Good day, welcome to the Fiscal Year 2021 Half Year Results Briefing conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Marc England. Please go ahead, sir.
Good morning, welcome to Genesis Energy's half year result presentation for the financial year 2021. You got myself, Chris Jewell, our CFO here, and Stephen McSweeney, investor relations, and a number of others listening in. I'll take you through the first couple of slides, hand over to Chris, and then come back and talk about operational and strategic updates. Today, we have the pleasure of delivering a really strong first half result too, which we're extremely pleased with. There are some market headwinds ahead, we're confident of beating the strategic EBITDAF goal of NZD 400 million that we set out to deliver in 2016. As you'll have seen, upgrading our guidance for the full year this morning. If I can start with slide four and just cover some of the highlights from my perspective, I won't read through it all.
The business has come a long way in the last few years. We've turned ourselves into a resilient and technology-focused company. Always seeking new and innovative ways of engaging our customers, operating our assets, and working smarter. Amongst the retail highlights, many of these are attributed to being embedded in the business as it continues to innovate and become more efficient. Many of the successes we're calling out today were started a number of years ago, and we're seeing the fruit of that labor, and really pleased with the hard work that many Genesis people have put into it. Of note, customer uptake of our digital tools continues to develop, and we're giving them more control of their energy and more things they can think about around how they control their home or their business.
As of January, we had more than 229,000 customers using our app, which doesn't seem very long ago. When we relaunched it, we were at just up to 100,000. Energy IQ has now become the tool that many of our customers use to engage themselves in their energy way beyond just looking at their bill at the end of the month. Energy IQ's Tip Center, which gives customers ideas to help reduce their energy usage, has had more than 380,000 interactions since July 2020. We're also significantly improving our customer care packages and processes, resulting in lower bad debt. In fact, that's probably one thing we're most pleased of coming off the back of COVID last year.
It was a catalyst for us to double down on our efforts to support our customers who were struggling, some of whom had had really good payment histories and then had short periods of paying. Through a program we call Manaaki Tangata, we've worked with them, and with government agencies, to be fair, who deserve some of the credit for it, to make sure that they stay with us, remain loyal, and we help them through difficult times. This half, we've also seen the benefits of some long-term planning investment come through on several fronts, notably in our wholesale division, which puts us in a strong position for the future. You'd have noticed that we've put a significant investment into the Tekapo Intake Gate this year or last year.
That's now finished and complete, giving us a level of seismic protection that we've just never had and Tekapo's never had since inception. While we were doing that, we did a number of improvements to a number of different generators and units across the Tekapo scheme, it's now in great shape and running at full pelt right now down in South Island. Really pleased with the effort that our people put into that. Also, as we may have called out last year, worked through COVID. We were alongside contractors to make sure we could get the work done in good time. We're also very proud of the Waipipi Wind Farm, which first energized the grid late last year and is now fully online.
That's adding an extra feather in the portfolio for us and enabling us to have more renewable energy in the system and displace what would otherwise be carbon-emitting energy. We've also started the rollout of advanced gas meters, which we're proud of, the first retailer in New Zealand to do that. That's been an investment they've been working on for a couple of years, which will start to give gas customers the same insights electricity customers have. You'll have noted we made a recent announcement about an investment in Ecotricity, which is New Zealand's only 100% certified renewable electricity retailer. It will be an arm's length arrangement for us. They will continue to operate independently, and some of you who know them may have some questions later on it. As a side say, our EBITDAF for the half was NZD 217 million, and NPAT was up to NZD 53 million.
Cash flow is also up versus the same comparable period, and net debt and EBITDAF interest costs are down. In all together, great result, which we're very proud of, and Chris will take you through it in more detail shortly. If I could just direct you to slide five briefly. Just wanted to make the point that we're planning for the future too, not just sitting there enjoying the fruits of the last four or five years' labor. We see ourselves playing our role to empower New Zealand's sustainable future. Partnerships with companies like Ecotricity, the RFP process around Future-gen to build new renewable options, and many other activities are part of that today.
You'll have noted that the RFP that we've talked about in the market for 6,000 GWh of renewable generation options will be assessed over the next few months, and we're reasonably optimistic that there are plenty of opportunities out there to continue to displace our base of thermal, while also empowering New Zealand's sustainable future by standing up for the need for backup thermal to back up this reliable, stable electricity market that can help the economy decarbonize in other areas. We've been prepared to back up our Future-gen program with a bold commitment around carbon emissions through the science-based target. I'll talk about that a bit later. We've committed to removing at least 1.2 million tons of carbon annually by the time we've delivered our Future-gen program and in meeting that science-based target for 2025.
