Good morning, everybody. Stew Hamilton here, the Chief Executive for Mercury. It's great to be here to present Mercury's interim results for the first half of FY 2025. It's my first opportunity to present results for Mercury. I'm sitting here with William Meek, Chief Financial Officer, and it's William's last opportunity to present Mercury's financial results, and actually his 24th in total over his tenure with Mercury.
I'll cover off a bit of an overview of the financial results and the key strategic drivers. I'll then hand over to William to talk to the financial outcomes and drivers of that. I'll then be handed back to give an overview of some industry context, talk to some of our strategic activity before finally handing back to William to talk about funding and guidance. First of all, if we look at the first half of FY 2025, it was a half of two halves.
Certainly some challenging conditions. The first part of the half year saw very dry conditions, going through to the second part, which saw very wet conditions throughout New Zealand and saw contrasting prices in the wholesale electricity market. Despite those challenging conditions, Mercury has put in a robust performance with careful portfolio management, mitigating the impact of that drought. That has seen our EBITDA for the first half at NZD 418 million on a generation of 4.2 TWh. That's down on the prior comparable period by NZD 16 million and 0.3 TWh. Despite the challenging conditions, we're still investing heavily. In fact, about 46% of our first half earnings have been invested back into new renewable projects and our existing assets.
We're investing at the moment NZD 1 billion into three significant projects, which come from the bottom of the south in Kaiwera Downs to the top of the north in Kaiwaikawe. Those three projects, when generating, will be delivering just over one terawatt hour per annum. Those projects are constructing on time and to budget and become some of the biggest levers we have for moderating the long-term power prices in New Zealand.
We continue to focus on customer connections. That's growing at the rate of 33,000 compared to the prior comparable period, mainly through cross-sale focus, especially increasing telco and mobile customers. We're also glad to announce last week the signing of a 10-year contract with Fonterra that supports the electrification of two sites, and we look forward to seeing that progress. The construction of the Kaiwaikawe wind farm started in the first half of last year. We're now into the civil phase of that project that will see 12 turbines bringing in a capacity of 77 MW. That's expected to see first generation towards the middle of 2026.
A strong market response from a number of sector participants, including Mercury, helped to maintain energy security over the last part of 2024, first half of FY 2025. Going forward, we see there's a significant number of actions required that will enhance the governance and market arrangements in place, and we certainly see the laser focus on supply security being a key area for us to look at in the next part of this year. Finally, if we look at EBITDA guidance for FY 2025, that is unchanged at NZD 120 million. William will talk a bit more to that soon, and the interim dividend declared at 9.6 cents per share, 3% higher than the first half of 2024.
Guidance for the full year 2025 is maintained at NZD 0.24, which will see a 17th year of consecutive dividend growth, so we continue to make really good progress on our strategic objectives in the first half of FY 2025. There's a key thing I just wanted to call out here. The first is in terms of delivering more reliable and renewable energy. We have a resource consent application lodged for Whakamaru Battery, looking for that consent to be granted in the next part of this year, and we continue to focus heavily on geothermal resilience with Forced Outage Factor now below 2%.
In terms of accelerating the shift to a low carbon future, we were pleased to see the Energy Transition Framework being signed by our sector participants in the last part of last year. As I mentioned, in addition to the Fonterra electrification contract, Tiwai now also becomes our largest customer. We supply now 50 MW to the site. That will grow to 75 MW as the project at Kaiwera Downs 2 comes to completion. In terms of creating success for others, I'm very proud to say that over the last six months, we have had zero bad credit disconnections as part of our very strong customer care program that supports customers that are vulnerable.
We continue to establish new relationships related to our pipeline, which, as I mentioned before, extends from the bottom of the South Island of New Zealand to the top of the North Island of New Zealand. At the core of our performance are our people. We continue to have a strong focus on health, safety, and well-being throughout the first part of FY 2025. We've had no fatalities, and our high severity incidents have also been at zero, and we continue to focus on a strong culture process to drive that performance. From an employee perspective, we have a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging strategy in place, which will continue to make us stronger and help to deliver our business performance. I'll now hand over to William to talk to some of our financial results.
Thanks, Stew, and kia ora to those on today's call, and welcome again to our interim 2025 results presentation. So I'm now on Slide 6, talking to some of our key financial metrics. Trading margin, so essentially revenue-less COGS across power, gas, and telco at NZD 605 million versus PCP at NZD 618 million. OpEx up NZD 16 million against PCP to NZD 207 million. EBITDA down NZD 16 million to NZD 418 from NZD 434 million. Again, I'll come back to the bridges, but yeah, generation lower by almost 300 GW h across mostly hydro, but also lower geothermal performance and less wind across the fleet.
