. They're going to deliver a lot of benefits for shareholders, but that will come over time because we need to balance those great project returns, the market that we're in today with delivering those dividends. So we're not going to be looking to give guidance beyond FY '31 at this stage. But we believe with a reasonable set of assumptions, the minimum 50% -- $0.50 dividends will meet those expectations.

Okay. Conservative. Then Mike, I think this question is for you. With your cost to serve going from 113 down to 90, does that open the door that maybe says let's do the one NZ?

Look, we're focused on our own business. Let's be absolutely clear about that. I had a bad experience of working in mass market telco, as Carolyn did as well, and we both fled that regime very quickly. So look, there are bigger and better things to be spending our time, and it's an interesting concept, which is out there, but this is going to take our time. This takes our focus. This is where our attention needs to be. And so getting that cost to serve down is absolutely critical; getting the replatforming done, absolutely critical; building those geothermal projects, absolutely vital; getting off the ground in wind and building up solar that's where the focus is.

So no conversation with Jason Boyes on front yet.

No, not.

My final question, just in terms of -- it looks like you've done all your numbers and you've laid them out there very clearly in terms of getting to 2.6x to 2.8x debt to EBITDA by FY '31. But that does come with quite a bit of extra PPA risk. And if we do go into overbuild, it does mean that you don't really want those PPAs. Wouldn't it be more conservative just to go to the market and raise a bit of capital?

I'll answer that. Look, our key thing is that we don't need to do that. We have flexibility. But that -- those PPAs, look, this is one of the critical things between us and IPP. We signed up that PPA for We've now contracted a large amount of the output from to the likes of and other dairy. We signed up -- interestingly, we signed up Fonterra for the conversion before we got the consent, and then we'll build into that. So that ability to not be time bound or time chained is actually one of our key attributes is that we can build, sign up the PPA and then on sell it or we can on sell and then build. And that flexibility is something that I'm dead keen to preserve, and that's what protects us also against that scenario of overbuild.

We'll retain the flexibility that we need through the cycle. And we obviously -- when we talk about our 2.9x net debt to EBITDA, that actually started the year at 2.3x. We leveraged up for Manawa, and we've got $500 million of growth CapEx, which is delivering the next wave of EBITDAF growth. So every time we get to that point in the decision-making cycle, we're looking at the full range of options that we have available to us, and we'll do the right thing for shareholders.

I think the other thing to remember is that when we first published the numbers on Manawa, I think we were looking at about 3.1, 3.2 peaking, and we think we'll be lucky to touch 2.9. So that outperformance just -- you just go, right, well, let's do that again. Let's do it again. So that conservatism that you talked about is actually keeping us in very good shape. Andrew?

Yes. A couple of sort of topics really for me. You've described wind and solar as noncore. Does that mean it is potentially up for sale and for capital recycling at some point? Is that in your thinking at all?

Look, all those things are obviously part of the flexibility of our portfolio. We see it as an opportunity for off-balance sheet financing. That's not necessarily noncore. Electricity is our core. But what we see is that ability. Look, if we do win the way that others in the market do win, we're going to come third or fourth. We need to find a way of getting partners to catch the competition and get establish a lead against them and that's going to come scale and new partnerships as we did with solar. So that's the thinking behind that. It's not -- you've got to -- we have to do that stuff differently, which is why it goes off balance sheet. And if there is the need, we don't need to capital recycle at the moment, which is the key point. We can, but we don't need to do that.

It's core that we have the energy to be able to support the customers who need to move off of gas on to electricity. That is absolutely core. The funding mechanisms and the timings of when we bring people in, at this stage, it's more about how do we get a project to market that's derisked, that's bankable, that we have a broad set of expectations around how we're going to deliver it, who's going to do it, someone with the experience, someone who can potentially bring procurement benefits beyond what we can do, even though ours is a 300-megawatt plant, those are fundamental to what we're trying to achieve at this stage, and that's why solar and wind off balance sheet.

So just related to that then on the wind side of things, if you don't get a partner, is there any risk there in terms of not getting a partner? Does that mean your wind development pipeline falls away? What do you...

We will find a partner. There are no shortage of potential partners in a range of different scenarios lining up. But to your point, we're going to have to work hard. We've set out we're going to get a partner. We'll get a partner. We've set out we have to have that growth in demand through PPAs. We'll get that growth in demand. So to what Matt was just saying, we've set some pretty chunky hurdles to make sure that we have to get over those to get wind going and that the shareholders see those returns. So if you can if we don't achieve that, then we won't get the right to do wind. And I see that as a really key point. We're going to have to work hard to earn that right.

And last question for me is, again, also related to the dividend. But with -- you talk about the buyback as a potential, particularly if you have dividends unimputed. So just to clarify, I guess, the $0.50 a share is after any buybacks. Buybacks might be in addition to that. And then secondly, some guidance, I guess, around imputation going forward. Clearly, that's something that you're focused on.

