Enefit Green AS (EGR1T) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Enefit Green's Second Quarter 2024 Results Presentation. I am your Interim CEO, Andres Maasing, and I'm here together with Veiko Raim, who's also my fellow Board member. Second quarter culminated in the departure of long-standing Enefit Green CEO, Mr. Aavo Kärmas. And the Supervisory Board appointed Juhan Aguraiuja as the new CEO, starting on the 14th of October. We wish Aavo best of luck in his future endeavors. In the meanwhile, I am your CEO, and I'm here to present your results. Enefit Green management team as well as Management Board are working tirelessly to deliver our results and continue a safe handling of your business. We are working on things that we can control and we can manipulate. Together with the Management Board, we are ensuring that the availability of the existing projects stay strong. We are working on, on-time and on-budget delivery of the projects that are in construction. We're doing it safely and we're also working on the development of our entire portfolio. When we say we're working on things that we can control and manipulate, there's one thing we can't control. And that is natural departure of people like Veiko Raim. However, we have started the process of selecting a new Management Board member and a new CFO. Meanwhile, however, Veiko and I will work very hard and tirelessly to make sure that when Veiko leaves in 24th of September, the business continues to stay strong. Talking about the business and where we're at, at the moment is that we've seen in the last quarter a relatively stable electricity prices across the Baltic region and unification of the prices across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, thanks to the EstLink2 being down. In the surrounding markets, we've seen stabilization of prices, however, the downward trend, thanks to lower gas prices and also CO2 prices being lower. If you look towards the future, in the upcoming 10 years, the independent market analysts indicate that the market prices will continue to remain in the same range as they were previously advised. However, we are glad to see that in years '25 and '26, it's proposed that the prices -- or it's estimated that the prices will rise by about 15%, giving further tailwind to our business. Moving to our regulatory developments and what we are seeing over the last quarter is that -- and here, I will bring out only few and invite you to have a look at our second quarter reporting for the full narration of the matters that are reported. However, as many of you voted on the 9th of June, we had elections to the European Union Parliament. We are seeing Greens lose power and lose their grip on power within European Parliament. However, nevertheless, we expect that the coalition will stand. And as the coalition will stand, we're also expecting that the green initiatives undertaken by previous parliament will not change. Moving to Estonia, that unfortunate that we've seen a change made to Electricity Market Act, whereby Iru power plant will lose market support from the Estonian government with a value of about EUR 2.8 million. This is the first time we've seen Estonian government adjust prematurely the support mechanism that they've laid out almost a decade ago. This support mechanism departure raises concerns for your company as well as it raises a concern on the sovereign risk when we are looking towards future market support mechanism, like 8 terawatt-hour support mechanism across onshore and offshore projects that the Estonian government has proposed. At the same time, in July, Elering, together with TSOs from Latvia and Lithuania, announced of an imminent departure from the BRELL network and, therefore, when they depart on the 8th of February 2025, raising need for the frequency reserve costs to be recovered. The initial indication of the frequency reserve costs being socialized between the generators and the balancing market operators, in our view, is excessive. And your management team and your Management Board are working very hard to ensure that these changes will not be as significant as they are currently proposed. Moving to the things that we, unfortunately, cannot control is the wind speed. We've experienced in quarter 2 2024 a 10% reduction in wind speeds. This means that our wind speed has been somewhere between P50 and P90 levels, yielding a material reduction in our overall operating performance. Unfortunately, these are not something we control. However, we continue to work on other areas that we do control and we can manage in order to improve your performance. One such example is that our operations team has continually focused and worked on ensuring the availability of our old and new plants remain strong. As you can see, we have returned to the availability in Estonia and Lithuania to the levels that we expect. Also, our solar team has continued to work tirelessly to maintain availability in the solar fleet. Unfortunately, we have incurred two unscheduled shutdowns at Iru. This is now trying to be rectified through a scheduled shutdown. However, that has resulted in a 3.5 gigawatt-hour reduction in our generation for the quarter and also 87.5% availability. Your management team is working to make sure that these kind of reduction will not repeat. But ultimately, we also need to ensure that the work that's being done now will continue at the strongest level. In the good news, we handed over another project from construction team to the operations team. And here is a picture from our opening ceremony. 