Genesis Energy Limited (GNE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay, folks, good afternoon. My name is James Spence. I'm the CFO. I've been with the company for just over 18 months now. So folks, I have got 10 slides here. And in these 10 slides, I'm going to take you through our planning assumptions around our profit and loss account. I'm going to start by looking at the EBITDA overall. I'm going to give a bit more detail on that on the following slides. I'm going to talk about our gross margin assumptions that underpin the EBITDA. I'm going to go into a bit of detail on our operating costs. I'm then going to summarize our investment program that you've heard as a theme going right through the day. And I'm then going to take a step sideways and I'm going to talk about Kupe, which we haven't heard a great deal about today, but I'm going to talk a little bit about Kupe, and then on our carbon position, our carbon assumptions. I'll then move to the balance sheet. I'll talk about our approach to funding and to capital management. And I'll wrap up by talking about the key metrics that we see in our scorecard, and then end on what we see as the compelling investor rationale. So I'm going to go through that. It's going to take about half an hour. Bear with me, I'll be as quick as I can. I hope you can find it interesting. My aim at the end of this is that you feel and you can see why we think there's a compelling investor rationale here. And just before jumping in to talk about earnings, I just -- I'm going to spend a moment on that. The feedback that I have had from you and from others over the last 18 months, is there are 2 areas of uncertainty when people think about the investor rationale at Genesis. The first is, where is the growth? We don't see where the growth story is. So that will be a theme that I'll talk to as I go through this. The second is that there are concerns and questions raised about our ESG credentials. And again, I'm going to address those, and you've heard them, of course, as themes right through the day, but you'll hear me referring to those as I go through this presentation. Last thing I'm going to say before jumping in, and this is the thing that almost I could end on and I can stop the rest of the presentation. The thing to really think about here, when you think about utilities generally, but us specifically, is there is a need for significant capital deployment in new renewables in New Zealand as there is all over the world. The value creation story is that in order to deploy capital into new renewables, you need a recipe of 3 things. You need offtake. It is really difficult to build a renewable asset without a view of where the offtake is. Number two, intermittent new renewables need firming. We have the best firming in the country, in our view. And number three, you need a strong balance sheet. You saw in Craig's presentation, the pipeline of projects that are under consideration in New Zealand. For many of those to get off the ground, you need an offtake with a strong balance sheet. So the shareholder, the value creation story is that we will deploy a significant amount of capital into new renewables, and we have a -- I don't want to say unique, but we have strong competitive advantages to enable us to deploy that capital at returns above our cost of capital. That's really the message that I'm going to be -- that's going to be recurring through my presentation. So let's go to numbers. Let's talk about earnings, and let's start with EBITDA. So just to want to take you on this slide. This is EBITDA by year, FY '24 on the left, FY '28 on the right. The orange bar is the Gen35, the program that we have. Under Gen35, the blue bar is the EBITDA on the existing asset profile. So I'm going to focus on the orange bars. Left-hand side, FY '24, we've repeated today our guidance of $430 million. That's reaffirming what you've heard before. I'm not going to spend time on that. FY '25, the next bar in, so we said today that we expect FY '25, the outlook we're providing in our base case, is to be around $500 million next year. Big step-up on this year. The main drivers of that, number one, Unit 5 will be returning to production. We expect that to be in January. So clearly, that's a one-off impact this year. We don't expect to recur it next year. Secondly, we expect to have contribution during FY '25 from both Tauhara and Lauriston. They'll come in, in the second half of the next financial year, and they will contribute to us. Also, we expect to have the new production at Kupe from the KS-9 drilling that is taking place right now. There'll be other areas of margin optimization, which will contribute to this number, particularly, we see an opportunity in LPG for further contribution. So let me move to talk about the '26 to '28 profile. And what we said today is that we see in our base case, EBITDA under the Gen35 program of -- at the mid- to high-500s in that time frame. Now I'm going to talk on the gross margin slide and the OpEx slide a little bit more about the contributors to that, but I want you to take away from this slide that the overall profile that we're talking about here of that mid- to high-500s in that time frame. Now bear in mind, and this is if you just orientate to the right-hand side of this table, you can see our planning assumption here is that we are basing our plans on the assumption that from FY '28, we'll see wholesale prices moving towards around low-100s. We use 102 as our central planning assumption dollars per