That was awesome. Thank you. You will get a chance to meet our later, as one of our employees, but more importantly, Mana Finau; he's sitting there with Dom, and they will be taking you around later. Just a reminder of the privilege we have, particularly here in Tāupo, you will get a taste of that later. Welcome to Contact Energy Capital Markets Day and the launch of Contact 31+ . We're 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 in preparation for Contact 31.
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. Jan and I are still here, obviously. That overarching process of both the stability and renewal is something that I see you will see repeated over the day. Introducing Contact 31, delighted 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 Contact is today, and where the New Zealand market is right now.
Look, I'm not going to spend too much on time. Contact 26, it's not often a CEO gets the privilege of talking about a strategy launched five years ago and is not going to have a red face turning up in five years' time and representing it. Contact 26 has transformed us, and there's been bumps on the way, but we have delivered. The market needs even more renewables and flexibility, and we at Contact are incredibly well positioned to seize that market opportunity. 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 Contact 26, and I just want to pause to reflect on where we were and where we are.
We have led decarbonization over the last five years and to all intents and purposes, 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 have 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 are probably at about 666,000 connections. You can see the delivery for shareholders, incredible value in that EBITDA growth, and you can see the shareholder returns that have been delivered. Contact 26, the fundamental premises we have delivered. We are bigger, we are cleaner, and we are stronger. We now have almost 12 TWh of renewable generation across hydro, geothermal, solar, a little bit of thermal left, and wind PPAs. We do expect to be over 95% renewable.
We have grown the EBITDA from NZD 540 million in 2021, NZD 450 million in 2020, to over NZD 980 million we expect in this financial year. Retail numbers out of date, 666,000, and we are now from being probably the least diversified, in fact, 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 Aluminium Smelter deal, but now the conversions of dairy into gas and the like have really done, have just triggered that.
We do have better clarity on key market risks. In developing the strategy, we're not assuming it's all going to be sunshine and roses. The one thing we learned from Contact 26 is that there will be changes that you have to meet head-on. There will be challenges. There will be difficulties. In preparing the strategy, Shelley, 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. That's really important to note. We are ready for those bumps. We are ready to pivot. 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 base building blocks of our economy here in Aotearoa. There is increasing investment in renewables to meet that demand, demand growth, but what that has led to is the absolutely phenomenal volatility that you now see in the market, both on an intraday, but also going ahead intra-seasonal, 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 to 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. You can see over a terawatt hour in demand response, which is now available to the market for both intraday, but also intra-seasonal. It is pretty incredible. None of this was there five years ago across the market. Yeah, I have put up a few of these graphs in my time, have I not? No, but you can see it is actually, yeah, 2020 and 2021 may have felt a bit empty, but you can see the kick-up there. We will take it. 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 centres if we can attract them here to Aotearoa, and there are other sources of industrial processing. The fact that James and the team managed to secure New Zealand Steel with that electric arc furnace 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. Funnily 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 Aluminium 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 of 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. 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. Contact, well positioned to capture that market opportunity presented by those relatively unique dynamics. We have the most diversified existing portfolio in the 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's 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, number one and two are fighter brands, of which one does not exist anymore, which sort of gives you we are well ahead of the pack of our true competitors. I introduce you to Contact 31. I am not going to spend a lot of time on this slide because you are going to have it repeated to you four or five hundred times over the next five years. You will get to know it well just as you got to know Contact 26. 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 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 Contact 26 and are well ready to deliver on Contact 31. We have fantastic relations with our stakeholders. Look, it's like family.
You don't agree all the time, and sometimes you do wake up in the morning in 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. That is the way we think about our relationships with our stakeholders. We are both here for the long term, and we both value that long-term nature of the relationship. Technology has played a huge role in Contact 26 behind the scenes. Smart investment. We have over 80% of our interactions in retail are digital now. We can see each individual customer down to the half hour and are able to direct pricing changes and engagement and product offerings as a result of that digital smarts. 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 technology investment in this company. That is very much linked to the productivity. We recognize that the cost increases that have hit the industry over these last five years, we have to turn and face into that challenge. That is important. 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. This is different. When I presented Contact 26, we did not make very ostensible commitments.
We sort of tweaked one out about, I do not know, NZD 700 million in FY 2025 a couple of years after when we got a bit more confidence. We are putting a stake in the ground on this. These are the outcomes that we expect. We expect 250 MW of committed geothermal, and you will have seen a few surprises in the pack that was released at 8:30, hopefully. We will have 500 MW 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 EBITDA to NZD 1.3 billion-NZD 1.4 billion. We will add 300 basis points to our return on invested capital, and we will grow that dividend to over NZD 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.
Hi everyone. It is good to be back amongst this group. I have missed you all. I mean that. We are going to start off by talking about execution. You are 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 have had with the construction of Tauhara have proven to be a blessing in disguise because they have really opened our eyes to what is required to operate in the construction space. We have professionalized in that area. We have brought in new capability. We have 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 the development team, ensuring we really understand how mature our projects are as we work towards a final investment decision, and we understand the risks 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. 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 3.
It was delivered pretty much on time and on budget, and he'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 Kōwhai Park solar project under construction at the Christchurch Airport. They are 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 3, Kōwhai Park, and the BEDS, we will have deployed NZD 1.4 billion of capital for a weighted average IRR of 13%. These are all growth projects and will 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 2A. We've actually renamed it Te Mihi Stage 2. You know 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 Wairakei, 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. We win the bragawatts competition, don't we, Mike? We have the biggest pipeline across renewable energy and across grid-scale batteries. We've had to tidy up some of the comparisons across the industry. To be honest, we've taken out the bragawatts component. Anything that's already been constructed, we've taken out of pipelines.
Anything that's considered to 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. We have done that to ours as well. 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. In terms of quality, we're very happy with ours. 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. The locations are good, which we will talk about with batteries, which is important. It is also important around diversification and how new projects integrate with your portfolios.
Good to see we've got more wind in our pipeline than 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. Like everyone, we would like to see more of this stuff to be being consented. 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. I'm confident that we're going to get there as a country. In terms of building effectively, you could say that a big development pipeline in the wrong hands is actually a liability.
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. You look at our last delivered project, like I said, that went well. We have three projects going on at the moment under construction. That is unprecedented for Contact. As I said earlier, they are all going well. In fact, two of them are actually very close to completion. Talking a bit about geothermal, we are New Zealand's leading geothermal operator and developer. You probably did not know, but in the last four years, 28% of all of the global investment into geothermal has happened in New Zealand. Within New Zealand, roughly 80% of that has been Contact. 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. That tells me that New Zealand is the center of excellence for geothermal. Within New Zealand, you look no further than Contact Energy. I am just going to get into the geothermal pillar around extending our advantage as New Zealand's geothermal leader. I am not going to go through this slide. I will go through some more detail, but this is important. It is in here. It shows you what we are aiming for in FY 2027 as a target and FY 2031, and we will be coming back to these, and we expect you guys to hold us accountable. Geothermal is no different from other renewables. We have seen big escalations in the cost of building it over the last few years.
Tauhara, if you remember back at FID, was NZD 4 million a megawatt. Te Mihi 2A, now Te Mihi Stage 2, it was NZD 7 million a megawatt. 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. The problem we have around geothermal is there are two other major components of building plants. We've seen big, big escalations in the cost of the plant itself and the cost of the steam field. These are our areas of focus.
A steam field has gone from costing about twice what you spend on drilling to now around six times what you spend on drilling. 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. 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 codes, look at the materials that pipelines are made out of, burying 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 makeup drilling. 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 iwi 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 MW of fluid consent on that field. That will mean we can build up to an extra 150 MW 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. Our next investment is going to be a 50 MW plant, which we're looking to take a final investment decision on in FY 2027.
That's important because our energy system needs more baseload renewables, 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 MW 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 MW of fluid consent. That's a very small increment on the existing consent that we have on the Wairakei field, but it's very important because it allows us to fuel a 100 MW power plant, which is what we want to build.
