[Foreign language ] That particular kata key is about the acquisition of knowledge, and so [Foreign language] . This particular greeting that I'm going to give you is an acknowledgement, first of all, to our creator, to the iwi, the local people of this particular area, to our Māori Queen, and to those that have passed on.
[Foreign language] Just a couple of other additions that I included into my kōrero there, and that was an acknowledgement to our Māori Queen, [Foreign language] , and also an acknowledgement to those that have passed on. As the time of Matariki is upon us, I acknowledge those that have passed on in their journey to become stars and amongst that realm of billions of stars in the sky.
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language] thanks, Moa. Welcome to Rotorua. [Foreign language] . I'm the Chief Executive for Mercury. It's wonderful to have you finally here, if not slightly delayed. We can't complain about the weather in Mercury because the weather and the elements are part of a big part of what we deliver value from. I thought I'd start with a little te whera, a bit of an opening as well, because this really talks to the elements that generate a lot of the value for Mercury. [Foreign language] that's binding the skies. [Foreign language] , binding the earth and the land. [Foreign language], binding the rivers. [Foreign language] , bind the four winds of our nation. [Foreign language]
I've been in the Chief Executive role now for nine months, having previously been in a generational role with Mercury and having led complex manufacturing and industrial operations across Australia, New Zealand, and Africa. Most recently, before joining Mercury, I was the Chief Executive at TY, and having jumped from the largest consumer of electricity in New Zealand to one of the biggest suppliers of electricity in New Zealand, I'm uniquely positioned to understand the connection of that system. I've taken the time and the approach in the role to reflect on the powerful whakapapa that Mercury has, understand the changing landscape and the challenges and opportunities ahead. With that, I've worked with the Mercury board, of which we have a few here today, with the Mercury Executive and the wider Mercury team to refresh and reset our strategy for the next five to 10 years.
Our objective is to deliver the greatest value: value for our customers, value for our people, value for our partners, our stakeholders, and of course, as one of ours. Together. Today we're here to share that with you, our current owners, our future owners, and the representatives and advisors of our owners. Thank you for traveling all the way from where you've come today and to the Mercury team. Thank you for your dedication, effort, and support over the last little while, and I'm looking forward to seeing you show off that proud depth of talent we have in the room today. Mercury has ahead of it a significant opportunity. This is how we can optimize for value and be Brighter Together. It all starts with our customer and his portfolio lead. Tim will open today demonstrating how our advantage portfolio is positioning us for growth.
Craig, Fiona, and Moa will then highlight how the scale of our retail and the efficiency we have is delivering and unlocking value. Mercury is in a very exciting period. We're currently constructing three large generation development projects that will deliver and unlock further EBITDA performance. We also have a plan for future growth, and that involves us being prepared to execute and build value tomorrow. Matt and Ben will join us a little later on to describe how we're accelerating generation development. Mercury has at its core a key set of assets and processes that deliver and add most value. I believe this can be even better. Later on, we'll have Emily, Rob, and Kevin join us to talk about how we're operating for value to deliver better today. To bring it home is the money shot.
Richard will join us later on to summarise our overall approach and link it to our financial aspiration. I'll then finish with an overview today, and we'll link over to Amy, who'll talk to the project which is kickstarting our renaissance into the geothermal generation development space and talk to our OEC5 project as a start of our geothermal development program. Starts with this team. The strategy we describe today is really forming around three key drivers of value. Firstly, value from our core. Our highest value, lowest cost options for growth come from our core. Secondly, the value of our portfolio. Utilising our portfolio to optimise value and therefore enable our third driver, which is in building executable generation development options. With those three drivers in mind, I've structured the executive team and recruited people into that team to deliver on those three areas.
Firstly, value from our core. We have two Chief Operating Officer roles inside Mercury that are focused on delivering value from our core. Kevin Taylor joined. The other core area of our business is in customer. Craig comes to us with an electrical engineering background, having jumped to the dark side of wholesale markets, moving through to customer, and that unique perspective across all parts of the business and a couple of gentealer roles means he's uniquely based to help us drive value on customer. In the next few months, he'll join us in a role of Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer to continue that drive for future growth. The second value driver I talk to is value from our portfolio. With that, I've brought Tim Thompson into the executive. Many of you will know Tim.
He's had a deep experience in Mercury across a number of areas, most recently in wholesale markets. His experience will be critically crucial to making sure we can continue to deliver value from our portfolio. Our third driver of value exists in the generation development space. Matt Tolcher joins the executive. Matt is highly regarded across New Zealand's infrastructure development areas. He's already had an enormous impact on Mercury in terms of driving our wind projects forward to FID and construction, and I'm looking forward to seeing more delivery to come. In support of those three value drivers, we have key executive roles in the supporting team. Lucy has been a vital member of the Mercury executive team, driven strategy across the last decade inside Mercury, and more so actually had significant influence out into the sector in terms of building solutions to help the sector address the energy transition.
Unfortunately, Lucy will be leaving us in the next month, but I'm very fortunate to have attracted to the role Katherine Thompson. Katherine joins us, having spent time at a couple of other gentailers over the last decade or so, and is very excited to be joining Mercury. Fiona has brought a unique perspective to a role which is actually quite challenging, both combining people and technology roles together. Fiona's culture, drive for culture, her leadership has led to value being delivered very quickly in the technology and people spaces. Fiona will leave us in the next part, the early part of next year, and I'm currently recruiting for a Chief People Officer. Of course, Richard has now joined the team as well. Richard has a really strong background in the power and energy sector. He's returning to his roots.
He also has extensive CFO experience in a couple of roles in New Zealand. He will bring a focus and clarity to our financial drivers and the management of risk. You'll see them all in action today. The core of our value begins with our assets and our strong market position. Since our last investor day, we have been building our wind portfolio from the top of New Zealand to the bottom of New Zealand, and that diversity brings huge value that Tim will talk to in a moment. We have also re-entered the geothermal. Our team is getting very near to finishing the Karapiro station refurbishment. With those three fuel types, geothermal, hydro, and wind, we now have the most diversified set of capable skills in generation development and operation in New Zealand. We're producing 8.8 TW hours of electricity, making up nearly 20% of New Zealand's power.
Our retail customer base continues to grow in value, especially since the merger with Trustpower a few years ago. We now have 25% of the retail market, and I'm particularly proud of our bundling strategy and approach. We're now actually the fourth largest provider of broadband services in New Zealand. This has seen our customer connections now grow to just shy of 900,000, with an aspiration that Craig and the team will talk to soon to grow that to a million. We continue to deliver shareholder returns. Since listing in 2013, Mercury has delivered a total shareholder return of over 10%. Our share price movement in the last 12 months has stalled that growth, but the underlying drivers are very strong, and we have a plan in place and an aspiration to return that back above 10%.
We currently have NZD 1 billion of projects under construction, and we're delivering an execution and growth plan. Allocating capital in a disciplined manner is vital, and managing the risk will enable us to continue our dividends growth. Our EBITDA in FY 2024 was NZD 877 million. We have updated guidance for FY 2025 at NZD 760 million, and that's off the back of a very dry year, in fact, probably one of the driest years on record. Later today, Richard will share our aspirations over the next five years. We are a sector that is endowed with challenge and opportunity. I believe that Mercury is very well positioned to mitigate and manage those. The trust in the sector has definitely declined, particularly since August last year.
Navigating the transition to a more renewable energy system, especially during dry years and with the growing demand, requires us to focus on the three parts of the energy trilemma: producing sustainable energy that is reliable and affordable. The first requires delivering new supply at a rate that supports energy demand. Having pushed the button on a number of projects to deliver more sustainable energy, these projects take time to come on stream. Therefore, managing that and making wise, disciplined investment decisions based on our assessment of fuel demand swings. Of course, supporting customers, particularly around affordable power, is a critical outcome to make sure we get that trilemma correct. There is clear value proposition now in helping to electrify away from higher-cost thermal fuels. Growing connectivity and the bundling opportunity is excessively important.
Global trends in technology also enable a step change, and you'll see later on today us talk to how we're bringing that to fruition in our generation, customer, and functional support spaces. Of course, to deliver on all these opportunities, we need to attract great talent, not just into Mercury, but into New Zealand. As we grow our infrastructure, we have that support from the top of New Zealand to the bottom of New Zealand. We need to excite and retain that talent by creating an environment that is driven by purpose, has a culture that people want to belong to, and where individuals and teams are rewarded for their performance. Importantly, whether those rewards align individual performance with the delivery of value for our owners. To bring a few of those challenges and ecosystems to life, I wanted to share a couple of further observations.
We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity ahead of us. The scale and the pace of the build required is immense. The sector has been building at pace and actually far greater than demand for many years. This is not a fact that many people are aware of. The top chart here shows the net annual generation, less decommissioned generation, and the difference between those, the yellow and the blue area, is shown in the black line. The rate of consumption is shown in the gray line, and therefore you can see the net increase in annual generation has actually outpaced the growth of consumption, especially since 2019. This is even allowing for the decommissioning of thermal generation. This is supported by the 2.2 TW hour of supply currently in construction. We are further supported to 2030 with approximately NZD 10 billion worth of investment and 50% additional generation expected to come online.
Therefore, the issue isn't are we building enough? It really needs to be the focus on firming, particularly winter firming. That is shown in the bottom chart, where the new peak supply is in the black line and is not quite keeping pace with the gray line to firm our winter requirements. Tim and Matt will talk more to this issue later on today. We're coming off a large increase in global input costs. We are seeing good signs; however, watching this very carefully. The high-cost environment shows up for us as much cost increases in steel, copper, silicon, shipping all add to the cost of building new renewable projects. Despite this, the far right-hand slide shows that the residential cost of electricity over the last 20 years has basically been sustained at or near the cost of CPI. We'll continue to carefully manage our costs, focus on productivity.
Craig and the customer team, Kevin and the generation team, and Richard will talk to the factors in this area soon. The decline in our sector that I spoke to previously extends to all business, government, media, and areas across the globe. This slide looks at the barometer of trust across those four sector areas, including NGOs. You can see that actually New Zealand in the blue is actually lower in all of those aspects compared to our global peers. However, business still actually rates as one of the more trustworthy of all of those areas on the slide, although this has fallen the greatest of any sector, and we still lag our global peers. This is a really crucial barometer for us to watch because it impacts the openness and the acceptance of public to the development of infrastructure particularly.
We are mindful of the social license, and tracking this barometer is critical to make sure that we're on track for delivering the energy transition. Through all of that, I believe Mercury is very well positioned to manage and leverage the value and these trends and challenges. It starts with our diverse portfolio, from the north to the south, from hydro, geo, and wind. We've got a diverse set of existing assets and a diverse range of technologies that provides an advantaged portfolio that will sustain and grow value. At the heart of our portfolio is the Waikato River. It's a superior peaking asset that enables us to match supply and demand. We have an outstanding pipeline of wind prospects that have been developed to the executable phase. We have the largest geographic geothermal footprint and are only generating at the moment from a small portion of that.
What is more, we have a team with proven capability and that match fit in hydro rehabilitations, geothermal development, and wind project construction. Lifting our performance through the application of technology and the delivery through this talent will lead to further improvements in productivity and efficiency. Mercury has strong commercial and relationship partnerships in place with Iwi. We believe that Iwi will be critical in infrastructure development in the future and place a strategic priority on those relationships and our technology in these three areas. New Zealand is really small on a global scale, and so having access to the right technology and attracting those suppliers to New Zealand requires having that connection that is built on trust and delivery. Mercury has that in spades. With the Trustpower integration nearly completed, we have the largest retail customer book and in-house broadband capability.
That bundling strategy is delivering value for our customers and our owners. The customer team will talk to in a moment how we go about providing customers value through clarity and transparency of cost, giving them options to control their usage, and then working with those who are most vulnerable and most in need as a core part of who we are. Building connectivity, bundling of solutions, and electrification options will deliver more value. In order to account for these ecosystem trends, challenges, and opportunities in a way that leverages those strengths I just spoke to, we have refreshed our strategy. Our strategy is purpose-led and priority-delivered. It starts with our purpose and delivers across five core strategic objectives. The first three at the top of that slide link very closely to the value drivers I spoke to before.
Delivering value from the core to be better today particularly shows up in the second objective there around earnings transformation. Building value for tomorrow through the right growth options shows up particularly around our Kaitaki generation development growth. Delivering value from capturing the energy transition growth in the last one shows up through Kaitaki. When you combine that with the people experience approach and our approach to building sector confidence, that is how we become Brighter Together. These objectives in the short term over on the far right link through to our 2030 aspirations in a way that delivers our longer-term aspirations. Matt Tolcher, Ben, and the team will talk to primarily our Kaitaki approach and then demonstrate the disciplined approach to the pipeline of our development projects ahead of us. The generation team will talk to the commercial value delivery, and Richard will summarize that later on.
Tim and the customer leadership team will talk to the work in the Katataki area, particularly as a driver for our growth aspirations and decisions. The Mercury Tharno distributed throughout the room today represent the culture that is Mercury. It starts with the identity of giving positive effect, people want to belong to, doing work that is worth doing. This is how we build a team that identifies and delivers value. You'll hear the team talk to a lot of that strategy throughout today. I wanted to briefly touch on the last component, which is about delivering and rebuilding sector confidence. I've talked to the challenges on the left-hand side of that slide earlier, and they're captured here again. These are influencing the narrative of the evolution of market and policy settings.
Unfortunately, there are many voices in the discussion that have predetermined solutions, many of which will not deliver the fundamental issue that we have at play. Fundamentally, we need to bring more electricity supply online, to have it firmed to provide energy when we need it, and provide it in the right place. We actually have an electricity system that is globally extremely competitive. We rank consistently in the top 10 of the World Energy Council. Can the system be better? Absolutely, it can be. In addition to building new supply, we are contributing and inputting to understand the problems that we face and shaping potential solutions. The key focus areas are showing up on the right-hand side there from a Mercury perspective. They include supporting arrangements for hedging such as Huntly Firming Options, boosting hedge market and pricing transparency, and working to enable better demand-side engagement.