You'll all know that that target is internationally recognized and verified, so it's not something we just came up with, and we didn't announce it until we were reasonably confident that we knew how we were going to deliver it. We've got some new build projects that we need to work with partners to get up and running in order to actually fulfill it. I'll touch on some of that more in detail in the strategy section. In the meantime, though, I'd like to hand over to Chris to talk you through our financial results in more detail.
Thank you, Marc. I'll start on slide seven, our half year financial summary. This just summarizes all of our key metrics, and we'll dive into the drivers of each of these in a bit more detail. Just to repeat at a headline level, EBITDAF is NZD 50 million up on the prior comparable period. NPAT, underlying earnings, operating cash flow, free cash flow, all up on PCP. Net debt is NZD 65 million down on PCP. Operating expenses are slightly up, as is capital expenditure for good reason, and we'll talk to those. Slide eight, dividends. This covers our dividend history and puts in context our half year dividend announcement. Today we announced a half year dividend of NZD 0.086 per share, which is half FY 2020 full year dividend, and in a similar trend to what we've done over the past four years.
It's also consistent with honoring our dividend policy of growing dividends in real terms over time. The dividend remains 80% imputed, and we continue to pay a supplementary dividend to non-New Zealand residents to ensure tax equalization. Notably, and importantly, the dividend as a percentage of free cash has reduced to 56%. This year, we, this half year, have decided to suspend the dividend reinvestment plan. This has been an important tool for us over the past three years in raising some capital to support our balance sheet following the acquisitions in 2017. The recovery of our payout ratios as we had anticipated and also our balance sheet metrics, directors felt now was the right time to suspend this plan. Slide nine, half year EBITDAF. This just breaks down the improvement in EBITDAF between the various segments, but it also shows the EBITDAF trajectory since our IPO in 2014.
Whilst half year is NZD 50 million, it is worth noting that the half year 2020 had some one-offs that dampened that result. More importantly for us is the trend since the IPO. Half year 2021 shows a NZD 38 million increase since our IPO. I would say this increase has exceeded our expectations and has been delivered through value uplift in each of our segments. If I flip to slide 10, looking in a bit more detail at each segment. Our retail segment includes all our sales of electricity, gas, and LPG customers, and also those now purchasing energy services. Here we saw a NZD 24 million uplift on PCP. This has been driven by a lower cost to serve, a lower cost to deliver, improved pricing, and further volume growth in LPG sales.
The wholesale segment covers all our spot market activities and all of our wholesale sales to large customers and some of our competitors. We're now through the peak of commodity pricing, and our weighted average fuel costs are falling. We predicted this, it will continue to fall with the roll-off of large gas contracts from the first of January 2021. This affects both margins on sales contracts and the cost of fuel for our thermal plant. Combined with the very strong plant reliability and in a contribution from the Waipipi Wind Farm, our wholesale segment has seen an uplift of NZD 23 million on PCP. Lastly, Kupe has seen an uplift of NZD 7 million on PCP, largely due to not having a significant planned outage this year as a result of gas sales. As a result, gas sales are up 16%.
Importantly, and again, very pleasingly, plant reliability at Kupe remains a standout, 99.1% availability through that time for Kupe. Turning to slide 11, NPAT and underlying earnings. This breaks down the improvement in NPAT, and NPAT does show a similar trend to EBITDAF. The majority of the NZD 44 million improvement in NPAT relates to the improvement in EBITDAF. However, there are also two other very important contributors to NPAT. Net finance costs, i.e., our borrowing costs, are down NZD 7 million, due partly to reduced debt but largely due to lower interest rate environment flowing through to our average cost of debt. Legacy higher cost debt continues to roll off, and this year we launched a commercial paper program, which allows us to offset or offer short-term debt to the markets, typically 90-day debt, at a deep discount to our bank debt.
As at December 30 this year, we had NZD 150 million of commercial paper on issue. The second factor that relates to NPAT being up is the Kupe depletion charge. In this half, we announced a 21.5 petajoule reserve upgrade for Kupe. The field is expected to last longer than previously expected, this is the third significant upgrade over the past eight years. The impact of this is that we deplete the balance of the remaining reserves at a slower rate. Just looking at underlying earnings, we monitor underlying earnings as a better measure of our profitability as our reported NPAT numbers regularly have noise resulting from changes in forecasted asset values. This year we did have another asset revaluation, which we do tend to have given asset values are based on a long-term outlook of pricing or prices.
The key differences in NPAT and underlying earnings are fair value adjustments that flow through the CFDs and asset values. Flicking to slide 12, controllable operating expenses. They are up NZD 9 million on PCP. The key drivers of this increase include cyclical investment in generation maintenance projects. As a consequence of having a few more outages, particularly around Tekapo, we've managed to push through some important maintenance projects at that time as well. Insurance premiums are increasing right across the sector, and we have seen that also for Genesis. We do have some costs for the Kupe strategic review. We also continue to invest more money in a number of our strategic initiatives, including standing up our Future-gen program. We also have taken another provision, or taken a provision for reinstating leases at the termination of the Meremere lease.