Impact was a net loss of NZD 67 million, I think the first for Mercury. Certainly, the effect is driven by accounting, so very large negative fair value movement in unhedged financial instruments. So on the segment note, you can see that for this half year, it was NZD - 290 million, which is leading to that net loss at the profit level. Operating cash flow down 20% or NZD 56 million to NZD 227 million, mostly driven by higher provisional tax payments of almost NZD 50 million.
Staying in business, CapEx slightly higher, driven by increased activity in drilling and in rehabs. Growth almost double the PCP at almost NZD 140 million, up from NZD 70 million in the prior period. And then dividend, again, as Stu said, up 3%, which is good. Turning to Page 7, just the EBITDA bridge, which really just explains what's the key drivers of this. So, on the PCP had NZD 434 million. Generation volume across the three fuels was an adverse movement of NZD NZD 45 million. We've seen higher yields, particularly in CNI, so those have been positive. Lifting earnings by NZD 27 million.
Mass market yields also up NZD 20 million. Gas performance worse than last year, so higher gas costs offset slightly by better gas pricing. We saw a slightly worse trading performance, so NZD 12 million for the half, positive, I think, versus NZD 14 million in the prior period. Also noting, I think our original guidance at NZD 820 million had trading profits at nil. Small impact from spot prices, and then OpEx, as already mentioned, down NZD 16 million, giving us that bridge to NZD 418 million for the half.
Just a deeper dive into operating expenditures, lifting to NZD 207 million from NZD 191 million, so up NZD 16 million. Variety of drivers there, mostly in our generation business. Amount of generation maintenance activity increased, some significant turnaround costs. So turnarounds are essentially major outages on our plants, typically geothermal. So Ngā Tamariki and Rotokawa had major turnarounds where the plants were off for several weeks, doing maintenance, which occurs infrequently.
With the brand refresh, you've probably seen our ads on the telly. We saw some additional spending there into that brand and brand refresh, so explaining that NZD 16 million. Stew's already talked to how cash has been allocated from our earnings, so with 46% of our earnings for the half being reinvested back into growth renewables. Dividends at NZD 163 million. We prepaid for the final dividend tax at NZD 140 million, interest at NZD 60 million, bridging to the change in net debt.
Now turning to stay-in-business CapEx was up NZD 13 million from the PCP, and as mentioned, NZD 7 million of that due to geothermal drilling. So we've been drilling at both Rotokawa and Kawerau. We had partly ended Ngā Tamariki, so we just finished a well at Ngā Tamariki and moving on to a second bore there. That drilling has been very successful over this financial year so far.
Hydro rehabs. It's still great to see the second unit of three at Karapiro completing. And so again, we're looking at about a 5 MW-6 MW increase in megawatts there from that unit and about a 4%-5% increase in efficiency. So that's also positive. And we continue to undertake some remediation on the existing tailrace gates, both downstream and slightly upstream of those gates.
So we can see the high-level breakdown of that NZD 73 million of CapEx across geothermal drilling, rehabs, a whole plethora of other generation CapEx in the gates, and then enterprises predominantly in our technology area. We're pleased to see a migration off SAP onto Workday for our financial systems, and we are currently in the go-live for transitioning onto our new Elcom billing platform, which is necessary for us to see and close down our legacy SAP financials and billing customer platforms.
Just talking to hydrology, it certainly has been dry in the North Island. So I think for the first half of this year, we ran 15th percentile inflows. That followed on from a dry sequence as we came into this financial year. On a year-to-date basis, we're running sixth percentile, so it's continued to be dry. We're seeing, I think, zero percentile, so the worst inflow sequence since November for the particularly almost four months from then in the Waikato catchment. We're also seeing very dry sequences appearing in the South Island, so they're also running, I think, zero percentile for the last two months. So as Stew said, it was a game of two halves and a half, so that's a quarter.
High prices at the start of the year on the back of tight conditions relieved by some demand response from industrials, gas trades, and epic rain into the South Island in Q2, seeing some of the lowest spot prices we'd seen. So sort of bouncing from prices in the 300s up to the 800s and then back down to, I think, just over NZD 40 for the second quarter of this financial year.
So that did enable us, despite dry conditions, to bring the lake back up to nearly full, so that has put us in an okay position as we head into winter. That being said, this extended dry is causing conservative generation out of the Waikato as we conserve again with an eye to this winter and security. The slide's got a whole lot of charts, really.