72-megawatt Tolpanvaara wind farm in Finland was handed over to operations. Unfortunately, we have experienced some reduced availability at Tolpanvaara, which is unfortunately common with a rollout of new technology like Delta4000 from Nordex. However, team, together with Nordex, are doing everything to make sure that your project will return into operation and will maintain high level of availability that is expected of it. Moving to the projects under construction. We've had, what I would call, a very good quarter. We've had return of the turbine number 20 in Akmene. The turbine that collapsed on the 2nd of May 2023 has now been operating for 3 months. And we also feel comfortable and confident that we can start Litgrid grid tests, together with Litgrid and GE. And we expect to hand over the project to the operations team before end of the year. The same goes for Šilale II project. Our Carnikava solar farms in Latvia, our first solar farms in Latvia, are progressing in their build-out at full tilt. At Sopi-Tootsi, I'm very pleased to say that our team, together with Nordex, have achieved erection of 25 of 38 turbines. Together with Elering, our team has been able to energize most of the substation. And the work now continues to export the first energy at Sopi-Tootsi very, very soon. At Sopi PV Park, we have also secured our grid connection. But we're also working on the layout of the solar farm with 100% of the piles installed, 80% of the frames and 65% of the PV panels. I'm very pleased to say that our Lithuanian team, on top of the Akmene and Šilale work, has also delivered 14 turbine erections at Kelme I project and has achieved an enormous success by connecting the substation at Tytuvenai with the Litgrid's grid. It was a real challenge for our entire business and raised enormous amount of risk. But now that this has been concluded, we can all breath a sigh of relief. At Kelme II, five hardstand areas have been completed off of 14. The civil works and electrical works are underway. And we are preparing for our first turbine deliveries in the new year. Moving to a near-term development portfolio. I'm pleased to say that we have achieved ready-to-build status at Vändra and Kelme III projects. The team are working tirelessly to ensure that in Poland, Strzalkowo PV plant also reaches ready-to-build status before the end of the year. Beyond that, for the first time ever, you guys are seeing that we're also announcing our hard work is looking to be culminating with a ready-to-build status also at Purtse and also our small pilot hydrogen project that we're looking to roll out. Both of these projects are delivered with the help from Climate Investment Centre of Estonia. And we are thankful for their support in ensuring that these projects can see the day of light. Moving to our long-term portfolio and the overall portfolio of the business. The work continues on making sure that our 2,500-megawatt long-term portfolio moves from a long-term portfolio to a ready-to-build status. However, a large amount of work in the last quarter was undertaken to make sure that Liivi offshore wind farm would be ready-to-build for the Estonian government feed-in tariff in the year 2025. Without such support, projects like these will not be erected. And it is a key area of our focus to make sure that we have put our best foot forward next year. Like last quarter announced, we made an arrangement with RES Global in Poland. And the team in Poland and also Estonia are working very hard to make sure that all these projects that we've acquired are integrated within our business. And we are working very closely with RES Global in making sure that these projects work through the development milestones into ready-to-build status. Looking at our share of new assets. Since the first quarter of '23, we've transferred 137 megawatts of assets into operations team. As you can see on the graph here, production from new assets is increasing and its share of the overall production is also increasing. Well, as I mentioned before, we are working on trying to ensure that we have 130 megawatts of additional capacity from the under construction projects moved into operating capacity before end of the year. That means that nearly 260 megawatts of new capacity will have been delivered in the last 2 calendar years on top of 497 megawatts of capacity that Enefit Green had before. With that comes also more efficient, newer and longer-term projects that your business will be able to operate. I'll hand over now to Veiko to talk through the financial results and then we'll address some questions lasts.