Looking at slide 13, capital expenditure. We do distinguish our capital expenditure between staying business and growth. A number of very important projects were undertaken this half, and it's pleasing to report that the NZD 26.5 million Tekapo A gates project was completed. This was a significant safety upgrade to reduce asset staff and community exposure to seismic risk. Additionally, unit 2 at Tekapo B was upgraded to restore its design capacity after a number of years of below design output. The upgrade also resulted in an efficiency uplift of 2.5%. We continue to invest in projects that create growth also. The Kupe compression project is well underway and due for completion in the first quarter of FY 2022.
We've also commenced the rollout of advanced gas meters, which is a project that's been a number of years in the making and will allow us to start to deliver a similar level of insight to our gas customers that our electricity customers have been enjoying for some time. Additionally, this will allow us to more fully integrate the gas and electricity experience. We also invested in software that allows us to optimize LPG delivery routing. The LPG business continues to transform from what was largely a manual operation to a more sophisticated digital operation. Our new dispatching technology has been critical in allowing us to remove over a million pieces of paper out of the LPG delivery network and also supporting a 13% productivity increase in delivery volumes versus the prior year. Looking at slide 14, capital structure.
The strong improvement in EBITDAF and subsequent reduction in debt is transitioning our balance sheet back into a zone that provides us future investment options. It's not a surprise. Debt to EBITDAF is now 2.5, importantly, Standard & Poor's reaffirmed our BBB+ rating in February 2021. Importantly, our interest costs continue to decline, we are increasingly able to take advantage of lower interest rates. I'll hand back to Marc, who will talk a little bit more about the operations and strategy before we come to our outlook and guidance.
Thanks, Chris. Slide 16 on our flexible generation portfolio. The portfolio demonstrated consistent and yet diverse generation this year. It is great to see, as we have said, Waipipi come into the portfolio driving lower carbon and lower cost energy in and driving some thermal generation out. We did end the year on lower storage the prior year. However, we had some massive rainfall late in December, and that is why you see some of the PCP difference. We used a bit more water than the prior year despite the lower inflows. As we moved into this last six or seven weeks, the first part of the second half, the trend has continued. We have got a very dry South Island and a dry North Island. However, we are relatively well-positioned in South Island because of our outages last year.
The Tekapo scheme is relatively well stocked compared to many other South Island lakes. The introduction into the market of a third Rankine unit from this week until the end of September in various capacities is recognition of the ongoing constraints around gas and hydro in New Zealand. We are a little bit worried about winter, but we feel reasonably well prepared, and we think the third Rankine, despite the trauma of the additional emissions it creates, is the right thing for the New Zealand market. Clicking to 17 and talking about fuel and carbon related to that. Stockpile costs have fallen, which is a big driver of year-over-year improvement, as Chris has said.
We've been able to take advantage of some of the cyclical lows in coal costs and we ended the year with a stockpile around about 500,000 tons, which I think was a record high. However, we do expect international coal prices to increase. They already have to some extent, and as we bring more in over the following months, we will end up with a higher weighted average cost of coal going into FY 2022. The wholesale gas sales roll-off much predicted, and we've been talking about that for a number of years, is happening. That's turning a headwind into a tailwind for the Genesis P&L, and we expect that to continue through FY 2022 and to 2023. Then just a note on our carbon hedge position, that it's pretty much fully hedged until 2025 at prices well below market. The current market price of carbon is NZD 39.
Genesis always retains the opportunity to use the fixed price option for our 2020 emissions, but we've made no decision to do that at this stage. If I could flick you to slide 18. Message here is that positive financial impacts come from being proactive with customer care. As I touched on earlier, COVID was a catalyst for us to double down on our efforts. We've worked collaboratively with multiple government agencies on this, and the team are really proud of how they've supported customers through difficult times. That can be they were in situations where a customer was a particularly good payer for a number of years and then came across some difficult personal circumstances, maybe due to COVID, maybe not.
We've supported them by keeping them paying, but helping them spread their payments out over longer. The outcome of that is greater loyalty and in the end, less disconnections and less bad and doubtful debt. You can see the trends on the right-hand side are moving in the right direction. Brand Net Promoter Score, which is not an interaction score, but it's asking a group of random customers the chances of them or the likelihood of them recommending Genesis. That took a bit of a dip in Q1 FY 2021 after being at a high during the COVID lockdown period, but is now ticking back up again, and we're looking forward to that continuing to rise. Flick you on to slide 19. Again, better customer service at a lower cost. The message is clear.