Just, I think it's quite interesting just from a snapshot about what was happening over the last calendar year. You can see the first demand growth, I should say demand reduction largely as a consequence of demand response to demand response contracts and response to high spot prices, particularly through that July-August period, and so you're seeing the demand down. Gas production, we know the challenges there in terms of gas supply to New Zealand gas users, so we're still on burn in terms of daily deliverable gas.
We're hopeful that gas exploration undertaken by some upstream owners will be fruitful, but at the moment, certainly the gas market remains challenging with significant declines over that calendar year. Unsurprisingly, we saw a large increase in thermal generation through the high-priced months, particularly in winter. And we're seeing quite a lot of thermal commitment now, even this early, and obviously the announcement from today from Meridian to trigger further demand response from NZAS.
We've talked to National Hydrology. Yeah, it was certainly very high by the end of the year, but again, we've regressed back below average at today's date. Gas prices were monstrous as essentially gas reflected the elevated spot prices, so peaking in August. And then those electricity prices also reaching on a rolling 28 or full week basis over 500 and then crashing back into the 40s.
Turning now to security for this winter. This is a chart from System Operator Transpower. It's quite detailed. The shaded dark blue area shows the 10th to 90th percentile national storage range in terms of history. We can see last year, we can see lake level was tracking downwards, but still well above the 1% emergency level. So actually, it was called by the generators. The likelihood of actually running out of power last year was extremely low. And certainly, those high inflow events shot lake levels back up to nearly full levels for the country.
We have seen a pretty substantial decline, but still, those risk curves, as we look forward to winter 2025, are slightly better, are better than what we had last year. And the industry is continuing to take actions to further shore up security, which is important for keeping the lights on and certainly for lowering energy prices to consumers. We're quite happy around the Mercury's response around the HSO. We are taking a structurally longer net portfolio position also. Certainly, we're leading it very hard around our wider industry initiatives to support security of the electricity system. I'll hand back to Stew.
Thanks, William. I'll talk to context from the ecosystem that is the electricity system in New Zealand. Firstly, appreciate that many people, households, and businesses have been doing it tough over the last while. Despite that, New Zealand has an electricity system that still ranks at a top 10 globally against the trilemma of sustainability, security, and affordability. That means we've got great foundations to make it even better. The current high household price signals supply risk, and hence the laser-focused desire to be on security of supply. There's five core areas which we continue to support and discuss with all stakeholders.
There are two important regulatory reviews underway at the moment, the first being the ministerial review and the second being an Energy Competition Task Force, in which we continue to talk about a laser focus on security of supply, encouraging more flexibility and transparency of the risk management options being very important, and then improving governance and increasing certainty of a policy. The Energy Transition Framework that I spoke to at the beginning in the summary will be an important mechanism to help consolidate the sector-wide knowledge and the key transition actions, and finally, enabling consenting arrangements will be crucial to ensure we can continue to build the sustainability of the grid.
So as New Zealand's grid continues to be more renewable, we're trending towards 90% renewables as energy security challenges become real. New Zealand has a strong track record in energy security, but as we saw through winter 2024, it's experienced some challenges. As we get to a higher renewables percentage, you combine that with the sudden deterioration and availability of gas and the strong reliance on hydro in New Zealand. It means that the dry years do create an energy shortage, and this means that we need to seek a range of solutions because there is no silver bullet to support that security.
So with that, we're leaning into New Zealand's dry year energy security challenge. You would have seen recently that market participants have entered into a heads of agreement to support the ongoing operation of Huntly for the next decade or so, but that's just one of the solutions in place. There are several potential solutions that are being looked at across the sector. We're really looking to find a number of levers to close what we believe is a gap of about 2 TWh-4 TWh in those dry years, and that will include a modest renewable overbuild.
It will include demand response. It will include contingent storage, and if you look at the range of options to supplement that, no doubt that thermal fuels will be required in the near term to provide that flexibility. Hence the reason why we've entered into the Heads of Agreement to explore those options to support the operation of Huntly for the next decade. With that, LNG we believe could be part of the solution, but in the short term has a low likelihood of being economic because of the high upfront investment and ongoing costs. However, we're pleased to see Genesis look at the operation's potential for biomass to be feasible over time.
Following on from the builds of Turitea and Kaiwera Downs number one throughout the FY 2022 to FY 2025 period, we're continuing to invest. You can see in the slide here over the next few years, we'll see up to 1.1 TWh of renewables come through. Just to put that into context, that's the equivalent power to provide 142,000 homes. It increases Mercury's portfolio by just over 12% and actually contributes to increasing New Zealand's generation by 2.5%.