We have enough power potential in New Zealand through multiple renewable energy resources. That is an advantage of New Zealand. However, we do not always have it when we need it, particularly with dry year support and particularly with the sudden drop-off in gas supply. Is the supply in the right place in New Zealand? Again, that is an advantage that I see in Mercury's portfolio and a key consideration we will take forward as we build out our pipeline of options. As I mentioned, the key priorities really show up on this slide. Firstly, we are advocating to firm our generation, particularly in dry years, and also looking at boosting the hedge market, particularly around shape hedges. I am really looking forward to sharing our strategy with you today. The strategy uses the capability that you will see a snapshot of in the room to operate for value.
Through better productivity, continuing to execute the projects we have in front of us and building from our core, we are lifting our performance, and that will lead to earnings transformation. That is how we will be even better today. We are developing a plan to build for future value, leveraged and led by our portfolio, growing our telco bundling offer, and investing wisely in future generation development. That is how we are building tomorrow. Growth to enable expansion is how we will be Brighter Together. [Foreign language] Success is not the work of an individual, but the work of many. We are not alone, and we will do it together. With that, I am excited to hand over to the Mercury team, and we will start with Tim, who will cover off where it begins from.
The portfolio of Mercury flows on to our operations and how we're going to build out our generation development pipeline. I will join you at the end of the day with Richard to answer your very insightful questions. [Foreign language]
Good morning, everybody. It is still morning just. It's good to see a lot of familiar faces in the room, and I'm looking really forward to meeting up with you through the course of today and tomorrow. Welcome. I'm here to talk to you about our advantage portfolio that is positioned for growth. This starts with better today, how we have an advantage portfolio today, building tomorrow, and looking back to Stew's slides before, how we have an eye on the challenges and opportunities ahead through the transition. Finally, brighter together, how are we positioned to deliver long-term resilient growth?
Now, I'm going to move reasonably quickly through these slides. I know there's a lot of interest in this area, so I'll try to leave as much time for questions as possible. Starting with better today. This slide summarizes how our portfolio is advantaged. Our renewable generation is diversified, complementary, and low-cost across hydro, wind, and geothermal. It is predominantly North Island-based and situated close to major load centers. Our hydro system is rain-fed, with inflows positively correlated to demand and inversely correlated to other major South Island catchments. This is shown on the chart at the top, with Mercury's inflows in yellow correlated to winter peaking demand in black and inversely correlated to the South Island in blue. The combination of these attributes is illustrated in our consistent superior GWAP, or generation weighted average price. The Waikato Hydro system receives over other major catchments.
Again, this is shown on this chart with the middle arrangement. This is showing up with a track record of delivery, with an example of this being our differentiated trading performance. Now, this is shown again on this slide with the bottom chart on the right, where our annual ASX and FTR trading performance by year is positively consistent, positive with circa NZD 15 million on average each year, where our peers recognize this typically as a cost. This slide moves on from the prior and illustrates how we manage our exposure across different horizons and the critical role the Waikato Hydro scheme plays in conjunction with our portfolio settings. A resilient portfolio needs to manage exposure across every period of every day. This includes at the trading period level for instantaneous peaks, across days and weeks for Dunkelflood conditions. Hopefully, you know what that means.
It means still and gloomy periods where it's cold, the sun isn't shining, and the wind isn't blowing. Finally, and importantly, across months where dry years are a feature of our market. Our hydro flexibility plays a key portfolio role in the shorter two periods, where the system is noted to be able to flex in the range of 4 GW-20 GW per day. This is shown in the bottom left chart with the firming of our current wind portfolio. It shows the daily output of the Waikato Hydro scheme on the Y-axis compared against our spot exposed wind generation on the X-axis. The chart shows a clear inverse correlation of our hydro generation to wind generation, which means when it's windy, we can back the hydros off, and when it's still, we can ramp them up for firming.
The gradient of both lines for the winter and summer days is greater than one, which means we have broader market firming through correlated wind through price. Telco storage in conjunction with active portfolio management enables extended firming through into dry years. Our current default portfolio settings have us circa 750 GW hours per annum in normal conditions long, which covers around 90% of all historic inflow sequences. The bottom right chart illustrates how we use Lake Taupō storage to manage downside risk. Our feature is that we target near full storage in January and lead up to a seasonally dry period and ahead of winter. This played out well this financial year, which is still running at circa third percentile inflows year to date. We were able to store water in Q2 when prices fell. And how we continuously test how we can better leverage what we have.
A great example is our Digital River, which is a digital twin of the Waikato Hydro scheme and a powerful AI-powered portfolio decision platform. Bit of tongue twister there. Thank you. Digital River supports hydro operations with optimized dispatch plans that integrate portfolio settings, market data, hydrology, river settings, and constraints. Supported by Digital River, FY 2025 is well on track to be our most efficient year on record. We expect to achieve a sustained annual generation uplift of 50 GW hours going forward, and this results in our expected annual hydro generation increasing to 4,140 GW hours. The chart shows this with the hydro efficiency shown on the chart with the ability to convert water into megawatts shown on the Y-axis. FY 2025 is a standout on this chart in the top right corner.
We're pleased that this innovation has been recognized by being named a finalist in the Innovation and Energy category in the Energy Excellence Awards. Moving on to building tomorrow. Building on from Stew's presentation, this slide talks to the opportunities and challenges through the transition. The opportunity to electrify New Zealand is immense, but we have to be mindful of the other legs of the trilemma. In this respect, we believe improving security of supply in the sector is our number one priority, and we're leaning into our advocacy, promoting flexibility, and playing our part in supporting thermal backup in the medium term. This is showing up through our ongoing support of the Huntly Rankine units and supporting context gas arrangements with Methanex through this winter. This slide also illustrates our forward planning, which acknowledges the transition is not likely linear.
We plan to be resilient to different outcomes through the transition and be flexible to adapt. The chart shows this adaptive planning approach, where we strategically consider a range of possible future states and associated pace of change and what impact these possible outcomes have on our strategic priorities. The chart clearly shows the importance of our focus area of capturing energy transition growth and helping our customers on this journey and to realize the broader benefits of accelerated transition consistent with our at the top of the chart. This approach also shows up with our generation development strategy, which is planning to deliver in line with the high TEAL GROWTH SCENARIO , but has the ability in the pipeline to flex down. Water context. The charts illustrate the constituent parts of our portfolio and how they are likely to evolve from an energy perspective to 2030.
For FY 2026 and FY 2030, the pieces of our long or net generation positions are shown on the left of those charts, and the pieces of our short or net sales position are on the right. The difference between these two stacks is our target portfolio setting of 750 GW hours long, as previously discussed. Also, on the FY 2030 charts, is mostly our committed generation development, but we've included also the TEAL SCENARIO, which is consistent with our 3.5 TW hours by 2030, and Matt will elaborate more on that in his presentation. Of note from the slide is we maintain a long-term view of the portfolio and are purposeful about having an adaptive and prudent plan. A necessity for this is the plan is intimately linked to and informs our generation and sales strategies.
Some notable choices we're making today in line with this plan are we're choosing to be more sales-led from a generation development perspective, noting the decay of Amanuwa Hedge, which is the TEAL boxes in the stacks on the slide, and recent strategic sales such as the NZAS contract. Both of these are hedging committed generation development today. Relatedly, the duration of our CNI book is extending to help our customers manage the transition and electrify, a notable example being our long-term sales agreement with Fonterra for the Wairau Energy Consultants. It is also helpful. It also helps further support generation development and manage renewal risk in an elevated price environment. Our average CNI contract is now roughly five years, whereas previously sat between three and four years.
Finally, we are looking at how we can participate in other fuels and are currently progressing a solar PPA expression of interest process. We see this as the best approach to participate in solar for Mercury today. This should be concluded in the second half of this year, and Matt will elaborate a little bit more on how this sits within the generation development process. Moving from an energy picture to a capacity picture, the next couple of slides look at how we are meeting our growing firming requirements. Our future approach to firming at its simplest level is reduce the need, supplement our flexible hydro assets, and enhance the portfolio further with strategic SALU. Of note, outside the tails, the marginal contribution of Kaiwaikawe is near baseload with the averaging across the wider portfolio.
Despite best efforts to reduce firming need, the translation of renewables into end-user sales will consume capacity. The bottom chart shows how this turns up for Mercury and illustrates how capacity additions can unlock further hydro flexibility. The chart shows our net hydro position, being the residual position our hydros cover once you subtract wind and geothermal generation from our net sales. When the portfolio is constrained, it is for short periods typically correlated with peak demand. Capacity additions, such as what is illustrated in the chart here as a battery, can unconstrain the hydros for broader firming across every period of every day. Finally, sales and hedging can play a critical role in shaping the portfolio and addressing the residual or tail risks.
On the sales side, a couple of great examples are long-term generation sales transactions that are linked to generational PPAs, one with AWS, which is 51 MW of Turitea, and another recent transaction we've done that's similar with Visa. This final slide brings together the price slide insights and indicatively illustrates our capacity requirements versus the portfolio of flexible options we are pursuing. The chart indicatively illustrates our capacity exposure in FY 2030, again for committed GenDev and our TEAL SCENARIO, but importantly, the options we're progressing to add additional flexibility. Now, there's a lot of assumptions behind these charts and there's a margin of error, but it should give you comfort that we have a view of our future needs. They are manageable, and we're progressing options today to address these needs. With regards to the options, we have grouped these into four areas. One, renewable diversity.
This includes geographic and wind diversity as demonstrated in the price slide, but also acknowledges the benefits of fuel diversity and the uplifts we're achieving through our hydro refurb program, and Kevin and team will talk more about this later. Two, something we've coined, portfolio flex, which includes the opportunity with distributed energy resources and the potential from behind-the-meter flexibility from a scale retail business. Three, again, contracted flexibility, which acknowledges we don't have to do it all ourselves, and we can contract for flexibility with other market participants. Actions taken today to advance these options are that fuel and geographic diversity are becoming an increasing feature of our generation development plan, and particularly the re-emergence of geothermal as a key feature as baseload generation. Matt and Ben will talk more about this later. We're again engaging in negotiations to support the ongoing operations of three Rankine units at Huntly.
This extends support for these key thermal assets from prior transactions, but is also a key feature of our portfolio with callable flexibility. Finally, we're undertaking various customer trials, with a feature being our hot water management program, which had 13,000 cylinders under management and went to 24,000, and is targeting 50,000 for this winter, which would be an awesome outcome and market leading. To summarize before we open up for questions, we have an advantaged portfolio position for growth. We've covered here today how we have an advantaged portfolio today. We have an eye on the challenges and opportunities ahead through the transition, and we're positioned to deliver long-term resilient growth. Thank you for listening to me. I'm happy to answer any questions you have. It's expecting a lot, so there should be a lot of hands. There we go.
Morning.
Morning, Rob.
Just on flexibility, 300 MW of battery in your pipeline, what are you assuming for the market, and what can the market's capacity get to before it actually collapses as a return on investment?
Yeah, so we're actively looking at that now. So 300 MW is what we can do at that site. Obviously, we probably won't do all 300 MW at once. We have obviously a need in our portfolio for that flexibility, but we acknowledge that the economics of those sorts of assets will be compromised with more coming into the market, so we're actively looking at that. We think something in the order of 100 MW-150 MW is a first step for us as achievable and works for the market.
Thank you.
Then on buying from the market, how far have you got in terms of negotiating with Genesis on these HFO-type 10-year deals?
That is still ongoing, Grant. We signed the HOA back in February. We have been deep in conversations about progressing that towards a term sheet, but watch the space. That is all I can say about that. In terms of assets, yeah. The Manawa Hedge decay is included in that committed GenDev bit at the bottom. We still have residual capacity in the portfolio as it is today, and we are going to be looking at these other options to supplement it. We are very comfortable that we can meet that requirement up to 2030.
The costs that you've associated with all of that in your NZD 1.2 billion forecast for 2030, can you give some sort of idea of how those costs change from here till then?
Yeah. They obviously come with different costs. Some are cheaper than others. The stack probably goes in the order as it shows here in terms of cost. Renewable diversity, there are some costs built into the business cases of those wind farms, but ultimately, once you've done it, it is free. It's a part of our portfolio. The portfolio flex, we need to work with our customers to ultimately share some of that value. The example that we've got today in terms of the hot water management control is it actually is quite low cost in the first instance. We're using smart meters. That's existing infrastructure already there.
There's a little bit of cost in terms of engaging with the MEPs and upgrading some of the technology or software there, but beyond that, it's reasonably cheap. You know some of the costs associated with some of the contracted flexibility that's out in the market there, so those obviously come into it. Then we've got batteries, which adds broader value too. There is a spectrum of costs associated with these options, and we're obviously progressing them in terms of which is the cheapest first and complementing the wider portfolio. There will be costs associated with this, but we're working through it in the best way forward.
Thanks, Tim.
Good morning, Tim. We're working.
I know we'll talk about it in a moment when we talk about geo-ops for solar and wind developments, but it seems, given the content of these slides, worth asking the question, what's your long-run view of the geo-op, TEAL op coming out of the Waikato system? So you've got the slide there in slide 18 showing the chart. Top end, looks like you could draw a rule through it and say that's sloping upwards. Does it rise above 110%? Where does it get to by 2030, 2035 in your current views? Are you just talking about GWAP for the hydro system? Is that what it is?
Yeah. Yeah. It's obviously a really flexible asset, so you're adding volatility to the market through intermittent price, and that will show up through GWAP. So we'll expect the GWAP of our hydro assets to keep on increasing through time.
Can't give you a number exactly what it is, Neville, but it will increase.
Great. Thanks.
Cool.
Morning, Tim. Good afternoon. I think it is now. One of the theories, I guess, out there is that over time, hydro is going to become more flexible, less baseload, which in theory may mean more spilling and, I guess, less average hydro generation as more wind and solar comes on. What's Mercury's view on that as a thesis?
I'll just go back a slide. The bottom chart there sort of shows that we will be using more of the flexibility and more of the range of the hydro assets going forward.