We've shown you these two charts a number of years in a row now, and we continue to invest in digital interactions over manual interactions, and we continue to increase the proportion of digital interactions. Our retail vision of being first choice for energy management is always about engaging customers, but of course, when we engage customers, we want them to be seamless digital experiences that don't have a high cost to serve. We continue to invest in that while also removing the pain points and the things that cause customers to call us that have a high cost to serve where we may have got it wrong and we haven't made the experience great for them. Still a lot of work to go into that.
If you flick to slide 20, we're showing you a breakdown of our churn numbers between Genesis and EOL, which I think is the first time we've shown it in that detail. You can see churn has ticked up a little bit in the first half of 2021, so we're keeping an eye on that. There's a number of factors to that, including the fact that during the COVID lockdown, churn fell across the market. That second half FY 2020 is probably unusually low. Nevertheless, we're keeping an eye on churn, and we're investing back in, and I'll show you in the strategy slide in a second, into improving the experiences customers receive as they join us and when they move house, so that we give them less reasons to shop around and less reasons to consider leaving.
Unlike our competitors, we continue to show two types of churn, gross churn and net churn. Everyone else just reports net churn. The gross churn for us is a really important metric because it tells us how many or what percentage of our customers consider leaving Genesis, even if we convince them to stay or they don't leave in the end. It's a harder measure, but it's one we keep our eyes on because every interaction after the point they consider leaving, whether it's through a home move journey experience or another, is a cost to us, and we're focused on minimizing those costs, as you can see. On slide 22, we continue to drive value in the portfolio in retail, you've seen that through the net backs.
You can see a breakdown here, slightly different to how we've shown it to you in the past, showing the sales volume over the last three halves and the net back as a consequence. Of note on the top right-hand corner is the C&I net backs and the C&I volume. We took a very rational approach last year to pricing C&I customers and made sure that we were rational from an ASX perspective. We have a relatively balanced portfolio from a generation to retail perspective. We're not long generation except sometimes in high wholesale price markets. We always price our C&I customers to an ASX forward curve. Very rational, but with our energy services proposition and the relationships we've built over years, we're able to sign more customers back up at reasonable margin. We're proud of that progress.
Ups and downs across residential and SME, as you can see. Of course, the charts here are only electricity. As you can see from the third bullet point, both LPG and gas net backs are also up across the board. Moving on to the strategic outlook. I've mentioned our purpose, and those of you that attended our stakeholder day in December will have heard that in spades. We entitled the conference Empowering New Zealand's Sustainable Future, we knew that was our emerging internal purpose for our employees. When we talk about empowering New Zealand's sustainable future, what's important to us, and you can see on slide 23, is it's not just about the macro environment, it's also about many other things. We've chosen five of the UN sustainable development goals to focus on.
Some of the activities underneath them will be familiar to you, some of them won't be. Across the board, we see employees increasingly engaging with that purpose around some of these initiatives. Some of them are obviously focused on climate change, but others are focused on maintaining our right to operate in the areas we work, ensuring that our employees are treated fairly, whether it's through the gender pay gap program we have or whether it's the living wage, and making sure that we're partnering, particularly that blue one, number 17, with other organizations out there to achieve outcomes that we couldn't do on our own and they couldn't do on their own, but together we can actually achieve more. There's a number of things going on here. I won't dwell on them all now.
The point of the slide is to point out when we say we're empowering New Zealand's sustainable future, it's a broad-based purpose, not just climate change focused. As you can see on slide 24, as you'll have picked up in December, we have committed to a science-based carbon reduction target, which is tied to limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. It's a bold goal. We picked 2025 as the year we'll have delivered it by. We didn't sign up to it without any insight as to how we're going to deliver it, because the Future-gen strategy, which has been a couple of years in the making, is the key enabler here. As you all know, we don't have all the projects lined up, but we're pretty confident that we can line them up in time to achieve it.
It will see a 36% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions and a 21% reduction in Scope 3 emissions, which equates to an annual reduction of at least 1.2 million tons of carbon for New Zealand. As we deliver that and we continue with the Future-gen strategy into the late 2020s, we expect New Zealand's electricity system to become 93%-95% renewable. Obviously, some of that will depend on what others do. We are still maintaining our position that the lowest cost opportunity for New Zealand to decarbonize energy more broadly is not to rush to 100% renewable electricity, but to accept that one of the biggest assets we have as a country is our highly renewable electricity system, we should be using it wisely to decarbonize other sectors.
With that, on to slide 25, where we lay out some of our very high-level thinking on the Climate Change Commission's draft report. We still believe that New Zealand needs a national energy strategy. We've got to protect against siloed thinking in certain parts of the energy system, and focus on what are the interdependencies between different parts of the energy system, and make sure that New Zealand is moving forward collectively in the best way to reduce emissions overall, and not cherry-picking certain aspects of it. We agree with a lot of Climate Change Commission recommendations, and I won't go into detail on everything. The one where we have concerns, and we've already fed back and we will do in our response, is we think that the electricity price path is overly optimistic.