There are three further projects which we are investigating at the moment. The first is Puketoi and the Manawatū, with final investment decision anticipated in FY 2027. The second, Mahinerangi 2, just west of Dunedin, that is looking for an FID anticipated in the early part of FY 2027. The third being Waikokowai, which is at a location just west of Huntly, looking for final investment decision in FY 2028.
All three of those wind farms projects are listed in the government's Fast-track Approvals Bill, and we look forward to providing updates soon. This slide just takes a bit more of a dive into the high-quality generation pipeline that we have. Spoken to the Waikokowai Wind Farm, Mahinerangi, and Puketoi. Also mentioned the Whakamaru Battery Energy Storage Solution. And in addition to that, we have a number of prospects in our pipeline which we continue to develop and look forward to sharing those details soon.
Just want to briefly touch on the three generation development projects that are underway and talk to two other major capital investments to give you some insight and color to those projects. This first slide talks to our OEC 5 unit expansion at the Ngā Tamariki Geothermal Reservoir. It's on track, both from a budget and timeline perspective. We're anticipating first generation late this year. You can see in the photo on the top left-hand side there, the bottom part, you can see the construction of the Ormat unit coming along. And so I'm very proud to say that that project is progressing to plan.
Second project I'll touch on is the Kaiwera Downs Stage 2 Wind Farm construction down in Southland. That project is proceeding as scheduled. We had some very wet months through spring, which meant that the civils were a little bit delayed, but that project has been progressing very well. The long lead time equipment deliveries are aligned with the schedule, and that's progressing to plan. The third project to round out our generation development, and we've gone from the bottom of New Zealand to the top of New Zealand. So Kaiwaikawe was approved late last year, and construction started in January. Again, first generation is also expected in mid-2026.
That wind farm development is expected to involve up to 100 jobs during construction, clearly supporting employment opportunities in the Northland region, and negotiations are nearing conclusion with Genesis for off-take arrangements. Finally, two more projects I wanted to talk to just to give some color. The first is the geothermal drilling program where we are drilling eight wells. That program continues, as William mentioned. It is looking at sustaining capacity for the Kawerau sites, Ngā Tamariki and Rotokawa fields. We have taken advantage of a second domestic drilling contractor now, and we have been drilling two new wells for the Ngā Tamariki OEC 5, which will support that project come online.
And as of February 2025, we've completed five of those wells, which has resulted in $113 million worth of investment and a further NZD 62 million investment required in the three remaining wells that will lead to the sustained operation of our geothermal fleet. And then finally, if we look at our rehabilitation program for our hydro assets, that too is progressing really well. So far, the Karapiro station capacity has already increased by 10 MW. The third and final unit was removed from service late last year. That's due to be returned back to service in August, with the next station rehab program for three stations at Maraetai, Atiamuri, and Ohakuri. They are progressing, and we're looking to award the key contracts during this calendar year.
The primary focus of ours continues to be on telco, particularly in the telco cross-sell opportunities post-integration with Trustpower. Our scale retail business has increased now in terms of connections, 33,000 connections higher compared to the last comparable period, mainly from the cross-sell focus, especially in the mobile and telco area. As I mentioned before, Tiwai is now our largest single customer, and we've progressed really well through the electrification of New Zealand in terms of supporting Fonterra to electrify Edgecumbe and Waitoa operations. That contract commences from August 25 for Waitoa and Edgecumbe in 2026. It represents a significant demand of 260 GWh per year.
Our journey to becoming a leading multi-product retailer is progressing well. Also, Mercury was named the 2024 Energy Retailer of the Year. We're very proud of all the work that's gone on from people across Mercury to support our customers to win that award. And particularly pleased that we can say that over the last six months, we have had zero disconnections due to bad credit as a part of the significant work we're putting in to support customers.
We do recognize that current price increases for residential customers will be tough. If you look at the slides on the left-hand side there, it shows the total residential electricity price has actually tracked lower than inflation over the last decade. This April, Mercury's overall electricity bill increase for residential customers will be approximately 9.7% on average. This includes larger increases in lines and transmission charges that's required due to the significant investment in infrastructure for lines and transmission to support the renewable transition. I'll now hand back to William to talk about funding.