I mean, obviously, any buybacks mean that the full extent of the growth program that we have ahead of us is not materialized for either market reasons, partnership reasons, return reasons, hurdle reasons. So I wouldn't take those 2 as sort of interacting in any meaningful way in this strategic period. Our focus is on using our capital to invest in projects with 10%-plus returns. and that's exactly our focus. I have sort of a -- you want your capital allocation framework to live beyond a strategic planning window where you think something is going to happen, but something might not necessarily happen and I've sort of got a personal aversion to paying out too many unimputed dividends.

And just in terms of imputation level guidance, is that because you're circa sort of 80% now, I think you expected it to go down a little bit?

Yes. I think we'll probably be a little bit lower in the range with some of those accelerated tax advantages that the government has got out on new build. For example, that 20% accelerated tax, we got that on the 3 plant, even though it sort of only came online about 7.5 minutes after the tax announcement. So those types of things, obviously positive for operating cash flow, but not great for imputation.

Stephen?

Can you just explain why you are still picking wholesale prices to revert lower? Everything I've heard today, gas supply halving in the last 6 years, a handful of OEMs controlling wind and geothermal, you've got the currency tanking, you've got bond rates still at record highs. I'm kind of a little bit confused why you still think, I'm being a bit facetious here, that wholesale prices revert to some lower level? And I just wanted to clarify that all of those numbers for 2031 build in that assumption?

Yes. So most of us were tortured through some form of economics in the various degrees that were held in this room, and we all fundamentally believe that prices have to eventually revert to the last molecule or the last electron dispatched at that LMC. But there are always circumstances which change that, which continue to change that. And that the volatility, I'm going to call it volatility that we've all experienced over these last few years has been phenomenal, which has led to that higher average price. The really important thing is that we look through that volatility, and we can genuinely see lower priced summers and higher prices in winter. We haven't -- we didn't see that 10 years ago. We can see that intraday volatility peaking and then with batteries coming off. So the important thing is less about, well, what's your average price path? It's looking through and seeing the nuance and the volatility within that and making sure that we, as a company, are match fit to take advantage of that.

Yes. All of our assumptions are around that long-run expectations around price. Mike has absolutely nailed it. The winters, we're very confident that we know what winter pricing is going to be because we've got gas, which is costing us $200. We've got the HFO, which is in that same ballpark. We're spending the same amount turning off the aluminum smelter. So those marginal dispatchable megawatts, it's it. That's it. The question that we still need to answer around are we sitting at 120 or 160 is around those summer prices. And that's why we're so committed to getting summer weighted industrials into our market because if it comes about that those summer industrials do come on and bring on a larger share than we expect, then we could see structurally higher prices. But we still believe with the amount of solar that's coming into market that we will see a reversion to prices over time. And remember, the forward market and the spot market, they sort of move in opposite. If you're an energy scarcity, the spot market pricing is lower than your forward prices. And if it flips the other way around, it can flip quite quickly.

So everybody here should be selling the futures price and buying Contact Energy equity essentially. Just one final question, I suppose, on all of that is are you in the camp that sees peaking factors for solar collapse to 40% in the next 30 years?

No, we have a much more rational market in New Zealand. I think we have a lot of the key solar developers are actually generators. So we do see a decline because today, obviously, you can build a solar plant and the peaking factor above 1. But we think it's a time-bound opportunity. And over the next 5 years, we'll see a reduction in those peaking factors more like towards sort of 70%, but rationality within the market will stop sort of self-harm going forward. We've got -- the people that are building the solar farms have all got very similar capital management strategies, and they've also got quite similar approaches to thinking about how the market works. So I do think we've got a more favorable structure than in any other markets.

Any more questions?

I'm not sure how to phrase this. It's a hard question to ask, but sort of it's in the background of the industry, which is the sort of political risk coming to next year. And I'm not going to throw hypotheticals at you, but maybe the question to ask, you can answer is kind of what's your -- what are the conversations you're having with politicians amongst the various parties right now? How much do you think they understand the issues in the industry? What -- how receptive are they to those messages that you've given today?

I think the first one, and I genuinely mean this, is our biggest defense is look at the delivery. It's our defense or it's our selling point to you -- to the people in this room, it's our defense with the politicians. We have laid down $2 billion of renewable energy investment. We have got the country as an industry from 80% to nearly 95% renewable. Mess with that at your peril. Mess with that at your peril because guess what, public sector government does not have that track record. And with that goes not just the capital, but the capability that we have attracted and retained into this really exciting part of New Zealand's development. It is an intergenerational opportunity and occurrence, which has retained some of our best and brightest people here in New Zealand when others have got out of university and said, well, actually, I'll just go to Australia. So it's not just the money, it's the capability and capacity that we have been able to retain in this country. And I personally and we as a company will sell that story morning, noon and night to whatever color of the political spectrum is in power because they can't argue with facts. They cannot argue with the delivery. And so as we enter into next year, yes, the energy will be part of it because, look, no one likes rising electricity prices, and there are -- have been challenges in the transmission and lines charges, which have gone up. And we have to front that and tell our story and tell our story well. And we have to continue to deliver. We have to continue to actively engage with our stakeholders, as Chris outlined today. But that fundamental premise of it's not about a glib promise, it's about real delivery. And that's the best defense that any individual or any company can have in the environment we operate in New Zealand.