There's a number of things driving that, but the main one is there's an assumption that Tiwai will leave at the end of 2024. We think that's driven by a high degree of recency bias around the recent negotiation with Meridian, and it just so happens to contract till 2024 for electricity. Our view, when you look at global aluminum dynamics, and you look at the future for aluminum, and you look at the future for New Zealand and South Island electricity, there's a very high chance they'll be staying. We think the Climate Commission should be A, their base assumption should assume Tiwai stays. We also think their base assumption should assume Methanex stays. Just because they have gas contracts until 2029 doesn't mean they won't have gas contracts beyond that.
That will be a tougher base case for Climate Commission and will then ensure we have the right discussion around the right policies and don't lead ourselves into thinking that it's going to be easy. We also think not enough is understood around the consequence of the Emissions Trading Scheme on the short-term electricity price, and by short-term, we mean three to five years. In the end, when the electricity system is even more renewable, carbon pricing will have less impact. In the transition right here, right now, carbon pricing is roughly adding NZD 1 per MWh to electricity prices for every NZD 1 per ton of carbon because of the way the energy-only market works vis-a-vis the costs of running a Rankine unit. We think that needs to be considered, and we'll be feeding a lot of that back.
Beyond that, we do think emissions trading scheme should be the principal lever for change, but we're supportive of some additional policies around the edges that help ensure a fair and just transition. In talking to others, we're quite taken by the idea of a carbon dividend which could help the New Zealand population buy into some of the changes that are needed to affect change. With that, I'll move on very briefly. I won't cover these next few slides in detail. Just to reinforce for those that didn't make it to our strategy day in December, what our strategy actually is. You've heard me talk a lot about Future-gen, which is clearly about navigating the transition. There are four components to it. One is displacing baseload thermal, which is right here, right now. We're out in market with an RFP around that.
The other part is also around securing gas flexibility, emissions abatement through our guidance, carbon, and other initiatives to mention in the future, and a reasonable amount going on to improve plant efficiency and megawatt capacity. We've had some success recently down in Tekapo, where we've improved the efficiency of one of the generators by 2%, for example, and we're focusing on a number of different activities across our fleet to ensure we can get the most out of it over the next few years. Slide 27 briefly covers the timeframe for the current RFP and FutureGen, and we're expecting responses back by the middle of March. The expression of interest we put out there late last year brought back about 12,000 GWh of potential opportunity. We've sifted through that, and we've gone back out to 11 organizations.
That covers about 6,000 GWh of opportunities where we think they're plausible build options. We're seeking pricing and commitments that we can then go into detailed negotiations on. Reasonably optimistic around that. Just for reference, the 6,000 GWh is the total Genesis portfolio, but we only need another 2,200 GWh to fulfill our science-based target and the first phase of Future-gen. We'll be weighing up different opportunities between wind, solar, and geothermal, different impacts that will have on our overall portfolio, and where that may take us beyond that. In our retail business, we've got six initiatives on slide 28. They're more about delivering more from the core as well as some building for the future. I've talked about residential experiences. That's really important to us. We're continuing to grow our share of small business, less so medium to large.
We want to be number one or number two in every region for LPG. Going to hear more from Energy Online, those of you that follow it, where we're going to unleash it as a real true competitor to some of the other tier 2s. We continue to focus on number five and number six, which is really our energy management strategy around new products, new technology, and eventually a new platform to transform the retail business into a retailer of the future, which we'll hear more about in due course. Slide 29 just articulates how we see the three brands we're now involved in. Ecotricity is very much arm's length. They're independent, able to run how they want, and we're not going to interfere in how they operate. Together, we believe Ecotricity can grow in a segment that otherwise wouldn't naturally consider Genesis as their supplier.
Ecotricity have later been very successful with a number of businesses seeking to achieve their own ESG goals, particularly around Scope 2 emissions. Ecotricity being New Zealand's really only certified wholesale carbon zero retailer gives businesses that opportunity. We see them growing quite fast from here, backed by our hedges and tied into our Waipipi Wind Farm initially, and then also other new builds as we go forward. That excites them around the transition that they can help to make happen in our sector with new renewables, and attract customers who are motivated by that. Meanwhile, we've got a very clear brand promise and proposition for Genesis customers, and Energy Online, as I said, will be unleashed a bit more. Again, it targets a different market, much more of a young professional than the Genesis traditional young family.
We're excited about that three-brand strategy, and we'll tell you how it goes as we go. With that note, I'll hand over to Chris to talk about outlook guidance and why invest in Genesis, which we always love to talk about.