Thank you, Stew. We're in the home straight. We're looking at a chart showing the debt maturities for Mercury's funding. Certainly, a diversified portfolio from 90-day commercial paper right through to 30-year capital bonds. We had a successful issue for the MCY070s in early July to refinance the NZD 300 million 20s, which were maturing with NZD 350 million bonds. So that was good. And we are actively considering a new debt capital markets transaction shortly. So watch the space.
Next slide. The balance sheet is very well positioned to fund our current Gen D program and beyond. We're sitting at 2.3 x debt to EBITDA. So the lower end of that BB B+ range. S&P Global confirmed our rating as BB B+ stable back in December. And we do have active DRP with a 2% discount. Last slide for me onto guidance. So a couple of reflections here. So this is for the full year. Guidance is unchanged from our original guidance back in August, but the makeup of that guidance is quite different. I would summarize the performance given what's happened as a robust performance while high and dry, and I'll come back to that.
It's an oft-repeated meme in the markets that gentailers profit from high spot prices. That is not universally true. I think we're seeing that across the board in the sector. Certainly, you can see the impacts of low rainfall, low wind, do impact generators' earnings. We certainly can see that here between decreases in hydro generation and our wind and geothermal performance. We're down almost, well, down NZD 100 million. Hydro's down 13% on a normalized basis, so 530 GWh , and that's assuming that we get median inflows from today to the end of the year.
So still quite a wide potential outcome there in terms of whether it rains or doesn't. Even the thermal operators in our sector have found it quite challenging as the thermal fuel prices have risen on the back of leaning into dry years in terms of coal and gas. So yeah, I think it's just important to call out the view that high spot prices lead to higher profits for all generators. And there's good reasons why prices are high. I think the market performed admirably.
The high spot prices did lead to significant responses on both the generation fuel dispatch and demand side, which is what a well-functioning market does. The vast majority of consumers are hedged. There's no mass market customers faced the price rise as a consequence of the high spot prices that took place earlier this financial year. Unfortunately, there were some commercial customers that were facing spot prices for decisions of their own who aren't with us today. That's unfortunate for New Zealand.
So just quickly on the bridge itself, we've called out the changes to generation. We did have a stronger portfolio outcome of which trading is in there. We're expecting trading gains for the full year of around NZD 25 million. We've got a better gas performance. We've had two gas price increases this year. We're a purchaser of gas. We don't make gas ourselves, so our pricing to our customers needs to reflect the costs of acquiring that. That being said, gas prices were quite soft through Q2, and we have had some success in contracting longer-term gas, which is positive. We have seen stronger yield growth, particularly in the C&I segment. OpEx is up 25%.
We saw an increase of NZD 16 million at the half year. We've brought forward a repair on a well at Kawerau Well 9 , which takes that full year variance to NZD 25 million. So quite a different makeup, but guidance held at NZD 820 million, reflecting that lower expected generation across the fleet. We've provided guidance on a normalized basis. That's normalizing for average hydrology, average wind, and geo performance, taking account of scheduled outages. That NZD 25 million we'd expect to be NZD 900 million had we had an average generation year. Thermal guidance remains unchanged at 3% and SIB Capex at NZD 150 million for FY 2025. With that, I'll hand over to Stew for concluding remarks.
Thanks, William. So as you can see, the first half of FY 2025 has been managed extremely well by the Mercury team. The focus now turns to the next six to nine months, especially our role in security supply, delivering operational efficiency and focused on generation development. We think we have the best diversified portfolio, and we continue to invest in that significantly. We're very privileged to service the largest customer retail base, looking for new innovations to support customer options and electrification, and look forward to sharing that as we go. Thank you very much, and we'll hand over to Paul.
Q&A time. Hi, I'm Paul Ruediger, head of business performance and investor relations, helping to manage the Q&A. Just raise your hands if you have a question. I'll bring you on, and you'll just need to unmute to ask your question. First up, we've got Andrew Harvey-Green. If you can unmute your microphone, Andrew.
All right, morning. Hopefully, you can hear me okay.
Yes, we can.
Thank you.
Great. Okay. Yeah, morning team. Thanks for that. A couple of questions from me. The first one, actually, I guess there's a couple in there as well, just revolving around the OpEx number. Are you able to give us an indication, I guess, of, and guidance, what you were assuming for the first half? Reading through the FY 2025 guidance, it sort of sounds like you're expecting roughly flat OpEx. And I guess the second question, just looking back to first time FY 2025 guidance, you're indicating OpEx coming down and some of those retail integration benefits coming through. But I guess at the high level, we're not really seeing that if you're able to sort of talk to what's happening in that space.