This is sort of, again, internalizing some of that stuff and how we sort of address some of the peak issues, but you will see the hydro assets flex a lot more than what you've seen in the past. It's ultimately because they are the cheapest form of flexibility in the system, so we should use that first. I just think you're going to see the variability in the output of the hydros increase as you go forward as you're adding wind and solar and the like into the system. You'll see that, as I said, internalized within our portfolio, but as a reaction to the wider market too.
Does that get to a point where, to help reduce dry year risk and affect your holding hydro higher, spilling a little bit more, less average hydro generation?
Do you see it getting to that point or not?
Yeah, we already hold the hydros pretty high leading into January, so there was always an increased risk of spill through those situations as we manage risk going forward. I think you are going to see a concentration of renewables into summer, and you're going to see some spill of some fuel, be it through the hydros being held higher or wind or solar. I think it's just an inevitability with low demand through summer and concentration of renewables through that period. Yes.
Hi, Tim. Thanks for the presentation. Just following on from Neville's crack at geo-op, TEAL op, I think Meridian are talking about sort of 140% in the next 20 years. Are you south or north of that kind of? Just given the trends in terms of renewables in the system.
I suppose an associated question just on solar. They're pretty dog on the, well, it's pretty much a mirror image of that flexible hydro curve. I think they go down to 50% geo-op, TEAL op. The economics look pretty challenging, and I do not think the Lazard LRMC models, kind of, well, COE models build that in as a cost. We've always taken that as Mercury's view on solar, that there is a hidden cost in there. Is that still your view on solar? Or perhaps you might want to answer that once you've completed the negotiations that you're currently doing.
Yeah, we still have that backdrop, right? That is why we've been reasonably cautious about entering into the space.
I think if you have the view that hydro is not going to go to 140, you kind of have to say that something else has to go down. I think given the correlation of renewables and summer, solar is going to get penalized for that. When we are looking at the COI process, we have sort of come to a landing that solar is cheap on an LCOE basis. It is competitive with wind at that sort of scale. We do have that trend in terms of GWAPs degrading through time. When we are looking, we are probably looking at a shorter contract period. We are probably looking at 10-year periods for these PPAs rather than super long-term, just to protect ourselves against some of those long-term trends.
Thanks, Tim.
On Neville's back.
Look out.
Wider market question, really, but it's implicit in your discussions about firming. What's the company view around beyond coal? Because obviously you've got the HFO discussions underway. What's your view about the sort of the size of the gas generation fleet going forward, what that needs to be compared to where it is now, and the size of storage in the system to supply the gas flexibility needed to do that firming? You don't sort of have any direct involvement in that yourselves in these slides, but what's the sort of the perspective you can bring to that?
Yeah, probably not going to give you specifics, but we're very focused on, well, we have a clear view that firming is going to play a key role in this market going forward.
We can talk about HFOs and the like and coal being part of that, but yeah, we definitely see gas or some substitute for that will be a key part of the market going forward. We are going to lose TCC next year. Talking positively behind thermal as a key part of the market, and we will support it where we can. Obviously, we do not play directly in that space, but you will see us supporting it, and that is indicative through the process with Genesis.
You might actually contemplate an HFO around gas if that becomes a possibility in the future?
Absolutely. We will be happy to have those conversations. Yep.
Thank you.
Great. Oh, one more. That is all right. Just conscious I have got three minutes ticking down.
Yeah, I will wipe them out. Went through it quickly, hopefully.
Yeah, just on the CNI duration, five years, the pricing of that, does that reset generally every year, or is that sort of extending as well with the volume fix?
Most of them are fixed or CPI linked. Ultimately, we're just taking a view on future prices. That's something we're prepared to do. I don't think anyone would disagree that we're in an elevated pricing environment. It's actually, we believe it's a good time to do those sorts of transactions, and it gives certainty to our customers in the same respect. We're very open to long-term 15, 20-year contracts that ultimately fix price for us and for consumers. Yeah.
All right. Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the session. I'm Craig Neustroski, Chief Operating Officer, Customer.
It's great to have you with us today as we share the journey that we've been on and set out the value that we're unlocking through scale and efficiency. Our strategy is simple: bundle and leverage our scale to deliver value, value for customers and value for shareholders. Today, we'll show you how the work we've done over the past few years, which includes the integration of the Trustpower retail business, has given us the scale and the platform to do exactly that. Fay and Moi will then share how fast, seamless, personalised experiences are the new norm, and getting that right just doesn't lift satisfaction. It also reduces cost. By improving our tech foundations and embracing AI and automation, we're unlocking scalable efficiency and value. Has been a huge success story. We've hit scale, and we've hit our synergy targets.
This means we're now in a position to unlock even more value, especially through our ability to cross our broadband and mobile into our legacy customer base. We originally targeted NZD 35 million in synergies over three years, and as of now, we've secured NZD 34 million. These gains have come from labor savings, tech rationalization, and core business simplification. As we complete our SAP exit and finalize organizational changes, we're confident in exceeding our initial ambition. The other thing that we've proven is that our original assumptions were conservative. Dual energy and Telco customers have grown significantly, lifting by around about 28,000 since November 2023. 70% of new sales are now multi-product, which drives higher revenue and materially lower churn. Trustpower's legacy customers have proven more comfortable with the change than anticipated, reinforcing the strength of our brand, the migration, and our propositions.
When we look at churn shown on the chart on the bottom there, you can now see a meaningful gap between Mercury and our peers. With integration complete and looking ahead, you can see from the chart on the top, we're targeting to maintain electricity market share through time and reach 1 million connections by FY 2028. Our differentiated strategy will deliver earnings transformation, and we're not simply competing on price. Our strategy is about bundling value, improving experience, and materially lowering OpEx per connection by around 30%. That's right, 30%. That's a game changer and not likely reflected in many models. I'll now hand over to Fay, who will share how our technology, data, and people strategies are making this ambition a reality.
Afternoon, all. Great to be back. Lovely to be here.
My name's Fiona Smith, and I'm going to share with you a bit about our track record of delivery and our plans to move from labor-led to tech-enabled. As noted by Craig, we stood here, he and I, in 2023 and promised you an integration with synergies, and we delivered. Not only did we deliver the synergies, but integration was actually delivered on time, on budget, with minimal customer impact. Really easy to say, but as others have found, very hard to. Fundamental building block for user-centric self-service that actually works. Social media is littered with AI self-service gone wrong. Even McDonald's found out the hard way with their AI drive-through system, which turned out to be anything but user-friendly. My favorite clip is the AI server absolutely confirming an order for 260 chicken McNuggets as the people in the car begged it to stop.
It was shut down shortly afterwards and probably not the return on investment that the golden arches were looking for. Our focus on data mastery and our user-led processes will ensure we get the most out of our future investments. We have not been sitting on our hands, leveraging smart tech and AI where it makes sense. One area is AI coding, with around 17% of our code now being written by AI. I know 17% does not sound particularly much, but Google went above the line late last year, and their percentage was 25%. I feel like I am in good company. AI reduces handle time, speeds up our delivery, and ensures our folk are actually working on higher value tasks.
We rolled out AI tooling in pilot mode, lifting leaders' capability and confidence being the key focus so they can lead the step change as we put it into the hands of everyone across FY 2026, driving out manual work and reducing those costs. There have been many other gains from using smart tech. One of them is digitizing post-call transcription. That is all the stuff that the agent does after the customer has asked us to note what they want and action it. Eliminating this manual task is about 20,000 hours per year, helping us to optimize the size of our teams. In addition, we have made significant gains on the self-service front. The graph shows that when we stood here in 2023, 38% was self-service, and that has moved up to 68% today. That is 2.1 million customer interactions that do not need a human interaction or intervention.
We are not done with the plan to move to 85%. We are confident, based on our track record, that we will deliver. We have not just assets that we already own. We cannot go past the aptly named Optimus Brine, our pentane sniffing asset monitoring robot that is out there silently, come rain, hail, or shine, delivering real-time information about the health of our assets. Wait, there is more. There is much, much more as we continue to drive out cost through smart tech. We are focused on optimising what we have, and we are certain that our modular approach to system architecture actually enables us to flex and adopt emerging technology rather than hitching our wagon just to one vendor.
The telephony integration that is kicking off shortly will see added functionality that really drives folk to low-cost channels and provides whisper listening, more sentiment analysis, more customer insight, and our ability to intervene if things are going off track. Great for our customers, great for our staff. Automating our manual tasks is a core focus. As I say, we are looking to lift our self-service to 85%. That is 3.3 million interactions that will not need a human intervention. The AI tooling pilot proved up its value. We are planning to get AI into the hands of all of our kaimahi across FY 2026. We unsurprisingly have a belts and braces approach to protecting and safeguarding our data and great governance around our AI initiatives. AI is a game changer for eliminating manual mahi every day across our operations. We delivered Digital River, and we are now looking at our geo assets.
Emily's going to talk more about geothermal optimisation in her session. Last but not least, we're exploring the use of agentic autonomous agents as part of the digitisation plan. These are AI-powered agents. They're not of the future. They are here now. They will use the foundations that we are building today to drive real-time, quality, low-cost customer interactions. Smart tech and AI is that game changer. As Craig said, we're targeting a 30%. We've got a strong track record of doing what we said we would and line of sight from plan to delivery. You can have confidence we will deliver that cost out without dropping the ball when our customers need us the most. I'm now going to hand to Moa. She's going to share more on how we're delivering value to our customers and transforming our customer experiences.
It's always a bit daunting following Fiona because she's such a great storyteller. Kia ora everybody. My name is Moa Haar-Simmonds, and I am the General Manager for Engage, or what's most commonly known as our service teams, or possibly the hub of customer. I am new here. I started two and a half years ago with Mercury. I had the pleasure of starting right before integration. I spent my first year with Mercury getting to understand two separate businesses and one future business, which was an exhilarating journey and continues to be so. I've grown up in customer business and actually have been politely reminded by a colleague today. I spent 14 years in airlines leading global teams and in the last five years leading customer and service transformation. I've had experience across banking and airlines and now today find myself in energy and telco.
It is a pleasure to be here today. I hope I get to meet some of you throughout the day. Right, you have now heard how integration has delivered value and why Mercury's multi-product scale is a platform for growth. That is complemented by AI assistance, automation, and modular tech. Craig has talked to our ambition to transform earnings through reducing our OpEx per connection. Now, it is one thing to have the ambition to grow, but it is another to earn the right to grow. That requires deep enhancements of our customer experience. How we are fundamentally transforming one of the most traditionally cost-heavy parts of a customer business, and it is our service model. This is backed by strong customer propositions and opportunities, and all of that while addressing affordability and looking after our most vulnerable customers. This is Brighter Together. Simple and smart with a human touch.
It's our service model vision. The 30% reduction in OpEx per connection is being achieved through a 50% reduction in our cost to serve. As Fiona put it, our ability to invest in smart tech and self-service channels. That means digital engagement or encouraging digital engagement. We know that one of the macro trends we're seeing today is in digitization across all businesses. Tim and Fiona have spoken to Digital River, and this is about digital customer. We have a plan, and it's in motion today. We are simplifying and personalizing every customer service interaction. This is backed by a telephony platform with integrated data insights and self-service channel enhancements. We're shifting 80% of our existing service volumes. When you saw Fiona's slide, it's the gray part, the human-assisted side, that we're shifting to lower-cost, more scalable channels.
This graph here highlights our shift from high-cost to low-cost channels out to FY 2028. Importantly, we are not forcing the shift. We are earning it, and that's through better experiences. All of this is while prioritizing support for customers who need us the most. We have a myriad of opportunities. We have 280,000 customers who are still yet to digitally engage with us. As you would know, more app downloads means less manual intervention, which means lower cost to serve. While 70% of our new customers are multi-product customers, we still have around 60% of our existing customer base who have yet to take up the offer to bundle. That is around 300,000 opportunities to cross-sell. Market trials include EV charging, hot water trials, and time-of-use pricing, which I will touch on soon.
Looking outside our core customer base, we have a changing market landscape where affordability, digitization, and trust remain key opportunities for competitive advantage, which emphasizes the need for us to get this right and why our differentiated strategy needs to reach across the market ecosystem. What does a world of digital engagement and smarter propositions look like? It is access to smarter pricing solutions, time-of-use, demand response, reducing peak exposure, and giving customers control to manage their consumption and costs. I will talk shortly about why this matters beyond the numbers when we talk about affordability. It is live usage insights in-app real-time. That means no more bill shock, fewer calls. Fewer calls equals lower cost. It is personalized bundled propositions. Our telco cross-sell ambitions mean more revenue and stickiness.
Now, I'm going to talk about how proud we are to be ranked first in telco speed to resolution and billing comprehension in the Commerce Commission's Customer Service Rankings report. The reason why this is really important is because it highlights the focus we've had on lifting satisfaction in a key growth product. It's access to Mercury rewards, more reasons to stay, and a lot of fun and engagement along the way. Our customers racked up one billion steps in May and converted those quickly to Mercury points, which then converted to 800,000 free power days in this financial year. Now, Nadia from our rewards team Googled, "Where could one billion steps take you?" That is to the moon and back if you ever wanted to have that little piece of gold. Finally, it's tech that scales. We've talked about a solid telephony platform and enhanced app and chatbots.
Faster, cheaper, easier to use, more efficient, and ready to adapt. This is how we will scale at lower cost without losing the human touch and continue to grow our connections. Why does it matter beyond the numbers? Trust across business, but also especially in our sector. How are we approaching this? Clarity and cost through real-time usage updates. Customers need to see what they're spending, when, and why. This is coupled with the great work we're doing out in the community, supporting [Foreign language] like Energy Mates, which is providing a whole-of-program approach. It's control through choice, flexible payment plans, bundled offers, options that meet customers where they're at. We have a raft of solutions for our customers that will get them back on track and create long-term value.