Thank you, Andres. Good afternoon from my side as well. So happy to see you all. So basically, what we have done in Q2, let me basically summarize and let me start actually by highlighting that we have changed our [indiscernible] a bit. So our avid followers will remember that we have power production and heat production as well. So given that we have exited our biomass business, then we have taken that bit away and we focused solely on the power now on this highlighted slide. And really, in the second quarter of '24, we managed to increase our power production by 35%. So on the back of the new Litgrid farms that have been delivering power 141 gigawatt-hours already in the recent quarter. So in terms of expectations, as mentioned, I mean, the wind speed was a little bit slower than we expected. That let us down a bit. But indeed, we keep on working to keep the availabilities good and bring everything online as fast as we can. In terms of power prices, we earned EUR 70 per megawatt-hour in Q2. So that's 22% below our result last year. And we'll jump into it in a little while, but essentially, it was both power market prices being lower and also PPA sales prices being lower than last year. That were the main reasons behind that. Finally, summarizing the financials. Operating income, EUR 38.3 million, slightly below last year; EBITDA, EUR 18.9 million, also slightly below last year's; and net profit above last year's. With operating income and EBITDA, we mainly also have the base effect to counter that our sold assets were producing money last year, whereas they now have been sold. And whereas in net profit terms, the main reason for the change is the lower corporate income tax that was levied on the dividends as our dividends were lower this year and, hence, the corporate income tax lower this year as well. So briefly, before we go into the quarter, also 6 months results, so pretty much the same dynamics and developments here, so 27% higher production; 21% lower power price; and then operating income, EUR 107.2 million; EBITDA, EUR 61.3 million, 2% higher than last year; and net profit is then EUR 37.4 million earned in the first half of '24. Now if we speak a little bit more about the pricing and the volume. So as we have done, I mean, it's a busy chart, but we'll try to explain it in detail. So essentially, on the top left-hand side, we show the volumes produced, purchased and sold. And really, the gigawatt-hours that we have shown in terms of the PPA versus the production, I mean, the ratios have been pretty stable over the last 3 quarters, so Q4, Q1, Q2. Compared to last year's Q2, the level of [ PPA ] production is lower. So that helps us a bit because it reduces the amount of purchases that we need to do. But the main highlight I would like to point to you all is really the added production that we have done in the latest quarter, 214 gigawatt-hours in dark green in the chart compared to 139 gigawatt-hours that we had last year. And that is a 15% growth. Hence, we have increased PPA sales a little bit, but actually, the production mostly has gone to market sales. And now you turn to the table in the lower left-hand side, then you can see that while the core market average electricity price is 8% lower, actually the electricity price that was sold to the market was 18% lower. So it's reaching at EUR 52 per megawatt-hour was the revenue brought in by sales into the market. So why is that? We have highlighted also in the last point that one feature here is also the discount, the wind discount, that reduction of the capture price that has changed compared to the same time last year. So for instance, in Lithuania, the big discount was 4% lower at 13%. And actually, the solar discount in Estonia also deepened from 24% to 30% in the recent quarter. So actually, the revenue or the price earned by wind and solar is substantially lower than the average market price that we see. In terms of wind in Estonia, the developments were a little bit more positive, so the discount was reduced to 7.9%, so lower than in Lithuania. But of course, it's also having an impact from the EstLink2 cable that is currently switched off between Estonia and Finland. So that impacts a little bit as well the picture we have here. Finally, in terms of the total implied captured electricity price that we earned, EUR 69.7 per megawatt-hour in the latest quarter, so really coming from the sales price being lower to the market, but also the PPA prices that I can see that actually is a little bit mistaken here. So EUR 68, it's actually not EUR 6.8 per megawatt-hour. So this, we have a typo, so we apologize for that. So essentially, the new PPAs that we signed in '21, I mean, these have started to actually be delivered also in this quarter, and really that is behind the level of lower PPA costs. In terms of the revenues or operating income, we can see the light gray bar in the middle of the graph here, so EUR 5.5 million lower or reduction compared to last year. So this is what's sold assets. In terms of the sort of segmental performances, wind energy production growth being higher than the price reductions. So you can see the wind revenues being higher in the second quarter. Iru basically had balancing factors at lower production and higher price, so marginally negative performance. Whereas in solar energy, we had actually pretty much a flat quarter in terms of revenue, slightly above last year's. No major change over there. Once we turn to EBITDA, then we earned EUR 18.9 million, which is 2% less than last year. Electricity net price was lower compared to last year's. So we actually had EUR 5.4 million negative effect on the EBITDA mainly, as mentioned two slides ago, due to the lower price of electricity sold to the market than the PPA price, whereas the positive impact came from the bigger volumes of sales. So essentially, that is behind the positive performance of the EBITDA. In terms of sold assets, so these combined had EUR 1.6 million negative effect and other impacts were already smaller coming from Iru and a little bit from fixed costs as well. In terms of segmental breakdown, we have basically wind segment result in the quarter, where our production is 54% higher, our sales revenue is 12% higher and EBITDA is 18% higher. So this is all basically showing that increase the production even in the place where we have lower prices will improve our results. In terms of costs, we have also shown here that there is 4 quarter average 8% increase in the operating expenses per megawatt of asset. So that's around EUR 40,000 per megawatt now. Compared to last year, there is again a little bit of a balancing effect there, given base effects there, as last year, we had some