When you're building geothermal, as you well know, you have to be at these 95% capacity factors to ensure that you're getting the right returns on your assets. What that means is we'll have incremental volume of Wairakei of 0.5 TW h, and that's over and above, obviously, we're replacing the Wairakei volumes, and we've also got the 150 MW on Tauhara. Collectively, that's 1.7 TWh of additional geothermal resource or output. It adds to the 5.2 TWh that we've got today, taking us close to 7 TWh when this is complete off existing fields. 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. It's not as high quality as existing fields.
That should go without saying. 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. 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 Contact's deep capability around drilling and the learnings that we've got from the many kilometers of steam field that we've developed over our last two 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. We think a realistic target over this period is to look to develop a 50 MW opportunity. That is the geothermal section. We are now into wind and solar. With wind, we want to do it differently. There is 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 are building these wind farms. We are going to accomplish that in three ways. You can see our projects on the chart.
Our 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 market. We have a similar issue, in our view, in wind to what we've seen in geothermal. We want to work with a partner and get the benefits of working with a partner. That does include off-balance sheet financing in a similar way to what we've done for solar. I see all three of these topics lowering the long-run marginal costs of our projects relative to the 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. This has broader New Zealand benefits around economic growth, jobs, and tax incomes.
I'd see this new market volume as being an offtake to the wind farm, with their creditworthiness and volumes helping underwrite the investment, but also reducing risk around market price and transmission of building a bigger wind farm. I would also see Contact as being an off taker to this wind farm, ensuring that our growing portfolio gets access to that low LRMC electricity. It will also help replace some of those Mercury wind PPAs as they roll off. One of the key things we look to around wind, but also any generation that we're building, is making sure it's diversified. We want volumes that add to our portfolio and complement it. We are 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, we didn't assume any value from their development pipeline. That wasn't because we thought it was bad. It was just because Contact had its own one. Now bringing these in and actually looking to build some of these projects, the MPV is now added 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.
The choice of wind 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 Lights ource bp, and that has been very successful for us. We are 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 have 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 iwi. 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.
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 is its experience because you could say, "Well, we haven't actually built any wind, 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 disproportionate amount of experience. We have the Roaring Forties wind 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.
You bring all three of those groups together, which was the point of the integration, and we actually have a very experienced wind development team, which is going to be very important for the delivery of this strategy. Now on to solar. Our key advantage of solar is who we're partnered with. We're partnered with one of the largest and most successful IPPs in terms of Lights ource bp. We get access to all their expertise, all 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 Lights ource 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 passed through to us through a relatively, well, 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. The risk around that is market price risk and an overbuild of solar, for example. However, we're managing that by contracting some awaited load, long-term PPAs in proportion to the solar generation that we're building. You can see on the chart there that we've already contracted enough some awaited load to cover the solar generation from Kōwhai 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 pair those two 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 the renewable electricity, but we want to get them off natural gas because that frees up the gas for other sectors, households, schools that aren't ready to transition onto renewable electricity yet. Our solar strategy has broader benefits than just the direct benefits to Contact Energy. We have a pipeline of three terawatt hours around solar, but we're only looking to build out one terawatt hour through this 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 the list there, the Argyle project, which is already consented. As I said earlier, we're going to build into increased some awaited 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. The reason is the 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. We will have already minimized our market price risk on our solar through those some awaited PPAs I mentioned.
We could run any battery for merchant, maximizing returns, which ironically are going to be highest if there is an overbuild of solar. That provides a very neat natural hedge to our portfolio. Now on to the flexibility section of our strategy. We think the overall size of the BESS or grid-scale battery markets at the moment is about 900 MW. That is about displacing thermal capacity that is currently used in daily flexibility. The economics of grid-scale batteries is improving because the cost of the fuel for those thermal assets is going up. We also see the size of the BESS market growing, and that is because peak demand is growing faster than overall demand. That is driven by retail load. We see grid-scale batteries as servicing that peak demand.
They're also going to play an important role because with the forecast of 1.6 GW of new intermittents coming online by 2030, grid-scale batteries are going to have to 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 are high because the risk mitigation or risk management tools to cover drier risk are relatively expensive. 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 TY Demand Response and Methanex Gas.
In terms of where Contact is with its batteries, we have 100 MW coming online in February 2026 at Glenbrook. Our intention is to take a final investment decision on another 200 MW early next year, also at Glenbrook. That will mean in 24 months' time, we will be operating 300 MW of batteries in the North Island. We then have a further 700 MW, which are either consented or going through a consenting process at the moment. I guess the key question here is, what is Contact's point of 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 BESS.
We think we should be taking a market leadership position around that. In terms of points of difference, that strategic relationship that we have built with New Zealand Steel, which has got us access to their Glenbrook site and the ability to build 500 MW, is so key. One of the main ways you can differentiate yourself on a grid-scale battery is getting access to a great location. That is one of the best locations in New Zealand because it is 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 is with Tesla. We have 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. We will get all of the learning curve benefits of that, which will lead to a more speedy implementation process and a 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 time for them to charge, obviously, and then they discharge at night when the sun comes down, driving increased value for you.
The last point, which is very strategic, when you consider 24 months' time, 300 MW of grid-scale batteries operating in the North Island for Contact, we'll have 350 or already have 350 MW of fast start peaking. We have now got all of Manawa's hydro schemes in the North Island. We have actually got an equivalent of market-leading flexible capacity in the North Island. We are up there with the market leader, albeit our capacity is more expensive. Just having that amount of flexibility in the North Island is incredibly strategic going forward. I am 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 dry year risk. I do not 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 five terawatt hours. There's been 300 MW of geothermal that's either come online or is coming online, which is providing base load renewable in the winter, even in the dry year. That five terawatt hours is now well below four. We have sketched it out on the chart how you would mitigate four 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. What we are doing at Contact and what I think the rest of the industry is doing as well is we are trying to come up with new ways to displace some of that more expensive risk mitigations. 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 that we're doing as an industry around this, you can see there's a lot of intermittents that are being built and that have already come online. When the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, that means the hydro operators are moving out of the way, which naturally means you carry higher lake levels into winter. That is 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 drier cover. That is good as well.
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. 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 Gas. It's a relatively expensive gas. It's for seven years. The market is in a state of flux. There was a lot of risk with that. 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.
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. That will also support lower prices as well, which is good for regulatory risk. It also allows us to use that gas for our retail business, as I said earlier, to support households, sectors that aren't ready to transition, which is also very important around supporting the broader energy system. The second topic is we're looking at ways to optimise new renewables coming onto the energy system to provide as much firmed energy as possible. 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 onto the electricity system, but also into our portfolio. If you're building a North Island wind farm, you then build a South Island wind farm because they're less correlated. You build a solar farm, and then you put some flexibility with a battery. Across those four things, you can get something that is a lot closer to base load renewables. That's how we think about integrating our development pipeline with our own portfolio. 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.
I saw the Meridian Investor Day last week, and I was very happy that they were also talking about it because with all of the intermittents that are coming online over the next 10- 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 three tiers. The first is relatively low risk, low cost, and this is around sort of replacing old assets with more efficient ones. We're 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's got some really smart ideas, actually. They're replacing turbines now or looking to replace turbines with low-flow ones, which better align to the conditions, which drive big efficiency gains.
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. 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. That's the second tier of stuff that we're looking at. The third tier is sort of big end of the town. That's stuff on the Clutha, and that's when you start getting into pumped hydro. We're lucky that we've got Todd Mead joined us from Manawa.
Todd was the head of generation at Manawa, was on their executive team, got an amazing CV because before that, he did development, and before that, he was doing hydro in the U.S. It is tailor-made for this role. Now he is 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. Actually, I should just say I have got a few on my team here today, and it is worth them putting their hands up and me just introducing them quickly because they are here today as subject matter experts. Hopefully, they will validate what I have just been talking about for the last half an hour. I will start with Todd. Do you want to put your hand up? We have got Robin Baxter.