Yeah, I'm happy to start on that question. Yeah, we were expecting our generation, the amount of work required in our generation fleet was higher than we expected. We've got some stuff happening with retail integration finishing, the Elcon project kicking off. You're seeing some costs turn up in our generation business. If you look at our segment note, the retail business has got lower OpEx. So I think it's NZD 9 million down on the prior comparable period, which is positive.
But yeah, there's just been a plethora of activity happening in our gen fleet. It's something we're watching. We've got some initiatives underway to manage that. I think the sector, we're still seeing just crazy inflation, particularly around anything with foreign or labor procurement attached to it. So market's still quite tight. So yeah, I mean, the guidance of NZD 820 million at the moment's got OpEx of NZD 395 million built in of it, of which NZD 9 million of that's brought forward well at Kawerau. I don'r know Stew, if you've got anything else to add.
Yeah, I'd say from a synergy perspective, we're still expecting to see the results of the synergy come through. Slightly delayed from the project related to Elcon. Those benefits will start to flow through because we're going live with that project last week and this week. So slightly delayed, but we're still expecting those synergies will flow through as we've guided previously.
Okay, great. That's good color. Thanks. And second question for me was just around, I was interested in some of your comments on Slide 15 in terms of, I guess, managing the supply-demand balance going forward and the need for being, I guess, moderately oversupplied by renewable energy. Are you able to give us an indication of how much oversupplied you're kind of thinking the market should be?
Yeah, so the work we've done to dimension, this is particularly in relation to dry years, in particular. And the work we've done to dimension the size of that issue indicates somewhere around 2 TWh gap. And then if you have a couple of dry years back to back, it probably grows up to close to 4 TWh . When we look at the stack of solutions that's likely to close that gap, as I mentioned, thermal definitely becomes a key part of that. The numbers were sort of typically looked at from an oversupply somewhere in that sort of 0.3 TWh region. And if you compare that with the other solutions, it's part of the solution, but not the clearly, there's a number of those activities that need to take place.
Yeah. That's great. Thanks. No, that was all I had. Thank you.
Thanks, Andrew.
Thanks, Andrew. Next up, we have Grant Swanepoel from Jarden. You want to unmute your mic? Yeah, morning, team.
I'm just going to follow on from Andrew as my first question. So your Manawa hedge is rolling off. You guys are building a whole lot of renewables, and you're talking about HFOs being a good thing, and then you're talking about maybe some overbuild. Are we seeing your company sort of pushing quite aggressively to build as quickly as possible and potentially not worrying too much about costs? So following from that question is, how do you see the wholesale price developing over time? I think the last time you guys spoke, it wasn't much over NZD 100 long-run marginal cost. Has that changed much in your book? I've got a couple more questions after this.
Sure, thanks, Grant. So just in terms of your first question, the answer is no. We are heavily focused both on building renewables as fast as we can in a way that is commercially beneficial to the company and also provides generation for New Zealand's grid. Equally, the focus is on cost. A couple of reasons for the cost increase in the first half of this year, but certainly there's a strong focus from myself and from the executive team and further into the organization to look at what we can do to bring those synergies to bear and to make sure the rest of our costs are in control.
So the answer is we're focused very heavily on both. From a wholesale price perspective, I think it was your second question. I'd say that generally we're pretty aligned with, I think, Mike Fuge and the Contact team and their half-year results, that was last week. Spoke to the kind of range of 115-125. I would say that we're broadly aligned in terms of our perspective on that.
Okay, so that has moved up a little bit.
Yep, yes.
Thanks.
I mean, the forward prices are much, much higher than that. And yeah, in terms of pricing, we're not out of the woods yet. I mean, in terms of gas, gas supply is still highly uncertain around, I don't know, sovereign risk and willingness of upstream suppliers to commit. Gas is important. Currently, we've already called out as important and strategic around coal because in the absence of gas, then coal in the short term is key. And yeah, thermal fuels remain expensive and therefore are still setting prices. So yeah, it's difficult.
The forward curve right out to 2028 is still showing very elevated prices, and that's on the back of essentially prices jumping since 2018. So that's a 10-year stretch of elevated rates. So yeah, the only way that you're going to get prices down from a market solution is to effectively bring on new supply.
Yeah. Because of all these pressures and uncertainties, are you going to follow the type of strategies that companies like Genesis are approaching, which is actually pulling back 1 TWh-2 TWh of retail exposure or load?
No. No, because you can't, because actually the customers generally are demanding fixed-price products. So if that's not being supplied by generators, then I think you've got a challenge because I don't think it's a good idea for anyone who's buying power to be sitting on spot prices.