We continue to test and learn in this space, taking learnings from across the sector. It is care when it is needed. It is proactive, data-led hardship support well before disconnection even becomes a risk. Our participation in research, such as the hidden hardships program and often leading discussions in this area, have uncovered insights that helped shape our program. At the 2023 Investor Day, actually, Lucy mentioned a whole-of-program approach to customer care. What you see on this slide are some of the three pillars that underpin our customer care program approach and some of the good work we have been doing over the last couple of years, not all of it. We still have opportunity to lean into that space. Essentially, we have designed a model that reduces disconnections, protecting bad debt and churn, builds regulatory and community trust, and protects long-term customer value.
Speaking of disconnections, we've been on this journey since 2023. We said back then that we were taking a customer-led approach to our collections and credit cycles. We've been showcasing this good work across community. Today, we are very proud to be standing here to be set to achieve our first full year of zero credit disconnections for residential customers. We've done it while balancing economic returns and bad debt risk. This is commercial resilience. It is doing the right thing for our customers. It is working with over 70 community partners and Iwi partners, of which Matt will touch on in his corridor. It is ensuring that as a sector, we do. You have heard from Craig, you have heard from Fiona, and you have met me. To wrap us all up, integration is behind us and synergy is delivered. We are positioned for scale.
We have proven we can grow and we have market-leading low churn. We're targeting a 30% lower OpEx per connection by FY 2028, with digital and AI doing some heavy lifting. We're targeting one million connections by 2028, all while leaning into affordability and vulnerable customer support. Let's not forget we've been building this capability. It was a focus in our integration journey, and it was a focus in our operating model journey. We've got some really great people at the helm who are doing the mahi to unlock our potential.
Thank you. We will now take questions and just be mindful I'm standing between you and your lunch. Craig will take questions.
Thanks very much, Craig, Fiona, Omar. Just on your 30% OpEx reduction, to what extent do your existing tech vendors assist you with that? I'm talking Salesforce and Gentrack here.
Or might you need to look to other vendors to help you with your targets?
Look, I think there's a lot of emerging tech. The way we're looking at our tech, it's about modular architecture. I don't think there's many vendors out there leaning into reducing their license costs right now. It's about being smart about what you do with your architecture and how you use it.
Yeah, and that 30% is obviously there are many things, many threads that come together in that. Some of that is just leveraging our scale. Some of it is through efficiency and reducing costs. Through that is more shared. We'll see that shift in terms of channels to be more dependent on those tech channels. We will be working with our kind of key partners to look to them to help us to deliver those savings as well.
It's kind of like a multi-pronged approach in order to get to the 30%.
Sure. And how material is weaning yourself off SAP to that 30% OpEx reduction? Is it material at all or not really?
We've always talked about it as part of the synergy. As part of the original integration of Trustpower, we believe to go. That comes from the exit of SAP in the next few months and some final organizational changes that we've got to make.
Thanks. Last one from me. Your customers are able to resolve a lot of their queries themselves now, but you're still not quite at your 85% target. What are you still taking calls from? What topics are customers calling about that they're not able to resolve themselves that they still need to talk to an agent for?
Yeah, so we still have the trend of bill shock, as I spoke about. Through the winter, high bills, those are really common themes that come through. We have been working a lot on our telco support for customers because we did see quite a big trend of those over the last couple of years, and we have managed to sort of narrow those down quite a bit. Mostly it is around billing and the like. Yeah, I think those are still the themes.
Inherently, telco is more of a dark art for customers than electricity. It is generally more confusing for simple folks like me when my lights are not working and I can see it is windy. I kind of figure there might be a power cut, but if the kids cannot get the Wi-Fi working and it is just not working, then often that is beyond me to solve.
Therefore I need some help. We see that in telco more so than energy.
Yeah, actually, if there's a big telco outage anywhere, you'll see the calls spiking. It's an emotive product. Yeah.
Thank you. Thanks for the presentation. Just two questions from me. Firstly, is your 30% OpEx reduction dependent on achieving that 1 million connections? I.e., does scale matter?
Scale does matter. It's probably about a 60-40 split in terms of the savings. So 40% of the savings we believe come through scale. 60% come through efficiencies in terms of when we're talking about that 30%. You can see the benefit of scale.
That was one of the, I guess, the thesis, the hypothesis behind the Trustpower acquisition, which would give Mercury the extra scale, but also the multi-products, which would allow us to kind of bundle, create value for customers, and ultimately lower churn as well, which is another key factor for how we get to the million. Customer base is a huge opportunity for us.
Great. Thank you. The second one is, let's say you achieve that 1 million connections by 2028. That is about a 12% increase compared to FY 2025. You are targeting 30% reduction in OpEx per connection. That means you are targeting, essentially targeting about 20% reduction in retail OpEx compared to today.
Yeah, in terms of the cost per, sorry, OpEx per connection, the target total was 30% overall. Yeah, so maybe I misunderstood the question.
You generally expect to see, yeah, overall Mercury Group OpEx, but customer segment level OpEx declining. Then, yeah, obviously when you do the math on that, you'll see that 30% reduction largely because of the—
that's on the per connection basis. Per connection. Your connection base will roll 12%. Yeah. You can do the math. Okay. Thank you.
Thanks for the presentation, team. Question sort of moving away from efficiencies, I guess pricing strategy for retail is not a discussion about that. We see in the feedback around the non-discrimination consultation that EA is running, the talk of internal transfer prices and margins there, and a lot of the feedback for that suggests that a lot of the large gentilers, understandably, regard retail customers as the, if you like, the base rock of their sale portfolios.
Sort of price against a long-run view. I mean, what can you tell us about sort of Mercury's pricing strategy? How do you see the world and how do you price retail?
Yeah, so there's probably two elements to that in terms of how we think about the wholesale price. You're right. I mean, the customer book is a long-term hedge for generation, so it's right to think about it that way. In terms of how we think about retail pricing, though, we've got a set of core pricing principles which set out how we think about pricing our products within market. One of those, I guess, core principles is that we will look to seek to, where it's reasonable, pass through input cost changes through time and look to maintain a sort of what we think of as a sustainable retail.
Is that sustainable retail market?
I knew you'd probably ask me that. Look, it's not something I kind of intend to kind of disclose today because obviously we provide too much competitor insight, assuming at least one of our competitors is watching us today. I think you'll be able to observe that through how you track our kind of, I guess, electricity retail prices on a netback basis through time. You should be able to observe that. The other thing that is one of the benefits of the bundling strategy is if you think about the kind of almost the implied netback price, which is the value and margin gross profit we get on those other products reflected onto the electricity price.
If you think about it that way, you'll see that our kind of, I guess, observed netback, bundled netback price is relatively firm and above the forward curve, which then kind of justifies and probably underpins some of the acquisition strategies you see us doing in market kind of thing, which is why it's so important for us that 70% of our customers that we acquire are taking multiple products.
Great. Thank you. I had one more. Just a question about shifting gears to talking about the sort of the firming products. Obviously, that's going to be a growing part of the customer relationship in the future, control of hot water, solar charging, etc.
In terms of your approach to pricing, I mean, how much of the benefits of that do you intend to share with the customer as part of the, if you like, encouragement to participate?
Yeah, that's something that we're trialling now. One of the things that with our scale is we need to kind of proceed carefully with things like sort of our hot water trials. If we were to have 300,000 of our customers participating in active hot water management and we're moving that around, we could have a very big impact on the network companies. We have been running a series of pilots, as Tim touched on, over the last couple of years to make sure that we can do that sustainably, both working with the network companies, but also understanding what does it take to incentivise our customers to participate in those programs.
As you might imagine, the level of participation and appetite to be involved really depends on the nature of the product. Hot water heating, as Tim talked about, as long as I get a warm shower in the morning, I do not mind, right? If you start messing with some of my other appliances or my EV, then I am going to want to pay a lot more attention to what you are doing. We are just sort of working through that now. We have got a bunch of pilot products that we are trialing with customers, and that is intending to generate that insight.
Thanks. I am just going to. In plus CAGR in retail pricing. That seems a bit aggressive, or is management pushing that NZD 80 million on you guys?
He probably is. No.
Look, I think if you're referring to the chat later, is it the bridge chat later on the side? Yeah, yeah. Look, so there are two factors within that. One is, so that's increasing trading margin, which has come about, classic P x Q. We're going to have more customers with more products, so there's an element of that in there.
In addition to our assumptions around future price, which again goes to, yes, what do we think about forward price curve? And how do we, and taking into account higher transfer costing from your generation division.
Yes, with a view of that as well. There's an element of that that's well granted in there. Yeah.
Thanks.
Thanks for the presentation, team. Just winter energy payment. Do you think there's cross-party support for the retention of that device, I suppose, to solve or mitigate energy poverty?
In the past, you've advocated for a more targeted winter energy payment. What's your updated thinking there?
Our updated thinking is, is that still our thinking? Yes, we do believe a lot more good could be done with a much more targeted program. We still advocate for that. Do we believe that material change might occur in that space? We're not optimistic would be our current view. It does require the political will to make a change to a scheme that's already in place, and that can prove challenging to get consensus and to make those kind of changes. We believe that there's opportunities to tweak at the edges, which wouldn't be too painful to make. That is, I guess, a thing we still advocate for. That's us. We're standing between you and lunch, I think, over at Paul.
Thanks, everyone. We'll break for lunch.
We'll be back at 1:30 P.M.
OK, good afternoon. I hope you all enjoyed the lunch. I'm Matt Tolcher, Executive GM of Generation Development. I've been leading Generation Development at Mercury for the last three years. I was here two years ago as part of the team for the Investor Day. I'm pleased to see some of you again. I look forward to lots of conversation over the next couple of days. I'll be supported today by Ben Pezaro, who's our Head of Geothermal Generation Development. I'm sure Ben's title alone has inspired some interest and hopefully some enthusiasm for what will be a share around how we're thinking about geothermal as part of the portfolio. Today, I'll focus on three key themes under Better Delivery Today. I'll sort of talk and celebrate a little bit around our recent track record and the capability within Mercury, including some very important partners.
Under Building for Value Tomorrow, I'll talk a little bit about our construction projects that are in flight. I'll also talk about pipeline. Ben will support me in talking about pipeline. Under Brighter Together, we'll talk a little bit about the broader environment in which we're developing and operating in and the work that Mercury does to sort of shape that ecosystem. Under Better Delivery Today, our track record's one of success and sustained momentum. We've reached fit or delivered, as Stew mentioned earlier, five of the last six wind farms in New Zealand. We've got NZD 1 billion in construction, 1.1 TW hours. Those projects are going well, which I'll expand on a bit. We're leveraging our experience in geothermal across operations, drilling, reservoir modeling. We're back in the geothermal gen dev game with OEC5.
As I said, we'll be sort of expanding on how geo fits in with our pipeline further. We're outpacing our peers, at least we have over the last five years. We're really proud of that. Our projects that we've delivered over the last couple have been successful. There were challenges on Turitea. I'm sure the broader community is aware. It was a difficult time to build infrastructure projects during COVID. That was still a great project for us, as was KD1. I was reflecting earlier. I was here two years ago, as I said, and we had a chart on the slides of the country, the map of New Zealand and our pipeline. At the time, Turitea, we were still building turbines at Turitea and getting ready to commission that wind farm. It's been operational for 18 months.
Kaiwera Downs stage one, I think we just poured the first foundation. That wind farm's also been operating for 18 months. OEC5 was in consenting. We were pre-fed on OEC5. Amy will be sharing more about some great success at OEC5, but that project's been under construction for 18 months. Kaiwaikawe was consented, and we were working hard to bring that project to life. That is now in construction, has been for six months. Kaiwera Downs stage two, actually, we were still thinking about TY. We were still focused on delivering KD1. Within a year, we developed and brought KD2 to FID to support the smelter. That project's also been in construction for about a year and going well. Two years is not a lot of time in the infrastructure world. In Tim's world, two years is a very long time.
When you're developing and building projects, two years is not a very long time. We have managed to achieve a great many things over that two-year period. None of that happens without people. Mercury has an in-house team that covers almost all the capability areas required to develop and deliver both wind farm and geothermal projects. Our wind farm development capability, we believe, is New Zealand leading. I'd be happy to compare that team to any team in Australia as well. We have a great team. We have a track record to prove it. As I said, we have a lot of skills in the geothermal space, end-to-end skills, drilling, reservoir management, operations, and construction through OEC5.
Just the chart on the right sort of looks over the last five years across some of those core capability areas and, I guess, demonstrating that a lot of that work is done in-house at Mercury. Obviously, we have partners in design and construction in other places, but we are a fully resourced in-house team across all those functionalities. What that means for us is the people who work on these things are greatly invested in the outcomes. They work on them from start to finish. We have people who have accountability and ownership for delivering value and delivering great projects. We can't do this alone. Supply chain's incredibly important. We've formed strategic supply chain partnerships across international suppliers, particularly around the OEMs and New Zealand-based contractors for wind, or, excuse me, for civil and electrical.
We think we're successful in that space of running sort of a split contract model currently. We have a very transparent and mature approach in terms of the discussions we have with contractors through early contractor involvement, where we're understanding risk collectively, apportioning risk, trying to create favorable commercial outcomes for all parties. We have been successful at that, bringing KD1, KD2, OEC5, and Kaiwaikawe to FID and executing contracts. We are not resting on our heels. We'll be testing that market both in the wind and battery space over the next 12 months as we progress those projects to an investment decision. We'll be looking pretty broadly at OEM, both through battery and wind. That includes OEM suppliers from multiple geographies around the world.
We will also be testing the local supply chain, seeking partners who we think can deliver, but also seeking commercial outcomes through that tendering work. There is a quote there from JD at Vestas, which I will not read, but sort of the outtake is strong partnership around, obviously, their strength in supply chain and supply. I think an appreciation of Mercury around our talent and the fact that we are getting things done. Position to build for tomorrow, talk a little bit about our construction projects, and again, talk a little bit about our pipeline. Tim spoke earlier about some of the market dynamics and some of the demand growth scenarios that we are following. I guess all the stuff that I will talk about around our pipeline and projects is obviously always couched across those broader market forces and certainly that demand and supply balance.