megawatt hour, in FY '23 dollars for Otahuhu baseload prices. Why are we using 102? We're using 102, we're basing that on inputs from a number of different sources. We have our own fundamentals view, but we test that against other external consultant views of baseload prices and indeed, our own understanding and view of LCOE for new development and the cost of firming. Now that's not going to be right. Just to be clear since I've been in this industry for 20 years, I've never seen someone predict correctly 5 years forward the wholesale price. But it's a reasonable planning assumption and the one that we use. Clearly, for investment purposes, we test investments against a variety of scenarios. So this shouldn't be regarded as our number for investment decision-making. An important point there, when you look at those FY '26 to FY '28 EBITDA assumptions, clearly there's an assumption that the wholesale price is coming off in this time period. That does impact these EBITDA numbers. These EBITDA numbers take that into account. So while we're showing that sort of flat trajectory in FY '26 through FY '28, that is -- we factored in the expected headwind from reducing wholesale prices over that time frame. And finally, before leaving this slide, I want to just draw your attention to the words on the bottom right there. In FY '28, we assume no EBITDA contribution from the Rankines. So we assume that our revenues will offset our costs. Now we think that is a conservative planning assumption. And clearly, we'll be aiming for a contribution above that. We expect, and you've heard this again, you've heard it from Malcolm and you heard it particularly in Tracey's presentation earlier on, we are working on biomass solutions. We are working at entering into commercial contracts to make that a reality to provide that as a backup source for New Zealand as New Zealand becomes an increasingly renewable system. In the event that we -- that turns into reality, we would expect a higher contribution from that activity. So I'll now move into talking about gross margin in a little bit more detail. You will have seen this format in our recent presentations where we look at it by fuel. We break down gross margin into different fuels. The reason for doing that, although we do run the business in segments, the retail segment and the wholesale segment, is that this way of looking at our business takes out the noise associated with transfer pricing between the 2. So for instance, when you look at electricity here, this is the revenue we get from the customers and from the wholesale market less our cost -- our direct costs associated with that activity, so the costs here, for example. So it's a pretty simple way of looking at this. Now a few key messages here. Number one, on the left-hand side, you can see that electricity is and will continue to be, by far, the most significant part of our overall gross margin and that I don't think is a surprise to anyone. On the right-hand side, you can see the contributions from Kupe, LPG and gas. I think the takeaway -- the first takeaway from this is there are no heroic assumptions here of significant uplift in our gross margin in these 3 areas. In fact, in both Kupe and gas, you can see we expect those gross margins to decline over time, and that will be driven by volumes. Kupe will go up in our planning assumption as the KS-9 volumes come through as we expect, but then it will be declining by 2028. Gas, as our customers increasingly move to electrification, we'll see volumes coming off in gas. We do see opportunities for optimization within LPG. The return on the invested capital that we're earning on LPG at the moment is not where we need it to be, and we're doing work to optimize and to improve our LPG gross margin. So coming back to the main story here, looking at electricity on the left-hand side. We see growth in our electricity margin over this period. What's going to drive that growth? Well, first of all, we'll see -- we -- you've heard Tracey talking today about grid scale battery. You've been on the tour, you've seen the site. We said today, we are targeting FID in the first half of calendar '24. We're working on the business case right now. Now I'm not going to give a running commentary on the business case. But what I would say is that the combination of the assets in our portfolio, the investments we're making in solar, which is obviously intermittent and therefore, lends itself well to combination with battery. The gas-fired operations we have here, particularly combined advantageously with a battery, the reserves position, the reserve costs we have, all of these factors as well, obviously, as the underlying arbitrage that you earn on a battery, we believe that those factors mean that we will have the strongest business case for deployment of a battery in New Zealand. Now we're also seeing at the moment, you heard Tracey talking about this, the cost of installation and implementation of a battery is moving in the right direction for us at the moment. So we -- our intention is to reach FID in the first half of next year. We think the implementation period is approximately 12 months. We expect a full year's contribution from FY '26. The other contributors to that increase -- the improvement in gross margin between '24 and '28, full year contribution from Tauhara, full year from Lauriston and indeed, the further deployment of capital into the solar joint ventures with the offtake agreements will result in further PPAs coming online by the time we