I like that answer. Just going down to a slightly more detailed regulatory option coming up, which is the level playing field measures, which if implemented by the middle of next year could result in the need to lift retail prices to comply with the level playing field rules. Can you comment on those? How do you think that might impact? Clearly, that could become part of the political conversation. But do you think in terms of your own pricing, when you have run the ruler over the rules, whether or not that would have an impact? Because as you pointed out earlier, you're taking sort of the long run view on retail pricing. When you compare it to a spot price, you would say it's underwater. But that's a portfolio position you've taken that might be compromised by these new rules?

Look, we, as a company, and it predates my time as CEO, we're one of the first companies in the sector to introduce a robust, rigorous, auditable and very transparent transfer pricing methodology, which sent the message very strongly, hey, the retail business has challenges. The innovation, creativity and business improvement that, that drove into that retail business has been phenomenal. And they have grown adjacencies, they have done gas deals, and they have built a very resilient business. I have no doubt that when the level playing field provisions come in of all our competitors, we are in the best shape having been literally turned into diamonds with that pressure that we can respond to that. And no, there should not be radical price rises because by that stage, we should have got ourselves to that. Certainly, we are getting towards that robust transfer pricing methodology, and we will continue to increment our prices in accordance with inflation. You are right, it is a very fine balancing act. But no, I do not see the need for radical price rises next year.

No further questions. Thanks, Mike. If you would like to close us out on stage...

and thank you for -- again for being here today and for some outstanding questions. Just to make some closing comments. Just an announcement, and I talked about behind Contact26, and it looks all very sunshine and roses. But we're all painful, we're aware that, that was a difficult journey where we built -- we had to build the muscle tone around project development and execution, and it was a painful process. So I'm pleased to announce today that we've just been approved resource consent for 400 megawatts of battery at Glenbrook, an additional 400 megawatts. So we talk about those Southland wind Lake Hardware. We are learning, we are adapting. We are acquiring that expertise, that instinct, which will carry this company well into Contact31+. So yes, hot off the press and no, I have not yet told my Board, so they're just finding out now. Look, just to repeat, we've laid the groundwork and have a clear vision for success through Contact31. The market and our strong competitive position present an opportunity to further build on our Contact26 achievements. Contact-31+ will see Contact lead New Zealand's renewable energy future. It's not just about decarbonization now. It's about a renewable energy future where us as ATR have a chance to lead the world. And for goodness sake, we need to seize that opportunity because as I indicated before, it's a once-in-a-generation opportunity. We will continue to lead the energy transition here at home in homes empowering customers to shift their energy use while making every interaction easy and personal. And the good plans have been a key part of that and will continue to be. And delivering on our strategy will be enabled by some fantastic people and leaders, great stakeholders and the relationships we are able to grow with those stakeholders over the long term, our tech advantage and getting after that productivity improvement. It will deliver the highest value outcomes for investors and for New Zealand. Just to talk through those pillars, the geothermal you'll see Tauhara 2 to delivered. You will see Timini3 online. You will see Tauhara 3 underway. The flex, you will see those batteries in place. You will see the renewable flex options. Wind and solar, we will be at 450 megawatts of solar. We will be committed to over 500 megawatts of wind. And at home, you will see our customers on the modern retail platform a little bit earlier than 2031 to the question raised earlier. You will see our cost to serve. You will see that 65 megawatts. These are all hard commitments by which this leadership team is standing up and say, you can hold us to account. Financial, you will see that ROIC improvement of about 300 basis points. You will see that $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion of EBITDA with the exit rate of $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion. And you will see that dividend. And yes, Grant, we are being conservative, but that has what has kept us safe and an ambitious program over these last 5 years. Now what's important, it's not just 2031. There is a stake in the ground. FY '27 is critically important to this company. You will see Tii Stage 2 on. You will see the Glenbrook battery on. You will see up and running. You will see the wind farm consented. You will see those OpEx numbers, which Matt talked to, and you will see those benefits, not just talked about and us getting increasingly confident about, but you will see them in the bottom line, and you'll see that dividend. So we're not just saying wait 5 years, we're actually setting out a bit of a road map and a bit of a way point on the way to which you can hold us to account. And I think that's an important feature of the strategy. You will be able to measure us not just at the end, but on the journey as you walk with us. Now #2 out of 500 -- this is the second time I've presented this slide, and it's going to be presented a lot more over the coming years. This is, ladies and gentlemen, Contact31+, where we aim to lead New Zealand's renewable energy future. Geothermal, flex, wind and solar, leading the transition at home with fantastic people, supportive stakeholders, a very nuanced technology advantage with people who are enabled to be as productive as they possibly can be each and every day. Thank you. It has been an absolute privilege.