Robin looks after our major projects team, so he deals with all of the construction. Mike Dunstall, the living legend of geothermal. He's responsible for geothermal development for Contact. 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 food-grade CO2 questions, you can talk to him. Paul Bertha. Paul's from Roaring Forties. If you've got any wind questions, Paul's the person to talk to. 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 the strong relationships we have with our stakeholders. Now I'm going to invite Chris Abbott up. He's our Chief Corporate Affairs Officer.
He's going to put a bit of meat on the bones around our approach to that.
Thanks, Dorian. Morning, I could tell you I'm Chris Abbott. I'm the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer. The Contact 31 strategy, as Mike has said and will be often repeated today, is to lead New Zealand's renewable energy future. 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 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 Contact 31 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'll be a critical enabler for the execution of our strategy. The integration of Manawa has significantly increased the diversity and span of Contact's operations and the breadth of our stakeholders too. We recognize the important status and contribution of tangata whenua in particular, and we're fortunate to have developed strong and solid and enduring partnerships with our iwi across New Zealand. The integration of Contact and Manawa, for example, has increased our iwi relationships from six iwi to 44 iwi. We engage today with approximately 200 Māori 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 in decision-making and cultural integrity. Its goal is to embed kaitiakitanga and trust-based relationships that support sustainable development and respect mana. 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 of local communities and landowners, we've established 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 work. As we pursue our renewable growth aspirations under Contact 31, we recognize how important it is for early and proactive community engagement.
As Mike said, we will not always get it right from every stakeholder's perspective, but we will always focus on maintaining enduring trust with stakeholders and working together for mutual benefit. In respect of 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. We love all political parties equally. Last week, as Mike mentioned too, 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. Contact's NZD 2 billion investment under Contact 26 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 fact of unexpected gas decline impacting a 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 fact of unexpected 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 shift their load through the Good Plans. To support energy wellbeing, we've launched a NZD 5 million Good Initiative and removed impediments for 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 have spoken about, we've secured up to 10 PJ of gas that enables us to support these gas-reliant businesses. We've also signed the all-of-government contract gas supply deal to support core service providers such as schools, hospitals, and prisons. As you know, the Contact 26 strategy is to lead New Zealand's decarbonization. We expect that for FY2026, generation will 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 three emissions in the short term.
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. 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 two to three months, John, meaning Contact will no longer have thermal baseload generation in our portfolio. The complementary nature of the Contact and Manawa hydro generation assets will also deliver a significant decarbonization benefit, with Contact summer-weighted and Manawa's winter-weighted generation further reducing the need for thermal peaking. Our battery investment similarly will help optimize our portfolio and further displace thermal peaking in normal hydrological years.
Today, we re-inject all greenhouse gas emissions from our Te Huka geothermal plant, and we're continuing with initiatives to capture and re-inject 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, all with the potential to further significantly reduce thermal peaking. Where we're 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 one and scope two emissions by 45% by 2026, which uses 2018 as a base year. This is aligned with the Paris Agreement's 1.5 degrees Celsius pathway.
We expect to achieve 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 has talked through will directly benefit the environment. This will be delivered in many guises. Our Contact 31 investments will further reduce emissions from our portfolio. We will also be supporting New Zealand business and industry to decarbonise and grow with renewable electricity. The example discussed earlier was the agreement with New Zealand Steel to power the new electric arc furnace at Glenbrook. Practically speaking, it will cut coal use and eliminate around about 800,000 tonnes of CO2 annually, which represents approximately 1% of New Zealand's emissions. Our Contact 31 ambitions will further capitalise on these types of opportunities to deliver decarbonisation for New Zealand. Investment under Contact 31 will also support nature and biodiversity.
Te Mihi 2 and 3 investments will end geothermal fluid being released into the Waikato River. That minimizes our ecological impact, but also importantly addresses cultural concerns. We've got clear principles and a 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. We'll always undertake environmental assessments at pre-site feasibility, and we'll 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 Southland 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've 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. Certainly, we do not 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 were supported by Ngāi Tahu, Environment Southland, and the Department of Conservation, but unfortunately, not three panellists. Inevitably, the first panel's 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 has failed to deliver improving environmental outcomes.
All political parties regularly expressed to Mike 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 bedding 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 soon be onto 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 and visual and ecological impact is low, we will continue to use the existing pathway, which we know well. We are also using fast track legislation, which, as I mentioned, is now onto its fourth iteration to consent projects at pace and ensure that we can deliver projects at a competitive long run marginal cost. Even in fast track, we will always ensure meaningful engagement with stakeholders, which is often an oft-cited concern about this legislation. It is in our long-term interest to do so, and it is also the right thing to do. We currently have seven projects in the fast track process at various stages of development.
That includes, as Dorian mentioned, Southland Wind Farm, the Glorit Solar Farm, which is unfortunately currently under appeal by Forest & Bird, the reconsent of three Manawa hydro schemes, and we also have two wind farms courtesy of Manawa that are pre-approved for application within the Fast Track Approvals Act. Despite a challenging consenting environment, we're really confident 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 Contact 31. With that, I'll open it up to the floor for questions, and Dorian and I'll, where's Dorian? We'll just kind of sit up here and stand up here, and I think there's a microphone too. Do you have any burning questions for Dorian or I? He's roaming Mike to go around.
Morning, all. Just a quick one.
Have you guys updated your long run wholesale price path based on what you're putting in? I think you had 115-125 before. To follow on that, the Te Mihi 2 fill-in project, how is that costing look relative to, sorry, the new fill-in one? How's that cost looking relative to Te Mihi 2?
We have updated our price path, and it's 115-125. Yeah, stay the same at NZD 2025 real. 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're talking about Te Mihi stage three, the.
Oh, the little fill-in one, the 50 MW.
Oh, the Tauhara 2?
Tauhara 2.
Yeah, we're working through that at the moment.
It'll be in the range that we're sort of indicating in the 6.5-7.5. Every project grant, as you know, will be different. It depends whether we need to drill re-injection wells. We might not, but we may. Obviously, if you happen to do that, the number of kilometers of pipeline you're going to need to build. Also which OEM we decide to use as well, because we're pretty keen to try and stoke up a bit of competition in the marketplace as well, which should be good for the project. 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. We're looking to overlay all of that sort of stuff into it. It's, as Mike F calls it, a geo sprint.
We're working quickly to get it all firmed up, get all the right design done, and to get a very good economic case together at the same time. It'll be a good project.
Thanks, Dorian. Shall we leave the dividend and debt questions for Matt?
Definitely.
Morning. Thanks for those presentations. A couple of things for me. Just on the consenting, I guess Contact's had a couple of hiccups, it'll be fair to say, over the last year. Is there anything from, I mean, you can certainly see that there are some real challenges with the process and, I guess, certain parties that like to appeal things. I guess any learnings through that from your perspective, that things that you could potentially do a little bit better going forward?
Yeah, good question. There's obviously been three incidents over a reasonable period of time.
One was, I mentioned, the Southland Wind Farm, and that was a decision to decline by the panel, and we're in the process. We don't think we could have done anything different, is our view, and we remain confident that we will get that. 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 Hāwea. We applied under the fast track to have a variation in our operating range and to gain access to the SOSFIP, so the security supply additional capacity. That was done somewhat in haste and at the request of the government as it was legislating. You had the opportunity to put projects into the Schedule 2 of the Fast Track Act.
The reality, I think, is, and this is probably our main learning from this one, is that we probably did not 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. That was a learning for us, and we are currently evaluating. Ultimately, the minister did not feel comfortable in allowing it to progress to a panel. We are currently looking at and reviewing that. The third one in respect of Glorit Solar Farm, which is, we were successful and we received a panel. Ultimately, Forest & Bird, three minutes before the closing time, chose to make an appeal, and that is on a point of law. It is a technical issue.
Again, 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 that. I think what it really, the key for me is how we engage meaningfully and early on it. We know for projects like Hāwea , it's a very difficult ask for communities. It would be far easier for us to do nothing. We have just got to lean into it, and that's about us engaging early and consulting early.
One other thing I'd just add on that is just making sure we've got more irons in the fire. There are a lot of stakeholders at play when you're going through a consenting process. 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.