get to 2028. You've heard Tracey talking about the value of flexibility, our investments we're going to make in trading. I thought [indiscernible] presentation this morning, his blue whale chart, I don't know if it's blue whale, but the whale chart, the emphasis there was on the value of flexibility that is unseen in the P&L, but is undoubtedly a key part of the value that utilities see as you deploy as we see increasing levels of volatility in the system. We think we're well placed to capture that value. You heard Stephen and just now, Ed talking about the value of retail, the way we're setting up our systems to enable us to capture that. We see value from that focus on retail and that renewed strategy we've got in retail. So there are a number of factors there that will be driving that improvement in electricity margin over this time period. So I've talked about EBITDA overall. I've talked about gross margin. Let's come to operating expenses. Now let's just be transparent and acknowledge that our trajectory on operating expenses has raised a lot of questions. And today, we really want to -- we're providing more transparency than we have done previously, and I hope we can really address and provide clarity on how we see operating expenses. And we're taking quite an unusual step here in some ways. We're giving 5 years of planning assumptions. You can see on the left-hand chart, this shows each bar represents a year between '24 and '28. The different colors represent different business units. And you can see there on the left-hand side, we're seeing it starting at 381. These dollars are nominal, moving through to the right-hand side, FY '28 at 361. I'll come back to talk about that in a moment, but let me take you first of all to the right-hand chart where you can see the main moving blocks between FY '24 and FY '28, and the items to really focus on here, you can see the savings initiative there, the first block you've heard, obviously, Stephen has been really clear about the program he has within retail to remove costs. And Ed's talked about the enablement within technology to support that. So that's $39 million reduction we see in operating expense reduction. Malcolm talked about a number earlier on of $40 million to $50 million. Some of those savings already come through in the FY '24 number, which is why you can see the $39 million number in savings initiatives. Digital projects. You can see on the left-hand side, We started $30 million. We've got a bow wave clearly coming through in the next 3 years, particularly, that will reduce to around $10 million we forecast by FY '28. Now in both Tracey and Craig's area, we talked about the need to increase our activity and our capability in achieving the opportunities we see in flexibility and then deploying capital into new renewables. So you will see increases in our wholesale operating costs as we resource up in those areas. So finally, on this slide, I do want to emphasize, when you look at the left-hand chart, and you look at 2025 and FY '26, you can see the numbers are coming up before they go down, okay? So don't be surprised to see the numbers going up because as Ed has emphasized, we've got zero in billing, we've got general ledger update, and we've got investments to make in our trading and risk management areas that will require investment. We've been pretty conservative in terms of we would -- we're expecting that we will expense most of that expenditure obviously remains to be seen, we'll just follow the rules, but for the purpose of this, we have taken the assumption that most of that expenditure will be expensed. So let's move now to talk about the investment program. You've heard about the investment program all day. Let's see what that means in terms of some numbers. And I'm really going to talk to the chart here, which runs from '24 to '30. And I'm going to start on the left-hand side. Obviously, this is a representation of dollars, millions that we expect to deploy into these various areas. So I'm going to start with that light blue wedge, which is in 2024. $65 million going into KS-9. We're spending the money right now. We're actually largely through that program. It's pretty much on track. It will complete in short order. And as I say, we're on track. We won't have the results. We won't have clarity on the results until first half of next year as we go through all the analysis that's required, obviously, but that is on track. The next item I want to bring to your attention is the green wedge in FY '25. So that's the battery, our first grid scale battery. We're anticipating a 100-megawatt battery 2 hours. And we're working on an assumption that the capital cost will be around $1.5 million per megawatt. We'll see where we end up. And we are also working on the assumption that flexible assets, we will want to maintain on balance sheet. It's unlikely we would want to enter into a structure, a JV-type structure for a flexible asset because really full control and full dispatchability on the asset. The next item on this chart, I want to draw to your attention is the dark blue wedge that runs across multiple years. And although it's not a huge -- I mean, it's not a small number, but it's not relative to some of the other investments, it's not a huge number, but it's a really key part of our investment strategy here. This is the cost associated with 450 megawatts of solar, which we expect to deploy in the joint venture structure. So if you think of 450 megawatts of solar and you work on the basis that