It's highly risky, and we're seeing the consequences of that. So I think it's incumbent on gentailers to effectively offer product because from a risk management perspective, suppliers are in a much better place to manage market risk than someone who makes widgets. So I think, yeah, I think the industry as a whole needs to step up. And if customers want fixed power prices, which they do, then it's incumbent on us to supply that.
And we keep providing those when customers come forward, both in terms of, I guess, fixed prices, but equally in terms of flexibility and flexible products.
Thanks. And I'm going back to Andrew's first question on OpCos. I'm still getting a disconnect. At the start of the year, you were talking about NZD 20 million of cost synergies coming through in FY 2025, even though there was some inflation. Now you've pushed that up NZD 25 million off nine, so it's up NZD 16 million net. So in the second half, should we see cost synergies, I mean, costs come down, particularly as you're saying those cost synergies are delayed into the second half?
Yeah, we're working through that. We've got a delay because of Elcon we haven't been able to turn off SAP yet in terms of those retail synergies because we've only just gone live in Elcon. So we've got to get everything off that stack to be able to decommission SAP. So you've sort of got delays causing an increase in cost in terms of Elcon, but you've also got delays in turning off SAP. So you've sort of got a double cost. Our expectation is that will definitely occur before the end of this financial year. So you'll see the benefits turning up in 2026. But yeah, we're right on the cusp of completing that work.
That's good news. And then my final question, just on those extra drills in Tamariki and next to those NZD 47 million. Without changing your maintenance CapEx from NZD 150 million, does that just mean that the drills continue at the same maintenance CapEx cost for this year and now that extra spills into FY 2026?
Yes, yes.
Thanks very much. And thanks for answering those questions. And goodbye, Will. It's been fantastic these last 20-odd years.
Thanks, Grant.
Okay, next up, we have Cam Parker from Craigs. I'm just going to bring you on. You can unmute, Cam.
Morning, guys. Thanks, Paul. Just going back to the structural length you mentioned, Will, with your portfolio, you've traditionally kind of managed it to about 400 GWh long. Is there a change to that going forward that we should be thinking about?
We are increasing it, but you can increase it by contracting, which is different from I'm just not going to sell fixed to customers.
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I think as we look to Will, where you've got increasing intermittent renewables, flexibility becomes really important. And we all know that hydros can provide a lot of flexibility, provided they've got water in the lake. And so therefore, a more conservative storage mentality is important. So I think you're going to find that. And I think you're seeing that. You're seeing that right now across the board with hydro operators.
What's the approach heading into this winter in terms of, are you like MEL, are you looking to lock in that sort of cover straight away now, or how are you managing your portfolio going into another year or another winter that looks like there's some Dry Year risk occurring?
Yeah. Again, obviously, we're in a pretty dry sequence at the moment. Droughts always break at some point. Yeah. Again, if you look at that risk curve, it's still remote that you've actually got a real security issue. We are steering into quite elevated spot prices. Yeah, we've done contracting. We're managing our lakes. We're making sure the fleet's available. We're still comfortable with our position. Yeah.
But yeah, if it stays really dry, yeah, there's no doubt that we'll have an impact on earnings because we don't have a hedge for reductions in primary hydrology. There's no hedge that protects you from zero-cost power.
So heading into this year, we're certainly managing the lake in a way that is trying to head us into winter in a good spot, but it's been incredibly dry over the last few months. If you back that up with the loading of the HFO and MSO that we have with Genesis, combined with other contracting, which includes, actually, we are looking to have 50,000 households on hot water control management heading into this winter. It's about 20 MW peak load. So there's a number of activities underway to try and support that, but it will still make it very challenging if the rain doesn't fall.
Great. Thanks, guys. Last one for me. Just in terms of the build costs on wind and so forth, I think we're a bit surprised at how high costs we're going to Kaiwaikawe. Any update on that or any update on the market that you're kind of seeing in terms of wind build costs?
Yeah, I think that's still a good project. As you say, that's marginal compared to some of the others we've done recently. And there's a few key reasons for that. One is the size of the wind farm. At 77 MW capacity, it's smaller than some of the other wind farms that we've recently done and some of the next few that are in our pipeline. The other is just the location, both from a grid access, even a roading to getting it out. So there's some reasons for the capital cost of that project being higher than what we'd expect, certainly have seen previously, and what we might expect for the next few projects in our pipeline.
Okay. Great. Thanks.