extraordinary costs in our operating farms. So these were not there this year and we had, therefore, lower operating expenditure. And of course, keeping a lid on the cost increases on all our production assets is a very important part of our cost strategy. Cogeneration segment. So here, we have also the impact on the sold assets. But leaving that aside, Iru itself, [indiscernible] struggling with availability in the latest quarters, hence, producing 10% less, 3.5 gigawatt-hours less. Really, the impact you can see in the bottom left-hand side in the operating income, where you can see that the electricity revenues are lower, also the electricity production subsidies are lower, but also the gate fees that we've seen for the weeks [indiscernible] were lower all because of the lower production. So actually, this availability backup where it needs to be is really important as it actually drives our revenue to enhance our profitability here. And then in terms of another factor that we have had in second quarter is also affected by the impairment of intergroup receivable related to our sold biomass assets in April by EUR 0.8 million. So that brings in total the result of the biomass sold assets in 2024 to EUR 4.7 million. So in the next quarters, we expect to see also still the base effect, where we have earned some EBITDA in 2023 from these assets that we have by now exited. But that should actually finalize, all that, already in '25, when the base effect will [indiscernible]. And solar, as I mentioned, smaller impacts, I mean, in terms of the overall share of EBITDA in 2024 Q2, it's 11%, so sizable, given that second and third quarters are the [ lean ] production quarters of solar. But bigger changes before we have the new assets online will be related to just more towards the radiation. It hasn't been a very good year in terms of radiation in Estonia and Poland. So hence, that has kept us a little bit back in terms of production. At least, availability has been good. So that is important. Finally, I'd also like to mention that in solar as well as in wind, we are also keeping a very strong eye on the potential negative hour moments. So we have also in second quarter needed to regulate down hour production [indiscernible] losses in the hours when prices are negative. So this is also sometimes keeping our production lower and in terms of [indiscernible]. So investments. We had a very heavy investment quarter, the heaviest in our history and actually, the largest investment quarter that we foresee in this investment cycle. So Q2 '24 was the sort of biggest that we see, EUR 129.8 million of investments. And really, the reason for that was that we were bringing forward certain works from the second half of this year to the first half, just to have Sopi-Tootsi primarily available earlier. So altogether in the first half, we brought forward probably around EUR 40 million of investment compared to our base plans. So we are just expediting the work just to be been able to produce the first megawatt-hours as fast as possible. So altogether, we still expect that we will invest around EUR 250 million to complete the current constructions. Around half of that is still due this year, EUR 225 million in second half total and the rest is in 2025 and a little bit in '26. So essentially, that is the split between the upcoming investments. But indeed, these are sizable amounts and basically doing all we can to bring production as fast online as due. In terms of earnings, total EUR 3.9 million of net profits. The main change behind the growth is really the income tax, which necessarily gets levied on the corporate dividends, dividends were lower, EUR 4.1 million positive impact from here. I also like to highlight that the interest expenses, in fact, we have been increasing quite substantially. So if last year, in Q2, we had EUR 2.4 million, now we had EUR 5.8 million, so growth of EUR 3.5 million. But as we are still in the investment cycle, then we'll capitalize 99% of that. Hence, it doesn't still appear in the profit and loss. And then once the production comes online, and that's completely [indiscernible]. Leverage. We have increased the leverage due to the heavy investment cycle from the beginning of the year of 4.0x net debt to EBITDA to 5.5x net debt to EBITDA. So we currently have EUR 590 million of net debt outstanding as of end of the quarter. So it is expected that we are increasing the debt levels, given as we go through the cycle. And really, to fund that, we have also signed additional loan agreements, actually increased our existing loan agreements with Swedbank to EUR 100 million at the end of the quarter. So that demonstrates our ability to keep on funding it. And we are actually on the lookout always for extending our relationship further and actually diversifying our sort of banking bases or banking relationships further so that just to guarantee ourselves the best possible sort of cost of debt. And really, to highlight also that our interest rate is slightly higher as we have been taking out loans with the available interest rates. But as the interest rates are expected to come down over the next quarters and we're already seeing the first ECB rate cut, then this is expected to reduce also our average interest rates for the loans that are [indiscernible]. Finally, in terms of electricity price risk management, as Andres mentioned, I mean, we have been below our expectations in the first half, so around 155 gigawatt-hours year-to-date. So around 80 gigawatt-hours of that, more than half, is coming from wind conditions but also Tolpanvaara, Akmene and Iru availability have impaired us or set us back in the first half. So we now expect most of these issues to be resolved. And we expect to return to expected availability and produce around 2.06 terawatt-hours of electricity in total in '24, subject to wind conditions, of course, and subject to new parts coming online. So these are the things we -- first of all, we -- first one, we cannot control, but second one, we are making every effort to be -- to let no stones unturned to bring every [indiscernible] into grid fast. Finally, in terms of our portfolio balancing transactions and the PPA risks, then we have not signed new sales agreements, but we have done short-term balancing transactions, i.e., we have actually purchased back around 23 gigawatt-hours from Q3 in the Baltic price ranges, where we see that we can perhaps reduce the risk of additional purchases. So this is the way that we short-term balance our portfolio. And we, of course, expect to carry out doing these transactions to have the best result also in the future. So I think with that, I would hand back to Andres for closing remarks.