it's around $1.5 million per megawatt, that takes you to something close to $700 million of total capital deployed into those assets in that vehicle. We expect around 70% project financing, and we will contribute around 40% of the equity. So we end up with a little less than 15% of the total capital cost, a little less than 15% of $700 million, works out at around $100 million contribution from Genesis. So it's a very efficient way to invest in a very large amount of new generation. And we think that makes a lot of sense for solar, particularly, and we're making really good progress, as you heard from Craig earlier on today in terms of getting close to our first FID on Lauriston, and we'll continue to use that mechanism. Now then going to take you to the bottom part of this chart, the red and the pink wedge that run through multiple years here. This is our stay-in business CapEx. We've said today that the stay-in business CapEx between '25 and '27 is forecast to be around $70 million per year. The dark red element there is the amount related to thermal. I think a key takeaway here is it's not a very big number, okay? In '28, there is an increase and that '28 number, which is $25 million in FY '28, is the expected overhaul cost related to Unit 5 that will occur in '28, okay? So then finally, let me take you to the yellow wedge on the top right of this. Now this is, again, going back to what I said at the beginning, this is the significant amount of capital that we expect to deploy into new renewables in the second half of this decade, which will drive growth into next -- into the following decade, the end of this decade and the next decade. It will drive the decarbonization. It will drive the achievement of the net zero in 2040. And it will enable us, and we will do this because it deploys significant capital at a return which we expect to be above our cost of capital. Now in Craig's presentation, he showed the pipeline of development assets in New Zealand, and he said, we have looked at a number or most of these. And we will continue to work with developers and will look to develop ourselves the best projects and the most economic projects in New Zealand. What technology are these likely to be? Well, we expect that there will be significant wind investment here, but we haven't -- we're not just predetermining that, but our expectation would be that there will be significant deployment into wind. We would see an additional battery capacity being part of this program, and there may be more going into solar. We'll figure that out based on the economics of the projects and the needs for our business and indeed for New Zealand. But we'll also, as you heard Craig said, we will keep a watching brief on new technologies as they arise, and we won't take a sort of constrained approach to this, we'll look at what's most economic and makes the most sense. So that's the key part of the capital deployment for the Gen35 program up to 2030. I'm now going to spend a few moments talking about Kupe. And again, Kupe is an area where we've had a lot of questions. There's been a lot of focus on this. And today, we really want to provide transparency on how we look at Kupe. And clearly, everything you can see on this slide, it's our base case assumptions. Clearly, there's potential for variability here. Most of the assumptions that we use here are provided by third parties to us, whether it be the operator in relation to costs, whether it be independent review, for instance, of decommissioning costs, which are forecast to occur in FY '36 or indeed a view of reserves, which you can see here. So to orientate on this, what you can see in the chart, the orange bars represent the forecast EBITDA by year based on 2P production profile. The yellow bars represent our forecast of free cash flows. Now key things to understand here. The main variable that we actually input into this model because most, as I say, of the assumptions come from qualified third parties is the gas price. And where I think there's been some element of doubt or uncertainty on how we look at the value of Kupe is how to treat the gas price. Now you should assume when you look at the value of Kupe, that Kupe, our holding company in Kupe [indiscernible] sells to Genesis on a carbon-exclusive basis. So carbon is a pass-through from [indiscernible] to Genesis. The cost of carbon is sitting in Tracey's P&L, and I'll talk about how we hedge that carbon risk on the next slide. So Kupe does not bear the cost of carbon related to the offtake arrangements. Kupe does bear the cost of carbon related to venting and flaring. But that's actually relatively -- I mean, it's not insignificant, but it's a relatively small part. Those costs are in the numbers here. So taking those assumptions, the outputs, 2 key outputs, $290 million of free cash flow we see between FY '25 and FY '30. Hold that thought, I'll come back to it. Valuation NPV, $190 million, we see. You can see we put in cost of capital at 10.8%. You can put in more or less any cost of capital. It doesn't matter. Reason it doesn't matter is because of the decommissioning liability because the decommissioning liability offsets the income related from the gas sales. So it's not actually very -- I know it sounds unusual, but it's not very sensitive to the cost of capital. On the decommissioning liability, just briefly in passing, we include in our valuation in '36, which is the scheduled [indiscernible] there is a possibility -- we don't build it into our numbers -- that this could be