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 popping out the other end in a timely manner so that we can continue building. 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.
Thanks. Just a second question for me, a bit more detailed, I guess. Batteries, you're looking at two-hour batteries or maybe going to four-hour? I guess the other question in there is just around where you're seeing the CapEx trends for those future projects.
Yeah, at this stage, we're still looking at two-hour 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 four-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 one. They were the first off at sort of NZD 1.8 million a megawatt. We then came in at sort of NZD 1.6, NZD 1.5, NZD 1.6. We're comfortable that the next one that we take fit on early next year will be significantly below that. 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. Going the other way, the cost of gas has gone up significantly since our first business case. That sort of arbitrage of prices when you charge and sell has got a lot more attractive. Overall, the economics of these things is improving in our view. They really do support our portfolio in the North Island, as well as being something that's incredibly valuable to the energy system.
Thanks for the presentation. Just a couple of questions on geothermal.
Seem to be sort of three prizes that everybody's thinking about, the super critical resource that at least GNS are getting very excited about, the low to mid temperature sort of 5 TWh that Mercury have put on the table, and the northern TVZ fields that are protected at the moment and could be unlocked. What are you most excited about? Could you discuss each of those three?
Yeah, I mean, super critical stuff's really interesting. I mean, it's a big bet for someone like us to make. We are happy that the government's doing it, but it's really interesting. They are looking into it. It's not a moon shot. It's an Earth shot. We are 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 that's supporting that, as I said in my presentation. Those types of techniques being used on conventional fields that we have in New Zealand. 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 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.
Over time, as you develop a better understanding of those reservoirs like we've done with Tauhara, then pushing to get additional fluid consent, 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's team and making sure you're engaging with the right stakeholders and partners around that and sharing value and things like that. 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, I mean, we talked about that. That means Mercury, we're talking a bit about that as well. We've got slightly different probably views around the magnitude of it. We're thinking it is definitely worth pursuing, but we're looking at something smaller.
We think something like 50 MW is something that we should be targeting over the next five years. As I said with that, that's not easy. With the cost of steam field going up so much, those fields aren't really investable as long as you don't have the innovations to actually get the cost of steam pipelines and things like that down. You've got to overlay that type of approach to actually get those types of opportunities so that they hit your targeted returns. I'd say super critical, great, and there'll be some learnings that come out of that, but it's not for our balance sheet. Extending existing fields where you can is the most valuable thing. If you can develop some new technology to help doing that, brilliant. Greenfield is probably the next cab off the rank for us. [audio distortion].
Steven, sorry. It's been a long time.
Thanks, Steven. Just a question in terms of your linkages between demand growth and new projects. Obviously, you highlighted the sort of three possible scenarios in your thinking. 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? I'm assuming all of those would be additional to the sort of the growth you already see baked into FY2030. Some commentary about that?
Yeah, I mean, 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 onto 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. We are 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. That is how we're working on that for solar. In terms of wind, yes, I think 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. Therefore, it is important that you have a counterparty in the geographic vicinity of your wind farm to help reduce that risk.
That is going to be an important component of that. I mean, what that means is our Contact's portfolio gets the benefits of the oversized wind farm and the lower LRMC as well through that because we get access to the electricity and it is at a cheaper price than we would have got if we had done it sort of on our own, if you know what I mean, Neville. That is how we would approach it. Geothermal may or may not. Obviously, geothermal aligns very neatly with displacing base load thermal data centers. You saw we did some stuff with Microsoft. We may look at some opportunities around that, but we are comfortable the energy system needs base load renewables and therefore would be comfortable building that without having an off-take PPA.
Great, thanks. Just follow-up confirmations on the material you presented this morning.
We should think that batteries and geothermal definitely 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?
We're working through that at the moment. I'd like to think it would be one partner for more than one project. I think our relationship with Lights ource 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. 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 dollar per megawatt you get for the wind as well if you've got a program ahead of yourself. That's most likely where we'll end up.
Thank you.
Morning. Thanks, team. Just a quick question on phasing geothermal. I think you've got a consent for 80 MW at Tauhara stage two. Just wondering what the decision behind going for 50 first and then 100 later is.
I guess it's speed. Want to do 50 relatively quickly to support the energy system. We're comfortable the resource reservoir can handle 50. We do want to leave a little bit of insurance there for makeup for Tauhara if required. That's why we're not sort of building out in short order the entire 80 that we've got available to us now. It leaves a bit more time for that. Is there a transmission capacity constraint?
I think you're talking to that in Tauhara stage three, which may lift the CapEx per megawatt.
Yeah, yeah. Not for Tauhara two, but Tauhara three, there probably would be, yeah.
Does that still keep the cost within the guided range of 6.5-7?
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.
Yeah. Cool. The second question just on Batteries. Talking to a couple of your peers, obviously, last week as well, they talked to a market sized 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.
Yeah, I mean, as I said, I mean, we're pretty comfortable with the market sized at 900 MW. We see it as displacing the role that thermal capacity is playing at the moment in the marketplace with daily firming. We see it's dynamic.
I mean, we see it's growing all the time. Retail peak demand is growing faster than overall demand. That growth is going to get catered for by grid-scale batteries. We're pretty comfortable that the market's sized at that at the moment. I guess it's a little bit of a moot point because we're not going to get to 900 MW of batteries in the marketplace in the next couple of years. As I say, with the market growing as well, I don't think there's a huge chance of there being an overbuild. If there is, as I said, our position is we have less flexibility than everyone else. We benefit from an overbuild of batteries to a certain extent as well, our portfolio. That's why we're comfortable moving into this position as a leader.
Thanks.
Any more questions? Thanks for the questions.
Thanks, Chris and Dorian. Did we? Yeah. Okay. One more for Steven.
[Crosstalk] One or a difficult one, Steven. Easy one. Under armor.
No more questions.
Wairakei A and B, 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.
Yeah, I'm sort of renewable growth, not business as usual operations. The plan is, Dorian, do you want to say this? You're better.
I think the easiest way to think of Wairakei extension is we have Wairakei A, which has three 11 megawatt machines in it. We'll be retiring that middle of next year. We'll be extending the three 30 MW units in Wairakei B and part of the Wairakei binary up until 2031.
We'll be operating that somewhere from 80-90 megawatts, depending on the fluid that is available from Te Mihi too once that is powered up and with the ability to flex up when we also have outages across some of our other stations. 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. Okay. 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. All right.
Thank you, Shelley. [Foreign language] Kia ora koutou.
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, are some people who it is very, very dear to their heart because they have been living and breathing it in the last few months indeed. With me today is our Chief People Officer, Jan Bibby. Our Director of Integration, Matt Bolton, who many of you may remember as our former Chief Retail Officer. Of course, our Chief Generation Officer, John Clark. Welcome. This is going to be a conversational session where Jan and Matt and John will share some of their insights into the integration process. It has 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. Unfortunately, we're not going to have time for questions in this session because we are going to break for lunch. I would really encourage you afterwards, if you do want to have a chat to this lovely trio when we've broken for food, just feel free to have some questions there. John, let's start with you. You ready? Now, Manawa has 25 hydro schemes across the North and the South Islands. 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. They are 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 dam, weir, culvert, pond, and canal that there is to see. There is a beautiful elegance to how these things actually stitch together and harvest water for these schemes. 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. 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 the day-to-day operations. The asset strategies were well matched to the value that each scheme delivers in itself. Look, there is always room and I always like to chase ways to improve performance and safety.
It is important when bringing two organizations like this together that we learn from one another, that we somehow take the best that both have to offer to come out with something that is greater than the sum of the two halves. A great example around that is dam safety. Manawa is and was a significant owner of dams in New Zealand and has a really robust dam safety process. Now, we are taking that on board and actually applying that to our Clutha dams as well. At the same time, we are 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. That is really important because it is not always just about reliability. It is also about maintaining the trust and confidence of the communities in which we operate.