Thanks, Marc. For just the operational and strategic update. I just want to pause very briefly on the picture that's on slide 30 of one of our customers in the supporters t-shirt there, the ETNZ supporters t-shirt. That's going to be an interesting few weeks ahead of us, and I just didn't mention, but that is a very proud sponsorship for us, sponsoring the ETNZ base , and it is going well. It'll go even better if ETNZ wins. Anyway, slide 33, outlook. We've updated our FY 2021 EBITDAF guidance to NZD 415 million-NZD 425 million. The second half FY 2021 will start to benefit from the expiry of the out-of-the-money gas contracts that have been in our portfolio for some time. The narrowing of the range is consistent with previous years. Lastly, there is no change to our capital expenditure outlook.
I'll just say, whilst Genesis is well-positioned for the second half, and we've obviously got an outage, a Unit 5 outage, and we've organized ourselves well around that. The gas market does appear to be quite short over the next 12 months, which is something that the industry should be aware of and should be planning for. The strategic review of Kupe is progressing well. We've had multiple parties sign the NDA with us to review details about the asset, and we do expect to be able to update the market again in midway through this calendar year. Just looking at slide 31. We presented this slide in December where we laid out some of the key uncertainties that exist in the market today. I'll just mention these again. Industrial closures. This risk has diminished for Tiwai but does remain present for others.
We are mindful of the very firm forward prices that we're seeing in the market and the challenges that those create. Our fuel book is declining, and thermal is essentially discretionary for us. Gas availability, there remains some discussion about this, particularly for this winter. Genesis is fully contracted and has multiple fuels to support our position. The pace of electrification is clearly an uncertainty. We think about that when we think about the Future-gen strategy. We also think about the opportunity that creates for the sector and for Genesis. Lastly, carbon pricing. We do expect carbon to largely pass through the wholesale market, as has been proven to date. In addition to our Future-gen strategy, it is important to reducing our long-run carbon exposure. Just to wrap up, slide 32. These are a strong set of H1 results that our team is very proud of.
There are some market headwinds ahead, but we're confident of meeting the strategic EBITDAF goal of NZD 400 million that we set in 2016. In fact, I'll clarify, we're confident of exceeding that, as is reflected in our guidance. The business has come a long way in the last few years. This half, we've really seen the benefits of long-term planning and the investment, and it's come through on several fronts that Marc and I both talked about. We are planning for the future and playing our role in empowering New Zealand's sustainable future. Future-gen is one key proof point, probably the most visible proof point, but we've also laid out a number of other proof points today. We are prepared to back up our Future-gen program with bold commitments to reduction in carbon emissions, and as we talked about in December, we've signed up for science-based target.
Hopefully, as you can see, it's been a very busy and successful half year for us. Just lastly, the commitments we made to our investors in December, we've replayed these. I'll just leave you with four reasons to invest in Genesis. We continue to have a very attractive dividend, and we do see earnings growth over the next decade. We are a company highly focused on reducing our carbon exposure and delivering you a de-risked investment proposition. We do believe we've got a very strong team with a strong innovative culture. With that, we'll open up for questions.
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Good morning, Chris, Marc. A few questions from me. First one, just on OpEx. The NZD 1 million in uptick in first half, should we expect a similar increase in the second half?
Sorry, Grant. I think the question was, should we expect to see more OpEx in the second half? Look, our OpEx will be up in FY 2021 relative to FY 2020. We haven't guided OpEx specifically other than to say you should reflect OpEx as factored into our EBITDAF guidance, Grant. We're not re-guiding OpEx in the second half.
Thank you. Next question, just on your outlook of NZD 415-NZD 425. Does this assume that the wholesale pricing tracks the forward curve at around about NZD 200 through to year-end?
Yeah. Look, our portfolio obviously performs in a range of wholesale price scenarios, and has different impacts depending on different scenarios. We do a range of scenarios, and we're comfortable that our guidance, while at the top end and the bottom end, considers all of those realistic scenarios.
Okay. Thanks, Chris. On your Future-gen strategy, how many of the 15 projects that you guys mentioned are actually of new interest into the New Zealand market?
I think we said 11. Most of them are. When you say new, there's a range of ways I could interpret that, Grant. If you mean not yet announced projects by other parties, then the majority of them, but not all of them.
Sorry, Marc. What I'm looking for is people who haven't actually built any form of electricity generation in New Zealand before.
Yeah. I'm not going to give you the exact number, but we filtered out a lot of the long shots or moon shots. In the original 12,000 GWh we received from the expression of interest, obviously, if we thought they weren't plausible builds in the timeframe we're talking about, then we didn't go back to them with the RFP. We've only gone back on the RFP on where we see plausible builds in the timeframe we're looking for.