So Cam, we're just looking forward to see what MEL negotiates on Puketoi because that's probably the next thing to have up the rank from a procurement perspective. So yeah, there's no doubt that we're still seeing quite a lot of pressures from suppliers of generation equipment around pricing.
Yeah. Okay. Okay. Great. Thanks, guys. And all the best for the future, Will. Thanks for all your input over the years.
Thanks, Cam.
Thanks, Cam.
Next up, we have Steve Hudson from Macquarie. You want to unmute? Steve, you there?
Hi. Can you hear me okay?
Yep. Hi, Steve.
Hi, Steve.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Just a couple of quick ones from me. Just on the mass market, can you give us a feel for what sort of, I suppose, credit stress you're seeing across your mass market portfolio, past due buckets or any kind of stats that you can give us?
Yeah, we're still not seeing. I think it's slightly deteriorated, but nothing material. I think in the hierarchy of bills, people pay, power still ranks quite highly. We're very focused around managing our vulnerable customers. I mean, you'll see the comments around zero-credit disconnections over the last six months, which is awesome. So we're still not seeing credit pressure come through in terms of non-payment of electricity bills.
Okay. That's useful. Thank you. Just on solar, I know sort of interested in, I suppose, both Will and Stew, your view, how you're kind of whether or not your thinking is changing as we come into sort of potentially a second dry year, dry winter, and the diversification benefits that solar may provide a portfolio like yours and the sort of the cost data points that we've seen, whether or not you're softening your view on solar, I suppose, is the question.
Yeah. I'd say solar clearly has a key part to play in New Zealand's future. And we're talking primarily from a gentailer perspective, grid-scale solar. And if that's the case and we continue to want to be one of the big players in the market, then definitely it has to enter into our prospective future view. So whether that's through actually being a developer, a builder ourselves, or whether it's supporting offtake agreements to enable others to develop and build, it's in our thinking.
As we move through our generation development pipeline, those are the sorts of things. There's a number of projects which we'll be exploring to see how they fit. To date, we still think that the wind prospects that we have in our pipeline are really good and can actually stack up very well compared to some of those other alternatives we'll be looking at. But certainly, we'll continue to keep an eye on some of those solar opportunities as well.
Thanks, Stew.
Sorry. Certainly, its advantages. Obviously, transporting large wind turbines to sites is quite complicated versus solar. So the construction is relatively straightforward. We are worried about the back end of the ownership curve. So it looks fine today. But you put 2 GW, 3 GW, 4 GW of solar into the grid. It's quite interesting when you start looking at summer daytime prices. So when you've got peak power and zero spot, I don't know, it doesn't sound like it's going to be worth a lot. And batteries don't really help you with that. So it comes back to it.
I guess it's sort of interesting that the latest PPA that's gone off is a 10-year one, I suppose, in that vein.
Correct. Sure is.
Hey, just one final one. Just on geothermal, I mean, congratulations on what appears to be a really successful Ngā Tamariki drilling or, sorry, expansion. Can you remind us what else you've got in the tank in terms of brownfield and greenfield and geothermal? I know we're sort of getting to the bottom of it, but just an updated thinking there would be useful.
At the moment, there's nothing that we have publicly disclosed in terms of either brownfields or greenfields. But certainly, as we look forward, there are a number of potential opportunities at the range of geothermal reservoirs we have. So as we work through with our partners at those sites, what there could be, we'll share that as it comes to hand.
Could that be meaningful, Stew, or sort of mix?
Definitely. I mean, geothermal is a really important part of not only our portfolio mix but New Zealand's mix. If you look at steady base load supply, regardless of whether it's raining or shining or blowing. So yes, definitely, there's still potential opportunity inside New Zealand. We're talking conventional geothermal, right? We're not even talking supercritical. Even just conventional geothermal, there's definitely some meaningful opportunities. I saw Contact talk to Tauhara South and some of their Wairākei activities. But we think we've got some meaningful opportunities inside the Mercury portfolio also.
That's great. I'll also just add my voice to say thanks, Will, and all the best. I'm not sure how we're going to sum up 30 years of achievements, but I guess we'll try over a beer next time I see you.
Oh, yeah. No, that sounds good. I think we are catching up for a beer. So there is no try. There's do or do not. I vote for do.
Love it.
Thanks, everyone, for your questions. That's the end of the Q&A. Back to you, Stew.
Great. So thank you very much, everybody. As I mentioned, I really wanted to thank the Mercury team for the work they've done to manage what has been a challenging first half. I'm looking forward to playing our key part in the solution as we head into the second part of this year. And I look forward to catching up with you all soon. Thank you.