That is something we pay very close attention to. It drives a lot of our thinking around projects and investment decisions that we make along the way. This is sort of an overview, and I have heard a lot of discussion about this slide in the breaks and before we all got here. I will just talk a little bit to the right. I will talk a little bit to the left. There are a few details here, so I will spend a bit of time, and then we will talk a little bit about some of the building blocks of the pipeline. On the right, technology fundamentals drive portfolio composition. I guess you can see there our view on wind geothermal as it relates to solar in particular. You will see that there is some pretty serious banding across those LRMC values. Really, that reflects, and I will give an example for onshore wind.
There's different quality of projects out there in the market. Every project is unique depending on location or characteristics of the actual site. There are a range of projects in terms of their LRMC and value. Same goes with geothermal. We've got brownfield geothermal options. We've got greenfield. They play a little bit differently in that LRMC scale. Tim talked a bit about solar in terms of LRMC. That spread probably represents a bit around location, but also potentially a time sequence view on solar. We do believe there's an opportunity to play in solar in the short term, but long term, we think solar will be challenged in New Zealand. For that reason, as Tim mentioned, we're maintaining sort of flexibility around solar by build partner, enabling third-party solar.
Tim described the EOI that closed early in the year and the fact that we're in discussion with two potential developers around those projects. I'll talk later about BEST, so in the interest of time, I'll sort of leave that for now. The figure on the left, sorry, your left, articulates our current position on pipeline and our ambition and aspiration around development to 2030 and beyond. We've got on the left side of that figure our pipeline position to deliver 3.5 TW hours by 2030. That is a pipeline coming to life around a TEAL GROWTH SCENARIO . That's us growing market share in a very high demand growth scenario. We've got some work to do to convert pipeline into filling that construction gap between now and 2030, which we have a plan for. In the middle is pipeline.
You can see the stack, mostly wind, a little bit of third-party solar, and some geothermal. That's OEC5. Or sorry, no, that's not OEC5. That's a future geothermal project. You can see the gap to convert what we call pre-pipeline into pipeline. In terms of the pre-pipeline, a nice balanced mix between wind and geothermal. We'll talk predominantly today. We'll focus in on the geothermal component of that pre-pipeline piece. Our construction projects,
1 billion, 1.1 TW hours. I think Stew mentioned earlier there's 2.2 TW hours currently in construction. We're building half of that. At the bottom is a bit of a snapshot on how those projects are going and some of the key milestones ahead of us. Amy will talk much more about OEC5, and you'll get a chance to see it for yourselves tomorrow.
I refer to the bottom there as a bit of a green wave. Really proud of how three very large projects, all three are going to plan. OEC5's 18 months in. Kaiwaikawe downstage is a year in. Kaiwaikawe, still a lot of wood to chop, six months in. All indications are that those projects are going great across the multiple contracts that we're managing now. Picture tells a thousand words, so I won't steal Amy's thunder. I'll leave the left one till later. KD2, you can see at the top there is a substation that's pretty much out of the ground now. So all the civil. We think there's a lot of value left on the table if we were to develop Puketoa as it was consented. Part of the initiative there by our team is to optimize that site.
Just maybe to speak to the pictures below to give you a flavor, if you can see that on the left, your left is Puketoi as it was consented. You can see green and brown there around the road, and green is fill and brown is cut. If you cast your eyes to what we're looking at in terms of an optimized scheme, which is pushing those turbines up the hill, we significantly reduce the earthworks volumes. That has significant impact on overall risk and program. That is one example of the optimization that we're undertaking at Puketoi. Great wind resource, 12 meters a second. It's off the charts. That creates a lot of opportunity.
It also creates a lot of challenge, which we're currently working with turbine suppliers on in terms of what machines would fit that site and how long they'd be willing to guarantee the operation of those machines. It is both opportunity and risk around that resource. In terms of post-2030, the story really is about wind and geothermal. We've got nine TW hours that we've identified and we call pre-pipeline, which means for us, we haven't fully secured the rights or we're in the early investigation phase around those opportunities. I won't waste too much time talking about wind because I know you're all very interested to hear about geothermal. With that, I'll introduce Ben Pezaro, who's going to share a little bit about how we're thinking about this awesome opportunity in geothermal.
In case Ben underestimates or is not quite comfortable describing himself, I just want to introduce Ben real quickly. He has got an incredible technical background, an incredible commercial background. His radar on stakeholders and partners is off the charts. I do not think there is anyone better in the country to lead this piece of work for Mercury. Over to you, Ben.
Thanks, Matt. Kia ora tatau. Good afternoon, everyone. Just a quick intro about me. My background is in mining and mineral exploration in North America. I have actually been with Mercury for 15 years. I started as a geologist a long time ago. I have worked across all parts of the business, including finance, GenDev, strategic projects, and geothermal management. Today I am here to talk to you about geo growth for Mercury. That is pretty exciting. I will just start by giving a quick recap on our foundations.
On the left of the slide there, you can see that geo is foundational to our portfolio. We operate across four really high-quality reservoirs with a total capacity of about 480 MW for Mercury and our partners. We do this in partnership really well. We've got excellent relationships with Tuaropaki and Tauhara North No.2 Trust. Those relationships have been very successful in creating value over the last three decades. These geo assets are complex, and we've got a great team that looks after them with really deep technical expertise. Lastly, I'll add that for these geo sites, we're making good progress in carbon capture and emissions reduction. Emily Collis will give you a bit more detail about that in the generation session. Moving on to the right-hand side of the chart, that's where it starts to get interesting.
We believe that this geo foundation that we have with our existing reservoirs is a really great platform for additional growth. Our initial assessment indicates that there's up to 5 TW hours of geothermal potential, noting that this is really early stage. So unfiltered, and as Matt said, as pre-pipeline effectively, and also pre-exploration. We've categorized this opportunity into high temperature, effectively above 280 degrees Celsius, and medium temperature ranging from 220 to 280. There's also potential below these temperature ranges. There are other parts of the globe that would absolutely cut off their arm to have this type of resource. At the moment, we're not looking at that. For reference, our geo fleet operates in the high temperature range. Therefore, we think there's significant potential to generate electricity out of that medium temperature range on our existing reservoirs.
This is done in parts of New Zealand already and is very commonly developed in other geothermal countries. We approach this by effectively exploring and targeting a wider range of temperature and permeability distributions. We then do that keeping in mind project feasibility, reservoir sustainability, and project economics. We're looking at this as a long-term play. This is not a next year thing. We've got an early-stage program up and running with the goal of developing competitive projects post-2030. Here is how we're looking at the program. I'll start over on the left. This is a map that shows basically our reservoir interests in yellow. You can see our four operating reservoirs as well as our greenfield prospect up at Lake Rotokawa. Surrounding those in gray are our extended land rights. This is pretty substantial.
You can see that we have the largest geographical geothermal footprint in the country. And just for reference, we're using approximately 10% of that to generate that 480 MW. We believe there's more potential across all of these fields, and that's delivered via a combination of both in-field and marginal expansion. Like I said, we're looking at both brownfield and greenfield opportunities. On the right, this is an example of how we're looking at brownfield at Ngā Tamariki, which is where you'll be going tomorrow. This is a really high-quality resource. I think quite a few of you were at the original opening in 2012. The resource has been developed in a series of stages. It's fair to say that as the resource has developed, our understanding of it has also evolved. That's part of the trick of these geothermal reservoirs.
In the center of the map, you can see in yellow there the current production area. That is where we are supporting the current operations, OEC1 to OEC4. It is where we will also be extracting fuel for OEC5. The red and orange temperature contours are the extent of the resource temperature at depth. You can see that we believe that this—sorry—the resource has potential to extend both laterally and vertically. At this early stage of the program, for a field like this, we will use detailed numerical simulation models. We will do detailed resource assessments based on the permeability and temperature distributions. We then overlay brownfield synergies, which is an option here. We put that through basically risk-based development phasing, where we are basically investing wisely in only progressing options that meet our criteria for both value as well as reservoir sustainability.
We believe that by applying this type of methodology with our partners, combined with the right exploration model and current and future technology, that we will be able to create some high-value options for Mercury over the long term. In short, our geothermal platform is really strong. It is a cornerstone of our current performance. We also think it has really great potential to build value for tomorrow. I will hand you back to Matt to cover our final section. Thanks.
Okay, we have about five minutes. I am going to go quickly here through the last few slides and make sure we have time for questions. Our final section is around shaping the New Zealand development ecosystem. I guess we can do within Mercury, we control a lot of the development life cycle.
We control a lot of the investment decisions or all the investment decisions that we make. We do not develop in a vacuum. There is an ecosystem in which we are developing. We are leaning into those to unlock growth, to make GenDev efficient within New Zealand, and to create strategic advantage for Mercury. Just a few examples of that. Social license, Moa talked earlier around social license and stakeholders. Iwi communities, in particular, are really more than consenting stakeholders. They are invested in these projects and the outcomes of these projects, both from a regional development, from an environmental, and from an impact on their families and their communities. We are really proactive and transparent around all of our projects. We have a team who are dedicated to creating the right conversations with communities, Iwi, and stakeholders at the right time.
I guess a proof point of that is that we have been successful consenting a bunch of projects over the last few years. I'm sure you read the news about Australia. I'm sure you read the news about New Zealand. Things do not always go to plan in consenting. I'm sure we will have challenges ahead too, but we have been successful over the last few years. Another domain and participant in this is government and regulatory. Lucy's team in particular spends a lot of time supporting GenDev around the regulatory landscape that we operate within. You all will have followed the fast-track legislation process. There is RMA reform on the horizon. Part of the RMA reform or adjacent to that is some of the national policy statement work around renewable generation and freshwater and other things. We are very active in that space.
I guess a proof point there is we managed to list four of our consenting projects in that fast-track legislation. I think there are only seven wind farms listed and not too many more energy projects. Again, we had more of our fair share of success through that fast-track process. We're busy making decisions about the right consenting model for our projects with that opportunity. In terms of grid, obviously, Transpower played an enormous part in terms of unlocking renewables growth in New Zealand. I think that's all intuitive for you all, so I won't spend too much time on that. One of the opportunities we have taken, the proof point around KD2, is we followed a developer-led model with KD2.
We're following that on other projects where effectively we work in consultation with Transpower, but we advance the project while we wait in queue effectively and then work in collaboration with Transpower as we enter the investigation phase. It is a new process for Transpower. We've been trialing on KD2. It's been successful for us in terms of enabling us to accelerate that project, and we'll continue to work with Transpower around those opportunities moving forward. The last is New Zealand development capability. As I spoke to earlier around supply chain, we're busy not only testing but supporting supply chain entrance into New Zealand. It's a small market, and it takes a little bit of energy and effort to convince people that this is a place to do business.
With a big program of work and, I think, a stable regulatory environment, we have managed to create some really interesting conversations with offshore suppliers who are interested in entering the New Zealand market. We will learn more through Mahinerangi to invest. With that, a very quick wrap. On the right, we have got an ambitious plan to deliver 3.5 TW hours by 2030. In parallel, we have got an ambitious plan to grow that middle bar pipeline to over eight TW hours by 2030 to enable us to build beyond 2030. We will do that by leveraging track record capability. We will do it through planning for 2030 and beyond, and we will do it by spending time and energy trying to make New Zealand a good place and efficient place for generation development.
I really haven't left a lot of time for questions, but any questions for Ben and I? Come on up.
A couple of questions. The first one is just around thinking about when you push go on projects and assessing, I guess, that TEAL SCENARIO that you're talking to. I guess demand growth was looking pretty good in 2024, and then we had the dry winter, and it hasn't looked a bit soggy since then. How are you thinking about that, and what are you wanting to see before you push go on some of the on Mahinerangi, I guess, and then those other two wind projects that you're talking about beyond that?
Yeah, thanks for the question. I mean, I guess it's a medium-term view on demand growth.
We do look by month and year on year, but we've got a form of view on demand will grow. For us, the question is a matter of when. We will be making investment decisions on that basis. As I said, the infrastructure life cycle is on the order of years, not months and weeks. I think aligning the view on demand growth with that infrastructure life cycle will be approached. Of course, every project will need to stand on its own feet around some of those investment decisions. Our view in particular on forward price, which is effectively where that supply and demand balance will land.
Okay, thanks. Our second question was just on, I guess, the geothermal, and you give us a very wide range on the LRMC.
I'm just converting that, I guess, into dollars million per megawatt brownfield versus where we might get to on a greenfield. Do you want to set that down there?
Yeah. Obviously, OEC5 at the moment coming in around NZD 6 million. That has moved considerably in the last five years. We do expect that would increase over time.
Greenfield on top of brownfield?
Yeah, I do not have a number for you today, and no one's really done it in the last decade.
I think that will be one of the challenges, as there are not as many historical data points, so we will need to be developing first principles view around economics for the future geo projects. Wendy can talk all day about dollars per megawatt, but yeah.
I seem to be much more excited about your geothermal opportunity than you guys appear.
Can you just put me right on this? Geothermal on your sheet of long-run marginal cost is run about 105 at the midpoint. Wind is creeping up to 100, and wind's still going to be firmed. Why, when you see five terawatt hours of opportunity, are you not fast-tracking this instead of going, "Oh, something in the 2030s"?
Yeah, I can speak to that quickly. I mean, obviously, OEC5, we're building geothermal now. We've been working on this opportunity over the last 18 months, thinking about optimization and new projects. Are we fast-tracking it? We're absolutely going to invest in this geothermal pipeline and invest people, invest time, and invest money on capturing these opportunities, understanding them a little bit better, and translating these, as Benson, into projects.
I think you saw in the 2030 stack, we've sort of socialized an idea about a project that could land within that timeframe. Hopefully that demonstrates how we're thinking about the opportunity and accelerating this suite of options. Tim's talked a lot about firming and the need for capacity, and obviously, geothermal plays a role in that stack as well.
To get to the five terawatt hours broadly, you've worked out a volume, a heat, a potential cost to extract or economical. Then you've still got resource consenting. What are the hurdles you've got to overcome before you can actually start this one project? Yeah, we've got all those factors. There is an element of exploration to actually prove that. You can model it all day, but you actually go and you will need to get the lie detector out and go and drill it.