Okay, thank you. That leads me into my next question on that topic is, how are you view taking on 1,350 GWh of PPAs and that's starting in 2024, when you still have this potential 5,000 GWh hole in 2025 from Tiwai exit?
Well, from our perspective, one way we'd like you to look at Future-gen is it's a wholesale generation cost reduction initiative. We look at it as versus our current forecast for input costs. At the worst case, let's say Tiwai does leave, but I don't think it will. Let's say Tiwai does leave in FY 2025, we're still better off than we would have been if we hadn't done it. You're talking about an opportunity cost or an opportunity that's been missed if the wholesale price falls dramatically in 2025. As we go forward, we will make decisions. We don't intend to contract with 1,300 GWh , 2,200 GWh or 1,300 GWh in one go.
We intend to phase it, and our optionality is to watch the market and see who else is building and see what demand side is doing, and decide whether we want to be long or short in the second half of the 2020s.
Thanks.
We see the Future-gen program as giving us lots of different options as we go forward. It's not one big blob.
Thanks, Marc. The final question, just on Kupe. You did mention that you had multiple parties looking. That was the same comment from a few months ago. Are you still confident in generating interest in your 46% stake as a sale?
Absolutely.
Thanks. That's all for me. Thanks.
Absolutely.
We will go to our next question. Caller, you may go ahead. Your line is live.
Oh, hi, Marc and Chris, Andrew here. Just a couple of questions. First of all, follow up on Grant's, just around the strategic review. Are you able to give us a sense of how many of those 11 projects are already consented and, I guess, also related to that, are they all required to be up and running by December 2024?
Well, there's 6,000 GWh of potential new builds in the RFP. We only need targeting 1,300 by 2024. That's the simple answer, but the potential is there. I'm not going to give you any more detail than that at this stage, Andrew. I know everyone would love it. We're in the middle of a process, and a lot depends on what we get back from the RFP in mid-March. There's a range.
Yeah. Okay. The next question I had was a couple just around, I guess, the guidance and outlook for the second half. In terms of bringing back the third Rankine units, have you contracted out any of that capacity or are you largely sort of intending it for Genesis use, i.e., being long generation in the second half if required?
At this stage, we haven't contracted any of it out. There's different phases for it. There's three phases at the moment till third week of March, it can only run overnight. From the beginning of April through, courtesy of myself now through July or August, it can run five days a week, 24 hours a day. In winter and through September, it can run seven days a week, 24 hours a day. We're building up the operational capacity. We're not saying we're not open for business, but we're being cautious about over-contracting it until the point at which, A, we've got operational confidence, and also we understand where the market's going.
Okay. Then in terms of the guidance upgrade itself, how much of it is, I guess, around about the very strong first half results and things that flow through from that versus the second half outlook?
Well, it's a bit of both because we've had confidence from our first half results. We're a momentum business, as you know, particularly in retail. That momentum coming out of first half will flow through into second half too. It's a bit of both, Andrew, to give you a vague answer.
Yeah. I wasn't expecting detail. That's all good. The last question I just had, at this stage, was just around the unit 5 outage. It's kind of unusual. I know I struggle to actually remember unit 5 going out, in April. Normally, it's a sort of a November outage period. Is that related to Kupe at all? Are you able to give us a bit more color in terms of why the outage is taking place and what's actually going on?
It's historically been based on timing. It's often happened around November. We're moving our asset management approach to be more about usage hours and the level of requirement in certain components in the units, rather than just time. We built some confidence last year that we could delay that outage from what would have otherwise probably been November to April, and we're confident it's still the right thing. It'll happen in April. That is something to be aware of when you're looking at half-over-half for each one. There was no outage for unit 5, which historically there would have been.
Yeah. Is it about a three-weeks outage or?
A little bit longer than that. Roughly that, yeah. Between three and four.
That's all for me. Thanks.
We will go to our next questioner. Caller, you may go ahead. Your line is live.
Hi, guys. It's Cam Parker here from Craigs. Congratulations on a great first half. Excellent result. First question, just on with regards to your PPA RFPs. Just what sort of proportion of the 1,300 relates to existing gentailers, and what proportion is independence? Is there any guidance you can give there?
Yeah. Nice to hear you, Cam. No, we can't, because we got 6,000 GW out to RFP. Some of it is with existing gentailers, with their new build options, and some it's not. It all depends, in the end, the 1,300 we end up going with will all depend on what they come back with and what price points they submit, and whether the shape of their generation build suits what we need overall. Lots of different dynamics. We're going through a fairly rigorous assessment process internally. The outcome of that will be some choices we make about going into deep negotiations with a smaller number. At the moment, with 11 out there, I can't tell you, because they may drop off, or they may be the primary player.