One other great thing is the proximity of most of the Manawa sites. Within 100 km of Contact's existing operational footprint, we can continue to collaborate, we can share resources, and we can provide engineering support across those sites. Manawa has a really robust enhancement project already underway, which is going to deliver up to 78 gigawatt hours of generation improvement through key replacements of turbines and generators, some life enhancement projects, and some significant dam safety enhancements. There are already key project wins on the board. Manawa has delivered Matahina and Waipori, the Bream Bay restoration, and significant dam safety works at Arnold, and High Bank and Coleridge continue to be in flight. These projects will deliver long-term value, both from generation uplift, reduced maintenance, and enhanced reliability.
I guess in summary, these are a really robust, high-value set of assets, and there's a lot of opportunity for us in them.
Thank you. I think I can honestly say I've even heard anyone talk about an engineering company as beautiful, elegant. Love it. Now, Matt, it's been four months since Manawa and Contact came together. As Integration 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?
Yeah, sure, Lou. Look, it's fair to say M&A activity is not Contact's DNA. We'd had Simply, we'd had Western. We kind of went quite long with Manawa, NZD 2.6 billion. 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.
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. 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, our people stayed safe, the assets kept running. In terms of reflections of where we're at now, look, as we head into Christmas, probably four major topics for me as I thought about it from the 11th of July till the Christmas break. The first is people. Jan will talk a little bit more about that shortly. We are well through bringing the operating models together for the two businesses. That was critical for me and for the business.
This was about a culture program, not just about the synergies or acknowledges room, but we needed to bring this business together really well to ensure it would continue to run. We're largely through that now, which is superb. We've been able to migrate two and a half, about 2,500 ICPs, their CNI business into our Simply environment now. That'll allow us to decommission their platforms and start as decommissioning work. All of those ICPs have been migrated across now. Half of them have been built out of the Simply platform, the other half from the 1st of December. That is going incredibly well with no impact on those customers. A significant milestone for that part of the business.
Tim's here from our trading team, but 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 two portfolios. That's going exceptionally well. I would invite you to talk to Tim over the break as well to think about how trading's going with the combined portfolio. The final thing for me, being the ex-retail guy, is the two brands will come together. We've been able to gift the name of Manawa back to Ngāti Hangarau , but we'll bring the two brands together this side of Christmas. As we come out of the January break, you will just largely see Contact in market. 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 NZD 28 million annualized run rate within the 12-18 months. We are pretty comfortable that that is happening. There is a lot of hard work there, but we are comfortable. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel. John has, of course, talked about the portfolio or the asset refurb program. We feel we are pretty comfortable with the portfolio benefits and, of course, the Mercury repricing into the current wholesale environment. I am sure the Maths is not too hard to see there, but we feel we will hit that number as well. Lou.
Thank you, Matt. 1,400 initiatives. Here we go. With any business acquisition, Jan, bringing two entities together, it is highly disruptive to a business, let alone 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?
Yeah, there's no doubt that when someone announces a potential acquisition, everybody wants to be involved. 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 set up, and appointed some of our really good people to lead those work streams. That group collectively developed the plan that Matt's just talked about that had about 1,400 initiatives in the program system that we were tracking to. At the same time, we constantly reinforced 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.
That was a consistent message over the months. They probably saw some of their colleagues who were pouring a lot of hours into developing that plan and thought they were probably better off doing BAU. There is 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 did not even know whether it was going to go ahead or not. It would be fair to say it has gone really, really well. We are on the cusp of completing the operating model change. 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. That has gone well. We welcome another 40-45 people on the 8th of December across onto the Contact system.
That pretty much leaves all of that operating model change now completed. We had targeted to do that by the end of December. We are well on track. I have done in my career, I have led and been involved in quite a number of acquisitions. I have to say this is probably the one that has gone the best of any I have been involved in. I really believe that was down to two things. One was the absolute meticulous planning to the very last detail that we did. 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 was a smaller business known for focus on managing cost. How is the new Contact going to leverage this expertise as we deliver cost and capital efficiency with Contact 31?
Look, the first thing, I'd assure the room here that Contact was also pretty diligent with its cost management. The performance in the retail business, I think, is a great example of that, of investing in the right places. However, you've always got to enter these things. John mentioned earlier, you need to learn. I think that's where Contact's culture is now. I think the insight for me is that Manawa is a business that's 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 exit a retail business. You chuck 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 people safe. It is a very diverse business with very different assets, albeit in the hydro space. There is a bit of magic in their DNA that we were really curious about. What I think we are 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. We are learning all the time about how to do things slightly differently. We have had the asset management or the dam safety view there. We will continue to see that, Lou, across the coming months. We have a number of the team, as Jan just said, coming onto the Contact team. We are learning all the time. It is fair to say that, as I mentioned, they look at it differently.
It's a good challenge point for us to embrace. I'd like to see some one plus one equals three off the back of it.
Thank you, Matt. John, we've talked a lot about Contact and the portfolio benefits of bringing their hydro schemes together. Now you're operating this combined portfolio. What have you learned and how are these really going to show up in practice?
Okay, I think firstly, we're just absolutely pleased and blown away at how well these two portfolios can stitch together. It's not just theory anymore. We can actually see it in the numbers. Manawa assets do have a clear North Island winter bias. It's the exact opposite of our Clutha scheme. It's been really good to see our earnings volatility has dropped significantly.
You only have to look at August, September, really, to see that where we could flex the assets around each other, where we saw winds dropping on and off. We saw thermal gas savings, and we saw the Clutha flexibility coming to the fore backed by the hydro assets. Within the first few months, we have identified a way to lift earnings by about NZD 15 million. That is without increasing any risk. That is absolutely awesome. The context has also shifted a little bit since we started the due diligence around the Manawa acquisition. We have landed the Greymouth Gas deal. We have the strategic reserve at Huntley in place, and we have managed to shift a bunch of gas and electricity deals. We see further opportunity ahead of us in fixed price sales. I mean, to be able to achieve that alignment across portfolios is critical.
We have made solid progress on that front with spot market optimization, with portfolio modeling, and long-term channel strategy management. The two trading teams have come together really well. We now have a combined set of portfolio tools where we can test scenarios and capacity decisions under different inflow and wind conditions. Standalone, both companies would have been at their risk limits. As a combined entity, we can take on more sales without actually breaching those limits. We are confident we can commit to further sales through winter 2026 and beyond. 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. 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.
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 and our success. At Contact, we're renowned for our transformational ways of working and our particularly strong culture with our people. Can you tell us about your strategy across capabilities and culture for the combined business? How is this going to support the execution of Contact 31?
Yeah, 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. They were pretty new in creating it, but they're very proud of it as well.
There are many similarities between us in terms of our culture, and there are some nuances. I really do believe if you bring those things together into something, you can create something pretty special. We have 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. We have 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 if we continue to grow and inspire those people and empower them to come to work and do their very best work every day, that will help us to ensure our success.
John talked a little bit about custodianship. The thing that I've been really amazed by is that the passion and the belief of all of our people in 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. If we can really empower and inspire our people, then we can collectively lead New Zealand's renewable energy future.
Thank you, Jan. That's a perfect spot and a really good point to finish upon. Thank you, Jan. Thank you, Matt, and thank you, John.
Now back to you, Shelley.
Thank you. Thank you, Lou. I do not think there are microphones on. Thanks. Thanks to our panel and thanks to the presenters from this morning. We are now going to take a break. For those of us watching online, we will be on pause for the live stream, and that will resume at 12:40. We will see you then. Okay, we are no longer live.
[audio distortion] . Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you enjoyed lunch. I am Carolyn Luey, and I am 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 Contact 26, 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 Contact 26, our retail business has delivered strong performance across a number of areas. We have 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. More recently, we launched the Good Initiative to support those that are in hardship or vulnerable in our communities. We committed to invest NZD 5 million this year in expanding the number of customers we can support with wellbeing 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 a third of our customers having electricity plus either gas, broadband, or mobile with us.