There is that aspect. Then there are some aspects of working with stakeholders and partners to get comfortable that that is the next best project.
Thanks. My final question: if you do get this five terawatt hours underway at the midpoint of that range you more or less put on the graph, would that change your long-run assumptions? Because I think at the interim results, you guys were pushing for 115-120. If you have got five terawatt hours coming on at more or less 105, does that not change the environment for the 2 030s?
I think one thing to think about in terms of the five terawatt hours is there is a capture rate of projects as you move right to left in terms of that, right? Not all projects will make their way to construction.
I think we're not proposing that we're going to build five terawatt hours necessarily of geothermal. We might, but there's a lot of work for us to undertake around the potential capture rate of those projects, which ones, as has been said, we can bring partners along with, which relates to access to fuel, and which of those projects makes sense economically. Obviously, the brownfield stuff is interesting and could move faster than the greenfield stuff, but that's all work that we'll be undertaking over the next year.
Any issues?
No, I mean, excuse me. Our most recent consent was OEC5. Obviously, we learned about that. We do think there's ways to do it better in the future, but we will need consent, yes.
Thanks. Just a couple from my team. First one, in terms of the wind farms, the large ones, Puketoi, 2.0, etc.
I mean, you've got them in the stack here as potentially FY 2030, but I guess the sort of the lessons of recent decades have been these things always take longer than expected. I mean, when was the earliest you could hit FID? And is it realistic to think these could be generating by FY 2030?
I think in the last half year, we socialized sort of investment dates for both those projects. I think that's still feasible. We've got dates for lodging consent for both those projects. I think both of those dates that were socialized are feasible. Frankly, I don't necessarily think we'll get there on both of them. That's hence the optionality. I think probably most of you would think that's a prudent thing, prudent approach. In terms of the stack, those dates were when those assets could be operational.
With both of those wind farms, for Puketoi, we're talking like 250, 260 meg now. For Kaiwaikawe, you saw we're looking at up to 300. We will need to bring that generation online within a couple of years of starting in order to make those business cases stack. The whole idea is that we'll be driving critical path through substation, not necessarily completing the wind farm before we start generating out of them. That is reflected in the slide as well.
Great, thank you. The second question, which is inevitable in this audience, is what is your current view, the sort of range of long-run price for the market? Odahu, Tiwat, what kind of ranges are you working with at the moment?
Yeah, I think we're probably what we've socialized in that slide around our view around LRMC is maybe as detailed as we'll go today. Between 80-140. Yeah, I mean, you've run the numbers on, I'm sure, Kaiwaikawe and KD1 and KD2, and that's a view. Yeah, I think that's probably as much as we'll share today. Every project's different. Every project's unique. Exchange rates go all over the place. There's so many factors that contribute to this, and we'll just be looking at each project on its own merit.
Thank you.
Thanks, Matt and Ben. A couple from me. I'm not sure. Did you share a sort of an appraisal or drilling cost to develop or firm up this resource?
No, we haven't done that.
Can you give us sort of ballpark what we're looking at?
Yeah, look, the nature of brownfield, it's going to be difficult to talk about drilling capital when we're seeking to understand resource potential because you could go through a phase of exploration before you're actually going into your dev or production drilling.
Okay, thank you. Just on the LRMC range, does that include a payment to your partners? And is that a big variable when you're assessing that range? You have land partners and so forth.
100% for wind, yeah, I mean, most of those agreements are on royalties, and that's certainly factored into the overall economics, including that long-run marginal cost. That's pretty much an all-in GWAP, TWAP adjusted view.
Geothermal as well?
Yes.
Yeah.
Are we looking at sort of leaning pretty heavily on Ormat here to come to the party?
Have you got other OEMs that you can kind of introduce some contestability? I guess the second part of that question, we've observed Ormat actually view you as a competitor. They're obviously drilling and developing their own resources here. Is that a constraint to your aspirations here?
Yeah, look, I mean, I think that's the same across any kind of fuel class for Mercury. We're always keen to look at different geothermal generating technologies. There are ones that are being deployed outside of New Zealand at the moment that we're watching. How and when they turn up to New Zealand, that's actually part of the program is understanding that.
I think going a step further and just studying that is having conversations about creating new market participants, same way we're doing with wind. I see that as the future geothermal as well.
We have a couple of years to build those relationships and create a convincing story.
All right, we are going to get in trouble for how much time we talk, but thank you all very much. Appreciate the discussion. See you next week.
Good afternoon. I am Kevin Taylor. I am Chief Operating Officer in Generation. I have been with the business for the grand sum of two months. My work since commencing in April has been to understand and ensure we are doing the right work in the short term to improve our performance and that we have a longer view and plan to add value into the future. I believe this presentation clearly indicates that the projects outlined in the session today provide the assurance that the right work is indeed being progressed and is delivering good outcomes today, is protecting value for tomorrow, and is ensuring future value.
We're working to enhance our generation whilst maintaining our CapEx at an agreed level. Today in this session, I have two highly capable and valued team members, Emily Collis, Head of Geothermal Resources, Strategy and Performance, and Rob Rankin, Head of Projects, contributing to take us through the work that is being progressed. The graph on the upper left, we've changed the graph around. The graph on the bottom right illustrates our continuous improvement on our % availability across our portfolio since 2022, with all being above or on plan. The graph above it speaks to our safety journey. There is no success without safety. Mercury is on a journey through to safety citizenship. Very strong positive momentum is delivering desired improvements, as can be seen in that graph.
Improvements in both all injury frequency rates and total recordable injury frequency rates represented by three recordable injuries in the past 12 months. It is the best safety performance that generation has put together in its history. Several key initiatives have been rolled out and are seen as key enablers of current outcomes and for future improvement. Quality leader routines, where we are preparing the team to deliver safe outcomes at the start of each and every day. Planning and executing quality in field interactions. Coaching for sustainable performance and uplift in leadership skill. Developing skills of all in identifying and managing hazards. That is about a few brief things that I wanted to introduce in this session. I will now ask Emily to come forward and take part.
[Foreign language] I must apologize, Kev.
I did move your graphs around, so I'm sure we'll have an engaging conversation about that later on this evening. As Kev said, my name is Emily Collis. I am the Head of Geothermal Technical Resources and Strategy and Performance for Generation. It's a real pleasure to be here with you today, and I really look forward to sharing with you some of the projects that we've been delivering in Generation that have really led to our success and performance at the moment. To start off with, Rob and I would like to share with you some of these key projects and how they're linking to delivering value today. In Generation, we have a really strong track record of delivering projects, and these continue to support our performance. The first project I'd like to share with you is around our carbon reduction program.
This program is linked to our broader goal at Mercury around our climate action plan. This plan sets out a target of 70% reduction of our CO2 emissions by 2030. We embarked on this program at Ngā Tamariki to start off with. The pie chart in the middle there shows you the breakdown of the CO2 that is emitted at our geothermal stations. We began in 2021 at Ngā Tamariki, where we were then an industry first to capture and re-inject CO2 back into our reservoir. This was a really exciting project for us, as it meant that we were charting new territory when it comes to achieving our climate ambition goals. We set out on this project, and I can successfully share with you now that we're achieving about 41% of that CO2 that's being emitted at Ngā Tamariki is now being re-injected back into our reservoir.
We've continued to expand the system at Ngā Tamariki, and we're actually commissioning at the moment, and we hope to be able to re-inject, hopefully getting close to 75%-80% of that CO2, which is a great testament to the team who have put a lot of effort into understanding how that CO2 is going to interact in the reservoir and also making sure that it doesn't mitigate any of our strong station performance that we've had at Ngā Tamariki over the last 10 years. What this has meant for us is that we have avoided emitting over 20,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since we began re-injecting in 2021. This has seen us avoid the payment into the ETS of over NZD 1 million to date.
In total, we'll be investing about NZD 3.3 million at Ngā Tam ariki, and obviously that then therefore presents a really commercially viable opportunity for us as a business as well. We continue to look further out for this program, and we're going to be conducting extra work to make sure that we can address the challenges at our other geothermal stations as well. Throughout this year, we spent a considerable amount of time conducting feasibility studies at our Kawerau Power Station, and we'll be moving into our strategic focus of the solutions that we've identified as viable in FY 2026. This will set us up for success to deliver on that 2030 timeline when we start to execute on those solutions by FY 2027. A really exciting project for us moving forward. The next key project I'd like to share about is our geothermal well drilling.
Over the last two years, we've undertaken an H-well drilling campaign, and this campaign has had two key objectives. The first one was to be able to provide the geothermal steam supply and re-injection for the expansion at OEC5 at Ngā Tamariki. The second objective was to make sure that we're maintaining our steam supply at our existing plants at Kawerau and Rotokawa. Since undertaking this program, we've gone on to achieve six successful wells to date across these fields. We've been able to produce some great results from each of those wells. Those have really come about because it's been a strong testament for the in-house team that we have built. We've managed to pull some talent from globally, which is now our in-house bench strength that is our geothermal drilling team.
They've been able to leverage some external consultants as well to make sure we've got the right support as we're going into some really challenging and complex drilling activities. Overall, we've been able to also partner with two domestic drilling rig suppliers, Maricopa Drilling and MB Century. And that's also been a key part of the success of these drilling campaigns. I'll now hand over to Rob, who's going to talk to us about some of the rehabilitation work.
Thanks, Emily. Good afternoon. My name is Rob Rankin, and I'm Head of Projects for Generation. I'm really excited by this opportunity to showcase some of the highlights from our portfolio of projects that protect and enhance value. The next project we'd like to talk about is the Karapiro Rehabilitation Project.
Karapiro is the last station on our Waikato scheme, and in 2019, we embarked on this project to rehabilitate this wonderful New Zealand asset. The NZD 90 million project includes replacement of the intake gates and generating equipment. The beautifully crafted turbine that you can see here delivers significant value that we will discuss as we progress through this presentation. The last unit that we took out when we commissioned it was 79 years old, which is such a credit to the ingenuity of the teams that originally designed it and built it. It is also a great credit to our asset management. The project is on track to be completed in September 2025 with no serious injuries and over a quarter of a million hours worked on the project to date. The projects that Emily and myself are talking about today form the majority of Mercury's stay-in-business CapEx.
Mercury is committed to retain our SIB CapEx at NZD 150 million, as previously communicated. The team will look to phase the work to balance risk, value, and the capital profile. The key drivers for this spend are the hydro rehabilitation program and the geothermal drilling. The rehabilitation program protects downside risk from the aging assets, but it also provides significant value to the portfolio. At Karapiro, we've seen a 16.5 MW uplift, which translates to 32 GW hours. Also, for the next three units that we are planning to replace, we'll see an uplift of 58 MW of peaking capacity, which translates to 87 GW hours. Drilling ensures that our geothermal stations can optimize output with resilient fuel supply. The next major component of our stay-in-business CapEx profile is our maintenance within the Generation Department, and that combines minor and major maintenance projects.
We're going to touch about two key projects in just a moment, which are the Taupō control gates and the Arapuni left abutment. Finally, we have our reinvestment in technology, customer, and enterprise-wide initiatives that make up our full profile. Our second section part of this presentation is on asset resilience, which is core to protecting the value that we deliver. In terms of building tomorrow, there are two key projects to discuss, which are part of our dam safety management program. The first of these projects is the Taupō control gates. The gates were originally constructed in the 1940s, and they control the flow of the Waikato River. Whilst the asset is fit for purpose, it is not designed to modern seismic engineering standards.
The design does not also readily allow for strengthening, so we are embarking on a project to investigate the potential to replace this asset. The control gates are a key infrastructure for the city of Taupō, and the river, the Awa, is of key significance to our iwi partners in the region. When the gates were originally constructed in the 1940s, they actually diverted the natural course of the river. Mercury has sat down with our iwi partners to really understand the history behind that and engage them early in the project. Whilst we remain at the optionary phase, we've already conducted a cultural impact assessment, and we've actually taken our local partners through our long list of options for the project, which is a really different way of engaging on such a key project and enhances our social license.
We anticipate construction commencing from 2030 onwards for this key project. The second project that I'd like to talk about is the Arapuni left abutment. Arapuni Dam was the first of the existing hydro dams built on the Waikato scheme, and it was built around 1924 through to 1929. There have been several remediation activities since on the dam, the most recent of which was in 2007, where we actually drilled through the crest of the dam, and you can see in the picture on your bottom left, all the way down underneath the dam to create a wall effectively out of piles to prevent seepage underneath the dam. Our active monitoring through our dam safety program has picked up some increasing or high pressures in the left abutment, which is shown in that yellow box.
Our internal team, and validated by an international peer review panel, has recommended intervention into this area. This is a really specialized piece of work, so we have assembled a team of internationally recognized construction partners as well as expert engineers to support us through this project. The work involves drilling down through that consolidated rock formation and then cementing in place piles which overlap to form a wall. As well as that, we'll look to install some drainage within that system. The project is complex, so we've set it up as a partnership model to share risk and get the optimum early engagement with our contractors to deliver the best outcome for Mercury. Our final section of this presentation is around how we're enhancing value every day. Mercury has previously communicated around the Rehab Program.
The Rehab Program offers so much potential to optimize and deliver value, and there's really three key things that we're looking at through this program of work. Firstly, our rigorous asset management allows us to maximize value from the existing assets, and we've seen that through the 79-year-age Karapiro unit. I.e., we really want to intervene at the optimum time with the assets. So we're constantly looking at our program and how that will work and how we balance the capital reinvestment program. Secondly, the next program of work is really driven by generator condition. But we've sat down and looked at the value for the overall program and determined that replacing the turbines is a net NPV+ intervention.