Thank you. As Veiko said, on an economics basis, we've had a better period in the first 6 months of this year compared to corresponding period last year. A lot of that benefit came from a large reduction from our new projects. However, we admit that we have had reduced production from existing and new projects on the wind side, largely due to the weaker wind speeds, the earlier-mentioned Tolpanvaara technical issues and commissioning issues that are now being resolved as well as the Iru availability. This is nearly 15% reduction compared to our expectations. And we are working on all things that we can control to make sure that these type of challenges that we can control will not repeat themselves. So your team here at Management Board but also entire Enefit Green is driven by the fact that we want to make sure that all the projects that we have earmarked for building get built safely, on time and on budget. We're making sure that our production and availability is as expected and as forecast. Obviously, that is affected by the things that are outside of our control, such as wind speed, such as power prices and other market movements. And our focus is on bringing more megawatts into operation that are currently under construction and doing so, as I mentioned, safely, on time and on budget. So those are the kind of summaries for this half of year. We are working on things that we can control. We are intending to be your safe pair of hands to managing your business. And we are looking forward to bringing more better results in the subsequent periods. But perhaps we move over to questions now. And Veiko, if you could please address.

Yes. So let me start the first one. So firstly, the question is where do you see the ratio between balancing volumes to the PPA volume in the future or under normal production conditions? So essentially then, what we've shown in the latest quarter, we had about more than 30% of our PPA volumes being actually purchased. So essentially, we see that these [indiscernible] as we were short of production. Hence, we had more hours where we needed purchased. So essentially, it comes from two places. One is that having higher production results will help us to reduce the purchases. I think around 20%, 25% in our current hedging approach is rational and reasonable to expect. But of course, in case one way to reduce the PPA levels and be more of the market terms, then when we would need to purchase less. But that would bring different risks. So this is the current response. So secondly, I think I'll be taking that as well if you don't mind?