an advantage site for offshore wind. The reason for that is, number one, the wind resource in that area of Taranaki is one of the best resources in New Zealand. And number two, the cost of the infrastructure is a big part of offshore wind and a lot of that is in place at Kupe. So that would make this potentially an advantaged site for offshore wind. But we don't factor that into our valuation of Kupe, but clearly pushing that decommissioning liability out would be relevant. It would also mean the cost of capital start to become more important. So enough on Kupe. Let's talk about carbon. So there's quite a lot of information on this slide, and you can look at it in your own time. I wanted to highlight 2 aspects on this slide. Starting with the bottom-left. So what the bottom-left chart shows is for the 2020s, it shows our carbon hedge position. The blue bars represent our supply position, and our supply position in the 2020s largely comes from forward contracts. Point to note that orange color box shows our weighted average cost of carbon. You can see it's quite advantaged relative to current market prices. The gray lines represent our expected requirement, so the demand we have for carbon. The reason they're quite widely spread is because it depends. It's significantly influenced by hydro in any year because obviously, high levels of hydro mean we run the thermal assets less, means our demand for carbon is lower. So we're showing you, but the real takeaway there is we are hedged in our carbon position. We have it at advantaged prices through the 2020s. If you now move to the top right, you can see the position in the 2030s, okay? Now I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because it's a way away, but you can see that we have, through our forestry investments, forecast of having 300,000 units coming to us from the forestry investments. Those forestry investments, the cash outflow, will be complete by -- pretty much complete. There's a little stub in '26, but it's largely complete by the end of '25. So again, we -- I can't tell you exactly what our carbon requirement is going to be during the 2030s, but we think this represents a pretty significant hedge on our carbon position in the 2030s. It obviously depends on how quickly we decarbonize the total level of demand for that. So we're hedged from a P&L perspective. Just as a sort of in parenthesis, worth just bearing in mind, obviously, that cash has already flowed out. So while our P&L is hedged, there will be a working capital inflow associated with carbon as we go through the 2030s because this effectively will come through to us as a net working capital inflow because we won't have to lay out cash for this requirement. That's worth noting. Okay. So I talked about Kupe. I've talked about carbon. I'm now going to talk about funding. So you heard Craig say earlier on that what we're doing is we're positioning ourselves to have alternative sources of funding for our Gen35 program. And we will utilize whichever makes most sense to us and whichever is going to give us the best economic result. And clearly, it will depend partly on the partners that we work with. We have power purchase agreements in place today on Waipipi and Tauhara. If you draw through our balance sheet, you'll see we've got a very advantaged position on those contracts. And clearly, we're going to enter into further PPAs. The strategic partnership with the development and equity partners is what we have in the solar JV. As I said earlier on, we think that's a really capital-efficient mechanism for financing new renewables, but you wouldn't want to finance an entire program of over $1 billion using those JV structures because that would create quite significant financial risk in the overall balance sheet position. So we think that the way to do this is to have a mix of funding strategies. And finally, you can see on balance sheet, which we will use and particularly, for example, the flexible assets are highly likely to be fully on balance sheet. And we anticipate that as we move into that yellow wedge that we talked about on the investment program, there will be further deployment of on-balance sheet capital for that program as we move through. Maintaining the BBB+ rating is really important to us. That's what enables us to write the long-term PPAs where we see a real advantage. We need a strong and resilient balance sheet with this type of investment program, and we need a strong and resilient balance sheet because there will be stresses that occur along the way and because opportunities will come up for further deployment of capital. And we want to have a strong balance sheet so that we can take advantage of those opportunities as they come along. So let's talk about the dividend. Clearly, one of the key bits of information that we're sharing today is that we will be resetting the dividend from FY '24 at $0.14 per share. Our aim will be to maintain that level in real terms and to grow when appropriate. How are we doing that? We are doing that by taking the Kupe free cash flow between -- forecast between '25 and '30 in the base case of $290 million, and we are spreading that over the FY '24 to FY '30 period, and that is the driver of the change from $0.176 to $0.14. So this is really key, folks. And I don't need to tell you. It's kind of obvious that it's absolutely the key. But what we are doing is we are redirecting cash flows that come from our primary fossil fuel source in Kupe and we are directing them into new renewables, okay? We