We are going to progress with that because we've seen at Karapiro, we've added the 32 GW hours, and at the future stations, we're looking at an additional 87 GW hours. We're seeing that value turn up now. At Karapiro, we installed the first unit back in 2023 and a subsequent unit in 2024, and we've already made NZD 6 million in additional revenue from those units. NZD 5.5 million of that is from turbine efficiency alone, so a 5% increase in turbine efficiency. Finally, the next three stations, Maraetai 1, Ohakuri, and Atiamuri, have been combined as part of a strategic supplier partnership, allowing us to optimize delivery, retain key skills within New Zealand, and manage asset risk and capital spend. The project at NZD 550 million will be New Zealand's largest hydro rehabilitation project. Thank you. Back to you, Emily.
Great. Thank you, Rob.
I'd like to share one final piece of the puzzle, which is around the optimization activities that we undertake in Generation, which is a really exciting area of our business. We really focus on how can we eke out more megawatts from the assets that we have today. These are some of the cheapest megawatts that we can find. We've got a team of optimization engineers that work really closely with our frontline operations to make sure that we can keep finding those incremental megawatts. We do this through a number of different mechanisms, and I'd like to share with you a couple of examples of the things that we've been achieving. The first one is around how we leverage technology.
Fiona touched on this earlier, where we've taken the premise of our digital twin for the Digital River, and we've cast our minds to how this would look for a geothermal application. The image in the middle is a representation of the multiple different parameters that we've taken in to build a digital model of our geothermal stations. This takes into consideration a multitude of different factors, such as well performance, weather, wind direction, and it provides the operator with real-time optimization adjustments that they can make to the station to make sure that we're producing at the optimum amount of megawatts. This model has been so far rolled out at one of our geothermal stations with really strong success. Looking forward, we've baked this into our plan in FY 2026, which is a really exciting piece of work for us.
We anticipate that we can generate an additional one megawatt of value across our Generation stations using this machine learning model. Another great example of how we've been optimizing is through bringing together the control room for several of our geothermal operation stations. Under this geothermal centralized operation model, we've brought together three stations that are now operated out of one location. This has been a piece of work that we've undertaken for about the last two years.
It has involved a significant change in the type of work that our people are doing by focusing on how our geothermal stations are performing from one location and allowed us to make sure that we do not just have one person that is on site at one time, but we are able to run 24-hour shifts with multiple people working together, which also produces synergies, making it far safer for these people to be in the working environment as well. When we have undertaken this upgrade, we have also thought about how we can use new technology to make sure that as our operators are running their plant, they are focusing on the most important activities that are occurring at any one time.
The control room now is set up in such a way that operators will be able to see alarms that are the most important thing and react to those in a really time-sensitive way. As we look out into the future, we then think about how we're going to create a funnel of opportunity, which helps us maintain these opportunities to optimize our plant. We have a pipeline of different initiatives and activities that we're going to keep working through over the coming years. These are going to be able to deliver two things for us. The first is to make sure that we can maintain the existing megawatt output of our geothermal stations, and the second is around enhancing them and finding those additional accretive megawatts that we can then bake into our plan going forward.
The graph on the right-hand side demonstrates what we've succeeded in delivering in FY 2025, and we anticipate that we would be hitting sustained values like that out into the future as well. I'll now hand back to Kevin, who will help wrap us up.
Just to summary close, we'll talk about delivering value today. We are better today. We've exceeded the plan and well delivery. We're demonstrating very good capability and strong desire to master the carbon capture. We've successfully or all but delivered the Karapiro project, and we're committed to and delivering outcomes within our capital envelope. Protecting value, building tomorrow. We've got the right projects to improve asset resilience, which are on track and are well understood by all stakeholders. Our key projects are well resourced in relation to the Arapuni left abutment and the Taupō control gates. All the while, we're strengthening our social license.
Enhancing value, Brighter Together. We're delivering incremental improvements that maximize and enhance future value. This can be seen in our Rehab megawatt uplift and maximizing value of assets through our machine learning. We have a history of proven delivery, which I believe has been well described today. Finally, I'd really like to thank both Emily and Rob for their very valued contribution in this session. That concludes that session, and we are now available to take any questions. Thank you.
Thanks, guys, for your presentation. Just one from me. On your hydro Rehabilitation Program, the sum on your slide was a total reinvestment cost of NZD 550 million, I think. There was a comment saying that turbine replacement is NPV positive, but is that just the turbine component, or is it NPV positive across that NZD 550 million total cost?
Yeah, it's a great question.
It depends how you calculate your NPV. We've done it based on two models. One says you factor in that the units are becoming end of life and that it decreases. Your production will decrease over time, and you model in the risk. In that instance, the whole project is NPV positive, which is why we're doing the work. We also model through, if you can keep the consistent generation, then the whole project is NPV negative based on baseline production to date.
Thanks. Just a quick question to clarify. SIB maintenance CapEx is NZD 150 million per annum. Is that nominal or in real terms?
That is in nominal terms. Okay, thanks.
Just to follow up on that, looking at the generation component, which I think is around NZD 70 million per annum, that is all of the hydro work, the NZD 550 million plus the NZD 20 million Arapuni, I assume, works out at NZD 70 million over 11 years, so NZD 70 million per annum. That makes sense. Taupō Gates, I assume, is on top of that, though, assuming you get to a decision on that.
The M2 fears are work over time, so there are peaks and troughs with the drilling. At the minute, Taupō Gates is built into that modeling and assumption over the whole course.
Sorry, I am probably flogging a bit of a dead horse here, but can you—so it is a 26-year refurbishment period that you are halfway through. I think you have recently talked about that. I think you have recently talked about spending sort of NZD 600 million to date.
Can you just clarify how much is left to do to finish the remaining 13 years, including the two projects that you've talked about? I'm interested also how much of that in rough terms is earthquake reinforcement. It sort of seems to be a recurring theme around the country at the moment.
Yeah, probably slightly different topics. The rehabilitation doesn't directly address earthquake stability. It's all about their generating equipment and their end-of-life asset for it. In terms of the ongoing cost for the whole program, I don't have that number off the top of my head, but we are looking at sort of NZD 30 million-NZD 35 million a unit at the minute to refurbish it.
Thanks, Steam. Just a relatively minor question for me. Tararua Wind Farm, I guess that's one of the existing assets operating. How should we think about the lifetime of that?
When does it reach the end of its life? What kind of repairing opportunities? Obviously, it hasn't featured, so I'm guessing it's sort of not high on the list. In terms of operating existing assets, how long can it live?
Matt, would you like to take that?
Yeah, I'm happy to. Yep, thanks for the question. I'll just jump back in. We have recently renegotiated O&M agreements for Tararua Repower, which takes us out a number of years. Obviously, that's a different type of O&M agreement that we sign when we build things, so a little bit more of a risk-balanced approach there between the OEM and ourselves. We have a project underway to scope the repower of Tararua Wind now, but we think that project is not within our current build to 2030.
It's 100% in our pipeline beyond 2030, and there will be a megawatt uplift of, I think it's 60-odd MW uplift through that repower. Don't quote me on that, but I think it's around there. Yeah, absolutely, a project for us sits in pipeline. We have secured O&M agreements. It gives us a little bit of breathing space, and we're working on a repower strategy now.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. Look, it's great to be up here talking to you, and I hope you're finding the insights today really valuable. I'm starting the wrap-up of today. I've been at Mercury for just under two months now, so it's still early days, but it's been a really valuable time, and it's great to be back in the power sector after a few years away.
I spent my time really listening, observing, and engaging across the business, and there are three perspectives I really want to share today. First of all, what I've seen inside the business. Secondly, what I've heard from a number of you. I've had the opportunity to sit down with a number of you and get your perspectives on how Mercury is tracking. Finally, where I see us heading through the lens of our financial aspirations. To me, there's a lot to be excited about, so it's time to get stuck in. Turning to our early observations, look, it's a real privilege to join a new company and to look at it with fresh eyes. I've really taken the time to observe, listen, and to get right across the breadth of what we do.
The first thing that I want to really talk about is the people and the talent that I've seen across the business. There's a real strength and depth of talent right across Mercury, from the front line right through to the executive team and the board as well. That gives me real confidence that the business is in great hands. Turning to the exec, I can see a great combination of deep industry experience and fresh thinking. That blend is really valuable. There's good challenge. There are balanced perspectives, but there's also a really strong platform for smart decision-making. Turning to the room as well, I hope you've had time to connect with a lot of the other talent from Mercury who are here today. You've also heard presentations from Moa, from Ben, from Emily, and from Rob.
They represent the type of high-quality, high-integrity people that I've encountered right across the business. Being successful in business is not just about individual talent. It is about how people work together. I have really noticed that collaborative mindset here at Mercury, a genuine willingness to share knowledge, to support each other, but also to make good decisions as a team. That kind of culture does not happen by accident. It is built over time. It reflects the values of the organization. I think it is a real asset, particularly when you look at what we have got ahead of us with the level of change and the energy transition. I think the ability to work together across disciplines and functions is going to be critical to our success. The next pillar I wanted to talk about is value.
When I sort of sat back and looked at Mercury from outside, but also inside too, the one thing that really stood out to me was the bold choices that the business has made over time. Whether it was the early investment in geothermal back in the early 2000s or the acquisitions of Tilt Renewables or Trustpower, they have really shaped who we are today. Back in the day when they were announced, and some of you are around, there were some quite mixed views at the time that we announced them. What is clear is those decisions have paid off. I am pleased to see that we are continuing to make bold choices today. I am a big fan of standing for something and backing yourself and the team, and that is what we are doing.
GenDev has picked wind and geo, and Grant is as excited as you are about geo as the future, and I think that's the right call from an LRMC perspective. As all of you know, to achieve above-average returns, you've got to stand for something and make clear choices, and that's what we're going to be doing. It's not just about building new assets. It's about finding value in the core. When I've joined the business, I can just really see a huge amount of opportunity right across what we're doing, from how we manage our generation portfolio to how we serve our customers, but importantly, also how we think about our cost base. The value story isn't just about scale. It's about discipline. It's about focus and continuing to evolve how we operate.
The final pillar I want to touch on here is governance. At Mercury, we've got a truly leading board, not just by New Zealand standards, but across Australasia as well. The depth of experience and the diversity of thought from directors gives us real strength as a business. From a CFO perspective, it gives me real confidence, and it also gives me great insight. I've been able to sit down with the directors and can see how the strategic guidance and the challenge is going to help us move forward with clarity and with discipline. That same discipline also shows up in how we're governing our projects. I've been really impressed with the rigor that we've applied to project governance. It's not about slowing things down. It's about making wise, well-informed decisions that stand up over time. Underpinning all of that is value.
We're really clear what our job is here. Our job is to grow long-term shareholder returns. We are using our strong balance sheet carefully, and we're making choices that are value-accretive and keeping TSR front of mind. On this next slide, I'm going to talk through what I've heard from you. I've talked to a number of you, our investors, our analysts, and our broader stakeholders over the last month or two. I really want to thank you for that time. It's been really valuable to me, and I've really appreciated it. I wanted to share a few consistent themes that have been coming through. I think first, and this came through really strongly, is a strong support for our overall strategy, the logic of our renewables focus, the quality of our generation portfolio, and the long-term opportunity from electrification.
I think the overall message is Mercury is set up well for the future. That said, there are also some understandable concerns, particularly around the recent changes to the executive team. I understand that transition brings a level of uncertainty, and I hope the time with the team today and tomorrow goes quite some way to addressing any concerns you have there. Personally, I think we've got the team to succeed. Secondly, you're looking for greater transparency, especially around how we're managing our GenDev portfolio. That includes the sequencing, the governance, the capital allocation, and the delivery of the projects. The interest here isn't because there's a concern. It's because there's an expectation. When you're deploying significant capital, I know you want to understand the rationale and that we're both protecting and creating value. Third, we discussed how we're managing our existing assets and driving value from the core.
You have heard a lot about that today, including how we are using digital to optimize our existing generation assets and how we see our customer business transforming in the years ahead. On the next slide, I am going to touch on our operating costs. It is a concern I have heard from you loud and clear. Finally, the overarching messages I got were there is a really strong message about continuing Mercury's track record of delivering value. We have talked a few times today about the 10% TSR since listing. That is a performance that we are really proud of at Mercury and one we are determined not to drop under our watch. We have also talked about the progressive dividend policy, and I know how important that is to our shareholders. It is front of mind as we shape our capital decisions looking forward. Above all, I have had a really clear message. Do not overpromise and underdeliver.
That is not something that we want to do. It has been front of mind as we shaped our presentation today. To sum up what I have heard, there is support, there is interest, and there is expectation. I hope what you have seen today gives you confidence that we are listening, we are focused, and we are going to deliver. Turning to operating costs, lowering our operating costs is a key priority for us. We kicked off a structured piece of work back in November last year, and we are now into execution of that. As a result, we are targeting to lower our OpEx to NZD 370 million and to hold at that level through to FY 2028. That is a tough target. We are managing cost pressures from inflation, but also the increased O&M spend as new wind assets like KD2 and Kaiwaikawe come online.
We have done the work, and we believe it is the right thing to do. This is the first wave of savings that we are going to be addressing here. We have identified the key levers, and we are pulling them. As Craig and Moa touched on earlier today, we have that 30% decrease in operating costs for connections as one of the things we are doing, but the savings are going to be right across the business. We have already banked many already. Importantly, this is not just a finance-led initiative. It is a company-wide effort. We know we need to do better, and we are owning that as a leadership team. We also know it is ultimately about value. We want to stand up well against our peers on cost, but we are not just chasing cost out for its own sake.
I'm comfortable being higher cost in some areas if we can see that driving much better value outcomes versus our peers. I just want to be clear on this overall. We think this is really deliverable, and we think this is a starting point for what we're going to be delivering on our cost journey going forwards. We're building momentum. We're embedding discipline, and that's going to support business and value going to the future. Many of you have seen in your packs that I've done one slide, which hopefully tries to wrap all of the key messages from today into one place. It's really using the themes that Stew outlined at the beginning of the day: better today, building tomorrow, and Brighter Together. Turning to customer first, we've delivered the Trustpower savings, and we've got a platform for value-driven growth.