This delivers both better retention and growth in EBITDA, 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 MPS, are more likely to stay, and have helped us shift peak load. We have also released three Flex Products to enable customers to get even greater value, with like Hot 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 five years, we have made great progress in cementing ourselves as a truly multi-services provider in the market. 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 one 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 products and choice.
With the cost of living challenges, customers are seeking more value and actively engaging in 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 personalized 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 Kiwis to electrify and contribute to New Zealand's renewable energy future. We have three 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 our 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 multi-product 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.
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 innovative 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 five 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 FY2027 with all customers live on the new platform by FY2031. We'll continue to reduce cost to serve per customer, decreasing it to NZD 90 per customer by FY2031, enabled by a new technology platform being embedded across the retail business.
Finally, lifting retail demand flex from 10 MW today to 65 MW 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 customer 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 are 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's load shape.
The overall market for retail flex is between 500 MW and 700 MW 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 MW 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 Contact's Virtual Power Plant platform that uses AI to automatically charge EVs during low demand periods is providing valuable 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 shape by reducing the demand peaks.
Contact's retail business is focused on supporting all New Zealanders through the energy transition. 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 for both us and them, and continuing to innovate and deliver great value through our multi-product offering across energy, broadband, and mobile, particularly supporting our gas customers through the transition as the gas supply continues to taper off. Importantly, focusing on energy wellbeing 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. 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.
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 five 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 Contact 26 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.
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 three 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 workovers of those wells to ensure we're getting the most capacity out of our plant. 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 of observations coming through. 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 have also increased our focus on trading. Tim got a plug earlier. I would 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 will double down on, as you will 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 seeing significant amounts of opportunity here. 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 one retailer in New Zealand. Carolyn talked a bit about retail, and this is a nice theme about the sort of surgical investment we have made.
You do not 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. We started at 40% of self-service interactions five years ago. Now we are up to nearly 80%. What that means is when a customer on a multi-product 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 have 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 will talk about, whether that is trading, generation, or retail.
Most organizations and a lot of the other CTOs with whom I speak are now learning the hard way that agentic AI does not come first. It is the data readiness, the data migration, the data cleansing, and that is how you actually get opportunity from agentic AI. We have invested in the right thing first, along with capability and data governance, so that we can accelerate into the agentic era. Corporates become an increasing focus of late. A lot of that is around automation, as you might imagine, in the HR space, whether it is onboarding or offboarding or finance. We have 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. I have mentioned along the way here some of the investments we have made.
We had early partnerships with AWS, early partnerships with Databricks, and Databricks has assessed our capability on their platform as the most mature in New Zealand. We are going to double down on that over the next five years and take advantage of it. From a pure technology perspective, 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 across the enterprise. We will take that foundational element we've built and we will now step into a more vocal leadership role for New Zealand. 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 Energy. We'll continue on that. We'll re-architect the organization. We'll get slimmer, we'll get faster, we'll get more effective. 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 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 KiwiSaver, depending on your KiwiSaver provider, it reminds me how important this is for us and how we will not take our eye off this. What does this mean for Contact 31?
In generation, we continue to make sure we get the most out of our consent, 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 Manawa, 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 our 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, un-upgraded, excuse me, which has left a lot of opportunity for us. It was almost a godsend in hindsight that we did not plow ahead with our plans because now the tools are there, they are more advanced, and each one of the potential options has already been rolled out at another tier one 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 Contact 31, and this is making sure we're doing this in a very smart way, along with agentic AI, but also the basic tools around automation and data availability. In that data and enterprise tech space, simplification, simplification, simplification. Along the way here, we'll be delivering the Manawa integration. Most of the work for Manawa 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 Manawa 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. 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. All right, here comes the 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 have market-making algorithms out there, and we also have a very strong trading portfolio optimization tool, but we haven't stopped there.
I mean, our trading and technology teams, they've engaged with energy trading operations in overseas environments, and we've done that because a free exchange of learnings and insights can take place as we operate in non-competitive markets. The transition, I think, has been characterized by rapid change over the last five years. There's more intermittent generation. There's changing markets. Spot markets are getting more volatile. Grid-scale batteries are coming in. There's the beginning of the home retail integration and growing residential solar and distributed resources. 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 dedicated technology support working closely with your trading business. Off-the-shelf optimization for incumbents can be dangerous, and it's better to control VIP.
In-house development of intellectual property tools and trading strategies with in-house expertise becomes very important. Digital trading, to me, is a people capability as well as a risk management initiative. 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 value while taking on and understanding what is acceptable risk.
The next steps in our trading technology roadmap will center on creating a centralized platform for both the Manawa 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 periods. For our portfolio in the near term, this means the Glenbrook BESS, the first integration program requiring algorithmic trading tools online first quarter of 2026, and the Coleridge scheme with its large flexible hydro asset suitable for optimization. Background on HOWARD, I'm not going to explain what's on the slides.
is much more out of people in the room than me who can just explain how machine learning works, but essentially it is a decision support tool for Clyde and Roxburgh hydro stations. 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. The benefits are it maximizes value by aligning operations with market opportunities to circa just under NZD 8 million per annum. It manages risk and ensures compliance, and it is also extendable to other hydro schemes, and we will adopt this approach for some of the other Manawa schemes. Background on BatMan. Look, it is an automatic trading tool for the Glenbrook BESS.
It optimizes bids and offers in the energy and reserve markets up to 72 periods ahead. Through data integration, it takes in price forecasts 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. 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 of two hours. It enables real-time responsiveness and automation and is scalable for future battery assets. If you have any questions on how either of those works and how Bayesian 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.
Thanks very much. Just curious as to the migration timeline for your new tech platform. It looks like you've been pretty generous in giving yourselves three or four years. Hopefully, it'll be shorter than that. Just wanting to get your views on why you had that in the presentation.
Because we did not really say what all our other targets were between FY2027 and FY2031. It will not be FY2031. We will get into detailed design, feasibility, vendor selection in the first six months of next calendar year. My expectation is it will take somewhere between 18 months and two 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.
Thanks. The second question, your cost of serve is already very low. As you migrate, are there any components of that current low cost of serve that you can bring over to, I suppose, the next way of operating when you migrate systems?
Yeah, I guess our cost of serve is a very good platform to build from. I have spent quite a lot of time in our call centers trying to understand the size of the opportunity. I know that once we can consolidate our 14 systems that our call centers use to service customers down to one, there are huge amounts of efficiency in terms of average handling time, after call work, and leveraging AI agents to kind of do some of the pre-qualification piece. Overseas, people are using conversational AI to do verification of the customer and to do intent. That can save up to 45 seconds on a call.
If you think about our average handling time as 11 and a half minutes, there is 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. Absolutely, we'll take what we've got today into the new world, and then we'll build from there. We're not waiting for the new platform. We're already building our agentic tools right now. I expect that cost of serve will continue to slowly glide down before we get to the new platform.
Thanks.
Thank you. Just two questions on the algorithmic trading. 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.
Thanks. Just secondly, there's been some concern in some other markets around extended use of 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. For us, it'll be a bit of a learning process. 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. 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. Thank you.
Thanks for the presentations. 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 will be off of the third one by the end of this month. Our ERP and billing were refreshed two years ago. We moved to SAP S/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. We will explore whether billing from a capability perspective is something we need to get into along the way.
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?
We've made it a little 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 multi-service 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 multi-product customer we've had to configure a new product for now have over 10,000 products along with 27 distribution companies, for all of whom we need to design unique products again. It is a little complicated in New Zealand because of the distribution network setup.
It's a little bit even more complicated because of the way SAP was configured 10 years ago. The replatforming itself will help us simplify a lot of that, take a lot of the back-end effort out. As an industry in New Zealand, we do not find to be particularly onerous compared to Germany, for example, or U.K. where we talk to other energy retailers.
Just on your cost of serve, you've got a target of NZD 90 per customer. How much of that decline from NZD 110 is due to increased customer number?
None really. Most of it is coming from greater efficiencies out of the call center and the back office. We have quite a big back-end operations team just because of what Tai talked to you about is we've got a very complex product catalog at the moment and there's a lot of manual work requests falling out. A lot of that saving will come from our back-end operations automation and from our call centers.