Yeah. Okay. Appreciate that. Looking forward to what comes out of it, too. Second question. Carbon, your carbon hedge book, which is well below market prices at the moment, how should we be thinking about the timing of realizing that? You've got emissions, probably it's looking like it's going to be above 3 million tonnes this year. Do you realize the lower carbon price in your book now, or do you wait and then realize it later when carbon prices are potentially going even higher?
At this point, we're not trading carbon, Cam, so we will realize it as it falls due. I mean, a lot of these contracts are time-bounded, and we're not endeavoring to create a big stockpile of carbon to trade. However, we do have options this year. Clearly, our book is cheaper than the carbon cap price, and the forward price is higher than the current carbon cap price. We do have some options around that. You should just expect us to submit that carbon as it falls due, as opposed to forming a long-term view on carbon and whether or not it's more valuable in the long term.
Okay. All right. Thank you, Chris. Lastly, just with regards to Kupe and the confidence around securing flexible gas at reasonable prices under the current market conditions, how are you guys feeling about that, and can you give us more color on where your head is at?
Our main contracts obviously are with Kupe, of which we own 46%. We can clearly set the contracts up in a way that suits us for our own share. We've obviously got some other contracts that roll off with the other joint venture parties, and we've given you a roll-off trajectory in the past, so you can see those. Look, I think that's always a negotiation. One thing I do know is when you've got coal and gas and electricity to trade, there's a trade-off between all those three fuels, and having multiple options gives you some negotiating or gives you walk-away prices. We've proven our ability to do that many times over the last 10 years, and I'd expect we'll be able to continue to do that again in the future.
Okay. All right. Thanks, Chris. That's it for me. Thanks.
As a reminder to our audience, if you wish to ask a question, press star one on your telephone keypad. We'll go to our next questioner. Caller, you may go ahead. Your line is live.
Morning, team. Jeremy Kincade from UBS here. My first question just relates to the lower cost to serve and how that's been declining over the years. Is that really a reflection of your Future-gen strategy and the strategy before that? Therefore, we can expect that decline to moderate as that strategy rolls off in FY 2023, 2024?
Jeremy, are you talking about wholesale or retail?
Retail.
I think you're talking about wholesale, so I'll answer it for that. What we've seen, the input cost of thermal fuel has fallen year-over-year, but we were at cyclical highs a couple of years ago with very high wholesale prices for oil and coal and gas costs across the piece. That's fallen, reducing our input cost for generation, which is part of the reason for the growth in the wholesale P&L. The only difference Future-gen would make is it should further reduce our input costs or our weighted average cost of generation, because we're only going to contract with new renewables if they're below the costs of base load thermal today and with a prediction of where base load thermal goes in the future.
You've kind of got short-term oscillations in coal and gas prices, but the medium to long-term trajectory of our input cost is what we measure a Future-gen opportunity against. Hopefully, that answers your question.
Not quite. The cost to ICP in the retail space, was NZD 160 three years ago, now is NZD 134. I'm just trying to get an idea of how that might track over time.
Yeah. We don't expect material changes in that cost to serve number going forward. About NZD 90 of the NZD 130 odd is metering costs, where we've had an impact to metering renegotiations of late, but that's a pretty stable base of cost. If you're comparing it to competitors, by the way, some don't include metering costs in their cost to serve. The addressable cost is limited. However, our Rubiks program, which is the next stage of systems implementation, which we talked about, James and Gilbert have talked about the strategy day in December, and we'll talk more about as we go forward, is where we see we might get a step change in cost to serve going forward. Until Rubiks is implemented over the next few years, we don't see material improvements continuing, but we expect it to stabilize.
That's helpful. Thank you. Then just the last one from me, relating to carbon. I know it's probably a hard question to answer, but do you believe current wholesale prices reflect market carbon prices, i.e., around NZD 39 per ton-
Yes.
exactly what the retailers hit? Okay. All right. Thank you.
Yes. Which is one of the several reasons why we think the Climate Commission are not factoring in that transition risk of the ETS. As we've said before, NZD 1 per ton of carbon equates to NZD 1 per MWh on the cost of running a Rankine. As long as there are Rankines in the market, everyone will price all their generation up to the cost of a Rankine coming in. That's the problem with the ETS and how it interfaces with the energy and the market today. We keep calling that out and we're going to call it out loudly in our response to Climate Change Commission. I think there's a real transition risk for less electricity pricing. Actually, we don't need any more carbon on electricity to incentivize new renewable build.
I think you're going to hear more from us on that.
Thank you. That's all from me.
At this time, we have no further questions.
Thank you, everyone. Pleased you came along and glad you enjoyed the conversation. We're really pleased with the result. I hope you've taken away from this too, that we're focused on the future as well as landing this year well, and there's lots of positive things to come out of Genesis as we move forward. Thanks for your time.