think that from an ESG perspective, that is a very -- puts us in a very well-credentialed position. You heard Rob earlier on talking about [indiscernible]. We think this clearly positions us as an improver. We think that -- it's difficult to see how we could be doing that more than by taking the cash flows from Kupe, 100% of our forecast cash flows, and putting them entirely into new renewables. Now on the right-hand side, you can see the balance sheet and the credit metrics. Just to orientate you on this chart, the Y-Axis is the debt-to-EBITDA metric. That is the key S&P metric that they use to determine credit ratings. You can see the 2 to 3, we particularly called out the 2 to 3 range, that's the range to be BBB+ given our position. The orange and the gray wedge, let me talk you through this. The orange wedge represents our forecast credit metrics based on the Gen35 program. The gray wedge represents what our credit metrics would be forecast if we were doing the Gen35 program with $0.176 dividend. And what you can see here is the balance sheet gets into stress territory at the back end of the decade. And that's not a position that we think makes sense for a business of our type. That does not give us resilience. It doesn't -- it puts us in a position where we would struggle to fund new renewables, and it means that any opportunities that come up, we would be unable to take because -- or less able to take because of the stress position of our balance sheet. That orange wedge you can see is down at the bottom or the strong end of the BBB+ range. And we think it's important that that's where Genesis is. Now I want to take you to the bottom-left chart as well. After this change from $0.176 to $0.14, if you look at the right-hand side of that bottom-left chart, our yield, based on our share price at the beginning of this week, our gross yield will be 8%. You can see how 8% compares to the peer group. And we think that's a pretty strong yield for our shareholders, while at the same time, providing a much stronger growth story for our investors because we are deploying significant -- because of the change in dividend is enabling us to deploy significant amounts of capital into new renewables, creating growth opportunities and higher earnings, not just at the end of this decade but into the following decade. So I said I would end talking about investor rationale. Before I do that, I just want to talk about scorecard. Now this is a really important page from an investor point of view. Again, we're sharing some pretty detailed metrics here for where we expect to be in FY '28. The reason we've selected these metrics is because we think that these metrics demonstrate how we would be creating value in the medium term. These are the metrics that will tell you whether we are on track to create significant value between now and 2028. We will provide -- we expect to provide each reporting period, a status on each of these metrics. It will be our view, and we will be transparent. And I wouldn't expect them all to be green all the time. I'm sure we're going to have movements up and down. But we will have an honest conversation with you about how we're tracking in each of these areas. It may be that one or 2 of these drop off, and it may be that some new ones add on as the business changes. I hope what the conversation we won't be having is whether we're at $425 million of EBITDA for this year or $435 million. That's not a great indicator of the value of this business. What is a great indicator of the value of this business is whether we're on track to hit these metrics in FY '28. So we want to provide the investment community with real transparency on the key value drivers for this business period by period. You'll be able to track us on that. So finally, I want to end on what I see as the compelling investor rationale. Now I'm not going to go through this line by line. I'm going to just refer to what I said at the beginning, which is, I think there are 2 areas where we've run into some choppy waters, frankly, with investors. And I think for that reason, frankly, I think sentiment is difficult for Genesis from the investor community. And I think there are 2 really key ones here. Where is the growth coming from? And what are your ESG credentials? You've heard us talking about this throughout the day. We -- there's a really big change in Gen35 from a financial perspective is we are taking a significant amount of capital, and we are going to deploy it into new renewables, and we think we have an advantaged position, which will enable us to deploy that capital at returns that are above our cost of capital. We think that's good news for shareholders. As we do that, I think it gets harder and harder for the investment community to apply an ESG discount to our stock. You will be the best judges of that. We recognize that there have been some trip-ups as well in terms of OpEx. I hope what you've heard today and you can see that there's real transparency and real determination from this management team to deal with that. So again, we'll be really clear on how we're tracking on those programs as we go through the reporting cycle. So I'll end there and pause. And thanks for taking the time to listen to that. We are now going to, I think, get the entire executive team up at the front. You've been very patient in not asking questions. We really appreciate that. I'm sure you've got one or 2 questions. So now is the opportunity for you to bring questions to the management team. Thank you.