Still just curious about your assumption in terms of customer growth. Is it you are not expecting much growth or you think even with meaningful customer number growth, you'd expect the marginal benefit you get from a cost of serve point of view is marginal as well?
Yeah, it's not massively modeled on big customer growth. I think it'll play out differently over the next five years depending on what happens with the wholesale price and as our generation capacity grows. At this point in time, 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 CNI, 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 standalone platforms for both CNI and retail. Our headwinds in that regard. That being said, the CNI platform has gone pretty well recently, particularly with the migration of the Manawa customers into our Simply environment. At the same time, we've built some gas billing capabilities for CNI into our retail environment to handle the all-of-government gas contract. I think the short answer is everything's 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 CNI capabilities and choose a separate vendor for mass market?
We haven't made that determination yet.
Okay, thanks.
Just had a quick one on retail flex capacity. I found that chart pretty interesting in terms of the TAM at 500 MW-600 MW. Fast forwarding the clock, FY2031, you're targeting 65. I imagine the 500 or 600 grows pretty substantially as well. It is a 10% market share on that number now, sort of pretty small number. I would have thought in FY 2031, just wondering what the bottleneck is or what the constraint is to get anybody there.
It's quite a complex ecosystem to, I guess, get the whole ecosystem moving in the same direction because it's dependent on having the right meter. It's dependent on customers having the right devices in the home. There is an addressable market and then us trying to grow our share above our current market share. I think there's a lot of dependencies on that. That's why we're not quite sure exactly what the roadmap and the path is going to be to that target, but we've got five years. We're going to be putting in a new platform and the market's going to change.
Okay, thanks.
Are there any other questions? Okay, thanks to our speakers.
Good day everyone. I'm Matt Forbes, CFO of Contact Energy. Today might just be the day that Mike regrets that international search for CFO. It's really great to be.
It's really great to be here today to share how the Contact financial framework will support our Contact 31 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'll 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. On the slide, we have six areas of differentiation between us and our peers. We are the country's geothermal leader, delivering baseload energy that is not dependent on weather. In a highly renewable market, geothermal is special.
It provides stability and certainty when other technologies just can't. Our position is strengthened by being New Zealand's second largest renewable hydro operator. 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. 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. 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 have 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 is 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 have come from through Contact 26. We understand that investors have a real choice, and that is why our track record is so important to us. Under Contact 26, we consistently beat expectations.
We delivered a material uplift in EBITDA, achieved project IRRs of 13%-14% on our major capital investments at Tauhara and Te Huka 3. When the numbers are tallied for the Manawa acquisition, I'm confident that this project will also receive expectations above our investment case. Importantly, we've been able to adapt to these major construction challenges throughout Contact 26. 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? Here we outline the Contact business model. The cornerstone of our performance is securing those long-term industrial PPAs via fixed-priced 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 five years. 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 scaled 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. 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.
As you know, hydro assets have better controllability and longer asset lives. That is even before factoring the synergies we will receive from the transaction. Thirdly, risk management. That hydro diversity has reduced our risk. In the two months since Manawa joined the Contact group, our earnings at risk metrics reduced by NZD 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 NZD 96 million improvement in EBITDA from the standalone 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 NZD 23 million-NZD 28 million cost synergy range.
None of these figures include the development pipeline that Dorian outlined earlier, which will further increase the value we expect to realize from the combination over time. In short, Manawa gives us ballast. It will deliver strong returns and position Contact as a scaled competitor as we enter the next phase of renewable investment. Now let's explore how we think about capital allocation under Contact 31. Our priorities are clear and they're sequenced for impact. Firstly, we need to keep the power stations running. Operational performance is a non-negotiable. 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. Returning to our 2.6x -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. Finally, discipline 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 will notice this category also includes NZD 140 million of time-bound sustaining CapEx investments over the five-year period. These are classified as stay-in-business CapEx projects 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 Wairakei Extension and Decommissioning, completion of the Manawa Enhancement Program, costs associated with new initiatives as per the Contact 31 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 are 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 are 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 Te Huka 3 are not 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. Their portfolio asset 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 Lights ource bp solar joint venture in our wind development aspirations, bringing in partners with expertise in procurement and project delivery, which help de-risk execution.
The table shows our minimum target returns for each of these projects. Just for some context, there are some discrepancies or differences between our current targets and the expected target returns. For example, off-balance sheet solar IRRs currently are well above these thresholds 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've 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. With net debt to EBITDA expected to be at the higher end of the S&P range for FY2026 and dividends linked to operating free cash flow, understanding how we plan to fund these growth investments is crucial. Our approach starts with growing EBITDA 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 non-negotiable. It gives us continued access to deep liquid international debt markets with the benefits evidenced by our recently issued EUR 1 billion bond earlier this month. Issuance 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 FY2025. We have a further liquidity runway of NZD 1 billion, which helps us manage risks during a build program.
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. Here is how our sales channels will evolve as the Mercury and INSA's 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-priced 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 NZD 115 million-NZD 125 million in 2024 real terms.
While retail net back looks in line with CNI 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. 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 we'll bring to market. This balance gives us really good flexibility and helps us manage risk as we grow our share of renewables. Contact 31 isn't just about growth. Productivity is a crucial part of what we're trying to achieve. We're targeting a NZD 38 million in run rate savings by FY27.
That is NZD 28 million from the Manawa integration and a further NZD 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. 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 FY2027. 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 EBITDA bridge here.
This includes our priority investment targets under Contact 31, 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 EBITDA 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 NZD 120 million supporting our deleveraging.
This takes us to approximately NZD 1.1 billion, with the addition of growth projects subject to FID contributing to a fully ramped exit run rate of NZD 1.3 billion-NZD 1.4 billion in FY2031. This includes all the projects outlined earlier except for Tauhara 3, as it is only targeted for FID right at the end of the period. We've also included a range of NZD 0-NZD 50 million in incremental EBITDA 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. It is 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 NZD 2 billion and NZD 2.5 billion over the next five 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 5-10% compound annual growth rate, moving from about NZD 3.25 billion to NZD 3.75 billion in fiscal year 2026 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 TWh . This is a 30% increase in volumes, unlike the price tailwind that we had in Contact 26. EBITDA margins are expected to sit between 24%-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%-60% of EBITDA as some of those time-bound standard business CapEx investments roll off. To support growth and then near-term deleveraging towards our target, dividend increases will likely sit at the lower end of our 80%-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 FIDs 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 FY2026 FID include the Glorit Solar Farm and the BESS 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. Contact 31 is fully fundable from Contact's balance sheet, supported by the same optionality that underpinned Contact 26. 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.
We'll take our final set of questions now. Anything on the financials or anything from the day that you haven't had answered just yet?
Grant. Obviously, first question, dividend. Just take what Matt went through. It does imply around about NZD 0.79 of free cash flow for dividends on a run rate 2031. This NZD 0.50 number that's thrown out there, can you talk about how conservative that is? If you've got a four-year trailing, should we be considering four years post 2031, we will be at least NZD 0.79 of dividend?
I'm glad you can multiply the five numbers we put out there. Grant, I think you're about right. Clearly, we're looking at continuing to deleverage and to fund the options within our portfolio. We agree. That's why we're developing all of these renewable assets. We think that they're going to throw off a lot of cash. They're going to deliver a lot of benefits for shareholders, 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. We are not going to be looking to give guidance beyond FY31 at this stage, but we believe with a reasonable set of assumptions, the minimum NZD 0.50 dividends will meet those expectations.
Okay, conservative, thanks. Then, Mike, I think this question's for you. With your cost to serve going from NZD 113 down to NZD 90, does that open the door that maybe [audio distortion] says, "Let's do that with instead"?
Oh, look, we're focused on our own business. Let's be absolutely clear about that. I had a bad experience of working a mass market telco as Carolyn did as well, and we both fled that regime very quickly. 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. 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.
No conversation with Jason Boyce on that front yet?
No, not.