Yes, absolutely.

So Pasi is asking, what is your IRR target for near-term portfolio of 536 megawatts? And is the funding of these projects secured? Our IRR target is 2% above our minimum, above our [ regular source ] of capital, which if one looks at our average capital costs in the recent times, then probably is around 10% or thereabouts. So at least double-digit returns on an annual basis, we're going to earn on this project, also subject to reasonable revenue security and [indiscernible] available. So it's against the markets, you would probably ask quite a bit higher expected return. And funding of these projects secured, no, we haven't secured any funding for that. So once these projects are on the verge of being FID-ed, then we would see cost of funding. But at the moment, we haven't done that sort of preemptively. So maybe the third one, Andres.

Yes, Pasi is asking again the question of many of your competitors have decided to postpone wind power projects. Do we need to postpone or cancel some wind power projects due to weak economic viability of wind power? I think I would respond to this in such a way that many of our development projects are Tier 1 wind projects with high fundamentals for wind speed, are low cost as well as our locations where the grid is available. This is the primary focus for us to delivering these projects. And ultimately, whether we deliver them today or at some point in the future, our intention is that these projects will always remain a Tier 1 project. However, the market conditions around financing costs and the power prices do create a little bit of a headwind in our current market. And as a result of that, we have continually considered our position in respect of our new wind and solar projects and continue to keep the market abreast with how these projects are being developed. And if you do recall my prior slide about projects being ready-to-build, we are accumulating projects in the ready-to-build status, ready to pounce when the market is ready for us and when we are ready for the market.

Right. Now next one, why have you excluded short-term development portfolio contributions in your annual production volumes forecast charts? Do those forecast numbers for short-term portfolio laid out in Q1 '24? No, they don't. We have taken this out because we are basically leaving ourselves more flexibility for the time when we make these investment decisions. So essentially, as we have also shown at the near-term portfolio, there is -- we don't specifically say out when we will make these decisions. So hence, there is also no certainty about also when the production is going on. However, what we are doing is we are working hard to bring them into ready-to-build and make these investment decisions when the time is right and the conditions are sufficient. Then Pasi is asking, what could be the interest expense per megawatt-hour new production when construction projects are ready? Yes, it's a tough one really because these megawatt-hours, they come with slightly different CapEx costs. And we don't think of it actually in these megawatt-hour terms so much. I mean, only a few euros per megawatt-hour would be fair to assume. But actually, if you think of the LCEs, where we have around EUR 60 per megawatt-hour, say, for new wind, solar, then actually part of that is the capital cost. And part of that capital is interest cost. So you start slicing it quite finely. We are focused more on bringing the electricity lower and making sure that we make return targets on top of our [indiscernible] cost of capital. So yes, it is -- that's probably the way how we look at it. Then Petr is asking, the debt levels are rising and you still have investments ahead of your incoming years. Do you still expect to continue paying dividends, too? I understand that [ 50% ] dividend payout ratio is policy. But any risk for also the next few years? Currently, we have a dividend payout ratio of 50%, so essentially that is exactly as it is. We have paid dividends for all of the years. And we currently expect to be doing that also next year. So this is the latest status. Then can you remind us how the maintenance and service agreements are constructed at the service provider? Are the prices annually indexed with CPI? Mostly, yes, they are, if we take wind producers, then they sometimes use PPI, sometimes CPI, sometimes baskets. So they're slightly different between different manufacturers. But as a rule, I think it's a fair assumption to expect that, on a annual basis, [indiscernible] and the CPI is usually the most useful [indiscernible].

Right. I think we exhausted the lists of the questions.

I think if there are any final questions, of course, happy to respond further. Or if you have them -- if you don't want to ask them at the moment, please send it to [email protected]. So this is also an option, so we'll respond, of course.

Thank you for your questions. I think as a summarizing comment, this is, as I mentioned at the beginning, Veiko's last quarterly presentation. I wish him good luck on behalf of our entire company and investor community and wish you godspeed and good wind. Veiko?

Thank you, Andres. Thank you very much. Too much still ahead, let's not get ahead...

No, no, we're not getting ahead of ourselves, but in this quorum, it's the last time. And last, I would like to take this opportunity and wish all of Estonian and other host market sportspeople in Paris wind into your sails and made a sunshine upon you. It is an extremely long process to get to the Olympics and to perform in front of our eyes on TVs or live for a very concentrated period of time. Similar to Enefit Green, it is a marathon for us. And all you're seeing here is a conclusion and combination of a lot of hard work over many years. So in summary, what I'd like to say to our investors is to think about the fact that things take time and ultimately, this is not a sprint, but it is a marathon. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.