We've already seen strong momentum from our multi-product offerings, and we're targeting to grow to 1 million connections by FY 2028. We're operating for value. That's really important. From a wholesale perspective or a generation perspective, we're committed to the stay-in-business CapEx for NZD 150 million and increasing our output where we can. At the same time, we continue to operate reliably and safely. We've really got a fantastic platform here with flexibility in hydro and consistent performance in geothermal, enabling us to manage risk and optimize returns. On costs, we've heard your message loud and clear. Our operating costs are high relative to our peers, and that's something that we can't ignore. As we discussed on the previous slide, we're committing to making a difference, and that's the first wave of cost savings that we're committing to through to 2028.
The next box down is about the value-accretive pipeline. I think we've got a fantastic renewable pipeline ahead of us and well-positioned to contribute meaningfully to the New Zealand energy transition. Our focus is on value-accretive projects: well-sequenced, well-governed, and commercially disciplined. As Matt outlined, I think we've got the team to deliver. We're going to keep on scanning the mark of other proven technologies to make sure that our current thesis that wind and geo are the winners is right. We've got to be humble about that. Ultimately, we want to look where the value is. If that means we're standing up out from the crowd and not building solar, I'm very happy to do that. Finally, down the bottom, better together. None of this work above happens in isolation. Our strength lies in how we work together.
I believe that's Mercury's secret sauce. Our tangata whenua partnerships are a huge strength for us, particularly across geothermal. I see a really big opportunity in geothermal. I think the shifts in technology and the bright future for baseload power make this opportunity really exciting. It's something no one else has in this market. We've got some more work to do to firm that up, and we're looking forward to talking to you about it a lot more going forwards. Partnerships are wider than that. Matt touched on the relationship with Vestas, and I think that's delivering some great commercial outcomes. We can see the same with our key contractors as well. We've also got great progress coming through on the C&I front, where our unique value proposition is setting us apart.
That's where we've signed up with Fonterra, AWS, TY, and Visy in recent times. This theme overall of better today, building tomorrow, and brighter together is not just a structure of a presentation. It's really how we're approaching Mercury's journey going forwards. There have been a few references to this slide during the course of the day. This is what it means in terms of our numbers. What this slide outlines is our EBITDA target for 2030. That's the ambition of where we think we can get to. It reflects our ambition, but also the discipline we're going to put into investments. We believe that's possible both through our existing business and also our GenDev portfolio. We see the NZD 1.15 billion as being the floor and what we should be able to deliver.
You can see that that represents a really significant step up from where we are today. It is not just about scale. It is about delivering value-accretive growth. That is why we are focusing on high-quality projects with strong fundamentals and then great execution of the choices we have, as well as driving value from the core business as well. If we deliver this pipeline well and continue to grow customer value and manage costs, this aspiration becomes very real. Why does it matter? It matters because of the TSRs we have delivered in the past. As a company, since listing, they have been really meaningful. That is the kind of performance we need to keep on delivering, not just through growth, but also through the core. This is not about making bold claims today. This is about setting out a credible, disciplined path to long-term value for our shareholders.
In delivering this plan, we maintain our progressive dividend policy, our credit rating at BBB Plus, and also deliver strong TSRs. Turning to the chart itself, we started with a NZD 760 million guidance that we put out to the markets back in April. We have adjusted that or normalized for normal hydro conditions. If we look at the building blocks from there, the first NZD 100 million relates to the 1.14 TW hours of renewables under construction. You know these projects well. We have disclosed quite a bit to you about them already. One number that I will give you that might help with some of your maths is that the OpEx number that we are using is circa NZD 18 per megawatt hour when we are looking at what the LRMC on these projects is like. When you are looking at that, do not forget about the locational impact of KD2.
Second pillar is the NZD 80 million from customer. And that's from the uplift in electricity and telco net revenue relating to prices into the long-term channels rising above cost increases. The foundation of that is really more connections and more multi-product customers. The NZD 20 million there is the cost out. So it's holding our OpEx at NZD 370 million. And that's partly offset by the inflation that's going to be happening between now and 2030. So it's a smaller number than you might be expecting to see there. And then we get to the final bar where you can see there's two colors there. The bottom color gets us to the floor, the NZD 1,150. And that's Mahinerangi 2 wind farm. That's our most likely next project to reach FID, plus the Whakamaru BESS, which will deliver between them about NZD 50 million by 2030.
Look, these elements together, the dark blue colors, highlight a path to the NZD 1.15 billion floor by 2030. As you heard from Matt, we're continuing to develop highly valuable executable options to deliver more projects by 2030. We think that the step up from the NZD 1.15 billion to NZD 1.25 billion is very possible with what we've got in the pipeline today. There we go. I'm going to wrap up now. Overall, what I've seen in my first two months at Mercury is a business with deep capability, strong alignments, and a real commitment to delivering value. What I've heard from you is support for our strategy, a clear expectation that we stay disciplined, transparent, and focused on execution for value. What I've laid out today is a credible, value-driven path forward.
The goal we have set for 2030 is ambitious, but it is grounded in the work that is already underway. We are not chasing scale for its own sake. We are here to deliver long-term value and maintain the strong TSR performance that you have seen to date. Thank you for your time and support. I have really appreciated it. With that, Stew, I think you are coming up onto the stage to do Q&A. With me? I can stay. Thank you. Stand together.
Hi. Thanks for that. Your target of NZD 1.2 billion at the midpoint, NZD 200 million of that is growth CapEx. I do not see any growth CapEx assumptions or comments in this presentation or where you think your net debt might end up in 2030 to give us some sort of context of whether this is good performance or bad performance.
Yeah.
Net debt peaks at 2.5x if we deliver all of this up to the total. We are very confident that we are in a good shape from that perspective.
In that, you comment that investors wanted just an incremental dividend. Is that the assumptions we should make? It is just an inflationary dividend, or are you going to be rewarding shareholders for patience?
We are going to continue to discuss what we do on dividends. There is a real choice there that we need to make. We are going to continue with the progressive dividend that we have over time and then, look, we will keep on assessing the level of growth of that dividend over time as we keep on with our investment cycle.
Thank you.
Everyone's questions answered.
This one is for Stew. This is yours now. Thank you.
I guess we haven't talked too much about the regulatory risk and sort of the conversation around the industry right now. The difficulty of asking a question is exactly what question to ask. I mean, can you summarize the situation now and sort of what measures you think might get through and are sensible to get through, and which ones start to flash red lights in terms of investment signals? There's sort of a start of a 10 way of asking the question.
Sure. It's a difficult question to answer as it is to ask. I'd say that at the moment, there's a few things underway. You've got the level playing field work that's underway for the Energy Competition Task Force. We, through Lucy's team, have put a lot of effort not just into providing direct input into the proposal, but equally working across the sector.
There's a lot of work going on with the sector framework, which means our peers, the lines companies, and actually upstream and downstream are working together. Looking at how do we actually think about the work that needs to take place, including leveling the playing field work. That's kind of a key factor for us. What will come out of that? A bit early to say. I think there will be some change of some type. You hear some people talking kind of at extremes. I think the reality is it'll be kind of smallish in sort of factor, but it would be foolish to expect nothing to happen. I suspect that the work, I know the work we're doing, will actually lead to better outcomes than what's been proposed. That's the Energy Competition Task Force.
In addition to that, we've got the ministerial review underway, which is being run by a group called Frontier Economics. That's, from what I understand, likely to come out over the next month or two. I suspect the big focus of that will be around affirming requirements, more so around the Energy Competition Task Force, which is largely focused on retail competition. It kind of comes back to what do we think the actual underlying problems are? Most of it actually is around how do we create the power that we need when we need it? We're actually working on, as we've seen today, building those things as fast as we can.
In the background, doing a lot of work to provide quite insightful database work to feed into those functions to hopefully make sure that the outcome is something which is reasonable, will work, and ultimately is something that can be adjusted and adopted by everyone.
Great. Thanks. That is helpful. Just in terms of level playing field, it seems likely those rules, if something comes into effect, as you say, it seems likely will be the soonest thing we'll see. The non-discrimination clause to offer your internal transfer price to third parties doesn't seem too contentious in itself, but it seems the immediate next complaint, or potentially built into the rules, will be the non-cross-subsidization, sort of the idea that you have to make a profit. The pricing for retail residential customers has to make a profit against their internal transfer price.
I mean, is that, in your view, kind of a step too far?
Yeah, I think, like you're saying, there's a spectrum that they're talking about, everything from do nothing through to vertical desegregation. Where they're at is kind of more down this end than down that end. We can do that at the moment. If anybody comes to us to ask for a price, we'll provide that. That's not done across the industry universally, which is part of the issue we're pushing for, is to make sure that those hedges are transparent and available to everyone. We do that at the moment. I don't think it's a massive change from what we are at the moment. It will create additional internal work that we have to move through.
I guess the threat is that we do that, and it does not necessarily result in the outcome that people are looking for. That is the fact that in the short term, prices are above long-run marginal cost, which I think has been driven by other factors, not just around retail competition.
Yeah, great. Thanks. Just on the level, sorry, not level playing field, on the sort of frontier work, if they do, as sort of everyone seems to suspect, go down that firming capacity route, I am assuming you would not be a fan of the capacity market approach that the HFO consortium works as a demonstration that sticking with energy-only kind of market design at the moment still seems to be working.
Yeah, I think we sort of look at it in two phases.
Lucy, the team are doing some good work here, where we think fundamentally we need to separate what is the solution to deliver firming? Then secondly, how is the burden of that cost distributed across the value stream? The first step around what is the solution, we believe that the market, as it exists, if you allow it to be unfettered, will provide the signals for people to invest into it. The kind of key question is, who pays or who faces the burden of those costs across the value stream? At the moment, the burden of largely being underbuilt often is felt by the consumer, as we're seeing at the moment. The flip side is the burden of overbuild is faced, and we often face that cost. Whilst nowhere are we holding back, we are building as fast as we can.
Certainly, that's a conversation which needs to take place.
Great. Thanks. Thank you. Just a quick one on the fast track. You've got four projects in that pipeline. I suppose maybe it's a bit early days, but do you think it'll actually deliver quicker projects and at cheaper costs as well?
Yeah, so we have four projects there: Tararua Power, Mahinerangi 2, Waikokowai, and Puketoi. We will make decisions as each of those projects come through as to which ones we actually put through into that process. It's early days for us. I think not much has gone through that process yet. The expectation we have is that it won't stop us from conducting the sort of engagement that we need to take place with all of our stakeholders, but it will help us to streamline the processes, have more of a one-stop shop.
It should streamline our processes, which should lead to, I guess, reduced cost overall. I do not think we put a finger on what that is likely to contribute, but it definitely is beneficial in terms of how we think about getting that progress through the consenting phase. Consenting is just one of the issues to cover when we bring projects to FID. Matt touched on, you are going to start from land access, consenting, transmission connection, all the way through to construction. It speeds up a part of it, but still there is actually a whole stream of work that needs to take place to bring these projects online.
Great. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Okay, it is my time to wrap up. I firstly wanted to acknowledge the yellow. Do not you love the yellow? Loving the branding. First, I want to thank the Mercury team.
In particular, there's been a lot of work pumped into this from the executive team. We've got an exciting prospect ahead of us. We've got an awesome team. We're looking forward to the next few years with you. Thank you to Lucy and Jess for all the energy and effort that's gone into developing the strategy, not just in the last 12 months, but prior to that. It's amazing. Pulling it all together has really been enjoyable. Thank you very much for that. To Paul, wherever you are, for wrangling us all together. It's been an effort in itself. Thank you very much. We did joke before that one of the reasons why we tried to delay the plane from leaving Auckland was to give you the chance to download the presentation and read it so you got here prepared to go.
Maybe that led to the smaller number of questions. Thank you for arranging that, Paul. We'll talk a bit later on. I really want to thank, I don't think they're necessarily in the room. I can see Lara. I know Sarah was around. I don't think Joy is here. Thank you very much for the logistics that's come together as well. Today, we've had the chance to introduce to you a new refreshed strategy that sees us progressing over the next five to 10 years. We've got a capable team, and you're seeing that today. We're certainly driving productivity improvement. We've seen a cost improvement already. We've got a successful bundling strategy. We've seen three very large projects that are currently delivering. This is how we're operating for value today. We've got an amazing opportunity ahead of us. Firming our portfolio provides resilience to our performance.
It informs the wise, disciplined allocation of capital and future. Optimizing future is how we'll be Brighter Together. Those things together will continue to deliver value for tomorrow. I too am super excited about geothermal space ahead of us. I think there's enormous potential there. We've got two and a half terawatt hours of projects in our pipeline to 2030. We've got meaningful progress on a best project, meaningful progress on our Mahinerangi 2 project. I am very excited about our Waikoko project, which would become the biggest onshore wind farm in New Zealand. We've got an exciting geothermal prospect ahead of us, and that will all form part of our eight terawatt pipeline of options through and beyond 2030. When you think about it, that eight terawatt hours would ultimately see us double our size by about 2035. We're building value for tomorrow. We've got great people.
We've got great opportunities, and we've got a great plan. Let's build today, building tomorrow, Brighter Together. [Foreign language] .
I'm sure everybody got something out of today. Thank you for your patience. I'm sure you're going to socialize a lot of what you've taken in today. As part of doing that, you're going to need to get some good oxygen and some good blood moving through your bodies. We're just going to do one final exercise as I want you to stand up. It's [Foreign language] . Do a little bit of a breathing exercise because you've been sitting down for a long time. Okay? [Foreign language] means to breathe in. [Foreign language] means to breathe out. Okay, this time you're going to breathe in and hold for three seconds. [Foreign language]. [Foreign language]. Now close your eyes. [Foreign language]
All right, so I think we break for afternoon tea now. We'll break for afternoon tea. What time do we want to be back here?
Back at 3:35.
Ten, fifteen minutes. Then we've got an OEC 5 project update and a little bit about tomorrow. We've got Amy McGregor and Rob Rankin will come back up as well just to provide an overview of, I guess, preparing for tomorrow, but equally giving you an overview of the OEC 5 project with a great little video clip or animation that shows how geothermal works and should set us up for success for tomorrow. Thank you.