But just reinforcing James's point, thank you very much for your time today to give the whole day out of your schedules for us. It's very greatly appreciated [indiscernible].

Okay. So there's people online. So just put your hand up. I'll come over to you. If you could just put your name and your job title or employer just to know who is online and who is talking. So yes.

Jonathan Davis. Jonathan Davis, ACC. Thanks for presentation and the targets. I was just wondering how sort of management incentives have been changed to align with those targets and over what time frames?

So we've moved the ticket instinct to be [ 8% ] [indiscernible]. So group outcomes in terms of STIs now make up 80% of that targets collectively. So the scorecard that James put up, the FY '28 scorecard is a collective scorecard for all of us and 80% of STI is weighted towards that. The other 20% is weighted towards individual performance and long-term incentive is what it is. I think it's detailed in our report, so that hasn't been changed.

Get the ball rolling. With the time frames you've got for [indiscernible] capital deployed to wind, you would have to have projects sort of on the block ready to make FID decisions within the next couple of years. Should we expect that?

There's a number of conversations that we're involved in. You should expect us to keep you updated as those conversations play out. Obviously, we're much more advanced in solar than we are in wind, but we haven't been sitting here for the last 3 or 4 months waiting for people to knock on our door.

While I've got the mic, is there an updated view on what their decommissioning cost is for Kupe?

You can see that on the balance sheet. We haven't updated it since it was last reviewed externally at the end of financial '22. There's a number on our balance sheet of $140 million pretax. That's the discounted value. Not all of that is Kupe, but you can think that most of that is Kupe. It is a discounted pretax value.

Cool. Thank you. That was Nevill Gluyas from Jarden. Just remind to put the name.

Grant Swanepoel, Jarden. 2 of us. First question, just on the -- a small one. The $10 million of digital CapEx or growth CapEx that's left in 2028, is that a normalized number of $10 million over and above every year from here on?

Short answer is yes. So we would expect that, that is our estimates on what a sort of sustainable run rate of system modernization will be.

And then on the CapEx of $1.1 billion, you've only got about $250 million of spend that you identified there. So you left about $850 million-odd. Is that the equity portion? And we should assume that some of that would be JV and actually, it's a big program that you got in mind for the back end of this decade?

Grant, it is a very big program, right? And that is the key information we're showing -- or one of the key bits of information we're showing today is we are going to deploy a significant amount of capital. Now we expect much of that will be on balance sheet, but we haven't taken those decisions yet. And we will retain flexibility to determine the optimal structure. But the short answer to your question is that is the total Genesis contribution we expect through that period. Obviously, it's a big number, a 100-megawatt battery is around $150 million. We -- so it will be a mixture most likely of flexible assets and new renewables.

Okay. So wind will also go in there, not just flexible assets?

Absolutely. So we would expect our base case would be that wind is a material part of that wave of investment.

And then my final question, just on your $550 million outlook to 2028. Is that a little conservative in that in 4 years, you only move up $50 million? And in that, you've got your PPAs replacing almost 2,000 gigawatt hours of expensive thermal? You've got $10 million to $15 million from the battery. You've got $20 million cost out, and you only get to $550 million?

Look, it's a good question, Grant. I mean I think really key point I tried to emphasize as I went through this is at the same time as we are making those investments and we'll be seeing those improvements in performance, we are facing a reducing wholesale price, which has headwinds on our numbers. And we've been quite conservative in the expectation that, that will flow through to prices that we're able to achieve. So it does look conservative on the face of it. But if you overlay that with an assumption that wholesale prices will move from where they are today to something that looks more like low-100s, that's a significant part of the explanation of that.

I think Andrew was next. Sorry, Ken.

No, we're not building a new gas peaker, Andrew.

Yes, Andrew Harvey-Green from Forsyth Barr. I just have a few small questions. I wasn't actually going to ask about the gas peaker, to be honest.

I'm really disappointed because I prepared for it.

Just a couple of clarification things as much as anything else. So you're obviously going to get some earnings from the solar JV as well as from the PPA. I'm assuming that's excluded from the EBITDA forecast? Or is that included?

Correct. It is excluded, and we expect it to come through as a contribution from associates below the EBITDA line.

Yes. Another project that's been mentioned in passing but not in a great deal is the North Island Wind Farm with Mercury. I'm assuming we should treat that again if Mercury does decide to go ahead with that project, that would be potential upside to EBITDA as well from a PPA perspective?

Yes, I think that's right in terms of accounts. And we're very keen on that wind farm. And so talking continually with Mercury on that delivering it for us.

Next quick question just on the dividend. Any plans on a DRP stopping? Or is that going to be continuing?

We -- in our plans, we assume that it will continue. Now that's not a commitment, but that's our planning assumption.

Only a couple more from me. In terms of the batteries and thinking about that, I'd just be sort of curious. We've seen [indiscernible] talk about batteries and they were talking about 2-hour discharge times. Can you just talk through maybe your thinking or have you done any analysis around sort of longer times in particular? And why 2 hours is the magic number for you?

Yes, we're still refining that, but 2 hours is looking good for us too in terms of how we would use it both for our own portfolio [indiscernible] but really thinking about the role that batteries play initially in meeting that short-term sort of [indiscernible]. Longer term, that role may change and then thinking about it alongside gas plant as well. We'll continue to review that.

And just last question from me. If I look at that carbon profile going forward, and if you're looking at, I guess, particularly 2040 and beyond, you're talking about net zero [indiscernible] and you still got carbon credits coming your way. So it does look like you have a long carbon position, which clearly has some value attached to it. My question, I guess, really was actually around the ETS review and sort of thinking about potential implications on forestry in particular and what your thoughts are around that?