Thanks. 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-2.8x debt to EBITDA by FY2031, but that does come with quite a bit of extra PPA risk. 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 that flexibility. Those PPAs, look, this is one of the critical things between us and IPP. We signed up that PPA for Kōwhai Park. We've now contracted a large amount of the output from Kōwhai Park to the likes of Simply and other dairy. Interestingly, we signed up Fonterra for the Fonterra conversion before we got the Glorit consent, and then we'll build into that. That ability to not be time-bound or time-chained is actually one of our key attributes, that we can build, sign up the PPA, and then on-sell it, or we can on-sell and then build. 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. We obviously, when we talk about our 2.9x net debt to EBITDA, that actually started the year 2.3x . We leveraged up for Manawa, and we've got NZD 500 million of growth CapEx, which is delivering the next wave of EBITDA growth. 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. That outperformance, you just go, "Right, let's do that again. Let's do it again." That conservatism that you talked about is actually keeping us in very good shape.
Thanks for those answers, and thanks for a great outlook and good explanations behind that.
Andrew.
Yes, thanks for the day. A couple of sort of topics really for me. You've described wind and solar as non-core. 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 non-core. Electricity is our core, but what we see is that ability. Look, if we do wind the way that others in the market do wind, we're going to come third or fourth. We need to find a way of getting partners to catch the competition and establish a lead against them. That is going to come through scale and new partnerships as we did with solar. That is the thinking behind that. You've got to do, we have to do that stuff differently, which is why it goes off-balance sheet. 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 onto 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 de-risked, 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 MW plant. Those are fundamental to what we're trying to achieve at this stage, and that's why solar and wind are off-balance sheet.
Just related to that, then on the wind side of things, if you do not get a partner, is there any risk there in terms of not getting a partner? Does that mean your wind development pipeline falls away?
We will find a partner. There is no shortage of potential partners in a range of different scenarios lining up. 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 and demand through PPAs. We'll get that growth and demand. 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. If you can quid pro quo, if we don't achieve that, then we won't get the right to do wind. I see that as a really key point. We're going to have to work hard to earn that right.
Last question from me is, again, also related to the dividend, but you talk about the buyback as a potential, particularly if you have dividends unimputed. Just to clarify, I guess the $0.50 a share is after any buybacks. Buybacks might be in addition to that. Secondly, some guidance, I guess, around imputation going forward. Clearly, that is something that you are 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. I would not take those two 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%+ returns, and that is 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. I have sort of got a personal aversion to paying out too many unimputed dividends.
Thanks. In terms of imputation level guidance, because your circuit's sort of 80% now, I think you expected it to go down a wee bit.
Y e ah.
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 Te Huka 3 plant, even though it sort of only came online about seven and a half minutes after the tax announcement. So those types of things, obviously positive for operating cash flow, but not great for imputation.
Steven.
Thanks for the presentation. 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 six 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. I just wanted to clarify that all of those numbers for 2031 build in that assumption.
Yeah, 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 last electron dispatched at that LRMC. 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 price summers and higher prices in winter. We didn't see that 10 years ago. We can see that intraday volatility peaking, and then with batteries coming off. The important thing is less about, well, what's your average price pass?
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.
Yeah, all of our assumptions are around that long-run expectations around price. Mike's 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 NZD 200. We've got the HFO, which is in that same ballpark. We're spending the same amount turning off the Tiwai Point Aluminium 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. That is why we're so committed to getting those 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.
We still believe with the amount of solar that's coming into market that we will see a severe aversion to prices over time. Remember the forward market and the spot market, they sort of move in opposites. If you're in energy scarcity, the spot market pricing is lower than your forward prices. If it flips the other way around, it can flip quite quickly.
Everybody here should be selling the futures price and buying Contact Energy equity, essentially.
Just one final question, I suppose, on all of that. Are you in the camp that sees peaking factors for solar collapse to 40% in the next 30 years?
No, 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. We do see a decline because today, obviously, you can build a solar plant and the peaking factors above one. We think it is a time-bound opportunity, and over the next five years, we will see a reduction in those peaking factors, more like towards sort of 70%. Rationality within the market will stop sort of self-harm going forward. The people that are building the solar farms have all got very similar capital management strategies, and they have also got quite similar approaches to thinking about how the market works. I do think we have 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 it's in the background of the industry, which is the sort of political risk coming to next year. I'm not going to throw hypotheticals at you, but maybe the question to ask that you can answer is kind of 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? How receptive are they to those messages that you're giving 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 the people in this room. It's our defense for the politicians. We have laid down NZD 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. Yeah? 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." It is not just the money, it is the capability and capacity that we have been able to retain in this country. 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 cannot argue with facts. They cannot argue with the delivery. As we enter into next year, yes, the energy will be part of it because, look, no one likes rising electricity prices, and there have been challenges in the transmission and lines charges which have gone up. We have to front that and tell our story and tell our story well.
We have to continue to deliver. We have to continue to actively engage with our stakeholders, as Chris outlined today. That fundamental premise of it's not about a glib promise, it's about real delivery. That's the best defense that any individual or any company can have in the environment we operate in New Zealand.
Thanks. 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. Do you think in terms of your own pricing, when you've run the rule over the rules, whether or not that would have an impact? Because as you pointed out earlier, you're taking sort of a long run view on retail pricing. When you compare it to a spot price, you would say it's underwater. 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. 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. 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.
Thank you.
Okay, no further questions. Thanks, Matt. Mike, if you'd like to close us out on stage, Mike, we'll take that.
Okay. I'm aiming for two o'clock.
You can take as long as you like.
Wow.
Dangerous.
[Foreign language] Kia ora tatau, and thank you again for being here today and for some outstanding questions. Just to make some closing comments, just an announcement. I talked about behind Contact 26, and it looks all very sunshine and roses, but we are all painfully aware that that was a difficult journey where we had to build the muscle tone around project development and execution. It was a painful process. I am pleased to announce today that we have just been approved resource consent for 400 MW of battery at Glenbrook, an additional 400 MW. We talk about those Southland Wind, Lake Hāwea , we are learning, we are adapting, we are acquiring that expertise, that instinct, which will carry this company well into Contact 31+ . Hot off the press, and no, I have not yet told my board, so they are just finding out now.
Look, just to repeat, we've laid the groundwork and have a clear vision for success through Contact 31. The market and our strong position present an opportunity to further build on our Contact 26 achievements. Contact 31+ will see Contact lead New Zealand's renewable energy future. It is not just about decarbonization now. It is about a renewable energy future where us as Aotearoa have a chance to lead the world. For goodness' sake, we need to seize that opportunity because, as I indicated before, it is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. We will continue to lead the energy transition here at home and homes and paying customers to shift their energy use while making every interaction easy and personal. The Good Plans have been a key part of that and will continue to be.
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 delivered. You will see Te Mihi 3 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 MW of solar. We will be committed to over 500 MW of wind. 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 of serve.
You will see that 65 MW. These are all hard commitments by which this leadership team is standing up and saying, "You can hold us to account." Financial, you will see that ROIC improvement of about 300 basis points. You will see that NZD 1.2 billion-NZD 1.3 billion of EBITDA with the exit rate of NZD 1.3 billion-NZD 1.4 billion. You will see that dividend. Yes, Grant, we are being conservative, but that has kept us safe in an ambitious program over these last five years. Now, what's important? It's not just 2031. There is a stake in the ground. FY2027 is critically important to this company. You will see Te Mihi Stage 2 on. You will see the Glenbrook Battery on. You will see Kōwhai Park up and running. You will see the wind farm consented. You will see those OpEx numbers which Matt talked to.
You will see those manual benefits, not just talked about and us getting increasingly confident about, but you will see them in the bottom line. You will see that dividend. We are not just saying, "Wait five years." We are actually setting out a bit of a roadmap and a bit of a waypoint on the way to which you can hold us to account. I think that is 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, number two out of 500. This is the second time I have presented this slide, and it is going to be presented a lot more over the coming years. This is, ladies and gentlemen, Contact 31+ , 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.