I think as we've said before, there are 2 key operative parts of the Zero Carbon 2050 triangle. There's the ETS and ERP. Over the next 25 years, we expect different governments to put different weights on the market mechanism versus the policy mechanism of that structure. But the ETS appears to be a structural feature of our journey into 2050. We expect New Zealand to continue the methodology that it has shown in terms of sovereign risk on market-based activity and that it will grandfather the rights of participants through any changes. So the assumption that we're working to is that our forestry credits will endure all the way through to expiry. Now different governments might do different things in the future, but New Zealand depends very heavily on international capital. And if you set up a market, there's significant sovereign risk with changing the rules retrospectively. So we've got nothing to suggest that, that policy won't endure as governments change. So we would expect to be grandfather through the system.

Great. Thank you.

[indiscernible] Just one for me, really. Ed and Stephen, just thinking about confidence on execution around your IT project and it's a reasonably chunky piece of work that's upon you now. And also the advantages you've alluded to the competitor advantage of [indiscernible] brand. Can you just give more color on that?

Yes. So why don't I pick up the delivery component and Stephen pick up the competitive advantage. I think as I mentioned before, the level of customization that we're looking to take on is -- has been suppressed as much as we can. So that's sitting at about 10%. So that helps massively. We've also got a high degree of familiarity with both Salesforce and Gentrack in the sense that Salesforce exists within our organization today. And clearly, Gentrack does as well. So whilst they are -- whilst we are moving to new platforms, we have preexisting -- long-standing preexisting relationships with both parties, we know how to work with them. They know our business, which gives us a degree of confidence that actually we should be able to execute really well together. But I'm not underplaying the level of complexity as well. So we've got to make sure that actually we've got our delivery governance well installed. We've got the right resourcing on board. And that's the phase that we're in at the moment and making sure that we're really setting ourselves up really well for the implementation phase.

Yes. Thanks, Ed. Look, I think the other part of it is from a design point of view, one of the things that surprised me coming into the energy sector and spending some time working with Ed and some of our other partners around the technology components is that one of the big standout distinctions for the platform that we've chosen is that it builds the model around the customer, not around the connection. And most of the platforms I've seen in the energy sector so far build everything around the connection, and the customers are kind of an afterthought to try and take it to market. And so because that models around the other way, there's a significant opportunity in how we go to market in the future and how we launch product, how we do pricing, how we add new adjacencies, whether they be energy or nonenergy adjacencies because it's actually centered around the customer itself. And that's -- at the end of the day, the customers who pays for everything. And they're the person at the center of the universe from an economic value point of view. So from my perspective, there's a significant opportunity to rethink through how we design products, how we design our go-to-market strategy and how we use our resources, both human and technological to create value.

Vignesh Nair from UBS. Just one question for me. Just largely focused on demand response, particularly sort of large-scale C&I demand response, which probably hasn't been touched on a whole lot today. Presumably, a sort of demand response contract was backed [indiscernible] and whatnot, a megawatt hour that sort of is saved on that end is one that doesn't come out of [indiscernible] sort of one way to think about it. What's the sort of firm's view on what sort of large-scale demand response means for the site and as a result of the CapEx you're spending here?

Demand response from Huntly is not indexed to the international aluminum price or the international steel price. So our willingness to give demand response is indexed to the electricity system. In terms of what does demand response from large C&I customers mean, it means that flexibility here is really critical. And so our ability to dial down if others are playing that role in the market is essential here. What that does mean is that when the system needs Huntly, Huntly will be more expensive.

Okay. Understood.

Any final questions. Just to warn you, any additional questions will further delay drinks.

Switching on of the air conditioning. We couldn't afford the power bill for the air conditioning, I'm sorry, so...

All right. That's it. So I don't know now if we've got anything final, and then we head to [indiscernible].

Yes. [indiscernible], if I could invite you to finish the day. And as you come forward, just on behalf of Genesis again, thank you very much for your time. It's an enormous time commitment, and we greatly appreciate it. [indiscernible].

[Foreign Language] It is important to note [indiscernible] it's important to close it. So as I close our meeting today, if there is anything unresolved [indiscernible] thanks again to your existence for the knowledge and experience [indiscernible]. [Foreign Language]

Thanks very much, everybody. Please enjoy some refreshments.